Lionel Page is a professor at the University of Queensland and an author. Lionel is one of my favourite writers so I had to bring him on to uncover the invisible psychology which drives our happiness. How can we optimise for wellbeing in a world full of distractions and pressures? Why does persistent happiness remain so elusive, and what shifts can help us build a healthier, more sustainable relationship with it? Expect to learn what everyone gets wrong when thinking about happiness, the most important mechanisms that drive our wellbeing, how the role of comparison on social media contributes to overall happiness, why evolution didn’t design us with the ability to simply feel greater and greater satisfaction, the role of a meaningful life, why we overestimate the importance of our future success and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get $150 discount on Plunge’s amazing sauna or cold plunge at https://plunge.com (use code MW150) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the common misconceptions about happiness?
Dude, I am in love with your sub stack. I subscribe to a lot of different sub stacks and yours is maybe my favorite one from this entire year. You're absolutely destroying it, dude. It's so great. It's evolutionary lens on things, big picture questions that everybody's already asking. I think it's awesome.
So when it comes to, I guess, what are the problems about how happiness is typically thought about or studied? What is missing from that?
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?
Chapter 2: How does evolutionary psychology explain happiness?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: Why do we overestimate the importance of future success?
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
It's so fascinating. It's like we're plants in an ecology and we sort of are able to grow toward the light that's nearest to us. And yeah, it's an uncomfortable realization that our feelings of well-being depend less on... absolute achievements than they do on just the comparison to other people in the social circles that we belong with.
And I guess, you know, that game of relative comparison and the way that social circles, the ones that we choose and the ones that we don't impact us is, it's just, it's endlessly fascinating to me.
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.
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.
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.
We just need to have these feelings.
Yeah, I think for the sorts of people that listen to this podcast, introspective, reflective, curious people, Having a question, having a why that does not have a very well-defined answer is kind of like some version of purgatory meeting hell. And you want to know, and you're right, that there isn't this definitive sense.
Just going back to the social comparison thing, I've been thinking about this for ages, and I love that insight about how people with disadvantaged social origins might be more likely to be happy because they've got a lower reference point to judge life from. It's so paradoxical, but it makes complete sense.
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Chapter 4: How does social comparison affect our happiness?
So...
You know what? It's true.
The advantage of disadvantage. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's right. Well, there is a kind of hedonic happiness advantage of being from a low social background and rising up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 5: What role does social media play in our perception of happiness?
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.
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...
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Does this mean that people in high achieving groups kind of have a bit of a double edged sword here because they've got satisfaction from recognition in like outside of the group, but they've also got social anxiety from within their group?
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Chapter 6: How can we balance high aspirations with happiness?
Okay, another source of pain. Probably, I think, I've been doing these live shows. I was in Australia recently doing these live shows. And there's buckets that at the Q&A portion at the end of the talk, people ask. And one of the most common is something along the lines of, why do I set ever higher goals for myself? Why do I seem unable to be able to be satisfied with what I've achieved?
Why every time that I score a goal, do I immediately move the goalposts even further away from me? Why do I overestimate the importance of my next success for my happiness? So talk to me about sort of the role of goals and how it impacts our happiness here.
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.
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.
Chapter 7: What is the focusing illusion and how does it affect our goals?
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...
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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Chapter 8: Why do we feel relieved rather than joyful upon achieving our goals?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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?
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