Plain English BEST OF: How to Be Happy and the Science of Cognitive Time Travel

If you're a fan of the inner workings of Hollywood, then check out my podcast, The Town, on the Ringer Podcast Network. My name is Matt Bellanyam, Founding Partner at Puck, and the writer of The What I'm Hearing Newsletter. And with my show The Town, I bring you the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. Every week we've got three short episodes featuring real Hollywood insiders to tell you what people in town are actually talking about. We'll cover everything from why your favorite show was canceled overnight, which streamers on the brink of collapse, and which executives on the hot scene. Busy, Netflix, who's up, down, and who'll never eat lunch in this town again. Follow The Town on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Hi everyone, Derek here. Throughout December, we're going to be re-airing some of our favorite episodes of the last 12 months. This best of list includes interviews that really stuck with me and others that you guys had a ton of feedback and thoughts on, including this one. I'll be back in the new year with fresh content, but until then, happy holidays. Today we're taking a deep, long and blessed break from the Helter Skelter news cycle to dabble in the philosophy of happiness and being alive. I have a folder on my computer called Books I'll Never Write. And one of the files in that folder has a weird, somewhat confusing, very new age guru, five word title. Happiness is a time machine. I've come to think that most of the ways in which we are unhappy amount to a kind of temporal displacement. That is, we are least happy when we're lost in time. Think about regret. When we ruminate on the mistake we made it work, the stupid and accidentally offensive thing we said to a partner or a friend. The apology we meant to give but felt too ashamed to deliver. We are lost in the past, and we aren't happy. Then there's anxiety. When we fixate on the future possibility that the plane we're about to board is going to crash or we lie awake at 3 a.m. We're worried about a difficult conversation tomorrow with the boss. Or we cannot stop thinking about the infinitive dangers that the world poses to our young children. We are lost in the future, and we aren't happy. And then in addition to past regret and future anxiety, there is this thing that's hard to define that I sometimes think of as sideways time. When we imagine ourselves in parallel universes, like railroad tracks running alongside the present, where we fixate on everything that we don't have but might have had in some alternate multiverse. This form of temporal displacement is very tricky to describe, but it's particularly important and I love the way that James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, put it. He said the fastest way to heaven is to think about everything you have. And the fastest way to hell is to fixate on everything that you don't. So here you have these three arenas of our discontent, the past, the future, and the psychodrama of the life unlived. And the secret is, they're all make believe. The past is gone. The future never arrives. The life not lived might as well be dead. These are altogether the unreal corridors of time. And to be lost inside them is to be lost inside a fantasy. And if you read or listen to philosophy, really any philosophy, whether it's stoicism or Buddhism or existentialism, modern positive psychology, you will find this very lesson, recycled and recycled and restated. There are tens of thousands of pages of philosophy that you could usefully boil down to the advice. Stay away from the unreal corridors of time. Now, the obvious solution to this problem I've just described is that we should do everything we can to be here now. And over familiar phrase, if you've ever trafficked in the genre of self-help, be here now. Focus on the present. Cherish the moment. And this is where I have to confess if you haven't figured it out already. I hate these phrases. An art work can be here now. A hummingbird can be here now. I don't have the brain of an art work. I don't aspire to the mere consciousness of a hummingbird. I want the richness, the messiness, the complexity afforded to me by the human brain and the consciousness of being a human being. And what makes us human, among other things, is precisely our ability to perform this trick of cognitive time travel, to drive into the unreal corridors of time, and learn from them. Why are we the most intelligent animal in the planet? It's certainly not because we have the ability to be here now. It's because we are uniquely good at, among other things, memorializing the past. Analyzing our mistakes. Learning from them. What makes modern civilization modern is precisely our ability to envision the future and encode it in present law. You cannot have a system of debt or credit or taxation, much less a 401k or a 30 year mortgage, if you step outside of a profoundly future obsessed society. Even at the very local level of personal psychology, our ability to take the perspective of the future can actually shake us loose from our deepest gloom. The psychologist, Ethan Cross, an experimental psychologist at the University of Michigan, and a former guest in the show, has done fascinating work in his lab on a principle he calls psychological distancing. Sometimes when we feel stuck in a rut, it's because we're failing to shake free of the moments shatter inside of our heads. So here's a scenario. You can't stop replaying a conversation that you just had with a friend, because they said something that deeply wounded you, that cut into your most profound insecurity and doubts about yourself. And now you're walking around your house or your street replaying these words, like on a loop, like an earworm from some demonic song that just won't leave you alone. And Ethan says the problem here is that you're not just stuck in the past. You're stuck inside of your own internal monologue. And it does no good to just be here now, because what is here and now is this sickly, deep, hurt, and rumination. And one clever way to break out of this rut is to take the perspective of your future self. What would Derek, one year from now, say to Derek today about moping around over something that he can't change? Suddenly, our ability to travel through time is not a detriment to make use of the time machine of our minds is suddenly profoundly therapeutic. But only when we're in the driver's seat. I was thinking a little bit about how to connect this to the problem of sideways time, that misery that can come from thinking too much about the life unlived. I don't know that I've nailed it entirely, but I thought of this. Our ability to imagine a narrative unspooling after some what-if moment can make us anxious tellers of our own story. But it also is the very thing that makes a story tellers. Like what is a novel or a screenplay after all, but a person sitting down to a table with a what-if prompt that unfolds in defection? And when a person reads that novel or watches that movie, they're living inside their own unreal corridor of reality, riding a parallel train track all the way to the end of a story which leaves them with goose bumps or with tears. What if, what if, what if? Maybe the very mechanism that can drive us crazy by comparison is also the thing that makes us artistic. So this temporal displacement, this mental time travel, it's not just the fundamental source of human misery, although it can be, it's also the first author of all our triumph. The ability to learn from the past, to imagine alternate presence, to sacrifice today for future reward, this is the formula for progress at a civilizational level. And the question of how to learn from past regret, how to plan for the future, and how to sometimes yes, shut down these unreal worlds and just sit in quiet peace. That is the messy work of being a person. It's just not a machine that we're very good at using. Today's guest is Laurie Santos. It's hard to imagine a better guest to wax philosophical and existential about the psychology of happiness and well-being. Laurie is a cognitive scientist at Yale. She hosts the very popular Happiness Lab podcast. The class she taught on the psychology of happiness at Yale was among the most popular in that university's illustrious history and her online classes at Coursera have been viewed by millions of people. Today, we talk about how to drive the time machine inside our heads. I'm Derek Thompson. This is "Plan English." Laurie Santos, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me on. You have an incredibly rich professional portfolio. You are a scientist. You host the popular Happiness Lab podcast. Your lectures on the psychology of happiness are immensely popular, whether it's a course at Yale University or an online class at Coursera. I wonder of all the jobs that you do and of all the tasks within those jobs. What makes you happiest? If I hooked you up to some Happiness Giger counter as you went about the typical month in the life of Laurie Santos, Happiness Expert, what part of your job would I discover brings you the most pleasure? I think this is an impossible question because there's so many parts of my job that I love. I love chatting with students and talking with them about their goals. I really love the part of my podcast job where I get to do interviews with people. It's so cool to learn about people's work and hear about their theories and stuff. A funny one that you might not expect is like, I really love the part of the podcasting that involves listening to someone's interview and figuring out exactly the choice quote where they set it in this perfect way and then kind of scripting it together. I can do that for hours and hours and it gives me tremendous flow or like time is passing really quickly and I forget to go to the bathroom and stuff like that and so I'm lucky that I have a job where I have lots of the parts of it that are pretty good but they wind up being parts that don't fit together in the way you might expect. This is a bit of a side from what I want to talk to you about the most but as someone who does a lot of writing for the Atlantic and has occasionally done edited podcast with the Atlantic this show is more of a talking podcast but I always thought of a distinction I wonder if this connects for you. Between writing and editing podcast as a distinction between painting and sculpting with painting you start with a blank canvas and it's all about what you add to the canvas just as in writing you start with a blank page and it's all about the words that you add you can truly write anything but with editing. Interview podcast you're not starting with anything blank you're actually starting with the opposite a huge unwieldy chunk of marble and there's a David hiding inside of it that you have to extricate with your sculpting prowess and I love the kind of opposite challenges of writing and editing in that way I don't know if that connection. Yeah no totally I see this analogy perfectly and it's so much fun to know that there's the David in there and to try to bring it out and to really listen carefully to people's quotes and stuff. This when I got into podcasting this absolutely was not part of podcasting that I thought would be like so much fun but honestly it's like if I could like just pick one thing to do on some random rainy Thursday afternoon it would be sculpting these beautiful audio to like a file that we have into the perfect David so much fun. I've always been frustrated by the language that we have in this category there's something ephemeral and unsatisfying about the concept of happiness that I think might connect with its etymology the idea that the word happiness like the word happens or happening has this old English route happy meeting chance or luck which is inherently fleeting. Some people prefer to talk about flourishing or they're talking about well being or contentment I think one of my favorite treatments of the language here is your distinction between happiness in your life versus happiness for your life what is this distinction and what work is this distinction doing for us. Yeah so to be fair this is a lovely distinction that I've stolen from the psychologist Sony Luber-Mersky you know she kind of defines happiness as having these two parts kind of happiness in your life is kind of what it feels like to be you right now so this is the fact that you're hopefully experiencing lots of positive emotions you know joy and laughter and so on and you got a decent ratio of those with negative emotions right. Note that that doesn't mean you want no negative emotions I think a good life involves a little bit of both but hopefully you've got a ratio such that the positive emotions are kind of weighing out against the negative ones that's kind of being happy in your life but there's also the second part of being happy kind of in with your life for sort of for your life right this is the sense that we have kind of a satisfaction with our life it's sort of how we think our life is going that's another way to frame the distinction kind of how you feel in your life versus how you think your life is going. And of course that matters too right we want to be satisfied with our lives we want to think that things are going well we want to feel like we have some meaning and I like this distinction is kind of pulling them both together because it kind of encompasses I think what the lay notion of happiness is right that there is something fleeting it's kind of about being happy in your life about how it's going right now but true definition of happiness or true definition of like living a good life would involve the kind of second part to where you really think your life is going well. And that gets closer to what I think you know a lot of the ancients for example thought about when they thought about happiness concepts like Aristotle's you demonia and so on are kind of more about this you know feeling like your life is going well. How am I distorting the concept of happiness in your life versus happiness for your life to say that essentially what we're talking about here is pleasure and purpose and it's lovely to have pleasure to be drinking a wonderful glass of wine and it's lovely to have purpose to be doing work that you think is meaning in the world that you think is going well. It is meaning in the world but the real sweet spot of happiness is a kind of three dimensional stacking of pleasure and purpose to end a day where you feel like you've done work that has extraordinary meaning in the world and to have a dinner party with friends who make you laugh and just as you finish laughing you're having a sip. And your favorite Cabernet Sauvignon and you're feeling in that moment a kind of stacking of in the moment pleasure and broader you dimonia. I don't know why even attempted to say a Greek adjective there but a broader sense of purpose in your life. How am I flattening this concept if at all by saying what you're talking about is pleasure and purpose. I think that sort of captures a lot of what we're talking about there. I think the issue is that when we think about being happy in our life pleasure kind of conveys maybe too narrow of you of what we want to be doing in our lives right. I mean we want emotions that are maybe nostalgic or bittersweet or these kinds of kind of for example pleasure that comes not from the moment but the idea that like I'm pushing myself right like a really hard run or really hard yoga session might be that kind of being happy in your life ultimately even though it's not like that. Pure pleasure in the moment and so but I think overall if you kind of expand the notion of pleasure to include more complicated forms of pleasure then I think yeah you're kind of capturing it with this sort of joint idea of pleasure and purpose. I think a really important implication of this distinction between happiness in our life versus with our life is that expectations that we have about our experiences are often just as significant or even more significant than the quality of the experiences themselves on the Sam Harris show you and Sam a few years ago I think it 2020 talk to briefly about the experience of climbing Everest where on a second to second basis. This is a kind of physiological torture but it is torture in service to glory right which makes it something that people will spend tens of thousands of dollars to do rather than spend tens of thousands of dollars to avoid. And at a much more prosaic level I'll testify that being a parent of a small and once colloquy and gratefully no longer colloquy baby. This experience involves several moments that do seem lifted from a CIA handbook on psychological abuse I mean constant loud screaming in your ear check a sudden end to social habits like getting drinks with friends check sleep deprivation check but again this is. Torture in service to glory and it seems like one implication of the in our life versus with our life distinction is that even in moments of stress incredible stress we have access to an expectation reframing device in our mind that says I may not be happy in this moment. But in time I might learn I might learn to be happy with this moment how powerful is this expectation reframing device when it comes to the kind of happiness that truly counts. Yeah I mean I think it's really incredibly important right I mean we do so many things that give us you know very little pleasure in the moment or as you're pointing out you know could be defined as CIA torture in the moment with the idea that we're building up to something you know much greater you know whether that's like you know studying for finals in the college students that I work with or being a parent you know any young parent who's dealing with the colloquy baby or you know half the time when we're pursuing big dreams that we have whether that's to run a marathon or to do some big project at work like. The in the moment time is sometimes you know pretty sucky when you get right down to it but having that expectation that things are going that what we're doing right now is going to lead to a sense of purpose lead to a goal that we have that's bigger. It can really push us to enjoy and sometimes even can translate to in the moment sort of enjoying it to you know I've heard parents like kind of reframing when they're bouncing the colloquy baby to have this moment realizing like oh my gosh this this stage is not going to last very long I have to have immense gratitude for it or just kind of really be present to kind of pay attention you know because even the screaming and stuff is going to go away. And so I think that yeah it's really that idea that we can not necessarily see things just as being happy in the moment but really focus on happiness in the future. Wines up really being important for building a life that's that's quite good and our minds are actually quite good at that. I actually think if you had to pick one of those ratios being good you'd want the kind of not so happy in the life but kind of living a life of purpose. We've all heard of people who experience the opposite who have lives that may be filled with like every hedonic pleasure at your flying first class and drinking the really nice wine and so on. But you lack a sense of purpose you lack the satisfaction and I think that that leads to deeper kind of psychological discontent on the whole. There's something kind of interesting in this connects not only maybe to modern psychology but also to existential philosophy that there's something special about the human need to struggle a bit. I mean Dostoevsky was very despondent about this idea he wrote in notion the underground that you could give someone infinite joys in life you could give them nothing but cakes and they would find some way to struggle against the life that is nothing but the eating of cakes. That's maybe a more dour Russian version of an idea that I think is very true that to your point there is something special and ironically contentment giving about denying yourself a certain amount of contentment in the present and telling yourself that this is in service to some larger story. And do you think this is something that's truly just fundamental to a lot of people's sense of identity and happiness and self. This is a whole book about pleasure where he talks about this and the idea is like pleasures complicated man like the true pleasure comes from deferring pleasure or painful kinds of pleasure right or these goals that we might even achieve over time and we kind of push ourselves with the hope that we might get there. And I do think that that's something like fundamental about being human is that what kind of allows us to experience a good life is much more complicated than you might think you know at first glance. Yeah, it's even connects back with you mentioned the concept of flow and I think me high she sent me highs concept of flow is one of the better ways that I think I remember it being described in that book is people love losing themselves in an achievable challenge right and so there's something very subtle but lovely there about the idea that we want challenge we need challenge but what creates these moments of ecstatic flow is having a sense in the moment that the challenge is achievable. That we are on the heroes journey and not in the middle of our own personal tragedy. I want to connect this with one of my favorite topics and happiness research which is our relationship to time and the ways in which being a content person is often about being good at using our capacities of mental time travel well. We had Ethan cross in the show a few years ago and he studied a principle that he calls psychological distancing which is essentially using our relationship with our future selves in order to make our current selves feel richer and happier and I would love you to tell us a little bit about how you understand psychological distancing and how thinking about events from the perspective of our future self can make us happier in the present. Yeah well I think the first place to start is just to notice how often we are not thinking in the present moment right you know if you were to kind of like you know stick me an fmri and look at what the kinds of things I was thinking about at any moment right any kind of idle moment it probably wouldn't just be like what it feels like to be sitting in my chair right now or what it feels like to be breathing is there no I'd be worrying about things that happened in the past thinking about what could be right now maybe I'm not sitting in this chair maybe I'm on a beach in Miami. Right now right I'd be fantasizing about the future or even ruminating about the future and sort of thinking about where it's going and you know the kind of things that might not go well. We exist as beings not in the present moment we exist as beings that are kind of everywhere in time and that raises this kind of question is like okay well what you know what's the happiest kind of place to be temporarily to kind of be in time well. And what I love about Ethan's work is it shows that sometimes we can harness the way we think about our future selves to do well in the present moment right sometimes we're kind of kind of caught ruminating a thing like I'm really worried about say this upcoming test I have again for if you're one of my college students. But then you can sort of take a step back and say wait hang on how in 10 years from now me be thinking about this test and I'm like well it's not really a big deal right I can kind of protect myself from sort of present worries or like super coming up really soon worries if I sort of fast forward myself into the future and that sort of psychological distancing that psychological distancing and the temporal domain. Ethan and just lay people do this a lot in other domains to another form of psychological distancing that I love is just pretending that you're somebody else you know so what would be on say do is a really fun way to think about this right like well if I was beyond say I wouldn't be worried about this thing coming up I just kind of be a badass and go on that's just a quick way to get out of my own current psychology to try to think about the world in a different way and so. Yeah, Ethan's work about psychological distancing is a way to harness ourselves in time and even ourselves in space and in our own identity in different ways to kind of navigate the worries that we're facing now in a way that feels a little healthier. I want to hold for a bit longer on this subject of our relationship to this time space landscape that you're describing our relationship to our future selves in a recent episode of your podcast an episode entitled does the you of today hate the you of tomorrow you talk to UCLA's how Hirschfield who's done several studies on how engaging our future selves changes our behavior in the present and in one experiment how brought people into a lab to write a letter to their future selves in three months. In three months versus in twenty years time so you write yourself write a letter to yourself in three months versus writing a letter to yourself in twenty years and then he looked at how the act of future self writing changed their present behavior can you tell us a little bit about this study and what how found. Yeah, I mean the amazing thing was what how was really interested is not necessarily what people wrote about how the act of writing really changed people's behavior in the future. And what what you was trying to get at was people sort of future oriented behaviors right there stuff I can do in the present moment that may not feel awesome right now but is going to help my future self out right I could say for retirement I could like get my butt to the gym like you know I could do all these things now that that you know may or not feel perfect right now but are going to help me in the future. And in this study one of the things that how looked at was people's exercising right if you're really thinking about yourself twenty years from now you're going to want your needs to be good you're going to want your heart to be good exercising would be a pretty good thing to do. And what he finds is that when people write to themselves many years off in the future they wind up exercising more in the weeks following that writing exercise than when they write to themselves you know just a month from now. And I find that really profound is just a simple act of sort of doing a little bit of perspective taking thinking about something from my future self's perspective winds up making me really good at doing the stuff that would benefit that future self. You know it's interesting that we can change our experience the present by imagining our future selves we can also change our experience of the past to in a strange way and apologize for listeners who didn't think they were getting something is persistently existential is this but I am so interested in thinking about about life this way I had this experience a few years ago where. I went to Northwestern University as an undergraduate and I returned maybe 10 15 years later and I remember walking around South campus by Allison Hall where I lived as a as a sophomore and near where I lived as a junior and I was listening to a playlist of music from my junior year which I suppose is music from 2010 2011. And it should be from 2007 and as I was listening to this music I was feeling very nostalgic about my time as a college junior and as I reflected on that later I thought that was very strange because my actual experience of being a college junior wasn't very positive I had really bad insomnia that year I really didn't like my classes as much I had just a lot of health issues my junior year and it was strange to think that 10 11 years later I could go back to that vault. I could go back to that very same place and listen to the same music I was listening to and merely pull out the nostalgia for my junior year rather than the suffering of that year and it made me think that even in moments that we are really suffering there is a kind of secret nostalgia buried within the present that we can only really excavate as the memorializing archaeologists of the future and it's kind of interesting to play with time in that way and think even when God you are hating this episode of your podcast that you're editing or I'm hating this article that I'm writing or I'm going through a really tough time with something else in my life to stand back and remember I will be nostalgic for this moment too. It's just kind of a funny exercise to do with yourself and it causes you to have this immediate and necessary reframe of well what will I be nostalgic for it's like a forcing function for gratitude and I don't know if there's a question at the end. I wonder if you ever find yourself sort of playing with time in this way as well. Totally and this is an effect that psychologists talk about a lot usually memory researchers not happiness researchers but it's a phenomenon that researchers call rosy retrospection one of my favorite studies that that looked at this. What did some research with folks were about to go on a really hard course cycling trip and so they survey the cyclist before the trip they're like how awesome is the trip going to be in the cyclist like this is going to be awesome this is going to be amazing you know like I don't like like 10 out of 10 right. Then the cyclist go on the trip and it's actually kind of miserable right because your butt hurts and you've got sunburned and it's terrible and so people are actually rating the trip every point in the trip you know this is a three out of 10 you know this is a four out of 10 whatever. Then they get to the end of the trip they're on the plane back home they do one more survey how is the trip and what you find is that people's retrospective evaluation of the trip was higher at that moment than every single moment in the trip right even if we were taking a ticker tape of every single moment we were experiencing immediately after our retrospection is a little bit higher. And I think that like Nostalgia I think that nostalgic rosy retrospection gets even higher you know as the years go by when we're looking back at you know what was happening in our 20s and so on. And so this is just kind of how memory works which I think is an interesting philosophical puzzle for memories right like who was actually having those experiences was it crappy and your butt was hurting or was it this great wonderful thing that you achieved. But I think that you're right that when you have this moment where you realize you know I could look back at this in a fond way all of a sudden it does kind of start increasing your gratitude even when you're suffering in the moment right again take a parent with a colicky baby. If you have the moment of like hey this is a this is a one year period two year period like soon I'm never going to get these crowd never hear these cries again right all of a sudden your gratitude kind of immediately kicks in and this gets to another psychological phenomenon that when we think about a particular phenomenon as being kind of short lived that you know it's kind of time locked we're never going to get back there even if the experiences kind of crappy just recognizing that it's short winds up making it feel better. There's another study that I love that surveyed college seniors and made them believe hey either you have a bunch of time left you know your senior year before you graduate or kind of framed it to be like it's not that much time left it's only couple months you don't have much time. What they find is that the students who had their time left framed as really short wound up saying that they were happier after graduation they wound up enjoying their time more. And it's in part because they changed how they behave when the students thought that time was short they wound up putting in more fun activities they wound up kind of adding in the stuff that they really wanted to get done during college to make sure it was great and so. I think this idea of remembering rosy retrospection and even kind of remembering the experiences are short can be all these little many time travel ways that we wind up making the present experience better even when the present experience itself might be kind of objectively kind of crappy. Everything just said makes me wonder what you think about the saying the cliche the finding that happiness equals expectations minus reality I've heard this in a thousand different places and I've always hated this phrase. I've hated it not because I don't understand it I understand the idea that if someone has very high expectations of their life and their life is merely OK they'll live their life in a state of permanent disappointment and that permanent disappointment will register is the same kind of unhappiness that they might have experienced if the reality was much worse but their expectations were lower I do get it. There's two problems that I have with this idea that happiness is the the delta between our expectations and reality one is that it seems to imply that we should have low expectations it seems to imply that for example when the ball when the Boston Celtics win the NBA championship we should pity them because now their expectations for the future have been lifted to impossible heights and we should say oh my God the poor Boston Celtics having won the NBA championship or now doomed to a life of misery because now their expectations are primarily higher we don't actually think like that. And it seems to violate something profoundly reasonable about we shouldn't pity winners as much as the saying suggests we should the other wrinkle to this this formula happiness being the delta between expectations and reality that I just thought of as you were talking is that to certain extent happiness requires a certain kind of facility that we have with optimism where we have like an on off toggle switch with hope and optimism where we can say in moments of real suffering. I can imagine a world in which this suffering is actually in service to a positive end in which like my raising of a college baby ends with me having like a happy child in which this suffering at low oxygen altitude will lead to me climbing my Everest those sort of high expectation stories that we tell are really important to pull happiness into the present in order to get us through the hard moments that are just inherently a part of life. So I wonder how you know you must have heard this this saying a thousand times happiness being the delta between expectations and reality it does seem like some things that you're saying suggest that this is not quite as simple a formula is sometimes presented. Yeah I think it's definitely not quite as simple a formula as is often presented but that said I might disagree with you a little bit on the on the winners thing I actually think that the Boston Celtics have something to worry about right like you know if you're just data you you know now you're like. The next one is not going to be as good as the first one now right like you know at the next time like those confetti comes down and he gets to hug do so it's going to yeah it's just same as before right one of one of the jokes I make in my class where I teach undergrads at Yale is I play that DJ call it song all I do is win and I point out that this would be a terrible life because if all you did was win you would stop getting each kind of happiness increase that comes from the wins now that would be expected and God forbid you do. And God forbid you do what normal people do which is lose occasionally now you feel really terrible and so it's not so much that expectations you know might as real like that's the whole thing about happiness but it actually matters and what but what. What I think it doesn't capture is the fact that you can change those expectations around a lot right you know Jason Tatum could then say all right like let me think back to what high school me would feel about this moment right like we can reset our reference points. So we can reset what is the expectation pretty easily with some intention and that's why I think it's a kind of not so simple I think we can move the equation around like we have much more intentional control over what the expectation is or what the reference point is but that reference point does wind up shaping a lot more stuff than we think. Yet the other aspect of this is that fear of future failure doesn't capture another reality which is resilience were incredibly resilient in the face of failure even failure that we spend and our entire life fearing happening to happening to us. I'm reading a book right now called far from the tree which is a book that Andrew Solomon now at psychologists I think at Columbia but previously a journalist with New York Times magazine wrote about children who are different from their parents either because their death and their parents weren't or their transgender and their parents were or their prodigies and their parents weren't. And in the first chapter he has this observation I maybe you know the study it suggests that they people looked at folks who had won the lottery and compared their self described happiness to people who would become double or quadruple amputees and found that there was only a small difference in how happy they said they were at that time at the time that that question was asked and you think how. How much people look forward to becoming a millionaire versus how much money people would spend to avoid the fate of becoming an amputee and it turns out that because of maybe some sense of homeostatic happiness or maybe some sense of resilience it turns out that both groups after a certain amount of time have roughly the same amount of self described contentment it does at least suggest that we should be afraid of future failure a little bit less and lean on or expect future success to make us happy a little bit less. Yeah this is what researcher Dan Gilbert calls the impact bias so the impact of both good and bad events will kind of hit us in a less magnitude than we expect and for less of a long duration than we expect. The good news about the impact bias is that turns out it's actually bigger for negative events so if you win the lottery you're not going to be as happy as you expect and you're not going to be happy for as long as you expect but if you became paraplegic that mismatch between what you're predicting and what actually happens is even worse so it's not going to be as bad as you think. And that Dan Gilbert argues means that we have tremendous resilience that we don't expect right it means that like the worst possible thing could happen and it's not going to be as bad as you think which is quite remarkable. It also means that we shouldn't put our fantasies in this you know the kind of things that we do want to happen in some sort of glory land I think we need to kind of think a little bit more accurately about what that's going to look like. And one of the ways he suggests you can do that especially if you want to say you know hey if I applied a law school and get in is that going to make me happy if I become a millionaire is it going to make me happy one way to get more accurate perception rather than using your own predictions is to talk to people who've actually had that happen. And often what you'll find is like they're not actually that happy right you know so we shouldn't put our dreams kind of in this heavenly state it won't kind of build up our happiness as much as we think. One thing I love from your show on our relationship to our future cells as you talked about balancing the dangers of myopia near sightedness focusing too much on the present versus a word I was not familiar with hyper opia which is focusing too much on the future. And whereas a classic example of myopia would be spending too much money now and failing to save for your future self I guess a classic example of hyper opia would be saying yes yes yes to a bunch of work requests always telling yourself you know I'll rest later I'll sleep when I'm dead. I need to be giving myself more and more tasks and later you realize you spent your entire life planning for a future that you've never spent fully living I'd love you to talk a little bit about this balance between myopia and hyper opia maybe you can tell us do you think you suffer more from myopic or hyper opic thinking. Yeah well when I started the episode is funny I was really much more focused on the sort of myopic cases and these are the ones that psychologist talk about a lot we don't eat healthy and then we wind up with the related disease later you know we don't save enough retirement right it seems like many of the cases where our present self is going wrong is because it's kind of screwing over the future self to do something in the present that feels quite fun. This is like standard procrastination kinds of things right and so when I looked at my own life I initially saw lots of cases of my opia right you know I really don't get to the gym as much as I'm supposed to in fact I was supposed to go right after this podcast and I called my trainer I'm like how will we push it to tomorrow. We're just like a wargaging future Laurie's day right you know things in the savings domain right at least I saw all these cases where like you know future Laurie is going to be stuck doing all the stuff that that current Laurie is not really thinking about what she wants best. But after talking with how her field and sort of doing a show I started realizing there are all these other cases of my hyper opia you know a big one for me that help pointed out is these cases where I have some resource that I could spend now but like in my brain I think like oh I'll just use that in the future. Right you know I get this nice bottle of wine that a friend gave me and I'm not going to like pop it open with lunch today I'm like oh I'm going to save it for like a really good time but then that time kind of like never comes right. You know this might be a little bit more girly than you can relate to but you know I have all these like bath bombs and like spa products that spend all this money on that I'm like I could use them tonight you know when I take a shower but I'm not going to use I don't know wait for kind of a good time. Another cat classic cases are frequent flyer miles right like a lot of us bank these things if you travel a lot and you think oh someday I'm going to take that beach vacation. But it sort of never comes around. And in all these cases are cases where like our future self wouldn't want our frequent flyer miles to expire or like you know for us to kind of never have enjoy but now if anything our future self wants to look back with rosy retrospection to think oh my gosh though such a great time that you use these things. And so these are cases of hyper opia where you know just we're making these decisions in the present thinking out of a goal of productivity or some sort of idea that our future self will have more time and more freedom. We make these decisions now that are kind of screwing over our present self but that our future self wouldn't be that happy with either and so the interesting thing about the episode was I kind of came around to like okay yeah my opia I should probably get to the gym present Laura should you know like actually start working out. But I should also start doing the fun things that I'm putting off for leader to those matter to. I thought I was so conditioned to think that when we consider the concept of procrastination we typically think about procrastinating on work procrastinating on exercise procrastinating on diet. But we can also procrastinate on pleasure some of us can at least and it was interesting hearing you talk about wine both here and on the episode because my wife and I both love wine. And I have a couple expensive bottles that I've been gifted by friends for birthdays or Hanukkah and a couple years ago I found that we just kept pushing off and pushing off and pushing off drinking these wines to the point where the wines were now past the date when people were suggesting that we drink them. And my wife and I developed this new catchphrase at home which is drink the wine and drink the wine just means if it's a Tuesday night and you're feeling fantastic and you've both had a great day. And the baby isn't squealing even she's happy and it just feels like a day to celebrate but there's nothing to actually celebrate. There's no birthday, there's no anniversary, there's no actual work accomplishment that feels like a once in every five years event you should still celebrate that moment you should still drink the wine. And so I do love this idea that we can procrastinate on work but we can also procrastinate on pleasure and there's no formula here but it's just useful to be aware of our complex tendency to do both. One more point on our relationship to time that I thought was really interesting is you you talked a little bit about the concept of time affluence this lovely feeling that we have enough time to get done what we need to get done and feel unrushed through it. If you look at federal government data the American time you survey it seems like we have more time more leisure time than we did 20 30 50 100 years ago. But if you ask any individual do you have more free time now than you did 10 years ago everyone says no I feel like I'm completely run ragged I've no time affluence whatsoever I am time impoverished. What's your explanation for why people feel so harried in a world where there at least seems to be some official data that people are not as harried as they used to be. Yeah well I think there's a bunch of factors here both structural and psychological but but one interesting kind of structural one has to do with the way the time we have now is broken up right it is true that we have objectively more time than we have had in the past. But if you look at people's time usage surveys the chunks of time we have are much smaller right it's 10 minutes when your kid falls is to eat more 15 minutes when that zoom meeting ends early our time is kind of broken up into tinier pieces. And this is what the journalist Bridget Schult has christened time confetti these little pieces of time here and there and we assume that they don't really add up too much right you know so I get that 10 minutes when you know this if the podcast interview ends early. I'm like oh that's just 10 minutes I'll check my email I'll scroll through reddit I'll like look at something stupid on Instagram right we don't actually use that time well and because time affluence is really our subjective sense of how much time we have when we kind of blow that time we kind of feel like we didn't have any. And so the ideas that are we do have more objective time but because it's broken up in stupid ways and as a consequence of that we use it in really dumb ways we kind of just blow it off like looking at something stupid on our phone. Now we wind up feeling more time and polished. And so one strategy for kind of dealing with that is just to make good use of your time confetti Harvard Business School professor Ashley Willens who studies time affluence a lot recommends making a time confetti wish list or it's kind of a to do list but not a work to do list you know maybe that's when you do. You know scribble in your gratitude journal or take a deep breath or text a friend or I don't know maybe like bust into that bottle of wine and you have a 10 minute wine delicious wine break or something. 2015 the afternoon is actually this is a 5 o'clock somewhere right but but the idea is that if we use those tiny chunks well then they can kind of allow us to feel like we've had a little bit more time. I don't know if this book exists surely it must exist but I would love to have at my desk a self help book from making better use of my time confetti a book that's like maybe the title is something like this will only take 5 minutes and it's just like a 100 page book a short little book that's just like here are 100 things that are really good for you. None of which takes more than 10 minutes and it can just slip right in there to fill this little time chunk this little time confetti right it's it's like here's why flossing is really important here's why doing like. 50 push ups the middle of the day might be like really beneficial to you if you do it every single day just like a handful of these ideas for making just slightly better use my time confetti like I don't want to be like humanoid robot man who's like optimizing every single 30 second chunk of my day but just having a little. A few of these things actually think would be very useful yeah I think I think making your own list can be a little bit helpful because then it's like on your I'm about to go to my phone to like look at right and I'm like oh I should look at the list and then. You can kind of build these things and I did this one one of the moments where I have this is in between meetings you know that sad thing about being a podcaster professor as I spend a lot of time on screen like this as we are talking looking at zoom. I often get these like five minute chunks in between and so I added to my bookmarks these little five minute like kind of chair yoga things that sounds so silly but it's basically just to like stretch in your chair. And I can't tell you how helpful it's been to just make me a little bit more embodied in these like moments that I was just going to blow away or to kind of make me feel like I use that time well and so I too if there's some if there's some you know kind of. Innovative journalist out there who wants to give us the time confetti you know to do this book i'm all ears but making your own list from things you kind of remember are useful for you can be helpful to. I know I love that right like a five minutes or 10 minutes between zoom calls it's like just listen to a little bit of like Marcus really is meditations do a little bit of yoga and you will be wiser and more limber than you will have ever hope to be in the next six months I want to talk. We're talking a lot about things that living inside of our own minds and I love I love this discussion but I do think that one thing it's missed which is absolutely my own fault not yours is the presence of other people. And something I've been thinking a lot recently about since we've had Robert Waldinger and Mark Schultz on the show is this concept of social fitness this idea that we should care for the quality of our relationships the same way that we care for the quality of our bodies. And I've become convinced the 21st century is a kind of full on assault on social fitness in part because it's become so easy to move through life without suffering the inconvenience of other people and I will confess right now I do not like talking to strangers I don't really engage my uber drivers I don't like talking to people on planes I don't want to come off like a dick but I don't like. Short brief encounters with strangers in the world I would just prefer not to is there empirical evidence that a different approach to being in the world would make me happier. Yeah, I mean I will say that just to update what you're saying you're saying I don't like talking to strangers and I would change that to I predict that I don't like talking to strangers. That you have not done careful a b a b testing of when you talk to the uber driver drivers you don't talk to the uber drive drive. Luckily there are psychologists who have done these kind of randomized control trials of forcing people to talk to strangers and interestingly what they often find is that when you take time to talk to a stranger you wind up feeling happier. One of my favorite studies on this came from the psychologist Nick Epley who's at the University of Chicago. He has people on the L train kind of commuting in Chicago predict how would it feel to spend your train ride just enjoying your solitude versus talking to a stranger. And people predict like talking to strangers going to be awkward and miserable it's going to like actively reduce my happiness. But then he has a different group of subjects actually do this and what he finds is that at the end of the train ride the people who talked to the stranger wound up feeling happier than those that didn't. And interestingly this is true for both introverts and extroverts you get the same magnitude of happiness that comes from talking to a stranger in introverts and extroverts which I find shocking but this is replicated now a few times. The difference is in the prediction. The extroverts are like it will be a little awkward to talk to a stranger but the introverts are like it would be you know like defcon 0,000 terrible like it's like there's no scale that will capture how terrible like talking to the stranger will be. And so I think that's an interesting message right which is that we make predictions about what we should be doing socially based on these expectations were expecting talking to a stranger is going to feel crappy so we don't do it. That means we never practice it so we never get to kind of disconfirm our expectations but it also means we kind of get out of practice doing this. I think so many of us especially kind of post covid are like even worse at this than we were before you know I was never like exactly the person who's like oh my gosh let's go to this huge party and talk to people but now kind of being out of practice doing that for two years you know in my house and my fuzzy socks. I think it becomes even even harder but again that's just my expectation about it being harder like when I actually get out there and try it out it's probably going to feel better than I think. I'm still stuck in the very first thing that you said you said something like Derek you say you don't like talking to strangers but actually you might just be wrongly predicting that you don't like talking to strangers and in fact there is a latent you who does like talking to strangers that you have not allowed to come out and play. It's really interesting to think that most descriptions of our own personalities are actually just predictions about our personality that we are when we describe ourselves to a partner to a friend to a therapist not in fact describing ourselves but making predictions about ourselves that haven't contested. And it suggests that maybe we should spend a lot more time in our life pretending to be other people to see if those predictions are accurate like if you're introverted and I'm mildly introverted I don't think there's a binary I think it's probably a normal distribution of introversion extroversion but yeah mildly introverted maybe I just be happy you're pretending to be an extrovert. And in fact researcher Sonya libremersky has done these studies where she's basically brought extroverts and said hey extroverts why don't you act introverted for two weeks or hey introvert why don't you act introverted for two weeks and what she finds is that the introverts who wind up acting extroverted wind up happier in the two weeks they do this. We should have another episode of this podcast where we interviewed this this lovely journalist Jessica pan hardcore introvert who wrote a book called sorry I'm late I didn't want to come colon introverts year of extroverting and so she did one of these like social experiments that journalists often do where she spent a year trying to be as extroverted as possible and she went incredibly hardcore like she joined like a comedy club and like went to the Edinburgh French festival and performed and did all these networking events. And you know she still thinks she's an introvert she still has the prediction that it's not going to be fun but she knows from her experimentation that it actually does make her feel better and she knows from her experimentation that it's a lot easier now that she's allowed herself some experience with it than she expected and so yeah we get a lot of when we put that episode out we get a lot of hate mail I get a lot of introverts being like okay maybe for that chick but like not for me it's going to be really miserable for me to talk to this stranger on the train. In fact what's funny is that when we do shows about social connection that's the ones where we get the most hate mail it's not politics or climate or anything it's really talk to stranger it won't be that bad it's like unleashes the full kind of crack and fury of the internet saying that I'm wrong but but the data are really clear here you know study after study just shows our predictions about social connection are wrong and even introverts would be happier if they got a little bit more extroverted. I just think about this all the time because it seems like so many different aspects of modern life modern economics modern technology simply make it convenient to act like an introvert there's obvious examples and I wrote an article early this year where I went through American time you survey and found that the average amount of time that people spend in face to face socializing overall it's declined 25% in the last 20 years. Among teenagers is to climb 45% in the last 20 years and this isn't just because people are spending more time on their phones I think it's also because different aspects of the economy make it more convenient to simply spend time inside of our houses in the last 10 years the restaurant industry has evolved to a place where off premise spending is now higher overall in American restaurants than on premise spending that is to say that the larger business for American restaurants now. Is take away bags rather than tables there's all sorts of 21st century customs and technologies that might be creating a kind of mass delusion of introversion that is actually a kind of false prediction of who we are that that it has become so easy to act as if we were introverted that we are deluding ourselves from recognizing that we'd be happier if we acted as if we are extroverted I'm just kind of like a weird weird combination of psychology and economic development yeah and I think this is something that people have pointed out back all the way back in our first season of the podcast we had the musician David burn from the talking heads on and he wrote this really interesting MIT tech article called eliminating the human or he made the point that you're basically making where he said if you look at pretty much any big technological development over the last couple decades it is one that eliminates the human right you talked about you know the kind of like food delivery type services right everybody's taking take out and things but even stuff like Uber right I can just plug in where I'm going I don't even have to tell my address to the driver you could look at things like you know online using share online music sharing services right you know we used to have to like walk into somebody's house and there'd be a big wall of CDs you're younger than me so maybe you don't remember this but like there used to be Derek a wall of CDs when you went into people's house now like nobody can talk to you about your music because it's hidden on your phone right you kind of can't see it even bookstores right we used to go browse in a bookstore and kind of walk around and see people and talk about books now they just kind of arrived via the internet onto our iPad and so burn goes through all these even online learning for example right knew this is something that you know I'm participating and we put our happiness class online and millions of people have taken it but they haven't chatted with me about happiness right we haven't had an educational system where we ask each other questions and meet in person and so I think so many technological developments are moving us away from human interaction with the assumption that that's good or at least it reduces friction or maybe it's like faster but there could be real psychological consequences to this and the episode we had David burn on we talked to another kind of interesting pioneer of an eliminating human technology we talked to Dawn Wetzel who's the inventor of the ATM he's in his 90s now I'm really getting up there but what I love about Dawn's story is you know he had the intuition that many of us had that like you know back in the 3 ATM back in the day you'd have to wait in bank line you know talk to the teller get the money just so much more frictionless if you could just have a machine do it but what's funny about Dawn's story is that his wife Eleanor is embarrassed that her husband made the ATM she insists on continuing to go to the teller because she likes chatting with them and having to chat and so that she kind of like even in their story she kind of figured out that this would be a problem for people that would be something that we're missing we're gaining something maybe in speed and reducing friction but we might be losing something really human that's so interesting I'm not a lead I think all these technologies are wondrous in so many ways I love ATMs but it is interesting to think that there is this subtle negative externality to a lot of technologies that can as as David burn said eliminate the human I want to close by time to threats together we've talked about temporal displacement and thinking of ourselves as beings and time and how a certain facility with thinking about ourselves living in time can make us happier in the present we talked a little bit about technology for these things together I'm interested in the fact that when we lose ourselves we can lose ourselves and past regret we can lose ourselves in future anxiety you can also be temporally displaced in the present too if your mind is just elsewhere right you're sitting down to dinner with your partner and they're talking and you are just not listening to them your mind is just a loud self-talk narrative about something that's happening somewhere else in the world I think about this in relationship to our cell phones a lot you mentioned in the episode that we've referenced a few times that psychologist Liz Dunn has done some work on how the presence of smartphones just their sheer presence in our visual field can change the way that we relate to people around us Can you summarize her work and why you find it significant? Yeah I mean Liz had this lovely analogy that she used in the podcast which is imagine you're sitting down to dinner with your partner and instead of having your cell phone out you had a big wheelbarrow and in the wheelbarrow was like printouts of everything every politician has said in the last three years you know like actually like binders with your emails in it you know huge photo albums of every photo you've taken before like you know DVDs of every cat video and porn you know show on the internet it's like huge rising into the sky you know CDs filled with music of every song you've ever listened to since the early 2000s Liz was like if you were sitting next to that wheelbarrow it would be hard to pay attention you'd be like oh I just want to look at the photos from that you know like that wedding or something and Liz points out like your brain isn't stupid your brain knows that on the other side of your smartphone is all that stuff and much much much more and so her what she points out is that the kind of distraction that you get from the wheelbarrow is ever so subtly happening all the time and she and her research is finding ways to kind of pull this out for example she has some data showing that if you're sitting in a waiting room with a stranger and you have your cell phone with you not even out and that you're looking at it but just with you you wind up smiling 30% less at the other people in that room because you know their presence has kind of detracted a little bit because you're kind of thinking about and paying attention to this other really distracting thing around you and so there's lots of hints that it's not even just when we really kind of I think the word is fubbing people right when we're actually on our phones when other people around even when it's just near us it's kind of ever so subtly stealing our attention in ways that are problematic and it's one of the reason if you look at some studies on various forms of concentration a lot of these are done with college students who are taking some exam like just putting your phone out of sight and even better out of the room winds up allowing you to concentrate better so students do better for example on a memory test or a decision making test moving their phone a little bit further away and it's kind of protecting you from that many attentional cost that's going on all the time well we have succeeded in my goal of ending every single episode I do this year with commentary on the downside of our smart phones I'm going to end it right there, Laurie Santos, thank you so much thanks so much for having me you