Transcript of Want to ‘Optimize’ Your Happiness? This Happiness Expert Says: Don’t. New

From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm Lulu García-Navarro. Are you happy? It's a deceptively simple question, right? But for me, at least, it's a really difficult one to answer. Another tough question: why is it so hard to be happy for so many people? Despite a culture of wellness influencers with their happiness hacks and mindset tricks, all of the indicators show that we Americans are less less happy than ever. What is going on and what can we do about it? I put those questions to Dr. Laurie Santos. Santos is a cognitive scientist whose class on happiness quickly became the most popular in Yale's history. And through her podcast, The Happiness Lab, and her free online course called The Science of Well-Being, Santos's reach has extended well beyond the classroom. I wanted to understand what the science says happiness really is, how our understanding of what it takes to be happy has changed over time, and why, with the pandemic in our rearview mirror, it's still been so hard for me and many others to do the things that will actually make us happier. And what she told me was surprising. Here's my conversation with Dr. Laurie Santos.

Thank you so much for being here. I'm so glad you could join me.

Thanks so much for having me on the show.

I am gonna start in a bit of a strange place because like so many people in the world, I was really obsessed with the story of Punch the Monkey.

Mm-hmm.

And that little monkey in Japan whose mother sort of rejected him and he had no one to socialize with, so he adopted that IKEA monkey toy.

Yes.

And I have a theory about Punch that connects to happiness, and I wanted to put it to you because apart from being a happiness expert, You also study animal cognition, and you started your work with monkeys.

Literally everyone that I know sent me information about Punch. I was, like, getting in real time what was happening with Punch.

I was really thinking about why so many people around the world connected with Punch's inability to form relationships. And you've long said that the bonds with other people are one of the building blocks of happiness. It's one of the most important things that we can do. But especially here in the US, those bonds were fraying. And I think we just saw some of ourselves in Punch. Do you think I may be right?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it was fascinating to see just how much emotion people showed about Punch, which I think is funny because sometimes we see news stories about the pain of other actual humans and we don't show that much compassion, right? But I think talking about the loneliness crisis through a monkey, like through this poor little monkey that didn't do anything, it wasn't really his fault. I think that really allowed us a way to talk about the loneliness crisis and to feel it admit it in ourselves in a way that wasn't as shameful. Hmm.

You know, I spent a lot of time in advance of this conversation really thinking about the nature of happiness, and I wanna start by digging into just what happiness is and maybe do some basic defining of terms, 'cause I went down a few rabbit holes.

You can, it's very easy to do with this term in particular. It is. Yeah.

And so as I discovered, lots of philosophers have tackled the question of happiness going back to ancient Greece.

Mm-hmm.

And there's two main types of happiness according to ancient Greek philosophers, as far as I could tell. And one is hedonic and the other one is eudaimonic. Can you explain what that is, what the difference is, what they were looking at back then?

So hedonic happiness, I think, is what a lot of laypeople mean when they mean happiness. That's just like a sense of good feeling, right? That's your personal pleasure. That's like the difference between eating a hot fudge sundae or stubbing your toe, right? Like there's some, there's something that it feels like to feel feel like things are good. And often when we're thinking of hedonic pleasure, we're thinking of the real basic stuff that evolution built in, you know, good food, good sex, a feeling of like accomplishment. Like these are the things that matter for us. Eudaimonic happiness is bigger. It's really about living a good life. It's about happiness that comes not just from your own success, your own pleasure, but from other people, from like actually building character. And if you look back at the ancients, folks like Aristotle and so on, they knew about both, but when push came to shove, they were like, go for Eudaimonic happiness, right? That is really, it's really about, they thought of like happiness as really synonymous with building character, doing nice stuff for others, civic virtue. It was much more like happiness as virtue. And when you look at the modern science, like this tension comes up, right?

In a lot of the interventions I talk about with my students, and maybe we'll even talk about today, there's a real question about which type of happiness we're building up. And I think where the research falls is saying that like, if we wanna do this well, we should probably be going more for the eudaimonic stuff. Like that's the stuff we don't get used to. That's the stuff where we get kind of more bang for our buck in terms of interventions and time and so on. But all too often when you look on the internet, if you look at social media influencers, when they're talking about happiness, they usually mean the hedonic stuff. And that's great. I mean, it's great to have, you know, great sex and hot fudge sundaes, but ultimately, you know, true happiness probably comes from what we do with others and building a broader good life.

In ancient Greece, the big philosophical debate was also if happiness is nature or nurture. What does the science say? Are certain people more predisposed to be happy? Is it biological?

Yeah, so the way scientists study this is they do these classic studies with twins. And the reason scientists are so obsessed with twins is that you get two kinds of twins. You get identical twins who are genetic clones of one another, and you also have fraternal twins who are as related as regular siblings, but you know, they were in the same womb, they probably grew up the same way and so on. And so what scientists do is they say, well, if there's a genetic component to happiness, if something about the variance that we see in the population is controlled by our genes, then those identical twins should look more similar in terms of their happiness than the fraternal twins. And like, lots of studies have looked at this, and what they generally find is that happiness is heritable. In other words, that doesn't mean there's a gene for happiness or anything like that. That means that some of the variance that we see in the population is due to the fact that somebody has one set of genetics versus another set of genetics. The important thing to know about those heritability studies though, is that the heritability factor is pretty low.

It's about the same rate as what you'd see for the heritability of something like religiosity or risk-taking, right? I mean, religiosity is probably, you know, if your parents were super religious, maybe you're more likely to be super religious, but obviously it's not set in stone. Same thing with risk-taking. And I think that's the message of happiness. Yeah, there's probably some component that's a little built in, but so much more of it is under our conscious control.

So we can learn to be happy.

I think that's the premise of my work, honestly. It's, it's that we have much more control over it. And interestingly, this was something that the ancient Greeks didn't totally realize. You know, if you look at Aristotle, he's like, we should cultivate virtue. You can do it, but it's gonna be hard. You know, Aristotle talked about the happy few. It's like, you know, you can go for it, but it's gonna take a lot of work and probably a lot of folks aren't gonna be up for that level of work. I think we think it's a little bit more malleable scientifically today, but we still share with Aristotle this idea that like, if you wanna If you wanna be happy, you can do it. But like all good things in life, you gotta put some time in.

When we think about happiness or wellbeing, is there a goal or is it just in the way that Aristotle said, an endless pursuit? I mean, can we reach the mountaintop and we just sit there, or is it just always searching for that place?

The pursuit of happiness is not like a destination. Like if I hopped on a flight and I got to LA, if I hopped on a flight to get to LA, I'd just be in LA and I'd be like, all right, LA. I'm here, you know, if I, you know, had the ability to stay, I could just stay there for a whole time. But like happiness doesn't work like that. It's not really a destination. And I think that it's funny when we think about happiness because I think we do kind of think of it as a destination, but we don't think of that with other good things in life. You know, take fitness, like say you're trying to get fit, I'm gonna go to the gym. It would be awesome if you took like one really hard HIIT class and then you were just good, right? Like you did that in your 20s and then, you know, all through midlife you're like, I took my HIIT class, I'm good. It was a fitness was a destination. No, we kind of get like, You gotta keep doing it over time or those, those kind of benefits don't stick.

And I think that's the way to think about happiness. You can get there, but it's active. It takes work like so many good things.

Can I ask you what exactly you mean when you say happy though? Because I was thinking about the nature of moments when I felt happy. I lived for 2 years in Rio de Janeiro and I would wake up every morning and I would look out the window and you couldn't be unhappy there because it was just so beautiful. And I had my young daughter and she would go to the beach every day and I had good friends. And you know, it's not even like looking back I was happy. I knew at the time that I was experiencing sort of happiness. Is that different than just general wellbeing?

Yeah, I think there's so many of these terms and it's so frustrating because we have so many of these terms. I also think that what laypeople mean by these terms is often a little different. Yes. There are actually studies on this of like, if you look at what laypeople mean, they tend to mean a particular kind of happiness. And it's kind of the one that you're getting at, which is sort of being happy happy in your life, which we might think of as like an affective part of happiness. You're just experiencing lots of positive emotions, right? It's awesome to live in Rio de Janeiro. It's awesome to stick your feet in the sand. Like, that just feels good. And that's half of, I think, what social scientists mean when they talk about happiness. They're talking about the feeling, how it feels to be in your life. It's kind of the ratio of your positive to negative emotions. Maybe we'll get into this, but happiness isn't about getting rid of your negative emotions. I think that's toxic positivity. That's not what social scientists mean. But it really is about having a decent ratio between positive to negative emotions.

That's kind of being happy in your life. But happiness, according to social scientists, has a second component too, which is this idea of being happy with your life. And that gets more towards these eudaimonic components. That's that you're satisfied with your life. You have a sense of meaning, you have a sense of purpose. It feels good to be you because of how you think it's going. So this is kind of the cognitive part of happiness. And I think the work of what we should be doing when we're trying to pursue happiness the right way is to, in theory, try to boost both of those.

You use the word toxic positivity. I mean, I think you're referring to this idea that we always need to be feeling great and exuding optimism. Is that what you're pushing back against?

Yeah, that's it. I mean, it's really summed up by the phrase that you see on social media all the time of good vibes only, like good vibes only. If there are any bad vibes, something's really off, right? And that just like doesn't make sense from the perspective of evolution. Like when I talk to my students, the way I often talk about negative emotions is as a signal, just like other negative sensations, right? You put your hand on a really hot stove, it's gonna hurt, it's gonna burn. And the reason you have that feeling is it's a good signal. It's like, get your hand off that stove. So many of our negative emotions are doing that for us. We should be so grateful for them 'cause they're helping us, right? If I'm feeling lonely, that's a signal that I need to change my behavior. I need to seek out some social connection. If I'm feeling sad, that's a signal signal that something's amiss, right? I might need more positive things in my life. A big one for me that I notice myself is I'm— if I'm feeling overwhelmed, that means I have way too much on my plate, right?

I have to make some changes. And those are signals, just like the signal we get from a hand on a hot stove, that to get back to equilibrium, we need to make some changes. And it would be sad to get rid of those. If you only had good vibes only, I feel like you couldn't live a positive life because you'd be missing out on these cues about where you're going off track and what you should change.

Do you worry if this idea of pursuing happiness, always striving for more, actually creates unhappiness?

Oh, definitely. Yeah. I think this— there's really lovely research on this from the researcher Iris Mauss at the University of California at Berkeley. She actually has a paper about the paradox of the pursuit of happiness, that the simple act of pursuing happiness often makes us feel unhappy. But that gets back to this, this fact that we just don't get happiness right. When we think about the pursuit of happiness, we think hedonic stuff. We think good vibes only, and whenever we're off track with that, we think something's gone wrong. And when things go wrong, we tend to have a different set of emotions, what nerdy psychologists like me call meta-emotions. Those are emotions about emotions, right? You know, so I don't know, you go on some really cool trip to Rio de Janeiro and you're like, oh, I'm annoyed with the sand. Like, it's a little too sunny. I'm not feeling happy. That's emotion number one. But then the meta-emotions come in. You're ashamed. How can I be in Rio de Janeiro and not feeling happy? You're disappointed. Like, oh, I spent all this money on this stuff. You're judging yourself. What's wrong with me that I don't feel so good?

Those emotions come up whenever we feel like we're off the path of pursuit of happiness. And the problem is if we are really into pursuing it, this is what Iris's data show, the more you value happiness, the more you think you're supposed to get there, the more these negative meta-emotions come up whenever you feel like you're off track. So yeah, it really does seem empirically that it's a paradox, right? That the more we go after at least one kind of happiness, you know, the kind of hedonic in-the-moment happiness, the more we think we're supposed to pursue that and something's really off if we haven't, what's going on, good vibes only, the more we kind of don't ever get there. Key though is that the paradox doesn't come up as much if you're pursuing the healthier kind of happiness.

You know, when I was thinking about this initially, I was like, ugh, this is such a modern idea, this idea of happiness. You know, this pursuit of happiness is something that I'm sure they didn't care about in the Middle Ages when they were struggling to eat. They weren't worried about, you know, maximizing their sense joy and aspiration to live the good life. And then I was sort of struck by the fact that this has been something very human for a very long time.

Yeah, I mean, I think we have cared about happiness for as long as we've been humans and could reflect on our own emotions and reflect on the state of being a human and what it means to be a human. But I think cultures really shift how we think about what we should be doing, right? So I think if you look at most of human history, sorry, I'm gonna nerd out and do like a mini happiness history lesson. Okay, this is great. Um, if you look at most of human history, we just didn't think it was possible to pursue happiness. So, so the word happiness comes from the cognate of luck. It's hap, right? Like happenstance. You know, I think even Shakespeare said, hap what hap may, or something like that, right? It's like, it's just luck. You, you might get a boulder might fall on your head or it might not, but you can't control that, right? That is for most of human history how we thought about happiness. Like it's good if you get it, but like you can't do anything about it. Then we get to the classic, Greeks, right? Folks like Aristotle and others.

And they had a slightly different view. They also thought, you know, it's all got a lot to do with luck and so on, but you can actually go for it. If you try to build up your virtue, if you try to go for that eudaimonic happiness, then you will get closer to it. You might not, you might not get there, right? The happy other happy few, but you can try. And I think we had that classic notion for a long time until we get to more of the modern day, until we get to the 18th century. And that was where a few things started to change. Change in these really interesting ways, right? One is that this is the first time where we're not having all the, like, Middle Ages stuff that you were just talking about, right? This is less 18th century, again, a little less pestilence, a little less terrible stuff going on. Life is starting to feel more controllable, like, even in really stupid ways, right? They could control the smoke that was coming out of their chimneys. They made bedding that was, like, a little bit softer. They had better lighting in their houses, right?

Better food.

Better food, right? It started to feel feel like, oh, I can, it's reasonable to think I might be able to control my hedonic happiness 'cause I've seen some evidence that my actions can do that. And at the same time, you get cultural changes that fit with this, right? This is around the sciencey time of like Isaac Newton and others where we're learning like objects just move in certain ways. You know, gravity pushes objects towards one another. Scientists are also starting to think, well, what does that mean for humans? Oh, we're, we move towards pleasure and away from pain. These are like Jeremy Bentham type arguments about this stuff. So the idea is like, oh, we're built to seek out pleasure, like this is a thing we should go for. So yeah, so I think every generation has wanted to feel happy. I mean, I think, you know, Bentham was right. We are built to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, but the cultural context in which we think about that can be different over time. We are in the notion of like looks maxing and like, you know, like getting all your pleasure right now and, you know, spa pedicures and this kind of stuff.

I think we really just definitionally think of happiness as about me, me, me. And so much of the science and so much of this classic wisdom tells us, no, it's not. Like, that's the way you get off track. That's the way you pursue it in the wrong way.

All right, so that brings us to what we deal with today.

Yes.

And I really wanna focus on social connection because the pandemic, I think, showed us that if you don't have it, you're really, really gonna suffer in ways that were perhaps not clear. And I have been trying to figure out what happened to me during that period. Honestly, I became a lot more insular and I had to sort of relearn how to make those social connections after that period. Am I typical?

Yeah. No, studies bear this out. Pretty much every survey I know of that asks people about COVID like, was it smooth sailing when you jumped back into it? People are like, no, right? There was some friction to this. We kind of got out of practice from it. And that makes sense because even though we're built to be social, right? Even though in some sense this should be easy, social connection's hard, right? There's another mind there that you're trying to like navigate and predict, and you don't often get direct access to it. So it is clunky and it does have some friction. Um, that friction is one of the reasons that, you know, as a professor, whenever I go into the dining hall, I'm shocked at how few of my students are just talking to one another. This is something professors remark about now when I walk into my classroom, say a seminar room where all my students are sitting around a table, they're not chatting with one another, they're all on a screen looking at it. And I think the problem for them is there's like, there's a little bit of friction, like it's hard to get that going.

And when you didn't do it for, you know, a year, a year and a half, however long it was, yeah, it got harder. You were simply out of practice from it. And I actually think that this is one of the reasons that our young people, I mentioned my students, are so lonely right now is I think just like over their developmental time, they just had less practice at it. Like, the modern world is taking away all these subtle ways that we talk to one another. One of my favorite articles that looked at this was by the Talking Heads, uh, frontman David Byrne. He wrote this article kind of presciently, I think this is back in the 2010s, called Eliminating the Human. And his idea was like, if you look at what pretty much every technology has done, it's taken away the human. From something as simple as like, we go to the ATM now, we don't have to talk to a teller. We don't go to a record store and talk with people about records to get our music. We just have an algorithm deliver it to us. In all these subtle ways, our technologies are making it so that we don't need to like talk to regular people.

And I think we forget like the subtle ways that this keeps coming up.

What do you think AI's gonna do? They really is trying to eliminate the human.

Yeah, no, it's gonna get way worse because the friction of talking to an LLM, I mean, we're already seeing this, isn't there. The LLM is there whenever you wanna talk, right? If you're feeling up at 2 in the morning, you can say that. The LLM is really not judgy. You know, if anything, the current iterations, when you and I are having this conversation, we're learning are too sycophantic, right? They can almost create cognitive delusions in people, but yet that is what our young people are turning to. I just had Jean Twenge, the kind of technology specialist on our podcast who's talked a lot about phones, and she's really shifting to the dangers of AI. One of her data points is just how many young people, and we're talking like 12, 13-year-olds, are having their first relationship with an LLM. Like their first boyfriend and girlfriend is an LLM. And so what's the friction gonna look like when they have to ask a real human out on a date, navigate like a sexual consent conversation with a real other human with preferences and so on? Yeah, I think AI is gonna change this in ways that are likely to make it worse.

It creates this cycle where it becomes harder and harder to overcome that little friction to talk to someone.

Yeah, I mean, my daughter asked me recently, "How do you start a conversation with strangers? How do you go up to someone that you don't know and just start to talk to them?" And of course, that's a function of their age and that's totally normal. I mean, they're learning how to interact in the world, but I also realize like how much harder it is Totally. To do that nowadays, because you're not only interrupting maybe a social dynamic, you're also interrupting people's interaction with their devices. Their phone. And I notice it in my own family because she comes up to me and I'm on my phone and I feel annoyed sometimes. I'm like, ugh, I'm in the middle of reading, can't you see?

Yeah, and so all these cues that it's appropriate to talk to someone, right? That they're making eye contact with you, they're smiling with you, that doesn't happen when your eyes are glued to your phone. And there's such interesting research on this. Liz Dunn, who's a professor at the University of British Columbia, a study I love where she puts people in a waiting room, strangers in a waiting room, and just either has them have access to their phones or not. And she just measures a really creative dependent variable, which is how often they spontaneously smile at each other. You know, you're sitting there, you just look over and smile, 30% decrease in smiling.

No.

Yes. Multiply that by what's happening on the streets of New York, right? What's happening in—

Let's not use New York. New York people are never smiling in New York.

Well, it's happening in Boston. It happens in Boston too. I mean, what's, what's happening at your own dinner table, right? Where your daughter's about to tell you something about your day, but your eyes are glued to your phone, right?

And you, she talks about it all the time.

Yeah. And you just don't notice, right? And you know, we're not like harshing on people for their phones. Like they're built to be interesting. They're built to have every interesting thing in the history of the universe. But the consequence of our eyeballs being glued to them is really dangerous. Dangerous for the social connections we care about most.

I mean, this speaks to the wider situation in which we find ourselves, because I was looking at some data from 2012 to now, and there was a recent report by the American Enterprise Institute that shows that across all age groups, people are now socializing with their neighbors less. And the authors blame a lot of things like technology, political polarization, post-pandemic issues. But do you think we've just become— sort of as a nation, indoor cats instead of outdoor cats? Like, we just have lost the ability to roam in the wild?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's something to that, and this is something that scholars have been worried about for a while, right? Rewind the late '90s, early 2000s, and you have Robert Putnam's, like, seminal book on Bowling Alone, where he argued like back in the day we'd go out to bowling alleys and we, people would bowl with their friends and bowl together and bowl in leagues. Nowadays, or nowadays being, you know, early 2000s, nowadays people just go and they bowl alone, right? They're not part of a league. They're not talking to their neighbors. They just talk to their immediate friends. I talked with, with Robert Putnam for my podcast, you know, and he had this interesting idea of like, you know, I wrote that before, like the internet was like in baby days. Like we didn't know that like viral TikTok videos were coming, right? We didn't know that there was television, which he was worried about, right? That was one of the actors he talked about, but we didn't know there was going to be like, you know, streaming services that picked algorithms to get you exactly the best documentary that only you, Lulu, would love, right?

We're fighting against technology that makes stuff interesting and attractive. Like, there are whole companies that are built to keep our eyeballs on that stuff. Of course regular social connection with my friend at the bowling alley might suffer, like, in, in the face of that kind of competition.

Yeah, I also spoke to Robert Putnam, and his prescription was, to put it, you know, succinctly, join a club, right? But I think a lot of people feel like they don't have time for that in between work and caretaking. They don't feel like they've got time anymore for those kinds of labor-intensive social connections.

Yeah, and this is something that social scientists are also really clued into. I think one of the coolest bits of work coming out of modern-day social science is on this concept of what's called time affluence. Affluence. This is a lovely work by Ashley Willans at Harvard Business School. Time affluence is feeling wealthy in time. It's not how much objective time you have, but it's the subjective sense that you just have free time for yourself. It's the opposite of what so many people listening right now, I am guessing, are experiencing, which is what's called time famine, where you're literally starving for time. And this term famine, I think, works physiologically because when we feel like we don't have enough time, it's almost like famine. It increases inflammation. It like does all these bad things to our to our body, but there's lots of work showing that it does bad things to our social connection. You just prime people to think about time, psychologists do these in these cheesy ways where you unscramble words and all the words are about time, so you're kind of implicitly thinking about time, and then you just look at like how many people folks talk to in a coffee shop, and what you find is that they talk to less people when they're feeling like they don't have any time.

And so I think this time crisis that of course it's worth saying is worse for marginalized people and people who are, you know, don't have enough income and are worried about putting food on the table, The time crisis is linked to the loneliness crisis. That crisis is linked to the fact that we don't have a lot of social connection.

Let me ask you though, is the time crisis real? Because I sometimes think about where I choose to spend my time, and it's not in making the effort to go out and join a club. It's in watching a Netflix show, sitting on my sofa, or bed rotting, as it's called, on social media.

Yes.

As a way to quote unquote relax. To relax when it's really not that relaxing at all. And I always feel much better when I actually make the effort to go out and make a connection. But is, is our time crisis real, or is it manufactured just by our bad choices?

Yeah, I'm gonna say yes and no on that one, right? Yes, in the sense that if you look to other countries that allow people to have a little bit more time affluence— I'm thinking of like the Netherlands, a lot of these countries that come up like very high on the happiness list in Scandinavia and so on. They, you know, have a 35-hour work week, so people have time to do stuff with their friends. And what you find is that in those countries, Denmark in particular, club membership is huge, right? People have like, you know, their racquetball club, and I don't think they bowl that much. I don't know about bowling in Denmark, but the idea is like they're joining, they're joiners, right? They, in part because they have time. Structurally, we've set it up so that they have time. I think that does matter, and I think if if we set things up structurally to have more time in the US, maybe with a 4-day work week, with people like Juliet Schor have shown us, like, you know, by all accounts is happiness-inducing, good for companies and so on. I think we could get there, right?

So I think there, there's something about the time crisis that is real. There are structural factors that are stealing our time. But if you look at the data, what you find is that people today interestingly actually have more free time than they did 15, 20 years ago. This is again Ashley Whillans' lovely work, right? Doesn't feel like it. It really does not. And there's a reason it doesn't feel like it, which is that the amount of time we have, the kind of blocks of time have shifted. They've turned into what the journalist Bridget Schulte has called time confetti. These 5 minutes when you're, you know, if our conversation ends a little early or 10 minutes when your kid falls asleep a little unexpectedly quickly, you know, some work meeting ends. It's not a big chunk, it's little chunks. We have more time because we have more of those little chunks. Chunks, but those little chunks don't feel like a lot of time. And so what do we do with the little chunks? I know what I do before I knew about this research. I check my email, I scroll something quick on Instagram, right? Like I look at something dumb on my phone, right?

I don't do any of the things that would make me use those 3 to 5 minutes, 10 minutes in like a positive way. And that gets to your point, right? Which is that in practice we do actually have free time. It's just like we're not using it that well.

The other thing I hear a lot of people say about why they don't interact more socially is that they enjoy being alone. You know, they interact with people all day for work, or they, you know, have to be in complicated social dynamics in other spaces. And so they just prefer their downtime to be more calm, more peaceful. I do sometimes wonder if people are just kidding themselves, though, and if that's not a real thing.

Yeah, well, there's actually some lovely new work on this topic by Mikaela Rodriguez, who I'm excited to say is gonna be my new colleague at Yale. Her work focuses on this flip side of the loneliness crisis. You know, she's a little younger than I am, and she's like, you know, my whole generation has spent all this time hearing about how bad loneliness is. It's so terrible. It's, you know, it's as bad as 15 cigarettes a day. And she's like, you know, two things there. One is like, let's jump back to, you know, the classic, you know, Aristotle, Buddhist texts, and so on. Those folks were into contemplation. They were into, were into solitude. They were into the benefits of, like, having the time and the bandwidth to notice what's going on with yourself, to think, to be bored, all these things. They knew that there were some benefits to being alone, to alone time. Second thing she worried is, like, we know from so much literature and psychology that your perspective on things, what psychologists call your construal— but this is basically how you frame something— that affects how you experience it. You know, if I'm a student who's, like, alone in the dining hall and I sit down and I think, oh my gosh, this is my me time, I can contemplate, I can think about what's going on, or I can kind of gather my thoughts before I go to class.

That's great. But if you're seeped in everything that social scientists like me have been saying, it's like, this is the loneliness crisis. Look at you, you're sitting in the dining hall by yourself. You're gonna feel crappy, right? You're gonna judge yourself. You're gonna have all those nasty meta-emotions that we talked about before. And Mikaela was like, there's something damaging about this narrative, and we need to bring back the idea that contemplation might be helpful. And so she's been doing all these studies first showing that yes, really hearing all this bad stuff about loneliness, having a negative construal about being alone makes it worse. But she also finds that if you have the right construal, lots of benefits to solitude. Great time to emotionally regulate, right? If you've been having a really terrible week at work, you kind of need that, that night alone. Maybe not to cut a Netflix, but just to get your bandwidth about you, just to have a tea, sit with your cat, process, right? Like, that helps you get back on track when you're feeling overwhelmed or anxious or and so on. So I don't think we necessarily want to justify it fully, right?

Pretty much every available study of happy people suggests that happy people have some strong relationships, but that doesn't mean be in social connection all the time. We can also enjoy and really positively use our alone time.

After the break, I asked Dr. Santos if the trouble that some young people have socializing has anything to do with their parents.

I can't tell you how many parents, like, are proactively trying to prevent their kids from screwing up, which on the one hand, yeah, you don't want your kids to screw up, but oh my gosh, is screwing up such a wonderful teacher.

I wanna focus on young people because all the sort of happiness reports show that happiness for young people has really cratered. Is there something different going on with Gen Z? Are they sort of a different generation or are they just facing a more extreme version than perhaps other younger generations have faced? Felt?

I think they're both different and not, right? I feel like I'm hedging too much on your tough questions. Like, yes and no, but no, yes and no, right? One of my upcoming episodes of my podcast has an interview with Alexis Redding, who's a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and she happened upon these very fascinating data sets of mental health interviews with Harvard students from the 1970s that were never published. They're actually just lying around in some attic somewhere, and she found them, and she went to these interesting interviews from the 1970s thinking the following thing, oh my God, this is great. We have a treasure trove of direct evidence of how these kids from, you know, my parents' parents' generation are different than the kids of today. And she went through and she analyzed it and she found there's absolutely no difference.

What?

There's no difference. If you look at the things they're saying, they could be my Yale students in my office. Like there was one clip from her research which was a student who said, said, oh my God, like, I just haven't studied for my orgo test. I don't know what I'm gonna do. Like, I just haven't been to class and like the test is today. I'm just gonna sit in bed and listen to music because I just, I like can't get out of bed. And I was like, that is literally bedrock. Another one was students saying like, everyone in my generation just knows they're never going to get a job because of technology. And I was like, oh my God, this is like, you know, like many 50 years before LLMs. What's going on? And so what's the story there? I think the story is a kind of yes and no story, right? It is the case that rates of depression, rates of anxiety, rates of suicidality, those things are higher now than they have been. The, like, true clinical track of student suffering, that has gone up, and we need to address that. We're not addressing it well right now.

But the garden variety feeling lonely, feeling scared about your future, like, feeling worried about what's happening in classes— college students have been doing that for as long as there have been college students. And I think we as adults forget that.

I wanna take a little culpability here because I've seen you talk about something called lawnmower parents, and I'd never heard of this phrase before. Is my generation of parents also to blame for how kids are dealing with social interactions that are hard?

Probably. Sorry. Maybe yes. So, so lawnmower parents. So most of our listeners probably have heard of helicopter parents, which are sort of parents that whenever there's trouble, swoop in to kind of help, you know, your kid, for gets their backpack to their soccer game, you drive home and you go get it. You know, they're having trouble at school, you go in and talk to the teacher, right? Lawnmower parenting is like an even worse step of that, where the idea, the metaphor is that you're mowing the lawn to make everything flat so your kids don't trip. You're like getting rid of the weeds that could get in the way of anything. And, and I definitely see this with my Yale parents, right, who are, you know, checking, calling to make sure their kids are getting into the right classes, um, calling to complain about grades grades. I've had parents send me emails about a student's grade. Another one that I was shocked by, but is more common than you think, is parents who are their college student's alarm clock. Like, so, you know, if they have a big test, the parent will call and make sure they got up.

You know, it's like, you know, there's not like they missed it. We're just kind of making sure, just checking in to make sure. And those things are well-intentioned, right? Like, parents have to care about how their kids are doing. I think parenting didn't used to be a verb, but like, now it is a verb, right? You really have to actively take take steps, but some of those steps are removing the friction, the high grass that's there. That's an essential teacher for kids developing social connection, for kids developing the ability to get through conflict, for them screwing up, right? I can't tell you how many parents like are proactively trying to prevent their kids from screwing up, which on the one hand, yeah, you don't want your kids to screw up, but oh my gosh, is screwing up such a wonderful teacher. You know, if I had to think about the things that taught me how to do things differently in life, oh gosh, screwing up teaches me way more than somebody doing it for me.

Let me ask you something that might be connected or might not. Is there anything about our happiness that you think is uniquely American?

Oh, for sure. I mean, we are such weirdos when it comes to happiness. I mean, we, we are really into happiness, first of all. You know, we care a lot about it, and that means that we tend to have more of that paradox paradox of pursuing happiness that we talked about before. This idea that when you go for happiness, the more you go for happiness, the more unlikely you are to get it. And this is one of the things I find most fascinating about Iris Mauss's research. She's actually, she works at UC Berkeley, but she's German. And I think one of the things that drew her to this work is that, you know, she'll claim that like Germans have just like a different relationship with the pursuit of happiness than Americans do. And there's some data on this. You know, there's studies that have analyzed, for example, like condolences cards in Germany and other parts of Europe and the US. And what they find is that, you know, all of them mention grief and something, but like the German cards stop there. They're like, you know, in deepest sadness or something. Whereas the American greeting cards are kind of like, but you know, silver lining, they're in a better place or something.

And she's like, the German cards just stop at what it is, like somebody died and you're sad, just like be cool with it. So I think Americans are kind of weirdos when it comes with happiness. You know, it's also focused on like optimizing, right? And this feels like very, Right now, this feels very TikTok, but you know, this is something, again, Americans were thinking about for a long time, right? Like rewind to the early 19th century and you have scholars like Alexis de Tocqueville, right? Who was this French scholar who came over to the US as like this anthropological experiment, like what's going on with the new country? And what he remarked about was that like Americans weren't just constantly pursuing happiness, but they were like never satisfied with it, right? He had this phrase or something like, you know, Americans will like make a house and before they're even done making a house, they'll start making a new house 'cause they really wanna like make sure I'm sure it's even better than it was before. And I think it was just this like kind of obsession with going after stuff and optimizing that was there even back then.

And my guess is, you know, if de Tocqueville showed up today and took a look around, he'd be like, oh man, this is even worse now.

It's funny you mentioned this 'cause I've noticed that there's a lot of interest in your work from what I'd call productivity dudes.

Oh yeah.

People who are obsessed with really practical tips and clear-cut answers for how to always be improving, you know, like always be getting better. And I've heard you tell them things like the science backs up that your employees will be more productive if they're happier. Do you have misgivings about productivity and this idea of optimization?

Yeah, no, I think a couple things there. One, yes, I definitely have misgivings is the answer, but I think one of the things that we have to pay attention to is like how we're optimizing. Again, we're trying to optimize in many cases for like happiness, but another thing I worry about with the kind of productivity culture is is that we're like just never gonna get there. I recently interviewed Oliver Burkeman for my podcast, who's this kind of productivity expert. You know, he would review like time performance apps and so on. And he had this realization, which is like, it's never gonna be enough, right? I could get the perfect app and it's never gonna be enough. I'm still a finite human. There's still too much stuff to do. Like this fantasy that I have about eventually optimizing my schedule is just gonna be a fantasy. Like we're just never gonna get there. And one of the ways you can productivity hack is to have a radical acceptance about that. There's always gonna be too much stuff. You're never gonna be perfect. Like it's always gonna be hard. And we can just give ourselves some grace and just radically accept that.

It's not the usual move for the productivity hack bros, right? Like self-compassion, realizing your limits, like recognizing your common humanity. But it's what the data suggests leads you to happiness. And perhaps given all those data on, you know, if you're happier, you produce more and so on, might actually lead you to more productivity too.

Let me ask you though, because I can hear a productivity bro, I hate to use that term necessarily.

They're not all bros. I get a lot of calls from the non-bros. Yeah, non-bros. Yeah.

But productivity people or just people who are interested in economics and say, actually the foundation of the American experiment, the foundation of our uniqueness and our power economically comes from what de Tocqueville saw back then, which is this idea of always being more perfect, a more perfect union.

Yeah.

That we can improve ourselves and make ourselves better, and that in work we find joy and we can find the this, you know, kind of miracle economic experiment, and that Europe is stagnant, and, and that, you know, is maybe happier than us but certainly not as productive.

Yeah, I think there has to be a balance here. And I think the problem with American society is that we may have pushed ourselves into the point of being so burned out that we're no longer being productive, right? And this might be the position that I sit, right? I see a lot of my students who, you know, to get students who in Ivy League school like Yale have worked incredibly hard to get there, but they show up and they have incredibly high rates of depression, incredibly high rates of anxiety, incredibly high rates of burnout. A lot of students say that they're miserable that they got there. I think we can shoot for a little bit more balance. And, and the reason I think that is that so many studies show prioritizing your social connection, prioritizing your sleep, giving yourself rest, right? Those are things that make you more productive, right? Even if all you care about is what the economist might care about, the capitalist bottom line, right? We want, I don't know, higher GDP or getting to the perfect school or whatever your bottom line is, most of the time you get to that bottom line better if you give yourself a break, if you take some time off.

Yeah. And, you know, we've been talking about sort of people who go to Yale, people who are in demanding perhaps office jobs, but of course there's the structural inequality that comes from American society where people are having to work 2 or 3 jobs just to make ends meet, plus raising families, et cetera, et cetera.

Totally.

And I guess that feeds into the lack have a social safety net and all the other things that you see in other places where the same holds true no matter where you fall on the income scale, right?

Yeah, no, I think, um, I mean, a couple things there. One is that one of the reasons that countries like Denmark and so on are happy is because they have those social safety nets, right? Um, it's one of the reasons people can pick careers that they like. You're taxed so heavily that it doesn't pay you to be like a finance bro because you're going to get taxed anyway. So you're like, well, I I might as well, you know, be an artist if I wanna be an artist, or I might as well be a teacher, right? There's the lack of like income inequality means people have an excuse to follow their purpose of what they really care about, which can allow people to feel like their life is better. And so I think those structural things matter a lot, right? I, I get in trouble sometimes for talking about so many of these individual solutions of like, oh, you should engage in social connection, or you should write in a gratitude journal meditate. And people think that, well, don't we also have to have social safety net? And I'm like, yeah, of course. Like, this is a yes-and situation, right?

Like, all these individual things that I'm suggesting are supposed to complement, not substitute, the stuff that we should really be doing. But another thing we know about individual action is that it just makes us more productive. It gives us emotional bandwidth, and that can mean the resilience we need to fight for stuff. I think people mistakenly think that these individual strategies sometimes build up the resilience you need to just like put up with being in a bad society. But I think the real goal of them is to give you the resilience to like fight the bad society. And there's data on this, on Constantine Kushlev, who's at Georgetown, has this lovely paper that he talks about the Pollyanna hypothesis, which is this idea that like, if we just make people happy, they're gonna be like this delulu Pollyanna walking around like, everything's great. Like all these structures of inequality, like I'm cool with that 'cause like fine, right? And his point in running the paper is like, well, that's a hypothesis about how human nature works. The hypothesis is like, if you make people happy, they're just gonna ignore the structural stuff. And what he finds is just the opposite.

If you look at people who are taking action to fix structural problems, he does this in the domain of like climate concern, and also he's running this around the times of Black Lives Matter, and so who goes to a protest and so on, he finds that like, it's the people who have the highest positive emotion, the people with the best mental health that are ones that are going and trying to fix stuff.

It goes back to where we started our conversation around the eudaimonic sense of, like, how do you become happy and how do you find meaning.

Exactly. And getting back to the American experiment, right, like, this was what the forefathers meant, right? They had problems, right? The forefathers were filled with people who were not focused on everybody's eudaimonic happiness. Those unalienable rights are for landed white dudes, not for everybody. But in their idealistic sense, what they were trying to go is that eudaimonic sense of happiness. It was about civic virtue. It was about making everybody happy, and that was the happiness they thought we should all be pursuing.

Laurie Santos, thank you so much. I've really enjoyed our conversation.

Thanks so much for having me on the show.

That's Dr. Laurie Santos. Her podcast is called The Happy Happiness Lab. This conversation was produced by Seth Kelley. It was edited by Paula Nudorf, mixing by Sophia Landman, original music by Dan Powell and Marian Lozano, photography by Philip Montgomery. The rest of the team is Priya Matthew, Wyatt Orme, Joe Bill Muñoz, Alejandro Sotogoico, Kathleen O'Brien, and Brooke Minters. Our executive producer is Allison Benedikt. Next week, David talks to Rafael Raphael Warnock, the junior senator from Georgia, about the Supreme Court's recent decision on voting rights.

I think that the Supreme Court has committed violence against our whole— the ways in which ordinary people can have a voice in our system.

I'm Lulu Garcia-Navarro, and this is The Interview from The New York Times.