YouSaid · the spoken record

Laurie Santos

lines on the record: 117
first: 2022-06-14
most recent: 2022-06-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Which is what's called negative visualization. So the Stoics thought that you should start every day visualizing just for a second that everything you thought was great in life is gone. So they said you should wake up and be like, you know, my spouse left me. I've lost my job. I'm lame in my legs. You know, like I'm about to be ostracized. You know, I don't have my community anymore. You do that for five minutes. You're like, but that's not true. It didn't happen. It's kind of like it's a wonderful life and you run the movie really fast in your head. And the idea is like just by feeling what it might feel like to have something negative happen, it resets your reference point. It also kind of like stops your hedonic adaptation for a second where you're like, oh my gosh, like they're a good things about having my spouse and so on. One technique I use, which always freaks out my audiences when I'm giving a talk about hedonic adaptation and negative visualization is I have people say, you know, if you're a parent, imagine like the last time you talked to your”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think there's so much that we can change by changing our mindset, by changing our attitude, by changing the things we attend to. You're talking about resetting your reference points, right? Like your reference point could be like, there's millions of other people that would be so happy with this, right? Another change that's related to that is a technique that we know.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you can say, all right, I'll commit to that. And I think this is one of the powers of doing this class with my students is like, I show them the grass. I'm like, do you want to be here on the graph or here? Like, if you want to be here, that's doing some thank you letters. That's writing down things you're grateful for. And I think when you see how much you can really improve, I think that's what gets people to commit and actually make the behavioral changes that take some work to really engage with this stuff.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Counting your blessings, there's evidence that in as little as two weeks the simple act of writing three to five things you're grateful for down on a piece of paper can improve your well-being, significantly improve your well-being. There's also evidence that expressing gratitude to other people, like writing a detailed thank you note to someone that you've always wanted to thank but never get a chance to. The act of doing that, at least in Marty Seligman and others' data, can improve your well-being not just significantly immediately, but can give you an improved well-being effect that lasts for over a month, right? Which is crazy. You know, if I was like, you know, there's like this pill that you can take that will improve your well-being significantly for over a month. You take one pill and months later you're feeling good. You'd be like, man, I'm going to do that. Like the simple act of writing a thank you letter can do that. And so I think we need the evidence because the evidence is sometimes shocking even for me that knows it. I'm like, I would not have predicted that. But then when you see it.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think one awesome thing about the modern day is that, you know, I think we have all these intuitions about what makes us happy. But with positive psychology and empirical psychology, we can test these. We can take not-so-happy people and make them engage in social connection or do nice things for others and measure whether happiness improves. Happiness as measured by self-report on how your positive emotions feel after doing that or your sense of satisfaction with life and so on. And when we do this, we find the things that make us happy are pretty straightforward, right? We want to increase our social connection. We're happier when we do nice things for others. We're happier when we are focused on our healthier habits, like things like improving our sleep and getting more exercise. We can really see the effects of this stuff and often quite profound effects. One of my favorite, most profound effects is the effect of taking a little time for gratitude. You know, the simple act of”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe not, you know, and my brain's not stupid. It's like constantly checking to go back to it. And so I think we've created these devices that have rewarding content that will always be more rewarding than in real life social interaction in the short term, in the little quick dopamine hits, but ultimately that means we're missing out on in real life social connection that really is better.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, we know that on the other side of our phone is all this interesting stuff. And she likened it on my podcast, you know, like imagine, you know, I'm in going to out to dinner with my husband. And instead of bringing my phone, I bring this big wheelbarrow full of interesting stuff. And it's got like DVDs and a TV of every movie out there, every music video. It's got photo albums that have printed out my photos for the last 10 years. It's got like, you know, printed binders of all my emails and like, you know, like videos of porn, like anything. If that wheelbarrow is there, you would not pay attention to the conversation. You would be like, oh, honey, let's like look at the pictures from our wedding that are like, and she's like, your brain's not stupid. Your brain knows that that full wheelbarrow and way, way more is on the other side of your phone. So like, you know, I have a very interesting husband. He's a philosopher. You know, we've lots of good conversations, but like, is his conversation always as good as that complete wheelbarrow?”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A psychologist at the University of British Columbia who studies a lot of the social effects of technology use, she has some really scary data. She does these studies where she has people sit in a waiting room as though you're waiting for the study, but really the waiting room is the study. And she has either have access to your phones or not. And she measures really simple things like how much you smile at the other people who are sitting in the waiting room, not even how much you talk, but just how much you have the basic human social interactions like smiling at other people. And she finds things like we smile 30% less when we have our phone near us. Even if you're not using your phone, right? And all of these teeny tiny basic social interactions are going away. But she points out like, it makes sense, right? You know, even if my phone is off on my desk, my brain's not stupid. My brain knows that on the other side of that phone is my entire inbox for the last 15 years. And, you know, every weather statistic and music and podcast and porn and cat video.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Catherine Price has this harrowing story that she told on my podcast that the woman who wrote this How to Break Up with Your Phone Book about she had just had a new baby and she was nursing and she realized as she was nursing that her baby was looking up at her into her eyes and she wasn't making eye contact because she was looking at her phone to buy new doorknobs. She was like I need new doorknobs. I'm doing this kitchen renovation and she was like oh my God this you know like millions of years old evolutionary moment of a parent looking at a nursing baby and I'm not even present there because like I'm looking at friggin' doorknobs you know and and I think we've all had these moments and so you know I think we really need to pay more attention to our technology is but also not beat ourselves up I mean one thing that you realize if you start taking attention seriously is like it makes sense that we're drawn to our phones rather than the people in real life Liz Dunn”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think, again, it's lots of things. I think the technology really is a hit on this stuff. I mean, I noticed this myself. You know, I teach this stuff and I try to be really careful about this stuff, but there are definitely opportunities that I've lost out on in real life social connection because of my phone, right? You know, I'm embarrassed about the number of times I'm like, huh? And my husband was talking to me about something. And I was looking at something on my phone, but it wasn't like some important, like, you know, do or die email. It was probably like the weather or like, you know, I don't know, I was looking at real estate prices. There's just like some stupid, incredible thing.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good to look forward to as you get older, right? Then there's not a lot of fantastic things to look forward to as you get super old. But one is that overall your well-being tends to go up, not down. Elderly individuals tend to be happier. But a little bit less so recently, and I think that's in part because loneliness is up in those populations. Same with my college students. I think college, you know, when I was there in the 90s used to be a time when people, you know, were really social, felt like they had a lot of friendships, you know, but these days, again, as I was saying, around two-thirds of college students report being very lonely most of the time. And so I think there were these historic age-related patterns that were related to well-being, but those patterns weren't just like, oh, you're just happier when you're older. You tend to do the stuff that promotes happiness more when you're older. It's either easier to or more culturally accepted to, or it kind of happens more naturally. But as those behaviors change across ages, you're seeing corresponding hits.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's some lovely, especially actually Lara Acknow, whose work I just mentioned, she, in collaboration with Kylie Hemlin and Liz Dunn and others, have done these developmental studies of little kids who you might think of as like pure selfish beings, like our pure hedonists. And what you find is they wind up happier if they're doing nice things for others. They wind up happier if they donate some of their goldfish crackers to some other kid, right? And so these kinds of practices that we're talking about in adults are probably not just kind of universal in terms of like across all people everywhere, but my guess is universal in terms of age, you know, these are time-worn strategies, but time-worn even across human development and things too. And I think that's one of the reasons that lots of historic patterns that we've seen in happiness across ages are changing a little bit, right? It used to be the case that, you know, older individuals wind up being the happiest, something we don't expect, but something that's”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Had better data that weren't mostly focused on Western subjects. Often when we look, you see surprising consistency. And if I had to guess not having the data in front of me, my guess is that a lot of the specific things we've been talking about are universal. How they play out and the nuances of how they play out across countries are going to look different. But at their core, being social, being nice to others, being present, moving your body in appropriate ways, like non-judgmentally interacting with your negative emotions, my guess is that those are going to work wherever you grew up.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She looks at the correlation, for example, between volunteering or donating money and happiness worldwide. And she's able to do that because you have some nice big Gallup surveys that look at these kinds of things. And she finds it's pretty much true in every single country you study, right? Like the idea is it's probably a cultural universal. And my guest is for most of these things, we're talking about cultural universals. And that's in part because the data we have, but in part because, you know, again, if you look to like religious traditions and what they're telling us to prioritize, like these people were on top of this stuff, you know, like Buddhists, you know, who lived in different countries with different kind of attitudes towards collectivism and so on, thousands of years ago, they were like, hey, be present, stop your craving, you know, focus on others. Like these are kind of edicts that are coming down that have been true across countries, across time, and so on. And so while I wish we had better data as an empirical scientist, I always wish we”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think many of these studies are done in Western populations. You know, the psychologist Joe Heinrich often talks about how psychology has a weird problem. And he uses the acronym weird for Western educated industrialized, rich, and democratic. Most subjects in every published psychology study study are Western educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. And they kind of come from those things. And that leaves out a whole host of different populations with different kinds of identities and backgrounds. So that is true of the work that we talk about. That said, you know, for a lot of the practices I'm mentioning, when you look cross-culturally, what you find is that these things work everywhere you go. You know, take the case of, you know, pro-social behavior, doing nice things for others, which is one that I think has been best studied worldwide. Lara Acknan has done some fantastic work on this stuff.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're talking about that really work. Social connection, doing nice things for others, being present. There's not a, you know, there's not this much of a fight between, well, do I want to do that now? What's the consequence going to have for the future? If you invest in those things now, they'll feel good in the moment and they'll feel pretty good in the future too. And so it's not to say that there's not, you know, our present selves riches, our future selves, and then there's no kind of trade-offs there. There always will be. But a lot of the stuff that really works for maximizing happiness, it's not a like, well, do I get the benefit now or later to kind of benefit both? And so it's a way to sort of overcome the typical thing we think of with happiness, which is like, well, you know, who's happiness am I investing in? If you do it right, you often, you know, can overcome that kind of trade-off in ways we don't predict.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think that this question comes up a lot, especially in my very type A Yale students who I feel like are often thinking that they're like, you know, studying and killing themselves now and not sleeping because eventually, you know, they'll be happily, they'll get this job that'll make them happily ever after, they'll get into medical school and so on. And so I bring up that example as like an extreme case because I think we often think there's this conflict between happy now and happy in the future. Like, well, we should sacrifice now to be happy later. Or, you know, oh, if we invest in the stuff that's fun now, we'll, you know, screw up our lives and we'll never get the accolades we want. But I think a lot of that sense that, you know, these things are in competition really comes from these misconceptions we have. Like, you know, yeah, you might not get the perfect accolade in the future if you don't devote time now, but that's because you're wrong about how much that accolade in the future is going to make you happy. If you look at the kinds of practice,”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your friends and family members or certain physiological markers. Like, we know those things correlate, but the best way to ask you, you know, hey, are you satisfied with your life? Scale 1 to 10 is I ask you and you tell me the best way to get at, are you happy in your life is to ask you, you know, hey, have you experienced these positive emotions in the last week and you tell me? And again, on the one hand, it feels not scientific, but it sort of is. And it's probably the thing I want to maximize, right? When we're doing all these interventions to try to improve your happiness, if I do these interventions and your hormones change, but you're like, I'm not any more satisfied with my life, yeah, I've probably failed, right? But if I do these interventions and you tell me, hey, I'm experiencing more joy in my life and I feel like my life is more meaningful, then like, check, we've sort of succeeded with our interventions.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I wish there was better ways to measure. You know, as a scientist, I wish there was a little happiness thermometer that I could put in your mouth that was like, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do do, do do, do, do do, do do. Like you're 80, you know, 80.1 happy or something. We don't have that. And we don't have that for good reason, which is happiness is subjective, right? Like the best person to tell me whether or not you're happy is you. And so the way psychologists often measure it is that we just ask people, which sounds not very scientific. It sounds when you tell people a lot of this work is based on self-reports. I think they think those self-reports are like some crap, like, you know, quiz that you'd get like on BuzzFeed or something. And you can have self-report scales that are true scientific instruments that have been really well validated. We know that they're measuring something that is like a true construct in the world. We know that these self-report measures correlate with things like if I were to do like a detailed hormonal analysis or detailed interviews.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doesn't feel good. Like, even if you're kind of pay attention to something boring, that presence can wind up improving our well-being over time. So finding ways to control the things that are stealing our attention and preventing us from being present can be really good ways to boost our happiness overall.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“being present in paying attention to the daffodils, or just kind of feeling like you had some time. Like sometimes these notifications just break up our time in a way that can make us feel a little bit more time famished, a little bit more like we just kind of don't have any free time to be present. You know, and we like, again, we willingly do that, right? Like we could shut off the notifications, but we kind of don't. But part of happiness really is about being present. You know, there's so much evidence that when we're mind wandering, when we're not fully present, that that's a time when we're also not very happy. It's one of the reasons that techniques like meditation, which are primarily techniques for intentionally paying attention to the present moment, often with a certain kind of attitude, like a non-judgment kind of attitude, those kinds of practices make us happier in part because the non-judgment, but in part just because we're there, we're present, we're paying attention to life, and just the act of paying attention, even if it doesn't.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, so, so much. One of the full lectures I give in my class is on what I call attentional hygiene, which is, you know, making sure you're paying attention to how your attention is being allocated. There's some really stupid features of human attention, which is like we kind of can't control where it's deployed, right? You know, if someone screams fire in a crowded theater, your attention is going to get deployed whether you want to or not. But the same thing is true. If you see great vacation shots on Instagram, your attention is just going to get deployed to how crappy your life is. If there's binging and things, like your attention is going to get deployed to that, you know, if you get a notification or something, even if you're having a nice conversation with your spouse, right? And so we put these devices in that are stealing our attention at kind of critical moments. And that's bad enough when our attention should be on something that could be improving our well-being. Like, you know, it's nice social conversation I'm having with my spouse.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And even kind of hardcore folks who've done the experiment to get rid of their smartphones, you know, you often find that you come back to them. Nick Epley, who's the researcher who does all the lovely work about talking to people on trains, was feeling like his smartphone was making him do that less. So he got rid of it. He got a stupid, paid a lot of money to get a stupid phone because nowadays it's really hard to get like a stupid phone. And what he found was like he had to get rid of it, you know, not because of the social media, but because like, you know, he needed it to call an Uber or a Lyft or like, you know, he needed like to look at the map, you know, when he was traveling for conferences and things. Like there, there are things that these devices are doing that are really helpful for us that I don't want to go back on, but we need some way to renegotiate the relationship and trying to mindfully notice what your patterns are and then changing them if they're not good can be a strategy towards using these devices, but in a way that's a little bit more intentional.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What did I pick up this phone for? Was there a purpose? You know, I was checking the weather. I had a specific text that I was looking at. Or again, just like wind up, you know, like, am I just down some rabbit hole of some stuff I was looking at my phone that's different? Why now, right? Like what was the trigger? Maybe again there was like some specific goal or maybe I was feeling anxious or I was feeling bored or it's just become this habit that I, you know, I pull it out when I'm walking, right? Like, you know, why are you really on there now? And then the critical question is like, what else? That's the sort of opportunity. It's like, what are you missing out on being on your phone? Maybe it's noticing the daffodils. Maybe it's talking to your spouse at dinner, right? Maybe, you know, it could be a million different things, but like when you mindfully and intentionally pay attention, what else could you be doing? And she argues that a strategy like that might help us because it's not like these technologies are awful. Again, they could be used for all kinds of useful stuff.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the question is all right, like, how do we, you know, you, as you mentioned, we're willing participants in this, right? Like this is us giving away our behaviors that are like not making us feel good. How can we do a little bit better? And one of my favorite pieces of advice that I share with my students comes from the journalist, Catherine Price, who is this lovely book called How to Break Up with Your Phone, where she argues you don't have to break up with your phone, but you have to like take it to couples counseling, basically, like renegotiate the relationship. And she has this lovely acronym that she uses called www, which stands for What for, Why Now, and What Else. And so she argues like whenever you find yourself on your phone, because again, sometimes it's social media, but for me, sometimes it's email or like looking at my text thread or looking at something else that's doing all those same things that stealing my attention, preventing me from connecting with people in real life and so on. And so, you know, you find yourself with your phone in your hand, think www. What for?”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's a hit on my sleep. You know, one of the physical processes that we know are necessary, critical for well-being. Lots of evidence that you see sleep disturbances in 13-year-olds, 15-year-olds, in part because they are looking at their phones. And so I think we could be using these technological tools for lots of good, but they're doing lots of bad.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“PhD students are finding out about certain fellowships, whether you got like a National Science Foundation Award or so on. And my entire Twitter feed is, congrats to my student so-and-so who got a National Science Foundation Award. And that's great. It's nice to celebrate that, but I know there's probably the 80% of other graduate students in the world who didn't get that social media word are looking at that tweet and feeling like crap this morning, you know? And we can't help it, right? You can't look at these reference points and not feel that. And so we get a lot of that. But then there's these just subtle things that I think social media is doing, right? You know, how many times do I pull out my phone when I'm walking down the street and could be paying attention?”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Social connection in real life. If you think about the study that we mentioned about Nick Upley with, you know, people chatting on the train, like, why don't people talk to other people on their commute? It's because their head is stuffed in a piece of technology, maybe not on social media, but they're in their email or they're just looking at something. And it's a way that you're not connecting in real life because you have these other tools. It's really not great for reference points. And I think this is one of the factors that people find when you're looking both at adult and teen effects or the effects of social media on adult well-being and teen well-being is that the more you're susceptible to social comparison, you know, the more being on social media winds up negatively affecting your well-being. We just see the vacation photos and the bikini shots and the nice stuff that's happening to other people. And even though it's well-intentioned, it can kind of make us feel crappy. You know, this is the week for academics when all our”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, social media is an interesting one because ultimately it's like a tool, right? It's a technological tool that we could use in all kinds of ways. And you could imagine a world where we use this tool for all the stuff that could promote happiness, right? Like I could use Facebook Live to connect with my family members and really have social connection with people. It might be tricky without that technological tool to connect with. I could use, you know, Instagram to be really present with my food and mindfully notice it and really be there. I could participate in charity appeals that are happening on these sites and things. I could use them to set better reference points. So I saw, you know, I don't know what people in Ukraine are going through or like really kind of figured out the privileges I had and looked at reference points that made me feel good. In theory, we could do all of that. In practice, we basically do none of it. Like in practice, these tools are often used oddly, even though they're called social media to reduce”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think, you know, of course, we know there's a lot about having shared beliefs with other people that, you know, allows you to feel a closer identity with them and so on. And so, yeah, I mean, I think we were talking earlier about kind of natural selection, shaping our intuitions. I think there's a lot of cultural evolution that shaped these cultural institutions. And I think there's a reason that institutions we have are thousands of years old. They've kind of beat out other sorts of practices because they're this sweet spot of bringing together lots of mechanisms that help us change our behavior in ways that might promote at least a sense of shared identity and in many ways an improvement. And it's worth noting that a lot of those institutions are kind of, you know, not going away, but I think we're becoming much more individualized, much more secular. These kinds of cultural institutions don't often have the same force that they did many hundreds or thousands of years ago. And I think that's telling for the kind of increase.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feel like you have this holistic identity. It turns out that does a lot of the same work, right? So you need something with like a sticking power and religions have special sticking power in part because they shape our identities and our belief systems. But if you can find other things that work that can work too, you don't necessarily, the benefits don't seem to come from the beliefs as much from the behaviors.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Often they're like thousands of years old. I'm forgetting that quote from Big Lebowski, but it's like, you know, I think Walter says, you know, like, you know, thousands of years of tradition from, you know, Moses to Stanley Kovacs kind of thing about the Jewish faith. And I think it's the same thing about so many religions. It's not just like some ritual I made up and I'm trying to get my family to do. It's one that's thousands of years old and has a lot of tradition behind it. And so yeah, these are powerful institutions for helping us put into practice these kinds of behaviors that will improve happiness. But it's worth noting that it doesn't have to be just religion. The divinity scholar Casper Turkile has been studying other kinds of institutions that are starting to do that. I'm thinking of things like your CrossFit group, right? You know, this really intense CrossFit group that you meet with every week. And if somebody gets sick or gets, you know, breast cancer or something, they do all these events for, you're present with them in a different way.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Day and I go to the spaghetti suppers and so on. When you really do that work, what you find is that the effect of the correlation between religion and happiness seems to be pretty fully mediated by those religious behaviors. So going to church, doing nice things for other people, you know, taking part in altruistic acts, it seems like it's actually religious behaviors that are making us happy, not religious beliefs. What does that mean? That means that any kind of cultural institution that gets us to do the stuff we were just talking about that makes you happier, social connection, doing nice things for others, being a little bit more present, we haven't talked about that yet, but things like prayer and meditation are great mechanisms for being in the present moment. Any institution that gets you to do that, it's probably going to make you happier. It's awesome to do that in the context of religious institutions, because like, man, those are like set up with a whole belief structure around why you have to do that stuff.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, there's lots of work that's specifically looked at religion and happiness. And overall, what that work finds is that religious individuals tend to be happier on average. But you can imagine that's for two reasons. One is that many religions come with a whole host of spiritual beliefs about the afterlife, about a god and whether there's someone taking care of you, power bigger than you, and so on. These religions will also involve the thing that I think you're getting at, which is all these rituals, right? Like they force you to be a little bit more social. You like hang out with everybody on Sunday or on the Sabbath or something like that. Often they involve doing nice things for other people and being present in prayer and so on. And so when scientists really try to dig into that, which is tricky, you have to separate people who are very religious, then they have really strong beliefs, but then don't go to services as much and so on versus people who are kind of like, you know, I say I'm Catholic, but I'm kind of agnostic. But like, you know, I go every Sunday.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't get as much work done. But in practice, it just puts you in a better mood that sets you up for the day. And I feel like all those little tiny weak ties, social connections we had, you know, the accidental talk with somebody on a train, even if you don't really strike up a conversation, you probably smile at people or say hi to the person when you're turning the ticket in, talking to the barista at the coffee shop, you know, the chit chat that you get in office on the way to the elevator or wherever you're going, all those little moments get taken away at the height of the pandemic. And for many of us get taken away when we're still working from home. And I think we, again, these are invisible little hits on our well-being that we don't often see. But yeah, social connection is a big one. And when you add to that the reduction of these rituals, that makes it even worse over time.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely. I mean, if I, you know, when I list out tips for how to feel happier, often the first one is improve your social connection. Every available study of happy people suggests that happy people are more social. They prioritize time with their friends and family members, but they're also just like around other people more often. And we forget that, right? I think our instinct is like, oh, I'll hang out with other people when I'm feeling social or I'm in a better mood, you know, when I'm kind of feeling in a bad mood, I want to plop down privately and like watch Netflix or something. But there's so many studies showing that if you intervene and force people to be a little bit more social, they wind up feeling happier, even with strangers. These are some lovely work by Nick Eply and his colleagues showing that if you force somebody to talk to a stranger on the train on their commute to work, for example, they wind up in a happier mood. They predict it's going to suck. Like they predict it's going to be awkward and I don't really want to talk to somebody. I'm going to feel anxious.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of that fell by the wayside in the pandemic. And that's a hit on our well-being, one that's often invisible, but one that I think we feel the psychological toll of.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ways of kind of connecting with other people and like putting our mind in the right mindset. Lots of lovely work from the psychologist Mike Norton and his colleague Francesca Gino about the power of using rituals, for example, to reduce anxiety. You know, something as simple as like, you know, you take the commute to work, can get you to work and feel like you're ready to go. Whereas when you just log on on Zoom, you kind of don't have that in the same way. Rituals are wonderful things when you do them together for creating social connection and things like that. Even the teamwork meeting where you all sit at the counter together and get coffee, like it doesn't have to be a ritual qualified a wedding ritual. Like it can be these tiny things that allow us to feel a little bit more bonded with the people around us. And I feel like both the big versions of that, you know, the graduations and the funerals and the weddings, like and the tiny versions of that, the like, you know, on Tuesdays we used to walk to Starbucks together or whatever.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's just lots of evidence that, I mean, obviously, we're just like creatures of habit, right? You know, we do certain things, but habits really help our minds compartmentalize stuff, right? You know, you're home with your kids in the morning eating breakfast and then back pre-COVID, everyone hopped on the subway, drove in their car to work, and then you show up at work, you see different people, you sit in a different spot. It kind of allows you to compartmentalize the identity you have as a parent, as a family member, as a spouse, and the identity you have at work. When you're doing work from your kitchen table and your kids are sitting next to you trying to do school, that can feel really jumbled, right? There's no division anymore between these things. And that's bad for two reasons. One is that we need those divisions to keep these things separate. We kind of feel a little bit more cognitively overwhelmed when we're like juggling all these things at once. And a lot of us lost that. But the second thing is that rituals are really powerful.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Excuse me, or just like, you know, spend time just like, you know, listening to music by themselves, I think students came to crave this social connection more. And so it meant that they naturally craved and built in more in real life social connection time. And so, you know, even in the depths of the pandemic, I think there were these moments where we saw, huh, these interesting things emerge, like these strategies came out that might help us live a little bit better, which is kind of ironic, right? Because I think Yale doesn't want to say, well, let's cancel all activities and all athletics and all parties because that will make our students happier. We don't think that. But I think we got a glimpse of overloading our students with too many choices and too many things. That might not be the best strategy either, right? And so, yeah, so I think that the pandemic has been this difficult, tough time, but it's given us these little glimmers of things to pay attention to, you know, to make the way we run our daily lives a little bit better.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have time to like read a novel or like read a book or just have some bandwidth, which was kind of interesting. The other thing we saw was that in part because, you know, students were kind of in lockdown together, they really did have this shared social experience. I think being on things like Zoom classes all the time made the in-person time they did have much more precious. And so, you know, after a day of Zoom classes, students didn't want to hop on a bunch of video games and look at screens and do nothing.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just missed, and I don't even mean academic formative experiences, I mean, you know, the normal stuff that you learn going to high school and kind of having those social experiences. So I think we haven't really seen the full cost of this pandemic yet. All that said, I think there were a few funny parts of the pandemic that wound up being better for my students' mental health than I expected. And this was particularly true during the first year back on campus. So the way Yale did it in 2020 is that we had students back on campus, but they were taking a lot of their classes on Zoom. A lot of like athletics were canceled, a lot of extracurriculars were cancelled. They were kind of doing classes, but that's it. And I was so worried about how this was going to go. But two interesting things happened. One, just not having as much stuff to do wound up making students feel less FOMO, less anxious, less time famished. You know, students would tell me it feels weird this semester.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's tough. These are things they're never going to get back again. I think also these for our students are really formative years of practice socializing. We now at Yale are realizing that our first year students are coming in and the class of 2026, which will be our next college class that's coming in, it was around their sophomore year that they got booted from school during COVID and many of them haven't really even had a full semester back in class. Imagine what you'd be like in college if you'd made it through your freshman year and then like a booted sophomore year, right? Like so many formative experiences.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you know, I think college students were at the breaking point when I first taught this class in 2018. All those statistics I was telling you were before COVID, you know, and many of them have just gotten worse. Like, you know, this pandemic is a sweet spot of destroying our social connection, flinging us into a period of extreme anxiety, breaking of all of our rituals and routines. And it's just uncertain. We have no idea when it's going to end. We keep being like, all right, we're out of it, but are we really? And that's tough. And that's happening to our young people at a time when those important rituals that you'll never get back again are happening at a clip, there's prom, there's first year formal, there's like, you know, like your sophomore dance or whatever, and they're missing. And in many cases where students were missing out on a lot of.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We joke, you know, because Silliman sounds a lot like Slytherin, but I think Slytherin is Jonathan Edwards, which is a different residential college than mine.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100 students, which is kind of a large class on campus, but they actually did change the axis on mine because we had over a thousand students shopping the class. So they took like bump the whole mechanism up by like an order of magnitude. And in the end, the only room that we could fit the class on campus was in the concert hall. And so over a thousand students enrolled the first time it was taught. And you ask, what did that tell me? I mean, it tells me students are voting with their feet. They don't like this culture feeling stressed and anxious. Like they realize that this is toxic and that this is like not sustainable. And I think, you know, they really wanted some evidence-based strategies to deal with this, which I think is cool. You know, the students today, they really respond to this more scientific approach. They don't want a bunch of platitudes about how they should live their life. They're like, okay, what does a science say? How can I implement these evidence-based tips? And that was really cool.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not encoding it if 40% of them are too depressed to function most days, and they're so anxious that they can barely get to class. And so, you know, I kind of both in an attempt to kind of do something for this community that I really grew to care about, but also like, you know, fulfill Yale's educational mission to really get students to learn. I thought, wow, we got to find ways to give students some of these strategies. And so it was really at that point that I sort of retrained in this field of positive psychology and behavior change to try to think, okay, what strategies does my field really have about how we can do our students better strategies and what we as individuals can do a little bit better? And so I kind of put together the class, you know, it was a new class on campus. I thought, you know, 30 or so students would take it, which would be typical for like a new social science class. I was a little surprised when we broke the registration form. So normally the registration forms at Yale go up.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At first, I was like, wow, is this Yale? Is this something about the Ivy League? But no, when you look at the national statistics, like we are dealing with an enormous mental health crisis among our young people, like national statistics report that nowadays over 40% of college students report being too depressed to function most days. Over 60% say that they're overwhelmingly anxious. Another over 60% report feeling lonely, extremely lonely most of the time, over 80% say that they're overwhelmed most days by all that they have to do. And more than one in 10 has seriously considered suicide at least once in the last year. These are national statistics. And as I started realizing this, I was like, wow, like we as universities are kind of failing in our mission, right? Like these students aren't learning, you know, the Canterbury tales or like, I don't know, computer science compiler programming, like all this stuff we think we're teaching them. Like they're just.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, the origin of the class was, you know, I taught psychology at Yale for over a decade, but for most of that time I was kind of like a professor at the front of a classroom kind of thing. So I saw student life at college and at Yale, but not super closely. And then I took on this new role where I became a head of college on campus. So, you know, Yale's one of these funny schools like Hogwarts and Harry Potter where there's like these like schools within a school or these like dorms have different names and communities and things. I'm head of Silliman College and that means I live on campus with over 400 students who are part of my college, part of my community. And in that, I mean, the role was amazing, right? You get to create this community for all these, you know, intelligent, amazing, talented students. But it allowed me to see their life up close and personal. And I really wasn't expecting the level of mental health dysfunction I was seeing, right? With so many students reporting feeling depressed and anxious, you know, cases of suicideality and stuff.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, I mean, again, you know, it has different goals, right? I mean, if I was building a mind, I'd build it in very different ways. But, you know, that was its goal was to kind of get us into the next generation. And it's not entirely clear going purely for happiness would wind up doing that as much as the built-in mechanisms for striving and going after stuff.”
2022-06-14 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT