Laurie Santos is a superstar in the crowded field of the pursuit of happiness. She is a cognitive scientist at Yale University whose course on the psychology of happiness was the most popular class in the school’s history. She is the immensely popular presenter The laboratory of happiness podcast. Today, she and Derek talk about her favorite lessons from modern happiness research, lessons on effort and anxiety from existential philosophy, our relationship with time, the science of the temporal mind, and cognitive time travel tricks to reduce anxiety like ” psychological distancing” and more.
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In the following excerpt, Derek discusses with Laurie Santos the psychology of her happiness and the difference between happiness IN your life in the face of happiness ABOUT your life.
Derek Thompson: You have an incredibly rich professional portfolio. You are a scientist. The popular is waiting for you The laboratory of happiness podcast. Your lectures on the psychology of happiness are extremely popular, whether it’s a course at Yale University or an online class on Coursera. I wonder, of all the jobs you do and of all the tasks within those jobs, what makes you the happiest? If I were to hook you up to a Geiger happiness counter as you go through a typical month in the life of happiness expert Laurie Santos—what part of your job would I find brings you the most satisfaction?
Laurie Santos: I guess this is kind of an impossible question because there are so many parts of my job that I love. I mean, I love talking to students and talking to them about their goals. I really enjoy the podcast part of my job where I get to interview people. It’s so cool to learn about people’s work and hear about their theories and stuff. A funny thing that you might not expect is that I really like the part of podcasting that involves listening to someone’s interview and finding the exact choice quote where they said it this perfectly, and then some kind of script together. I can do this for hours and it gives me an incredible flow where the time is going by so fast and I forget to go to the bathroom and things like that. I’m lucky to have a job where I have a lot of parts of it that are pretty good, but they end up being parts that don’t fit together in the way you might expect.
Derek Thompson: This is a little off the beaten path to what I want to talk to you about the most, but as someone who writes a lot about of The Atlantic and has occasionally done edited podcasts with The Atlantic. This show is more of a talking podcast, but I’ve always thought of a distinction, I wonder if this is relevant for you, between writing and editing podcasts like a distinction between painting and sculpture.
With painting, you start with a blank canvas and it’s all about what you add to the canvas. Just like writing, you start with a blank page and it’s all about the words you add and you can really write anything. With interview podcast editing, you’re not starting with nothing. In fact, you’re starting with the opposite, a large clumsy piece of marble, and hidden within it is a David, which you must carve out with your sculpting skill. I like the kind of opposite challenges of writing and editing that way. I don’t know if this relates to you.
Laurie Santos: No, completely. I see this analogy perfectly. It’s a lot of fun knowing that David is there and trying to bring him out, and really listening carefully to people’s quotes and stuff. When I got into podcasting, this was absolutely not a part of podcasting that I thought would be that fun, but honestly, if I could only pick one thing to do on a random rainy Thursday afternoon, it would be carving these beautiful audio tapes. the files we have in perfect david. It’s a lot of fun.
Derek Thompson: I have always been frustrated by the language we have in this category. There is something fleeting and unsatisfying about the concept of happiness that I think can be related to its etymology. The idea that the word happiness, like the word happen, or happens, has this Old English root Hap, meaning chance or luck, which is essentially ephemeral. Some people prefer to talk about flourishing. Others speak of well-being or pleasure. I think one of my favorite treatments of language here is your distinction between happiness in your life versus happiness about your life. What is this difference and what work is this difference doing for us?
Laurie Santos: So, to be honest, this is a nice distinction that I stole from psychologist Sonja Lyubomisrky. She somehow defines happiness as having these two parts: Happiness IN your life is what it feels like to be you right now. So that’s the fact that hopefully you’re experiencing a lot of positive emotions, joy and laughter and so on, and you have a good ratio of negative emotions. Note that this does not mean that you do not want negative emotions. I think a good life involves a little bit of both, but hopefully you have a ratio where the positive emotions outweigh the negative ones. That’s what being happy is all about IN your life. But there is also the second part of being happy, with your life, or ABOUT your life. This is the feeling that we have a satisfaction with our life. It’s kind of how we think our life is going.
This is another way to define the difference: How you feel about your life versus how you think your life is going. Of course, this is also important. We want to be satisfied with our life. We like to think things are going well. We want to feel like we mean something. I like that distinction as sort of pulling the two together because it kind of encompasses, I think, what the secular notion of happiness is, that there’s something fleeting. It’s about being happy in your life, how it’s going right now. A true definition of happiness, or a true definition of living a good life, would also include the second part, where you really think your life is going well. This is closer to what I think many of the ancients, for example, thought when they thought about happiness. Concepts like Aristotle’s eudaimonia and so on are more about this feeling that your life is going well.
This excerpt has been edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow Simple English food on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Dr. Laurie Santos
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Subscribe: Spotify
