The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning - Lionel Page

Dude, I am in love with your Substack. I subscribe to a lot of different Substacks and yours is maybe my favorite one from this entire year.

Oh, wow.

I think you're, you're absolutely-

Thank you.

... destroying it, dude. It's so great, it's evolutionary lens on things, big picture questions everybody's already asking. I think it's awesome. So when it comes to, I guess, what, what are the problems about how happiness is typically thought about or studied? What, what is missing from that?

Look, excellent question. So, um, in one of my post, I have this, um, cheeky, uh, picture of, you know, the elephant and, and the blinds. It's a, I think it's comes from India, the story. Uh, and the story, I'm sure lots of your listeners have heard about it, but you've got a bunch of blind people and they, they are, they are put in front of an elephant and they are asked, okay, what, what an elephant looks like. And so, you know, one touch the trunk of the elephant and says, "Well, an elephant is kind of, you know, looks like a tube and it's wet at the end." Another one touch the, the tail says, "Well, you know, it's look as a string and it's very fluffy at the end." And another one touch the tusks and say, "Well, it's very hard, you know, it's very... and it's very smooth." Um, and so when you read the literature sometimes in behavioral sciences and social sciences and when they don't have an evolutionary perspective, you get the same kind of stuff. You, when, you know, I talk about the books on self-help, books on, on psychology, on, of happiness. And you will see, you get a book and this book will tell you to be happy, you need social connections. You know, the, the, the secret of happiness is to have friends, to have family. It's okay, oh, very interesting. You take another book and this other book will tell you the secret of happiness is to, uh, control your desires. You know, to learn not to want what you don't have. Um, that's stoicism, that's Buddhism. And another book will tell you the secret of happiness is to reach for the stars, you know, to have very high goals and to work very hard to reach it. And then you, you look at these different things like, okay, but what's, you know, what's the link between these different things? I mean, are we talking about the same things, are we're talking about happiness and there is one explanation? What's the deep connection between these different stories? And these books are like the blinds, uh, uh, you know, giving you a perspective of the elephant. And the elephant about happiness is that you have to consider that happiness is a system of valuation, design, uh, and I, I use the word design, you know, not designed by a designer, but evolution is an impersonal process which looks like it's designing stuff. Designed by evolution to help you make decisions. And so when you take this perspective, all these different kind of secrets of happiness makes sense, but in a big picture. Uh, so you, you're asking, you know, what kind of stuff it explains. Like, for instance, as I say, we are social species, so we will need connections. That's one fact. Uh, but on the other hand, um, sometimes you, you get all the books about happiness tells you, well, you need to know when to say no to other people. You know, you need to say, people make claims about to, um, to your ˣ can you help me? Please can you do this? Et cetera. At some point you need to be able to say no. Well, every system we have of, um, subjective feelings helping you to navigate the world has to handle that you are facing trade-offs. So if you're always saying no to people, you know, maybe you won't have too many friends and that's not good for your success. But if you're always saying yes, you know, maybe you'll be a pushover. People will take advantage of you. So a, a right system leads you to balance these things. If you take another, uh, uh, things like, uh, the goal you have in life. Uh, if you, if you have very low goals, like, you know, everything is fine, whatever you achieve, you, you're very happy with, you will be very successful. And so a system of happiness which is designed to make you successful has to push you, to nudge you, to try as hard as you can. So whenever you're going to be successful, you know, the, you, you are going to look forward to the next challenge. So now you may think, oh, what will make me very happy in the future is this big milestone. If I reach this milestone, that's it, you know, I won't need very much to do much better than that. And what happens is that, let's say you work very hard and you reach the milestone and, and then so you say, "Okay, that was good." Uh, but what next? You know, like, you're going to start looking further ahead, like, what's the next milestones? Like, if you think that being millionaire is what's ma- will make you happy, well, the sad story is that when you reach the million, the first million, two million, whatever, you'll feel good, but you'll start thinking about the next thing. So, so your system habits will keep pushing. And so when you have these books that tell you, you know, uh, either you need to have... you don't need to care about, um, uh, what you don't have or in the country, you need to aim very high, they kind of... they just look at one side of this balance. The book tells you don't care about what you don't have, it says yes, you shouldn't look too high. It does... it's not worth it for me to think in the morning, oh, I'm not as rich as Elon Musk. So this is very disappointing. There's no point for me to think that. So that's not going to help me being successful to have a goal which is so high that I'm, I'm nev- you know, there's no point, whatever I do in the day is not going to change it. So I shouldn't care about things which are unachievable. But at the same point, at the same time, you know, if I wake up in the morning and says, you know, "I'm great, I'm healthy, everything is fine." You know, "Why do I stress?" Et cetera. Well, I'm not maybe going to do the right things which is going to help me move forward. So our system of happiness is going to be this kind of stuff which kind of try to find the right level to push us to do our best. It's neither too high, neither too low.