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 class in the school’s history. She is the host of the immensely popular Happiness Lab podcast. Today, she and Derek talk about her favorite lessons from modern happiness research, lessons on striving and anxiety from existential philosophy, our relationship to time, the science of cognitive time travel temporal mind tricks to reduce anxiety like “psychological distancing,” and more.
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In the following excerpt, Derek and Laurie Santos discuss the psychology of her own happiness and the distinction 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. Your lectures on the psychology of happiness are immensely popular, whether it’s a course at Yale University or an online class at Coursera. I wonder, of all the jobs that you do and of all the tasks within those jobs, what makes you happiest? If I hooked you up to some happiness Geiger counter as you went about the typical month in the life of Laurie Santos—happiness expert—what part of your job would I discover brings you the most pleasure?
Laurie Santos: I think this is sort of an impossible question because there’s so many parts of my job that I love. I mean, I love chatting with students and talking with them about their goals. I really love the part of my podcast job where I get to do interviews with people. It’s so cool to learn about people’s work and hear about their theories and stuff. A funny one that you might not expect is, I really love the part of the podcasting that involves listening to someone’s interview and figuring out exactly the choice quote, where they said it in this perfect way, and then kind of scripting it together. I can do that for hours and hours and it gives me tremendous flow, where time is passing really quickly and I forget to go to the bathroom and stuff like that. I’m lucky that I have a job where I have lots of the parts of it that are pretty good, but they wind up being parts that don’t fit together in the way you might expect.
Derek Thompson: This is a bit of an aside from what I want to talk to you about the most, but as someone who does a lot of writing for The Atlantic and has occasionally done edited podcasts with The Atlantic. This show is more of a talking podcast, but I always thought of a distinction, I wonder if this connects for you, between writing and editing podcasts as a distinction between painting and sculpting.
With painting, you start with a blank canvas and it’s all about what you add to the canvas. Just as in writing, you start with a blank page and it’s all about the words that you add and you can truly write anything. With editing interview podcasts, you are not starting with anything blank. You’re actually starting with the opposite, a huge unwieldy chunk of marble, and there’s a David hiding inside of it that you have to extricate with your sculpting prowess. I love the kind of opposite challenges of writing and editing in that way. I don’t know if that connects for you.
Laurie Santos: No, totally. I see this analogy perfectly. It’s so much fun to know that there’s the David in there and to try to bring it out, and to really listen carefully to people’s quotes and stuff. When I got into podcasting, this absolutely was not a part of podcasting that I thought would be so much fun, but honestly, if I could just pick one thing to do on some random rainy Thursday afternoon, it would be sculpting these beautiful audio tape files that we have into the perfect David. It’s so much fun.
Derek Thompson: I’ve always been frustrated by the language that we have in this category. There’s something ephemeral and unsatisfying about the concept of happiness that I think might connect with its etymology. The idea that the word happiness, like the word happens, or happening, has this old English root hap, meaning chance or luck, which is inherently fleeting. Some people prefer to talk about flourishing. 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 versus happiness for your life. What is this distinction, and what work is this distinction doing for us?
Laurie Santos: So to be fair, this is a lovely distinction that I’ve stolen from the psychologist Sonja Lyubomisrky. She kind of defines happiness as having these two parts: Happiness in your life is what it feels like to be you right now. So, this is the fact that you’re hopefully experiencing lots of positive emotions, joy, and laughter, and so on, and you’ve got a decent ratio of those with negative emotions. Note that that doesn’t mean you want no negative emotions. I think a good life involves a little bit of both, but hopefully you’ve got a ratio of such that the positive emotions are weighing out against the negative ones. That’s kind of being happy in your life. But there’s also the second part of being happy, with your life, or, for your life. This is the sense that we have a satisfaction with our life. It’s sort of how we think our life is going.
That’s another way to frame the distinction: How you feel in your life versus how you think your life is going. Of course, that matters too. We want to be satisfied with our lives. We want to think that things are going well. We want to feel like we have some meaning. I like this distinction as kind of pulling them both together because it kind of encompasses, I think, what the lay notion of happiness is, that there is something fleeting. It’s kind of about being happy in your life, about how it’s going right now. A true definition of happiness, or a true definition of living a good life, would involve the second part, too, where you really think your life is going well. That gets closer to what I think a lot of the ancients, for example, thought about when they thought about happiness. Concepts like Aristotle’s eudaemonia and so on are more about this feeling like your life is going well.
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Dr. Laurie Santos
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Subscribe: Spotify
