Most Replayed Moment: Why You’re Never Satisfied! The 4 Pillars of Lasting Happiness

So people in memory turn pleasure into enjoyment. That's right. So alcohol, add people in memory, you know, the Anheuser-Busch Corporation doesn't put out advertisements of, you know, a dude alone in his apartment pounding a 12-pack. That's how a lot of people use the product. But that's, everybody knows that's an irresponsible, dangerous thing to do that can lead to alcoholism. What they show is the same guy with his brothers and friends, you know, clinking bottles together, having a great time. That is pleasure, alcohol, plus people, plus memory equals enjoyment, and that leads to happiness. Because they want to join their brand to happiness, not just to pure pleasure and certainly not to addiction. Same with, like, Coca-Cola. All the Coca-Cola ads are like, "The world cut with your friends," and, "In summer with your friends." Yeah. And that's actually less addictive. I mean, there are certain, you know, the sugar and caffeine are certainly addictive. They don't have the same properties of brain capture in the same way, for sure, because they don't stimulate as much dopamine as, you know, something like alcohol does. And so they're less likely to make you really addicted. But the whole point is that it does give you a little bit of pleasure, but it makes you way happier if you get to enjoyment, and you only get that when you're doing it with people. Satisfaction. Satisfaction is the joy you get after struggle. You're an entrepreneur. You understand this one really well. You're good at deferring your gratification. All entrepreneurs are good. Successful entrepreneurs are good at deferring gratification, which means I'm going to do this hard thing, and it's going to get big payoff, and that payoff is going to be sweet. That's satisfaction. A really funny thing about humans is that we need struggle and suffering for us to actually get the joy that we seek, and that's a really important part of our happiness. So you find the people who are better at deferring their gratification get more satisfaction, and they're happier. You've heard about the Marshmallow experiment, and people have debunked it, but they actually haven't. So the Marshmallow experiment was taking place, it took place in the late '60s, where Walter Michelle was a psychologist at Stanford out in Palo Alto. He had a little laboratory set up where he would come in and sit down on one side of a table, and it was a kid on the other side of the table, between four and eight years old. And in front of the kid was a marshmallow, and so he says to the kid, "Do you want the marshmallow?" The kid's like, "Yeah." He says, "I'll tell you what, I have to go take a phone call in the back here, but when I come back, if the marshmallow is still there, I'll give you another one. Can you wait?" Every kid's like, "Yeah, totally, totally, totally worth it." He comes back five minutes later, so 80% of the kids had eaten the marshmallow, 20% of the kids hadn't. Now, that's a lot. 80% of the kids could not defer the gratification, so the real question is who's the 20%? It's Steve Bartlett. These are the people that went on to do distinguished things. They did better in school, they got better grades, they went on to have more job success, they had better relationships. That's what they found, that the most successful kids, what people fight about now is why, whether it's nature and nurture, it's probably 50/50, like everything else in life. It's both nature and nurture, but the bigger point is good things come to those who wait, and when you wait, you suffer, and you need that suffering as part of the basic, satisfying experience. Now, the bigger problem with satisfaction is that mother nature has a big lie at the end of it. Mother nature says, "If you get it, you're going to love it forever." That's not true. The brain works emotionally and physically in an environment of homeostasis. Homeostasis means that you always return to your baseline physiologically and emotionally, because you can't stay in an unusual physiological state. Unusual states are a reaction. You need to be ready to react, and so you step off the treadmill, your heart is elevated, your heart goes back to where it was, so you're not dead in a week. The same thing is true for you emotionally. Something really good or bad happens to you. You think it's going to last forever so that you have an incentive to avoid or approach the thing, but it doesn't last forever, does it? That's the problem. We actually think that if I get that billion dollars, it's going to be really great. The first thing that somebody who has a billion dollars says to her or himself is, "I guess I needed another billion because of homeostasis," and that puts you on something called the hedonic treadmill, more, more, more, more, more, more, more. That's the great conundrum of the striver, is that there's never enough, never enough, never enough. I deal with people all day long. I really specialize in people who are incredibly successful, but not happy, and a lot of what I do is explain one simple equation that both explains that, but also gives you the solution, which is that your satisfaction doesn't come from all the things that you have, so have more is not the right strategy. Satisfaction is all the things you have divided by the things that you want, have divided by wants. People people need to manage their wants even more than they need to manage their haves. They need to want less, and that's a whole kettle of fish, that's spirituality, that's discipline, that's fitness, that's diet, that's a whole lot of things that go into that. That will help you actually get enduring satisfaction. Sounds like a contradiction though, doesn't it? It sounds like a contradiction to that the striving and the struggle is going to make me happy, but I should want less. People actually who crack this code, and a lot of Eastern traditions actually get into this, is not that striving is bad, but that striving in itself has a reward to it, that the process and what you find out along the way is that what you wanted was not a rival, what you wanted was progress, and then you start to get the reward from the progress itself. There's a funny thing in the research on dieting. We all know that it's the most expensive, unsuccessful industry in the world. Ninety-five percent of diets fail, which means within a year people have gained back all the weight that they've lost, but they're successful insofar as that almost everybody loses weight when they go on a diet. Here's the thing about diets. Every day you're willing to forego the food you like in exchange for the reward, which is the scale going down. When you hit your goal, it's going to be so great, it's going to be so great. You know what the reward is, Dave? You never, again, get to eat the things that you like for the rest of your life. Congratulations. Once you've got that. That's why you fail. The arrival fallacy, which is an identifiable phenomenon in my field, is that it's going to be sweet when I get to the goal. It isn't. What you're going to have is homeostasis when you get to your goal, frustration and disappointment. Therefore, you need to want less. You need to think about less, about wanting these arrival experiences and get more satisfaction from the progress, from the journey. That's really what it comes down to. People who crack that code over the course of self-discipline, self-understanding, self-management, they can actually experience remarkably higher satisfaction. The Dalai Lama, I've been working with the Dalai Lama closely for the past 11 years, and I asked him this question, "How can I get lasting satisfaction?" He said, "You need to want what you have, not to have what you want." That's what it comes down to. "It's the management of my wants, not my haves." On that point, we're at the time of year now where so many people are thinking about diets. You mentioned that there. For those people that are approaching that moment and they're going to be setting their goals and stuff and all those kinds of things, what is a better goal to set if not a weight number or a financial number or whatever? What's a better, more realistic goal to set that has more chance of success? Yeah. It's interesting because there are certain things that we can accumulate that won't homeostatically return us to the baseline, that won't throw us onto this hedonic treadmill over and over again. Those goals are the goals that actually do lead to the happiest life, and the more you have, the better off you are, or more actually is better, but they don't fall into the categories of money, power, pleasure, and fame, which are the typical goals that we get or related goals like weight loss or whatever it happens to be. The four goals that really matter are faith, family, friendship, and work that serves others. Those are the four really great and transcendent goals that we can have. Now, there's nothing wrong with money or power or pleasure or fame. There's nothing wrong with those things, but only as intermediate goals to make it easier for us to pursue and accumulate deeper faith or philosophical life. I'm not talking about traditional religious faith necessarily. Other family relationships, which are very mystical, poorly understood, even in neuroscience in a lot of ways, friendship, deep friendship, which is hard for a lot of people, especially successful people, and work that where you earn your success and serve other people. That's what it comes down to. Those are the new year's goals that we need. This year, what am I going to do, how am I going to grow closer to the divine? How am I going to do that? This year, what am I going to do to draw closer to my family and to have a more intimate relationship with my family? How am I going to have deeper friendships this year? How am I going to take my work and find it more meaningful and satisfying on the basis of serving other people? How am I going to do that? We haven't gotten to meaning yet. Yeah. We haven't got to meaning yet. You said the word there, but I want to make sure I close off from this point about a better goal because there's still going to be a huge group of people that go, "Listen, I get it. Love it. I believe it." But I hate this belly fat. Yeah, I got it. And this belly fat yo-yos every year. No, I get it. Those are intermediate goals and there's nothing wrong with those things. The problem is where they become satisfying and self-destructive is when that's the final goal because by the time you get there, you think, "Why? Why? That wasn't as meaningful as I thought. That wasn't as good as I thought. That's the arrival fallacy that when I actually get rid of the belly fat, then I'm actually going to have somehow a more wonderful life." That's actually not true. The reason that you're doing that is because you want to live longer with your spouse and see and dandily your 11 grandchildren on your knee. That's the reason you want to do this because you need to do it for some intrinsic reason as opposed to an extrinsic reason having to do with, "People will love me more." I mean, it's amazing to me because I do a lot of wellness and fitness and stuff as it interacts with happiness. I work with a lot of people who are very big in the longevity community because I have sort of the happiness console, the science of the happiness console that I put into those things. I mean, a lot of people that are really into the fitness part and what a lot of guys will tell me is that they'll have these fitness goals. I'm going to put on 15 pounds of muscle this year and I'm going to get rid of all my belly fat and the whole thing. And if they stick to it by September or October, whether they're finding is that they're not getting any more attention or compliments from women, but a lot of dudes are going, "Look at good dude," and they're like, "That's not what I wanted." And part of the reason is because the arrival fallacy is you build up this image of what will actually come from the satisfaction that will come from hitting these intermediate goals. These aren't the right final goals. You got to have the right final goals and then set some intermediate goals along the way, but let's not kid ourselves. And when you think carefully about that, that losing your last five pounds of belly fat so you can see your lower abs, which by the way is not necessarily that healthy, is going to materially improve your life and your relationships. It's not. It just isn't. What's the better end goal then as it relates to fitness? Would it be something more centered on health or... It is. Something that's actually sustainable in having to do with health, also with happiness is the way that this works. So, I work out 60 minutes a day. It's not because I'm vain. Look, I've got a face for radio, Steve. You're good. I don't know what you're talking about. No, but age adjusted. I look good. You know, this is the... I think you look good, period. I'm not, you know. I'm a good girlfriend, but credit where credit's due. Thank you, Steve. I appreciate that. But you made my week. See, this was my goal. The reason that I do this is because I find that for me, that working out as much as I can is much harder than working out every day. Working out every day is much easier than working out as often as I can, right? Yeah. And practicing my religion every day is much easier than practicing my religion when it comes naturally to me or when I find it convenient. Eating healthily is much easier when I do it every day. And so, the result of that is that I find that with those particular routines, I program those things into my life and I'm a much happier guy. Look, it lowers my cortisol levels, which are naturally very high. I'm a very anxious person and I understand anxiety. I understand the cortisol production. I understand how to manage it and this is one of my management techniques. Something about fitness to understand is when I say it makes you happier, it actually doesn't. It lowers your unhappiness. Happiness and unhappiness, largely the experiences of happiness and unhappiness, which is to say positive and negative affect, they're produced in different parts of the limbic system. So you can both be very high happiness and very high unhappiness. I have tests for that that I put my students through. You're probably somebody who experiences both very high positive affect and very high negative affect. We've only met, but my guess is that you're a mad scientist. That's the profile. And so that means is you've got two strategies. You want to keep your positive affect high and you want to manage your negative affect. And one of the best ways to manage your negative affect is physical exercise, vigorous physical exercise. Today, for me, was leg day. I hate leg day, but I feel pretty good right now. Okay, that makes sense. I've got an answer there that I'm super clear on. I should be aiming at the end goal of happiness ultimately, even if the intermediary goals are things like belly fat and these short term things that are measurements of my progress towards the bigger goal. And the real key here is consistency. This was the big unlock for my whole fitness thing, because I was that person, which will be 90% of people listening now that made the goal every year that I was going to go to change my life every year. Never worked because I was aiming at getting a six pack for summer. So when I arrived with the six pack, and it worked or some, it was great, I got, I actually got, I think I got a couple of compliments, which was nice. However, the minute summer finished or the six pack arrived, I could not find for the life of me the motivation. So I'd go into winter and I'd become like a willpower that can like you cannot muscle these things out unless they become a part of your life. Consistency to making my goal consistency and habits habits was the big unlock for me for sure. And then, okay, the goal becomes if I go to the gym every day, if I make that part of my habits, I'm going to be healthier, happier, better at my job. Fucking, is there anything more important? Is that less important than a six pack? And that mindset shift changed my life. For sure. Meaning then. Meaning was the last of the three. Yeah. Meaning is the why of your life. This is the hardest for most people, especially young adults. This is really, really hard. So meaning is really a combination of three things. It's coherence, purpose and significance. Coherence is things happen for a reason. And so meaning in your life means you got to have a theory about why things happen. It's like it's one damn thing after another. I mean, you got to have some concept of why things happen. Purpose is my life has direction and has goals. That's what purpose really is. I'm going in this direction toward these things without getting stuck on the arrival fallacy. And the last but not least is significance, which is it would matter if I weren't here. I'm significant. Those are the three parts of meaning in people's lives, according to philosophers and social psychologists. So there's a test that I give my students that kind of encompass these three ideas so you can remember them into two questions. And you have a meaning crisis if you actually don't have answers to these questions that you believe. And there's no right answer. You've got to have your answers. You want to play? Yeah. Here's the quiz. Question number one, why are you alive? You can answer that in terms of who created you or what you're on earth to do. Yeah. Okay. So why am I alive? That's something that I get to answer every single day. I get to define that by what I chose to do this morning when I woke up. What was it? I went to the gym. I was on the running machine because I know I've got a, not going to be able to today. And then I came here and had this conversation with you. Yeah. Why are you, why are you doing this conversation with me, Steve? The Ikegai theory comes to mind when you ask that, which is it's incredibly selfish. I learned a tremendous amount already just from this conversation. And I know that it pays, pays it forward to other people who are going to, going to learn from it as well. And that makes it feel worthwhile. So you said two things, fun and service. Yeah. Right? Which is more important to you? Transcendently, which is more important to you? It's the service part. Yeah. It's really good. Because that gives me all my, that gives me all my worth. Yeah. The more you focus on that, the better it gets. Now we uncovered that. So now thinking about that, you put the order of operations into the podcast to say, does it serve? Is that guest going to serve? Is this question going to serve? Is this show going to serve? Is this sponsor going to serve the people who are watching this podcast? Then suddenly, meaning starts to go, starts to really spread out of the soil. Because we got to that. If it's like, is it fun? Yeah, good. So look, my whole, have a company that rides alongside what I do academically. And everybody that works with me, we have an order of operations. And the order of operations are, these are the four goals, but they have to be in this order. You just told me that the order of operations is serve other people and have fun for your work. That's what you basically said. It's probably more like lift people up and have an adventure. That's probably an intellectual adventure, right? But the order of operations has to be right. If you're having fun more than you're serving other people, you're not going to find your sense of meaning based on that first question. So you see where we're going with that, right? So the second question is harder. For what are you willing to die today? There's a couple of people in my life that I'd die for. I'd die for my romantic partner. I'd die for my brothers and sisters, any of them. Personally, I don't know if I'd die for my parents, which is interesting. Would you die for an idea? Would you die for your country? I would die. When you say for my country, do you mean to save the country? I don't know. I mean, if you were called to, even if it were ridiculous, even if you thought it were ridiculous, would you die because you love your country? It depends what you mean by that. What's the cost if I stay alive? No, I know. Everything is context-specific to a certain extent. But really what I'm trying to see is what your reaction is to this. There are good things in there. You are willing to die for your girlfriend, you are willing to die for your brothers and sisters. Mom and dad, it's like, is your mom listening to this podcast? They do, but I'm just being honest because I think, I don't know why I said that, but I don't know for sure. This is good. This is really important. This is worth thinking about. The worst answer is, I don't know, or nothing. Those are the worst answers. That doesn't mean that's a problem. On the contrary, it's a huge opportunity, huge entrepreneurial opportunity to realize you don't have answers to these questions because you don't have to go to get your PhD in philosophy. You don't have to sit at the mouth of the cave with a guru someplace in the Himalayas. You need to look for your answers to these questions. That's it. Yes. That's the vision quest. When you see somebody find these things, a lot of young adults have, they're nowhere near you, where you are on your journey. You're solid, Steve. This is good stuff, but I meet a lot of people like, why am I alive? Because a egg met a sperm. Really? Yeah. What are you willing to die for? Nothing really, or I don't know. A lot of people, and then they uncover that they don't have a why is what it comes down to. Repeat the questions again. Why are you alive, and for what are you willing to die this very day? There's no wrong answers. What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.