Lionel Page
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And another book will tell you the secret of happiness is to reach for the stars, to have very high goals, and to work very hard towards it. And then you look at these different things like, okay, but what's the link between these different things? I mean, are we talking about the same things that we're talking about? Happiness. And there is one explanation.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Look, there's several things in what you said, but I'll start with the social media. I totally agree with you that social media is a very strange environment. We were not selected to be in this kind of thing. As you say, it's expanded social circle. You have, as you said, people who lie on social media lie in the sense that we take selfies all the time.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
I'll take maybe 100 selfies and I'll pick the best angle The one where the light is good, I have a twinkle in the eye. Maybe I use a filter and eventually I put that as my social media profile. And you do that for everything. My videos of my holidays will be brilliant. I mean, when I have a...
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
boring holiday i won't necessarily talk about it but when i have something a nice cocktail on a on a beach in bali i'll post about it and so we're exposed to these beautiful lives these beautiful pictures of all these people and as we as we were talking before we can't help compare right and if this is our comparison points and it's move us you know it moves this comparison point much higher and then we were thinking well i'm not doing that well in comparison uh
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And we have to learn to discount, to learn, okay, wait a minute, there are filters on these pictures. Maybe these people are not that young as they look in pictures. You know, I see all the nice things they do in the holidays. I don't see all the troubles they went through these holidays, et cetera, et cetera. That's difficult. And there is a...
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Even another thing which is very interesting on social media, I guess you have heard of it, like the friendship paradox. Do you know this thing, the friendship paradox? No, tell me more. Okay, the friendship paradox is something which happens in networks. When you're in a network, your friends, on average, have more friends than you.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So if you're on Twitter, the people you follow have more followers than you have. If you're on YouTube, the stuff you follow on average has more subscribers than you have. So that sounds strange. How is it possible? Shouldn't it be on average? On average, we have the same. No, because the people you select to follow or to be your friends, they are selected.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And you have not selected the people with the least friends. You have selected people who tend to have more friends. And the fact that you selected them is an indication that they are selected. And so when you look into your circle of friends on social media, you'll find, wow, why don't I have, you know, I have so many followers and these guys are like, you know, super popular.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Well, I'm not as popular as that. So the funny thing is that whatever network you'll be, you will not be as popular as the average popularity of the people in your network. So that's another thing which is not intuitive, but it will make your reference point higher. And in comparison, you won't look as good. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
What's the connection between these different stories? And these books are like the blinds, 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. And 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.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah, so that's a paradox of the fact that we always want to go higher. When we are in a peer group or in a club, we tend often to look for the next club, the most prestigious club. Academics, for instance, they want to be in prestigious universities. Well, the cost of it is that whenever you move to another one, which is more prestigious, your colleagues...
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
they tend to be more successful than before, right? So that goes with it. And so you join clubs of people more prestigious and what you have, exactly what you say, you have this kind of Let's say, you know, if you join Harvard as an academy, well, for people outside, your Harvard member of staff is very prestigious.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
But for you, within Harvard, the comparison now are your colleagues who are superstars. That's very stressful. And so in one of my substacks, I described there was Thomas Schelling. You know, it's a story told by Glenn Lowry when he He joined Harvard, and he got very stressed by the pressure of success, of being successful in publishing, et cetera, et cetera.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And he goes to his colleague, Thomas Schelling, a very famous game theorist. And Thomas Schelling says, what do you think? Everybody here is extremely stressed. They all think that they're underachieving. And when you ask, what are you doing? They think, oh my God, I'm being judged for not being performing enough.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And so you have this double-edged sword, as you say, that from outside, we think all these people are very successful. But because they're in clubs of very successful people, they feel the pressure of not being up to scratch with their peers.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yes, and you have this term like the imposter syndrome, right? And I think the imposter syndrome is exactly that. So you work very hard to be successful in professional life to be maybe... promoted as a manager in a very important function in academia. You want to be promoted professor in a prestigious university. And then people once they're there, they think, oh, maybe I shouldn't be here.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
You know, maybe people didn't see that actually I'm not good enough to be here. I'm here by accident, right? And so people have anxieties like that.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah, look, that's a good point. I'm not sure if I have used it I've used it, you know, in practice to kind of not being stressed by, you know, not joining higher circles. So when I was actually, I was in a, when I worked for some time in London and I have the opportunities to choose between academia and to work in finance.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And I thought, you know, obviously the wages are much higher, you can imagine, in London in finance. And I thought, well, from what I know from Behold Science, I know that actually the wage looks much higher. But if I go there, you know, next thing you know, I'll think that I'm not paid as much as Warren Buffett. And that's actually very true.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
designed by evolution to help you make decisions. And so when you take this perspective, all these different kind of secrets of happiness make sense, but in a big picture. So 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.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
You know, I was talking to a trader, and the guy must have been on something like £150,000. So something like $200,000, $250,000 a year. So clearly in the top of the distribution. And the guy, you know what, I was having lunch with him. He told me, I hope I was rich.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
I was like, well, I mean, you know, you're not a billionaire, and you're a young guy, and you're already on these kind of wages, like super good. But from his point of view, you know, he's thinking of his manager, who is on $2 or $5 million a year. And then the next thing is a success story is Warren Buffett. So... So I'm aware of this kind of thing.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And I guess I'm not looking back and thinking, oh, I wish I'd done that, et cetera. Because I know that, I mean, I think I've been very happy there as well. But I'm thinking that you need to be aware that if you were to move in such a circle, then your reference point would move with you. And so that's a reason not to stress too much and to appreciate what you have now.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Look, I think that's a key part of my research. I have a paper, several of my posts on subsects were on this topic recently. You know, maybe I'll use a metaphor. I'll start far, and we can go back more on the topic. But I'll use a metaphor. Let's say you can think of evolution. Evolution is an impersonal process, right? But it's as if it was designing you.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And you can use a metaphor if it was kind of a designer trying to nudge you to be as successful as possible. So now, what kind of situation we can think of where somebody tries for you to be as successful as possible, right? Well, one situation is when you have a parent and a child.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And a truth that is going to be clear for every parent is that it's not necessarily always best to motivate a child to be truthful with the child, to say all the truth. And so for the child to know exactly what are going to be the rewards is not necessarily optimal from the parent point of view. And here's what I mean. Let's say that...
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
You got your son or daughter and you register your son or daughter in a competition. It could be athletic competition. It could be a chess competition. And you have no idea really how good they are. And you want to motivate them and say, if you do well, you'll have an ice cream. So you give a schedule of kind of rewards. Say, if you do well, I would bring you to the cinema.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
If you do very well at school, I'll give you a video console, et cetera. The problem is that you don't know how good they can be. Suppose that you find out they're excellently talented. They're clearly well beyond your expectations. So you told them that if they were going to do well, they would have all these rewards. So what do you do now?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Do you just keep them giving them all these rewards all the time? They don't need to work very hard because they are very talented. So you keep giving them rewards. If you do that, it's not going to... Nudge them to do better because they don't need to work hard. They're super talented.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
But on the other hand, sometimes you get all the books about happiness tells you, well, you need to know when to say no to other people. You need to say, people make claims to your time. It says, can you help me, Chris? Can you do this?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
If, on the contrary, you find out that your child has difficulties, is challenged, is struggling to be very good, you say, oh, sorry, you're not very good, so no reward for you. Never. So that's not going to help the child as well. So what you'll do is that you'll adapt your schedule first. If you find out that your child is excessively good at chess, you say, okay, maybe I'm going to give you
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
cheater and I'm going to issue win tournaments, you know, you'll have more rewards, whatever, depends. In Australia, what we do is we have a lot of, it's very athletic as a country, very sporty. So you bring your kids to the swimming pool and you see whether they are good and if they are good, you enter them in competition.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
You may have seen in the Olympic Games, Australia does very well in swimming because pretty everybody swims in this country. So, What you do as a parent here is that you won't tell your kid before, oh, wait, I'm telling you that if you're successful, you get this reward. But if you're very successful, actually, I'm going to move the carrot further ahead.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
You don't have to say that because if the kid knows that if they do very well, then you're going to move the carrot well ahead. They'll be like, what's the point? And nature does exactly the same thing with us. That is, for us to work very hard, we think, oh, you know, I need to achieve these things. It's very important. And
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
All the information tells you if you can achieve it, we have this kind of urge. The paper I've written on it, the title is called If You Can, You Must. So if you feel that you can, you really get excited by the idea that you want to do it. If you can't, if it's way far ahead of your expectations, the realm of what you can achieve, you don't want to try. You won't be interested.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
But if you think, you know what? I think I could run a marathon. You will try. You will want to try if you think it's prestigious enough. If you think, well, I think I can run a marathon, but in four hours, you know, then you'll start thinking about how can I achieve that? What kind of steps? And that feels good to think that I think I could achieve this. Then,
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
The problem is like, let's say you start, you know, you start thinking maybe I could run a marathon and running a marathon will be something which I think is an achievement. You start running and you think, actually, I'm pretty good. So now running a marathon is not enough. You will have to do it maybe under four hours or maybe more or maybe a better time. So the count will keep moving forward.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
At some point, you need to be able to say, well, every system of 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, maybe you won't have too many friends and that's not good for your success. But if you're always saying yes, maybe you'll be a pushover. People will take advantage of you.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And your hedonic system kind of lied to you initially because your hedonic system told you initially, oh, if you reach this goal, you'll be happy, you know. But as you realize that you are able to reach this goal, maybe you can reach better. So if you can reach better, now the card has to move ahead. And now this initial goal is not enough anymore. And you want this additional goal further ahead.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And the problem, I totally understand people in your shows who says, why do I do that? Well, it's by design. We're designed to be like that. And we're designed to be like that. And we're designed not to anticipate. Because if you were to anticipate that, If you achieve the next goal, you'll get used to it and you think about another goal afterwards. Well, you'll be like, well, what are the points?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
I work hard and I may as well just enjoy life as it is now.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
It's exactly that. If you think that it's very important to have this next promotion, this promotion will give you status and prestige and income, that you think that's what I want in life, then you work very hard for it. But actually, in reality, once you have it, six months later, it says, okay, what next? Next challenge, actually I could do better, et cetera.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
If you anticipate that initially, if you anticipate that the cart is always going to move forward beyond you, beyond your reach, then that's not motivating anymore to reach the next step because you know that the same process will repeat.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
But that's exactly that. So the focusing illusion is a term proposed by Daniel Kahneman and his co-authors. And so that you focus in life, you say, you tend to focus on some things and say, this is really what I need. And people may have different view about what they need to be happy.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Maybe some people say, you know, what I need is a romantic partner, which is attractive and faithful and friendly, et cetera. And if I get that, I'll be happy. Some other people say, well, what I really want to be rich. Other people may say, you know, what I want is just a group of friends, good social network. And so you really care. You say, this is what I need.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And usually you say that when you don't have it. And you think you would be really happy. You focus on that. This is the key for you to achieve happiness in your life. And then if and when you get it, Eventually, you come to realize that was not so important for your happiness. So the key example given by Kahneman are people in the U.S.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
who think that, oh, if I only had a job in California, I would have fantastic weather, brilliant lifestyle. And so maybe if you live in, let's say, Minnesota, where winter is very cold, you imagine that you'd be very happy if you moved to California. Now, what Kahneman did is went to ask people who moved from Minnesota or something like that to California and says, are you more happy now?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So a right system needs you to balance these things. If you take another things like the goal you have in life, if you have very low goals, like everything is fine, whatever you're achieving, 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.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And basically, after six months, a year, people say, yeah, I'm happy. But they didn't get the kind of change in life satisfaction that they were thinking they would when they were not there.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
You're totally right. A goal, you can think of it, we used the word reference point before. You can think as a reference point. So you judge where you are, how well you're doing, with this goal as a reference. So if you have a very low goal, everything looks good.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
If my goal in life is just to have a nice job, a house somewhere, not necessarily in a luxury suburb, et cetera, well, it's much easier to achieve that if I say my goal is to be a top manager, to have a very high income level, et cetera. So having a high goal... makes that for a given level, if I have a low goal, this looks great. If I have a high goal, the same thing is not going to look great.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So a very simple path to happiness is to have low aspirations. And if you look in history, I talk about Stoicism or Buddhism or Epicurism as well. So a lot of the kind of historical path to happiness recommendations is very simple. It's like, stop desiring what you do not have. just be happy with what you have. And that's the secret of happiness.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And there's something very true in it is that if you're able to stop, you know, try to get outside of this race where the goal keep moving forward, says, you know what, I'm healthy. Have a good meal every day. You know, got electricity, warm water. My ancestor didn't have that at all. So that's a fairly good life, right? I don't need to chase further success and further success.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So if you're able to do that, you can extract yourself from this pressure, you'll feel better. But then what you have is that your hedonic system is not designed for you to feel good. As we said before, your hedonic system is designed for you to be as successful as possible. As successful as possible.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And so your hedonic system, your brain should kind of pick all the information available to identify what you can do. And if... you learn that you can do something better, well, your hedonic system should just go a notch above and says, we have to do it, right? You're not designed to be happy and enjoy life. You're designed really to try as hard as possible.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Exactly, because if you think about our ancestors, some ancestors may be born with psychological traits where they enjoyed being on the beach and, you know, if there is enough food, you have enough food and one fish, etc. And some others were maybe a bit more neurotic, wanted to always work harder and harder.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Well, unfortunately for us, you know, the people who are the most neurotic and keep trying harder and harder are more likely to be ancestors now than the people who just enjoy life.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So I would say, you know, there's a balance, but... Our hedonic system should be designed to keep finding the best thing you can achieve. So as I said before, it's not worth you being depressed every day because you're not Elon Musk. There's no point into it. But you should identify what is the best thing you can achieve. Really best thing. And then aim for it. And so our hedonic system...
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
It does that. We get a lot of information for what we have done before, what people like us have done. And then we integrate all this information. We think, okay, what somebody like me can do? I have some psychological traits, which makes me better at some things. Maybe if I'm very good at talking to people, I should aim to be a manager or maybe to be a public speaker.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So whenever you're going to be successful, you know, 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.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
If I'm very good at math, I may be thinking, what I should do is working in engineering or in finance. So you will try to find... who I am and the traits I have, what is the best thing I can do? And you don't need to think consciously about it. You pick it up. You'll pick up that, wait a minute, this person is like me and this person is very successful. Why am I not doing this?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And the character will keep moving forward because it's designed just to push you not too far, but as far as possible.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah, look, that's fascinating. It's another... You can explain it for... from how happiness works. Happiness is going to work in your brain, always setting expectations and giving you feedback about whether you're doing better than expectations or lower than expectations. Now, when you aim for a goal, usually the resolution to what is going to take time to take place over time.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So if you're working to get a promotion in a company, you have progressive information whether you're doing well enough to be promoted. So your impression about whether things are going well or not, and as things get better, you feel more and more happy. Similarly, let's say you run a marathon. As you're running the marathon, you get information whether you're likely to finish or not.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And so the thing is that you will consume the benefit of success all throughout as you get closer from the goal. So if you look at
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
games like you know in the US you have American football for instance the guy starts being happy before they score the touchdown they start being happy as they know that there is nobody you know in front of them and they are going to score the touchdown and so they start consuming in a way the happiness of the success before the success happens exactly and then when you reach it
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
When you reach the success, the only thing which could happen is that you may be 99% chance of being successful, but you could still mess up. So you're running toward the touchdown and you fumble within one meter. That would be a catastrophe. So you have a relief because you have already realized that you are going to be successful. You're super happy, but there's a risk that you could not.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And that's this final step that you're happy not to be failing.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And then suddenly they say, okay, that was good. But what next? You're going to start looking further ahead. What's the next milestone? If you think that being a millionaire 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.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So I think... I think there's two things. First, you will enjoy the striving because the striving is really going toward the goal. It's increasing the chance that you're going to be successful. But obviously, at the very end, the fact that you indeed are successful, there is still an important step. So if you look for, for instance, sports matches,
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
and let's say your team is ahead in the game, you start being happy that you realize you are very likely to win before the end of the match. But nonetheless, when the whistle blows and you win the match, you're happy because that's the final outcome, the success is realized. Now, what you have is that
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Relative to expectations, relative to maybe the foot about how you would feel before, if you were to be successful, then you have this focusing illusion. So you, um, I have this quote in one of my, uh, sub stack about Andre Agassi. It's in his book open and Andre Agassi, uh, um, you know, I'm not sure if people remember because it's a few decades ago, but there was a lot of pressure.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
He was a very talented play teams player, but there was a lot of pressure that he was a bit rowdy, you know, uh, and people say, maybe he's not this kind of guy who can actually win big titles. And, and then he won Wimbledon. Uh, and then you think, well, I felt let down because I was led to believe that winning a Grand Slam would be life-changing. I wouldn't be the same person.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
I would acquire maybe another level of existence, a big world. But you would grow into something else having reached this very high level of achievement. And he said, well, I felt exactly the same person. And Compare that to how depressed and sad I was when I was losing in the final of the Grand Slam. I was not that happy having won.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And so that's the thing, because you would focus on thinking that the Grand Slam is what he needs to be happy. But once he gets the Grand Slam, surely he's very happy on the day, right? That's one thing. On the day, he's happy, he may cry, whatever. But a few days later, his hedonic system is going to kick in and says, wait a minute, if you want one, you can do more.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
You know, you can be number one. So the next crash lab is in three months.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Oh, yes, you have the gold medalists. Are you referring because you have this study about the gold, silver, and bronze medal?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So your system of happiness will keep pushing. And so when you have these books that tell you, you know, either you don't need to care about what you don't have, or on the contrary, you need to aim very high. They just look at one side of this balance. The book tells you, don't care about what you don't have, that says, yes, you shouldn't look too high.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
That's right. Yeah. So I didn't know the term. Uh, it's interesting. I didn't know this term, but yes, that's exactly that. And I think, you know, but that's what we're in a way doomed, uh, to, to, to experience because if you win one, well, that's a good, you know, it's good correlation. People win one slam. Often they win more than one.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And so eventually you should be, you know, if people were like, I win one slam and I'm happy, now I'm going to enjoy cocktails at the hotel. Well, that's not, you know, conducive to further success.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Exactly, exactly. But the funny thing is that you have these... The fact that all people behind or below these very highly successful people think that the people who are very successful are very happy.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So, you know, I can imagine that, let's say if you're on social media and, you know, if you start, if you think, oh, if only I had 10 followers, or not 10 followers, 10,000 followers, that's the thing, I'll be very happy. People with 10,000 followers, they think, wait a minute, you know, why don't I have 50,000? People with 50,000 says, why don't I have like, you know, 200 followers?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And we don't know that. So we think that these people are happy, but these people are just looking two steps ahead.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah, I don't remember the numbers, but I saw a study. Do you remember?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Oh, yeah. So I can tell you a few things about this. First, on a level, on a very basic level, you ask people, let's say when they're 20, what would be a good life? You know, what would be something where when you're 40, you have achieved and you're happy?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And they say, I don't know, I've got a house in the suburb, I've got a car, I've got a big TV, you know, and then you guys in their 40, okay, you've got a car, you've got the house, you've got a big TV, Do you think you have a good life? He says, well, you know, not really because, you know, I don't have this thing. I don't have that, et cetera. So people move their goalposts.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
The kind of stuff that they said they would be happy with is not enough for them to be satisfied. So that's a first thing, interesting thing. And then in terms of... People were always looking ahead. I remember I listened once to an interview of a psychologist who was a specialist of the psychology of millionaires.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And he said, you know, when I'm saying that a psychologist of maybe not millionaires, but like super rich, maybe multimillionaires or billionaires, when I say that I'm a psychologist for these guys, people say, wait a minute, they don't have any problem. And the problem is that he says, no, on the contrary, often they are very miserable people.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Because, you know, if you earn $50,000 or $100,000, your next comparison point is maybe the person who gets $150,000. But if you're a millionaire, your next comparison point is a guy who's like twice the size of your house. He has this multi-million yacht with all these VIPs coming in. And so they are super frustrated that they are not competing well enough with the next guys ahead.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
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. That's not going to help me being successful, to have a goal which is so high that whatever I do in the day is not going to change it. So I shouldn't care about things which are unachievable.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
That's a good one.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
You're right. Here's a trick. We experience positive feelings from doing better than expected. When you go up, usually there's a part of uncertainty which is resolved. Usually, if you're promoted, there was not a 100% chance initially. As you win and you're successful, there's an element of surprise, of positive surprise. And so you enjoyed that.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
But if you were on a schedule where the growth of your income, for instance, or the promotion is totally scheduled, there's no uncertainty. Maybe because your income is indexed on inflation and it's going to increase, whatever, or maybe not on seniority. So as you get older and older, your income automatically increases.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Then if you expect these increases, even if you're doing better, you will not feel better because... All these increments are going to be factored in. You expect them. And if you expect them, you're not going to be more satisfied. That's a trick.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah, yeah. And you may wonder, why? Why are we designing like that? Why can't we have something like happiness, which is something like a mountain, and you start from the bottom, and as you're more and more successful in life, you get more and more happiness. Why are we not designing that?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And the quick answer is that designing a system which instead of measuring big difference like that, only focus on measuring variations related to expectations, it's a more efficient system to treat information and to, uh, use whatever, um, cognitive capacity you have in your brain to produce a signal, which is going to help you. So it's a bit abstract, but I can say that, um,
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Something which we have learned in the last 30 years is having a very interesting convergence between AI research and reinforcement learning and cognitive neuroscience. And what some cognitive neuroscience found out is that the brain looks like when the brain rewards you as a difference relative to your expectations, it pretty much looks like it's implementing.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Look, excellent question. So in one of my posts, I have this cheeky picture of, you know, the elephant and the blind. I think it comes from India, the story. 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're put in front of an elephant and they are asked, okay, what an elephant looks like?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
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.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
optimal algorithms used in machine learning. So you'd have people working in artificial intelligence, trying to program how a program is going to learn the right thing to do. And the best one simple thing to... for this program to learn is to say, well, form expectations about what different actions are going to lead to, and then try out. And when you try the action, you just compare.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Is this action, is the outcome better than expected or worse than expected? And then you adjust your expectation. And if you try a lot, eventually you are going to learn to do the right thing. It's pretty much exactly what we do. And it's an efficient way of processing information.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
it would be much more difficult for your brain to have a very complete map about, you know, happiness from zero to the top. It's better to have a kind of a local stuff guiding you locally. Incremental. Exactly. Incremental. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Well, it's exactly what I was saying before, is that it's more efficient. I think a very good comparison is our visual system does exactly the same thing. So your visual system doesn't kind of recall the objective luminosity in a room the objective luminosity. Actually, it's not measuring it.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
From the time where the light hits your retina, what's recorded is actually a divergence relative to expectations. And what you see is that, you know, if you were to turn off the light somewhere, so now you see things, you turn off the light, everything is bleak. So you can't see anymore. But if you wait a bit, your eye is going to adapt, you're going to start seeing shades, et cetera.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And so you're going to be able to perceive difference in contrast that you were not perceiving before. What has happened is that your eye It does exactly the same thing that you have a kind of an expectation and you observe differences within this range. If suddenly I change the range of luminosity, your eye doesn't see anything anymore.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So you have to adapt to eventually perceive again the differences. And having this, why is it useful? Because if you have a kind of range where you can perceive differences, you want to maximally use this range in the area you are. If I was to look at this range and say I have to stretch it to observe any kind of differences,
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Then the problem is that a lot of things would look the same because you have a limited ability to perceive differences. So I want to use this ability to perceive differences the most in the area where there are variations that I need to observe. So my eyes are optimally adapting my ability to perceive difference in contrast in the range of contrast that I'm facing now.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And if you turn the light off or put a bright light, I'm going to adapt to this new range. And your happiness is the same thing. So your perception of subjective values, they adapt to the range you're facing. So if you are not very rich selling sandwiches on a cart, you need to be careful about not losing $10.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So you'll be mindful about not making mistakes such that when you count the money you're handing in and getting back, that you're not losing money because this money is important. But let's say that you scratch a lotto card and you become a millionaire. Well, $10 doesn't matter anymore. So why would you care?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
It's neither too high, neither too low.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Why would you allocate some of your perception of value to difference in $10 when this doesn't matter anymore?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So I think you're right that if you are very successful very quickly, one challenge you face is to reset. Because we're designed for that. We're designed to have goals and to move forward, et cetera. So one challenge you face is to reset your goals in life. if you're not able to do that, if you're not challenged anymore, first, you may become bored.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Exactly. That's something very important because we think that we always compare. One aspect of happiness is that We may think that happiness is just objective and that we have this view about what we would really want. And if we get it, we'd be happy. But in truth, we always compare to other people. One reason we compare is that we learn from other people. Let's say, you know, you...
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
You know, if you don't think that you have anything to achieve, but also you may make mistakes. So I think I've heard that, you know, people win the lottery and were not specifically rich before. Often they get counseling and you can imagine so because if you're used to have a lot of money, you want to have a professional investment strategy, right? To, gain even more money.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
But if you move from not much to a lot of money, maybe you think, well, I'm going to buy a luxury car, a luxury boat. And you're going to spend things which maybe their value deteriorates. Maybe you organize luxury parties, et cetera. It doesn't last. And you may remember, I think that was a very famous footballer. I think it was Best.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
I think George Best who said, most of my money, I use it on women and drugs and the rest, I squandered it. So, you know, if you have a lot of money very quickly, you may not do make the best use of it. So I think the challenge when you're very successful is to find your, to get yourself back on the ground says, where do I want to go from there?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So look, it's a very good question. So habituation, once you reach a certain level of habituation, of a comfortable life, which should be, you know, lower middle class in the US. Anything better, what you observe is that people think they will be much more happy or much happier if they get more. And actually, you don't. So happiness doesn't increase much. It does increase within the country.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And one likely reason is because within the country, you're able to compare yourself to others. So what we observe is that it doesn't increase between countries. So you take Americans now, overall, for instance, and you look at the number of people who say they are happy or moderately happy. It's the same number as 1949. Now, think about all the things that happened since 1949.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
People have fridges, they have color TV, et cetera, they have internet. Things that, whenever it happens, people say, it's amazing, it's fantastic. But when you ask now, they don't feel happier. And that's something you see in most countries, that when you look at countries, apart from the very poor countries, which... They get sanitation, they get water, et cetera.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
If you're from a low- or middle-income country to a rich country, it's very flat. Happiness is very flat. So that is true. Nonetheless, at the bottom end, there are things which can improve life satisfaction. So if you move from being homeless to having a house, that improves in the long term your life satisfaction.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah, so one thing which is possible is that, you know, your hedonic signals, if you think about the modern life that we are living, when we have food on the table, when we have, like, you know, sanitations, water, et cetera, that's a good life. I mean, ancestors didn't have that.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So we are in the range of the good life, which, in a way, the basic signal that we can get, we can still learn that we can do better, but... We're already doing very well relative to the kind of things that our ancestors were doing.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
But if you are in a life where your life is threatened because you don't have a home, your health is threatened because you don't have access to good food or protection, etc., that may still give you signals that, you know, that's not good from an evolutionary point of view. So I think there's something where... Oh, that's so interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
if you ask yourself, am I successful in life? Well, you can look at people like you, people maybe who were in your high school when you were young, your mates, et cetera. And if they were much more successful than you, then, and I'm not saying that you're spiteful necessarily. It's not about that.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
No, no, exactly. I think you're right. And I have nonetheless... So all this vision is a bit depressing because... It can be depressing. You know, Kahneman described himself, Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist, described himself as a cheerful optimist, a pessimist, a cheerful pessimist.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
I like that because, you know, you don't tell yourself stories about how the world is. You know, you take it as it is, so it's a bit pessimistic. But... Actually, you can still be cheerful in your life. As a person, I'm going to be cheerful, and Daniel Kahneman was as well. Anyway, the thing I wanted to say about the habituation is that there's a positive aspect to it.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
It can be a bit depressing, but there's a positive aspect to it. It's that the... the rest point of happiness where we come back to is not neutral. And there's good reasons for it, which we can come to it if you want. But, you know, if you take a scale from one to 10 and you ask people how happy you are, people don't say, I'm kind of neutral on average. They won't say five. They would say seven.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So, People, on average, tend to be fairly cheerful, fairly fine with it. And, you know, it's true. You go to people who don't have a high income and they say, well, yes, life is relatively fine. You know, could I do better? But they will give you an answer around seven and you go higher levels and people will tell you an answer. So we habituate, but we don't habituate to
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
misery, we habituate to a fairly fine level of happiness. So that's the positive news.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Look, I think it's likely to be true. And maybe this explains why your happiness still increases when you get richer within your country, because your status increase within your country. So when the whole country gets richer, you move with the cohort of your country. So you get the fridge, but everybody gets a fridge. So you're happy to have the fridge.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
But if you see that they were much more successful, you may think, wait a minute, like, you know, they didn't have anything more than me when we started. So why am I not doing like them? You know, you extract information from that, from these people who were like you, who were like you. And so you would want to, You know, that's going to help you maybe to change tack.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
But when you get the fridge and people don't have the fridge, you're happy that you have the fridge and are ready to others who don't have it. So I think status makes sense because status...
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
uh is we are very social species and status you know how well you are regarded by others in your community is a key indication of success so if you go to ancestors uh in particular for males like status would have much much more conducive to find mates and to have hairs etc so
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
even if it's something not like food or sex or whatever, status, it's likely that it is one thing where we feel what the primary was, that you feel good from experiencing status.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And that's something that, you know, cognitive neuroscientists also, maybe not necessarily all of them, but something which is accepted by some cognitive neuroscientists, that status as such, experiences an increase in status going to feel good. And that is going to be Status is super flexible. And you can always keep increasing status all across your life.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So when we were talking about food, et cetera, in a way, once you can eat well, from an evolution point of view, there is no... a big difference between the food you get in a five-star Michelin restaurant and the food you can buy from getting the supermarket.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And that may seem shocking to a lot of people, but the fact is that the food in the supermarket is super safe relative to where our ancestors were freaking out, etc. You don't have to fight for the food. There is no bacteria or parasites in your food. You know, it's warm, etc.,
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So the food in the five-star Michelin restaurant, the biggest difference is not the number of calories, whether it's safe, et cetera. In terms of fitness effect, it's not going to be very different. The difference is the status, is that it gives you status or to be able to... Because you have status, you can do that. It's a signal status to be able to eat in such a restaurant, et cetera. And so...
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
While you can't, you know, increase all this stuff about the comfort of your life, you have a roof over your head, you have food, you have water, et cetera, status can keep increasing. You can keep relative to other things doing better and better. The sad thing about it, though, is that status is a zero-sum game. Correct.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Exactly. So as you rise in status, all those who are competing with you are, relatively to you, going down in status. And so it's Well, I'm just going to say it's not something that you can, you know, you have utilitarianism. It's this philosophy that you want to maximize the happiness in the country.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And thirdly, if status is one of the key things where you can increase happiness of individuals, well, you can't increase the happiness of the country because status is those who have it and those who don't have it. It's a zero-sum game. So you can't increase status of everybody.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
You say, okay, you know, I thought that it was fine doing what I'm doing, but when I'm seeing what they are doing, maybe I should do something else. So these kind of comparisons, it's not useful when you compare to people who are very, very different. So if you're homeless...
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Look, I find it fascinating. And once again, I think it's fascinating because We have these big questions. What is the meaning of life? What am I meant to do? I mean, some people don't care, but some people care. Some people think, what should I do? What would give sense to my life, et cetera. Some people make big life decisions.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
They go to foreign countries and work, et cetera, in poor countries to dedicate their lives to some causes, et cetera. Why do we have these feelings? And why don't we understand? Why are these kind of mysteries? And here again, we are in the thing where evolution gives us the feelings that guides our decisions for us to navigate the world. But evolution didn't need to tell us why we have them.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And so part of the mystery is that because now we kind of try to think about why we have this, but we have not been given the tools because understanding why we have these feelings is not in itself helpful. And actually, I was saying before that you have a convergence between cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence. And it's exactly the same thing in artificial intelligence.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
If you design a computer program to do a task, You don't need the computer program to know why it's doing the task. So if you design a computer program to win at chess or to win at Go, you know, the game of Go, you don't need to tell the program, you know, everything which is happening now is for you to win.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
You just give this program, this system of values, it expires these values to choose the next decision, and it revises values depending on whether the outcome is above or below the expectations. And the program can be completely myopic. It ends up winning at chess. It has learned to win a chess, but it doesn't have a conscience saying, oh, my goal in life is to win a chess.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
But now imagine this program become self-aware and start thinking, what am I doing? What is my goal in life? Well, you would have to find this stuff by itself because the programmer didn't need to put in the program the answer, oh, everything which is happening is because you have been designed to win a chess. And this is the same problem we have.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
and you wake up every morning thinking that you're not a millionaire, that's not going to help you move the next step ahead of where you are now, right? And so you will care not about people who are much poorer than you or people who are much...
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
We have been designed by evolution to be successful. And we experience all these feelings for us to be successful. But we have not been given the awareness about why we experience these feelings. And so we are grasping these big questions because we don't have the tools to naturally think about why we're doing that. So the thing about the meaning of life, we have these big questions.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And I think there is a fairly simple answer. Is that the hedonic feelings we have... they have to answer several types of questions. One question is right now, you know, is my meal now good or is it not good? Should I stop it? You know, is it too greasy? Does it make me sick, et cetera?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
You know, is this person I'm talking to a friendly person I want to continue the interaction with or is it a boring person I'm wasting my time or somebody who doesn't like me and I shouldn't say anything private because this person is going to gossip about it, whatever. So you are asking all these questions and your hedonic feelings right now
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
whether you feel that you are happy because the food you're eating is good or you feel sympathy with somebody. All these feelings are helping you to guide you in the right now moment. Now, this is good, but a lot of success is going to be determined by a larger span of time. Are you in the right setting in the stuff you're doing in your life overall? Is it good?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So if I ask you, how satisfied are you with your life? you are going to think about what you are doing with your life in a bigger window, bigger time window. And you're not going just to think about, oh, is my meal good? Is this friend good? You're thinking of the biggest scheme.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
You know, am I going somewhere in life which is in line with what would be successful, which is like a building, maybe you're standing in the community, finding a romantic partner, maybe raising your kids and seeing your kids grow, et cetera. So if you... can see that this kind of stuff happening, you're more likely to experience this kind of life satisfaction.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And what you can have, you can have a disconnect. between pleasure and achieving these goals because you can have a lot of pleasure in the short term, but they don't lead you to achieving these goals. Often achieving these long-term goals need for you to do some things which are costly now. So, you know, if you spend your time playing video games from 6 p.m. to 5 a.m., it may be very nice.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
less successful and you're much more successful you typically care about people around you and that's this interesting stuff that we care a lot about the people who are just like us being a step ahead of us and the people who are very far ahead we don't even care too much about them
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
But if I ask you six months later, are you happy with your life? You may say, you know what? I'm not sure I'm going anywhere. I enjoy what I do every day. That's why I'm doing it. But I don't feel I'm going anywhere. Something is missing. What's missing is that you're not doing what's right for you to feel that you are progressing toward a successful life.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And so when we think about the meaning of life, I think what's kicking in in your head is this kind of intuition about, am I in the right setting? Am I in the right progress, this right dynamic toward being successful in life? Something which is meaningful is, doing things where people are happy what I'm doing. So my standing in the community is increasing.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
I'm perceived as somebody nice and contributing to my community. I have friends, I have my family, my partner loves me, et cetera. This gives meaning because we think I'm doing things right. I'm moving forward in the right direction. And so this gives us this kind of feelings.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
That makes total sense. I like how you frame it, as you know, being focused on meaning or being focused on pleasure. And we have always to make these choices, like pleasure right now versus later. And our ancestors had to do it as well. A lot of, for instance, a lot of cooperation, like basic cooperation decision is being nice to other people. You know, sometimes you can take advantage of people.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Now there's a benefit now, but what you lose is that you lose that goodwill tomorrow and they won't help you when you need their help. So even our ancestors in very different settings, you know, had to see straight ups. But something which, on modern world is that these trade-offs have become way outside of the kind of range we were facing before because time horizon has increased massively.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
First, our life expectancy has increased. If you compare to even 200 years ago, the life expectancy had doubled. That's one thing. But also, the time horizon has increased because now we have a lot of institutions which are Give us the time to invest in the future. Now we have banks. So sometimes banks go bankrupt, but very often, most of them, they don't.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So you have this crazy thing which you can put money in the bank at 20 and get money back at 60. When I say bank, it's all the financial system. Now you think about this. Our ancestors were not designed, you know, we're not facing this kind of decision. So when you are 20, 60 is like, we're out. So thinking about making these decisions, we don't have the intuitions.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
We don't have the hedonic feelings to make these decisions. And when you think about now, you know, think about, I don't remember when, what was the age of Alexander when he conquered his big empire, but he was super young. I think he was less than 25 or something like this. And think about people who are 25 now. They are like, often considered still like kids, right?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
We have these things where we become in a way ready to enter the world much later. And it takes a lot of time to achieve leadership positions and high position, et cetera. So you need a lot of investments You need to work hard at school when you're 15. You need to work hard in early position when you're 25, et cetera, to invest to be successful.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
I mean, if you want to be successful, I say you need this if you want to be successful. And the thing is, this requires a lot of postponing of enjoyment, maybe less video games, less eating nice stuff and less holidays and more. And so I don't think we have necessarily, this is a big challenge we face and a lot of unhappiness
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
that we observe is, I think comes from this tension, is that the world offers us a lot of ways of being happy now. You know, you have, at the kick of a button, you have, in fact, for young boys, like a lot of video games takes a lot of their time, et cetera.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And it's designed by, you know, designed by psychologists to be exactly tapping into the stuff, which is pretend status, which they like and they enjoy, et cetera. So you have all that, But then you ask people later, are you happy with your life?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Well, the problem is that all these very nice things that you're doing in the short term and that you have been seduced to do in the short term, they have not led you to maybe go the steps for you to progress in life. And so you have this mismatch. between what you said, you know, this feeling for meaning and this feeling for pleasure.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And in a way, the problem with the modern world is that it has designed so much appealing things which are pleasurable in the present and we want to buy them, but it has increased the time horizon that we face and increasing the importance of waiting for them.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah, well, I'm with you. Like I'm super fascinated in it. I think what's interesting is like, What's fascinated me is how kind of key happiness and these questions we ask ourselves are central to our lives. And in a way, how we are... we don't really know, you know, we don't have the intuitions.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Right. So, um, I think you're right that a lot of times when we think what's the meaning of life, people want to see that there's something objective out there which gives sense to your life beyond your subjective experience.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So, for instance, if I'm, you know, working in an orphanage in a poor country, helping kids, you know, learn things, I feel I'm doing something good and that gives sense to my life. Now, if you... believe into some metaphysical reality, like, for instance, religion.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
If you're religious and you believe there is a God or spiritual entities out there who gives you a mission to do in life, then I guess that can be the meaning of your life, is to follow these goals that are given by your religion. Personally, I don't think that... my point of view is purely naturalistic, so I'm just going to look at naturalistic explanation.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
If you don't have any metaphysical explanation, the fact is these feelings that we want something objective to give sense of, to give a meaning to our life. It's just a feeling because, you know, the only thing that we have is our subjective experience. And so I think that there is nothing out there.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
There is a Dennett evolutionary psychologist called Skyhook, you know, to have an explanation, a hook which comes from the sky and hold your theory. So if you don't have a skyhook like a religious explanation, the only explanation you can start with is that we have these feelings. They come from our brain. They have been designed to help us make good decisions.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Um, and the feelings of meaning have to come from the view that, you know, you are going somewhere in your life and it has to be connected with the kind of thing which help ancestors being successful. And it doesn't mean... So some of it often is linked with being very pro-social. So I think people often experience meaning where they are doing good toward other people.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And I think it makes sense because investing in the future, as I said before, often being cooperative is investing in the future. So it doesn't pay right now to do a lot of good things to other people, but you build goodwill and a good reputation, and that helps you being successful in the future. And I think that we would have the hedonic system helping us to take that into consideration.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And, you know, because it's far in the future, in a way, this feeling that we're doing something good is bringing the benefit from the future in the present. And so... I'm not saying that we are consciously calculating and think, oh, you know what, I'm going to help my neighbor today. I don't really care about my neighbor. But by doing that, when I will need my neighbor's help, I can ask.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
No, we don't do that. We help our neighbor and we feel good about it. But what it does is that it also gives us goodwill. So when we need it, we can get it.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So evolution is this kind of programming process which has designed us to work well in the real world. But evolution didn't care about telling us the rule book. It tells, you know, they gave us, evolution gave us the design but didn't explain why we're doing what we do. And so we're like following the path that our feelings lead us to.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And so I think that lots of this feeling of goodwill, of meaning that we experience when we are doing good things is because it would have helped our ancestors to actually be good co-operators and to care about being nice with other people, contributing to the community, rising and standing as being perceived as an altruist and positive person, a trustworthy person.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So I think that's why we experience this kind of meanings. But if you don't have a sky hook, it all has to come from these feelings which are designed to help us being successful.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah, exactly. And I think that's, you know, you see, for instance, a big topic now is the challenge faced by young boys in the modern world. Young boys, for evolutionary reasons, are maturing later than girls. And so they are not necessarily ready for the kind of demanding pushback of pleasure that school is requiring.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
School is requiring to be systematic, to be not jumping around, listening to the teacher, doing your homework, et cetera, for years and years and years. And the rewards are very far in the future. And what happens is that we see now with... decreasing proportion of young men going to university, being successful, et cetera, because the world offered them all these quick reward accessible online,
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And has pushed back the schedule to become successful. As I say, Alexander must have been riding a horse with his father and fighting before he was 20. That doesn't happen anymore. Before you're 20, you're still a kid in the modern world. So this is a clear mismatch. And the perspective I'm proposing is not a normative perspective. I'm not saying you should do that.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
because there is no normative principles, philosophical principles. I'm just saying this is the way we work. But what it can say is that because there is a mismatch, it can give the warning that, you know, Maybe if you don't think enough about the future, be careful because the modern societies can entrap you with all these nice pleasures it's offering you now, especially when you're young.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And it's not going necessarily to help you do the right stuff for you to be happy when you're 35.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Well, I've got a book, which is here, Optimally Irrational, nicely placed. So it's about, you know, if you're interested in psychology and behavior, I highly recommend that you check it out. And otherwise, as you said, I have my sub-stack where I kind of continue with the same name, Optimally Irrational,
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
But why we have these feelings and why they have the shape they have and, you know, that we don't have the intuitions necessarily. So that's why, When we start thinking about, oh, what will make me happy, why I'm not happy, et cetera, et cetera, it's actually not trivial because evolution in a way doesn't care. To make us successful, we don't need to know why we have these feelings.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
and i continue talking about psychology of an evolutionary perspective and game theory perspective economic perspective and yeah the last um posts were about um happiness and the incoming ones are going to be about collational psychological theory which i think is super interesting as well good until next time i appreciate you thank you chris see you
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And so, you know, one touches 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. And everyone touches... The tail says, well, you know, it looks like a string and it's very fluffy at the end. And another one can say, well, it's very hard, you know, and it's very smooth.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
We just need to have these feelings.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah, look, that's... And actually, that goes back to my PhD. My PhD was on that topic in education. It sounds, you know, when you say that, it sounds like maybe some people on the left would say, well, you're saying that people who are from a lower social background are privileged or that people from a higher social background are disadvantaged.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
You know what? It's true.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
That's right. Well, there is a kind of hedonic happiness advantage of being from a low social background and rising up.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Because then what you have is that, you know, if you use your original social background as a comparison point, and it's natural to do so because even as I said, you know, if you use your peers and you come from a low social background and you look at people who are your friends and maybe they're still your friends, Now you think, well, I did well.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And so you have these comparisons which helps you have this outlook on life. Am I unsatisfied with my life? Well, I did very well relative to where I started from, and that makes you happy. On the contrary, if you're born from a very highly successful social background, well, the bar is super high.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So if your father or mother, they are lawyers, well, if you don't do a super high education achievement, well, let's say a very high educational achievement. It's just the normal standard that you need to achieve. It's not, you can't be super happy. It's just normal. And so that's a high pressure. And what you observe is that there is a kind of a, you know, that's what I'm saying.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
I don't want to say that because there's a lot of questions about privilege, et cetera. But people were born in a privileged background you observe sometimes more risk-taking and also they want to do some different line of work because they want to escape the comparison.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
So if your parents, maybe they are lawyers, et cetera, maybe you want to become an artist because you want to be in a dimension of, social comparisons where you can escape the comparison.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
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 know, I talk about the books on self-help, books on psychology of happiness. And you will see, you get a book, and this book will tell you to be happy, you need social connections.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah, I'm totally with you on that. So If you are, let's say you can take two kinds of cases. Let's say your parents moved from... a poor country in the US. They didn't have a high school diploma. You know, they work hard to pay for your education. And you end up in a community college in the US and you get a job. And for you, that's an achievement. You made it.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
You're able to have a house, a mortgage, a car, you know, standard US way of life. Now, If you consider from there, do you want to try harder? Do you want to go to university or higher, more prestigious university and get a master's degree?
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
The psychological benefits for you is not that important because the difference psychologically between where you are now and that additional stuff is not very large because your reference point, as you said, is low. And so the biggest difference is between where you started in your mind here and what you have achieved.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Now, if your parents are lawyers and they did an Ivy League school, you know, I mean, there's no way you would consider going to community college as something like an achievement. You'd be like maybe dreading it terribly. And so for you, this step of, you know, the difference between going there or reaching a prestigious university is going to matter extremely. And so, as you say,
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
The drive is going to be there. And even I would say the risk-taking, something which is interesting when you look at the statistics that for the same grades in high school, kids from higher social backgrounds with average grades, they're more willing to take the risk to continue in standard university things than kids from lower social backgrounds.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Kids from lower social backgrounds says, you know, I'm not sure I would be successful at university I want a practical training which is going to give me a job. Well, the kids from higher social backgrounds are more likely to, even if it's uncertain, they would be successful to try hard and to go in university.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
The secret of happiness is to have friends, to have family. Okay, that's very interesting. You take another book, and this other book will tell you the secret of happiness is to control your desires, to learn not to want what you don't have. That's Taoism, that's Buddhism.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
Yeah, so that's, you're right, because we often associate drug taking, et cetera, you know, to low social background, like neighborhoods, which are risky, et cetera. But what we observe is that there is a lot of this kind of behavior also in kids who come from high social background.
Modern Wisdom
#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning
And one possible, so, you know, one conjecture is that this kind of risk-taking is also associated to the pressure that you have, you know, in society.