Laurie Santos is a superstar in the crowded field of happiness research. She is a cognitive scientist at Yale University whose course on the psychology of happiness was the most popular course in the university’s history. She is the host of the hugely popular Happiness Lab Podcast. Today she and Derek talk about their favorite lessons from modern happiness research, lessons about striving and anxiety from existential philosophy, our relationship with time, the science of cognitive time travel, temporal mind tricks for reducing anxiety like “psychological distancing,” and more.
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In the following excerpt, Derek discusses with Laurie Santos the psychology of her own happiness and the difference between happiness In your life versus happiness for your life.
Derek Thompson: You have an incredibly rich professional portfolio. You are a scientist. You host the popular Happiness Lab Podcast. Her lectures on the psychology of happiness are immensely popular, whether it’s a course at Yale University or an online course on Coursera. I’m wondering, of all your jobs and the tasks you do in those jobs, what makes you happiest? If I hooked you up to a happiness Geiger counter while you lived through a typical month in the life of Laurie Santos – happiness expert – what part of your job would I enjoy the most?
Laurie Santos: I think that’s an impossible question because there are so many aspects of my job that I love. I mean, I love chatting with students and talking to them about their goals. I love the part of my podcast job where I get to interview people. It’s so cool to learn about people’s work and hear their theories and stuff. A fun thing that you might not expect is that I love the part of the podcast where I listen to someone’s interview and find out exactly the best quote where they said it in this perfect way and then kind of write it up. I can do that for hours and it gives me a tremendous flow where time goes really fast and I forget to go to the bathroom and stuff like that. I’m lucky that I have a job where a lot of the parts are pretty good, but they end up being parts that don’t fit together the way you might expect.
Derek Thompson: This is a small digression from what I would most like to talk to you about, but as someone who writes a lot for The Atlantic and has occasionally made edited podcasts with The Atlantic. This show is more of a conversation podcast, but I’ve always thought of a difference – I wonder if you can relate – between writing and editing podcasts and the difference between painting and sculpting.
With painting, you start with a blank canvas and it all depends on what you add to the canvas. Just like with writing, you start with a blank page and it all depends on the words you add, and you can really write anything. With editing interview podcasts, you don’t start with anything blank. Actually, you start with the opposite, a huge, unwieldy chunk of marble, and inside of it is a David that you have to free with your sculptural skills. I love the kind of opposing challenges of writing and editing in that way. I don’t know if that connects for you.
Laurie Santos: No, absolutely not. I get that analogy perfectly. It’s so much fun knowing that there’s the David in there and trying to bring him out and really listening carefully to people’s quotes and stuff. When I first started podcasting, that was absolutely not a part of podcasting that I thought would be that much fun, but honestly, if I could only pick one thing to do on any rainy Thursday afternoon, it would be to shape these beautiful audio files that we have into the perfect David. It’s so much fun.
Derek Thompson: I’ve always been frustrated with the language we use in this category. There’s something fleeting and unsatisfying about the term happiness, which I think may have something to do with its etymology. The idea that the word happiness, like the word “happens” or “become,” has this Old English root “hap,” which means chance or luck, and is inherently fleeting. Some people prefer to talk about thriving. Others talk about well-being or contentment. I think one of my favorite treatments of the language here is your distinction between happiness in your life and happiness for your life. What is that distinction, and what function does that distinction serve for us?
Laurie Santos: To be fair, this is a nice distinction that I stole from psychologist Sonja Lyubomisrky. She defines happiness as two parts: happiness In Your life is what you are feeling right now. That means that you are hopefully experiencing a lot of positive emotions, joy, laughter, etc., and that you have a reasonable ratio of those emotions to negative emotions. Note that this does not mean that you do not want to have negative emotions. I think a good life involves a little of both, but hopefully you have a ratio where the positive emotions outweigh the negative ones. That is a type of happiness. In your life. But there is also the second part of happiness, with your life, or for Your life. That is the feeling that we are satisfied with our life. That is how we think our life is going.
That’s another way to phrase the difference: how you feel about your life versus how you think your life is going. Of course, that’s important too. We want to be happy with our lives. We want to think that things are going well. We want to feel like we have a purpose. I like that difference because it kind of brings the two together because it encompasses, I think, the general idea of happiness, which is that it’s something fleeting. It’s about being happy with your life, with 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, which is that you really think your life is going well. That’s closer to what I think a lot of the ancients thought, for example, 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 the Simple English feed on Spotify.
Presenter: Derek Thompson
Guest: Dr. Laurie Santos
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Subscribe: Spotify
