William von Hippel is a psychologist, professor, and author. Modern life feels so complex that even basic emotions like happiness seem distant. Were we happier as hunter-gatherers, with more connection and autonomy? If so, how do these prehistoric needs shape our well-being today? Expect to learn if it would be helpful to return back to a simpler hunter & gather time of human evolution, why so many people struggle to be happy, why having autonomy is so important, what happiness research says about how well off hunter-gather tribes were, which forces shape autonomy and connection, why we worship individualism so much, why anxiety is the emotion de jour of the modern world, how to rebalance your own life, 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 a 20% discount & free shipping on Manscaped’s shavers at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM20) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom 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: Why does modern life feel so empty?
episode 41 was when you were last on the show and this will be 910 or something maybe so you've been busy yeah it was so have you uh but you've barbelled uh two ends of a half decade of of lots of content um so i was thinking i was just i just got back from a walk and i was thinking about your new book and
And I had this sort of consideration in my mind, whether it would be useful for us to still have hunter gatherers living amongst us today, just to remind all of the modern humans about how good we've got it across human history, this sort of weird inequality reminder that would sort of be lingering there in the back of our minds.
Yeah, that would be awesome. I mean, not long ago, I remember ordering a pizza, and it came with barbecue sauce instead of tomato sauce on my meat lettuce pizza. And I was just devastated. I was like, how could this happen to me? And a couple of hunter-gatherers in our existence, and I would go, oh, who cares about my pizza, right?
Yeah. So why, given the fact that obviously the joke that everybody hates to hear, I hate to hear it. I hate to be reminded of my opulent, bourgeois, luxurious, you know, 21st century life. But given the fact that living standards are objectively the best they've ever been, why is it that so many people are struggling to lead happy lives despite being relatively blessed? Yeah.
Yeah, that's the sort of shocking fact that got me started on this book. And I always thought it was everybody else. You know, I read this literature. I know it very well. Being wealthy doesn't make you happy. And I kind of admit I felt a little superior to wealthy people. And I thought, well, you know, here I am, just middle-class guy.
If I were wealthy, I would be happier because I would appreciate what I have. I even remember visiting an old friend and just marveling at his inability to appreciate this extraordinary wealth that he'd accumulated since we were kids. But it wasn't until I was reading Frank Marlowe's wonderful book on the Hadza that I realized, you know, I'm just as bad as he is. We all are.
We don't appreciate these amazing riches that we have. And if you think about them, you might say, well, what does it really matter that we have riches? you know, a fancier chair or something like that. But it's not just the trivial comforts. They, hunter-gatherers, buried almost half their children. You know, they lived in a world that was dangerous and uncomfortable and unpredictable.
And we live in this world that's comfortable and safe and... And as an endless opportunities for entertainment, and yet we're not any happier than they were. And if you look at the literature, there's all sorts of bits and bobs of advice, you know, express, express gratitude, do these things. And those are all pretty good pieces of advice.
They help in the moment, but it doesn't answer the question of how can we possibly not be happier than they are? And that's what got me started in about 10 years ago. And it took me that forever to figure out what I think might be an important part of the answer.
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Chapter 2: Were hunter-gatherers happier than us?
Yeah, I imagine that the complexity, the compute that's needed to be able to keep track of all of this, because there is a sense of coalition going on here. There is a sense of reciprocity, even if it's relatively costless. That means that the information can be spread more strategically. You can give it to some and not to others.
If you're a bat that's only got however many milliliters of seal blood that it's got over the last evening of hunting, the algorithm's relatively easy. It's like... Is this enough for me to survive? If yes, maybe I can give some to my friend. How long ago was it that they gave me? Whereas if it's free information, well, how valuable is this information?
And how close to my coalition is this person? And do I really want them to know that?
And there's all of those But nine times out of 10, you know, every once in a while, I know something that I just don't want you to know. And we can talk all about privacy because that's where privacy gets all caught up into it. But setting that aside, and also every once in a while, I know some really cool information that I can leverage if you don't know it. And so I want to keep that to myself.
Those two things definitely happen. But... It's also the case that most of the things I know aren't necessarily valuable to me, but could be very valuable to you. So if we take a look at one of the most cited papers in the social sciences, it's called The Strength of Weak Ties.
And in that paper, the author argues that it's not your close friends who are really valuable to you in making career moves and things like that. It's your distant friends. And the reason for that is your close friends are highly motivated to help you, but you know what they know. Your distant friends are barely motivated to help you, but you don't know what they know.
And so the moment they run across a job that's in your wheelhouse, it's not theirs. They don't want it, but they know of its existence. If you ask them, oh, hey, anybody hiring at your firm? They go, oh, yeah, actually, we're looking for a new engineer to work on the wing. And you're like, I'm a wing engineer. I'd love to do that, right? So he argued this. They tested it on LinkedIn.
And sure enough, it's true that the people who are your more distant ties, they manipulate the algorithm as an experimental test across millions of people. And your more distant ties were more likely to help you find a job than your close ties were. Now, humans, well, there's one of the species that can kind of do this. Dolphins can do this.
Males form these coalitions across very broad networks where they cooperate with each other in interesting kinds of ways in their mating competitions. But so far as we know, no other animal can come close to what humans can do by forming these kind of coalitions across distant ties where we can transmit information that's so valuable.
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Chapter 3: How do autonomy and connection influence happiness?
Yeah, well, I suppose it kind of relates back to what you were saying with regards to a partner, that the path of most easy connection and autonomy is to choose a partner whose interests align with yours so that your autonomy is your connection. And it's the same when it comes to, you know, you can try and...
swim against the tide as much as you want with trying to make yourself into this kind of a person. But so for instance, you mentioned earlier on about the highly empathic person. Look, man, like if you know, you really feel the pain of others very deeply that you have the opportunity to connect, you seem to sort of make connections more quickly and sort of drop in more easily than other people do.
You probably shouldn't be a Navy SEAL sniper. Like that's probably, that's probably not the career for you, but working with soldiers that have got PTSD or, you know, working with a job that requires that, that level of connection, therapy, stuff like that. Oh my God. You know, like that's really, that's really a wheelhouse as long as you can avoid bringing your work home with you. Um, yeah.
So yeah, I've been talking about this a ton. I did a DNA test about three or four months ago with this company called Intellex DNA. No affiliation, but they're cool. And I'd already taken the Robert Plowman behavioral genetics red pill a long, long time ago. But I'd never actually thought, well, what are you talking about? When you talk about your genes, what is it you're actually referring to?
Well, you're referring to pairs of alleles.
And there's very specific pairs of, now you've got the polymorphic thing, which is sort of these big bundles of them that come together, which tends toward traits of X and Y. But very individual alleles do very specific things, especially when you're talking sort of neurobiologically, when you're talking, and getting to see the building blocks of your behavioral genetics in front of you written out.
It's like, oh, you've got the one copy of the CY4KK protein gene, which means that you clear adrenaline and norepinephrine more slowly or something like that. This is one of the reasons why after an emotional event, it takes you longer to come back into land. But it's also associated with you being able to work incredibly hard at one thing for a long period of time.
And you're seeing written in front of you, the bricks, literally the bricks that make up the house that is you. It was so fascinating. I can't stop thinking about it.
It was great. Yeah. It is super cool. And I've only done the 23andMe one, which doesn't dive into that level of detail. Maybe it does now. I did it because I was interested in my long-term health score, like Alzheimer's risk and things like that. And I was amused to see that I have this Neanderthal allele that makes it hard for me to discard rarely used items.
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