September 10, 2025 • 30 mins
What other factors affect your happiness? And does more money mean more problems? Jorge continues his quest to find a formula for happiness.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, it's or Hee. Before we get started, I wanted
to tell you that my new book, Oliver's Great Big
Universe Evolution Changes Everything, is coming out September sixteenth. It's
a great read for smart kids and smart adults with
lots of science, humor and heart. Check it out at
Great Big Universe dot net. Thanks a lot. Hey, welcome
(00:25):
to sign Stuff. Reproduction of iHeartRadio. I'm Poritchhim and Doday
were answering the question does money make you happy? Now?
This is the second part of a two part series
on happiness, so be sure to listen to part one.
In this episode, we're going to continue our conversation with
a couple of experts about what science says are the
(00:46):
factors that affect our happiness. We're going to talk about purpose,
stoicism and money. Does money make you happy? Or is
it the case as they say that more money means problems?
The answer is coming up. Hey everyone, all right. In
(01:09):
the last episode, we talked about some of the main
factors that affect our happiness. Genetics is one of them,
and in a study that tracked the happiness of hundreds
of thousands of people, doctor Matt Killingsworth at the University
of Pennsylvania found three main factors that play a role
in how happy we feel. One living in the moment,
(01:30):
two having in person interactions with others, and three staying
physically active. But these are not the only things that
make us happy. Here's more of my conversation with doctor Killingsworth. Now,
I wonder these three factors you mentioned. Are those the
three main factors because they have the highest impact on
(01:50):
our happiness? But do you mention these because these are
three that we have some control over.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
It's some of both, but I think those are some
of the biggest and most unified things I see, And
there are things that we could conceivably control. But you know,
there's other stuff that matters too.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Okay, we're going to spend the rest of the episode
talking about some of the other factors that affect our happiness,
starting with having a purpose in life? Does that make
you happy? Here's my friend and co author of the
book Out of Your Mind, Professor Dwayne Godwin of Wake
Forest University. Let's talk about purpose, this idea that finding
(02:28):
purpose in your life will somehow lead to your happiness.
What do we know from psychology about purpose?
Speaker 3 (02:33):
Well, purpose is important to a sense of well being.
For the most part, our psychology is wired to seek purpose.
There is a story about Victor Frankel, and Victor Frankel
famously wrote A Man's Search for meeting. He was in
a concentration camp during World War Two, you know, held
captive by the Nazis, and while he was imprisoned there,
(02:56):
he noticed that the people who survived often had some reason,
some purpose in their life to live, whether it was
taking care of a loved one, taking care of unfinished business,
or you know, their spiritual beliefs. And he wrote that
those who have a why to live can bear almost
me How so, you know that idea of being able
(03:18):
to find purpose even in the context of suffering is important.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
How would you define purpose as it'sychology.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
You know, helping others, you know, working on projects that
I find personally very satisfying. From a neuroscience perspective, purpose
activates again the brain's reward system. It does so more
consistently than something like a fleeting pleasure. Purpose driven individuals
tend to show higher activity in the prefrontal cortex because
(03:48):
again that's the place where you're doing these sorts of
assessments of positive emotional valance, and that's associated with things
like long term planning, moral reasoning, and overall levels of satisfaction.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
In other words, the idea of purpose, when your actions
align with a greater goal that you think has value,
is one way to activate your brains reward center, because
that's kind of how your brain is wired. This doctor
Garmin speculates probably came from how our brains evolved. But
I think what you're saying is that somehow our brain
(04:24):
evolved to need purpose to be happy.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Well, our brain found a way to be happy when
we were being purposeful. You know, it could be that
from an evolutionary perspective, that having purpose. If you think
about now communities of early humans, Now that was a
trait that was selected for because having a purpose and
contributing to the community was obviously a great survival benefit
(04:49):
for the collective. And you can imagine that the opposite
of that, not having a purpose, would be somewhat counterproductive
to the community.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
But I guess sometimes in our modern lives we can
get kind of stuck because we don't have a purpose.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
I think that's right. I think that a real danger
in our society when we have become so disconnected from
one another. You're not going to, you know, be scrolling
through Facebook and necessarily find your purpose.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
I asked doctor Killingsworth if purpose was something he's seen
in the data from the thousands of people who sign
up on Track Yourhappiness dot org. People mention things like
purpose a lot. Does that volunteer your non objective category.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Yeah, I mean I think to me, that's almost more
like an outcome than a predictor. I think a lot
of the things that bring us happiness, like living a
purposeful life, for a meaningful life, for all kinds of
other things to some degree or kind of satisfying fundamental
human needs because we're a social species, and so you know,
when you engage with other people, when you feel respected
(05:52):
by them, when you have all of these other like
social features, that would show up on all these other
different forms of happiness outcomes as well.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
What doctor Killingsworth is saying is that a happy life,
in a way will have its own purpose. Meaning you
can think of having a purpose or aligning your actions
to your values as making you happy, or you can
think that finding things that make you happy aligns your
actions with your values, giving you a purpose. It's all
(06:20):
a feedback loop in your brain, so you can look
at it both ways. And this brings up another factor
that affects your happiness, which is how your brain reacts
to events. Let's talk about stoicism. What is that.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Yeah, Stoicism is one of my favorite philosophical concepts. It
was popularized by Marcus Aurelius, and for people who don't know,
he was the emperor in Gladiator, So at the beginning
of Gladiator he was the guy that was in charge
of Rome. So he was a Roman emperor. Russian here,
not Russell Crowe. They were buddies, you know, at least
(06:57):
that's my memory of Gladiator. Marcus Aurelius was a Roman
emperor and he was a Stoic philosopher, and he was
very much into self regulation and how to regulate his
own emotions and his responses to things, because he felt, hey,
I have this important position. I need to be on
(07:19):
top of my game. And so he wrote down a
lot of reflections in the form of a journal. He
to remind himself how to deal with the world, how
to accept pain, how to accept change, and how to
deal with things like loss. He lived during a time
of plagues war, he lost several of his children that
(07:39):
his writings are filled with reminders to welcome challenges and
to focus on what is within one's own control.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Okay, you might be wondering what does ay Roman philosopher
have to do with science, and the answer is that
Stoicism and Marcus Aurelis's writing have become the base is
for something called cognitive behavioral therapy.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
Yeah. Kinditive behavioral therapy is really one of the most popular,
i would say, and most widely subscribed counseling therapies where
you assess the world and what happens in the world
somewhat dispassionately, and negative self talk is diminished in your perception.
(08:26):
I think we an example. You know what happens if
you lost one hundred dollars out, Well, if I lose
this money, you know, there are two responses to it.
One is, oh, I'm stupid. I shouldn't have lost that money.
I really needed that money. I'm not going to be
able to make my rent, or I'm not going to
be able to buy those shoes that I really wanted.
Those sorts of things, those sorts of negative self talk
(08:48):
bits that can help to really drive our mood and
our emotions to a negative place. But the other way
to look at it is, hey, you know it is money.
It's replaceable in the ground scheme of things. You will
probably get that one hundred dollars back through some way
or another. And yes, I lost one hundred dollars, but
someone else, perhaps someone who really needed that money, will
(09:10):
will find that money. Now, it doesn't really blunt the
fact that you lost a hundred bucks. But what it
does do is allows you the emotional space to process
that and not allow it to drive your total emotional response.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
It's about taking a step back and that that gives
you the power to kind of choose how you're going
to interpret what happened.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
I think that's a good way to put it.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
If you've been to therapy, this idea of changing the
way you look at things might be familiar to you.
And this is important because you might remember from the
Happiness Tracking project that mind wandering, especially mind wandering negative thoughts,
is highly correlated with unhappiness. Well, according to doctor Godwin,
the solution is not to stop having negative thoughts, but
(09:58):
to train your brain to change how you view those thoughts.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
You know, if you talked about the neuroscience of cognitive
behavioral therapy. I think that there are two elements to it.
One is engaging these sort of logical based areas of
the brain, areas like prefrontal cortext but it's also the
process of slowing things down so that you have time
to process. We know from the neuroscience literature that activity
(10:25):
and patterns of activity actually are capable of rewiring the brain.
So learning to take a step back and providing different
thought patterns that can effectively change your response should the
same set of circumstances arise in the future.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
In other words, you can train your brain to see
things on the bright side, which the data shows will
make you happier. All right, Now, we're going to get
to the question of money. And here I'm going to
guess you believe one of two things, One that money
doesn't really make you happy, or two that money does
make you happy, but only up to a certain point. Well,
(11:04):
if you believe either of those things, I'm here to
tell you that the size of happiness says you're wrong.
We're going to get into that after the break, will
be right back and we're back right. We're talking about
(11:27):
the different factors that affect your happiness, and now we
get to the topic of money. Does money make you happy? Well,
According to doctor Killingsworth, for a long time, the conventional
wisdom in scientific circles was that the answer was no.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
So if you go back to the state of the
scientific literature, I think the kind of common narrative amongst
happiness researchers is that money doesn't really matter very much
for happiness, like especially given how much people seem to
care about it. While there's something that's true about that
that I'll mention in a minute, I think we actually
got that kind of wrong. It turns out that people
who make more money are pretty consistently happier. You know,
(12:10):
on average, people who earn more tend to be happier.
You could be rich and miserable, you could be poor
and very happy, but on average, flipping the money switch
up without making other things worse probably is going to
nudge you in a positive rather than a negative direction. Least,
that's kind of the shape of the correlation that I observe.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Now I know what you're thinking at this point, which
is yes or Hey, of course money helps make you happy.
He need some money to survive, to have something to eat,
and to have a roof over your head. But surely
at some point money stops being useful, And that's what
I thought too, So I asked doctor Killyesworth this question.
Is there an amount after which money will not make
(12:50):
you happier? Or is having more money always better?
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Well, that's a good question. You've hit on one of kind
of the key topics here. Starting around twenty ten, there's
this very famous paper by Dannykanneman and ingus student where
they found that while cognitive aspects of well being seemed
to keep rising with income, they argued that the emotional
component of happiness rises up to around seventy five thousand
(13:13):
dollars a year in income, and then it plateaus. And
when I run into regular people, if they know like
one thing about the signs of happiness or what is
the data show, it's probably that finding. That's like the
one thing that probably the most people know.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Yeah, you might have heard about it in the news.
The study from Dustin and ten supposedly found that making
more money makes you happier, but only up to about
making seventy five thousand dollars in income a year, and
after that it doesn't make you any happier. And this
finding was very popular, I think because it confirms what
we all want to believe, which is that money isn't everything,
(13:51):
that rich people are not necessarily happier than the rest
of us. But actually, when doctor Killingsworth looked into it,
this turned out to be not quite true.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
One of the things that I've been working on in
the last few years is kind of unpacking this relationship.
So I've now run this big set of using experience
sampling a really really great way to measure how people
are actually feeling. And it turns out in my big study,
when I look at the relationship between how much money
people earn and how happy they really feel in the
moments of their lives, happiness in the moment just keeps
going up. There wasn't an inflection point at seventy five
(14:24):
thousand dollars or any other particular level of income. There
didn't seem to be any threshold where that relationship change.
It just sort of kept going modestly but steadily.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Upward, meaning people with more money have fewer negative in
the moment happiness.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Yeah, just kind of their average moment gets a little
bit better and a little bit better the more money
they tend to be earning. So people are more satisfied
and more fulfilled and find life more meaningful on average
to a modest degree. When they earn more money, I
see and their day to day experiences seem to be
better as well.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
So more money, not more problems, More money, fewer problem
on average. What doctor Klein'sworth found was that an average,
having more money always makes you happier. That's true if
you're poor or if you're already rich. Getting more money
in general will make you even happier. This doesn't just
(15:17):
show up in doctor Kleinsworth data. There have been natural
experiments that prove this.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Money is hard to experiment with compared to lots of
other things, but we have pretty good evidence that when
people are like randomly assigned more money, they actually become
substantially happier as well. There are some nice natural experiments,
for example, called lotteries, So there are some great studies
that have been done where they've looked at people who
play the lottery a similar amount. But then some people
(15:44):
win and some people don't. Uh, and when you follow
those people up later, the people who want and got
more money actually turn out to be happier and sometimes
quite a bit and sometimes for quite a long time.
There was a great study I think it was in
Sweden where they looked at people ten years later after
they won. It's a pretty decently sized effect.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Now, to be fair, one thing that doctor Kellingsworth found
that doesn't get better with more money is stress.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
However, when I look at like, what is like the
emotional profile of people who are earning more money, they're
not necessarily less stressed. That's kind of the one emotion
that doesn't really get better when you earn more and
more and more money. So if you think, hmm, it'll
be great, you know, when my income is doubled, you
might not be any less stressed. But pretty much every
aspect of kind of your emotional life, at least my
(16:34):
data would predict, are probably going to be better.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
In other words, if someone offers you money, you should
take it. On average, having money will only increase your happiness,
even if it doesn't make you less stressed. Now, of course,
there are several caveats here. Number one, this relationship between
money and happiness is on average, having more money doesn't
(16:57):
guarantee you're going to be happier. And number two, money
isn't everything. It's just one of the many things that
contribute to your happiness.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
It's just one of the many leavers. So I think
the part that's really true and importantly true is that
tons of things matter for happiness, and money and income
is just one of them. So if you sacrifice all
kinds of other sources of happiness and make more money,
you're probably going to be less happy, even if money
is helpful.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Now, one interesting fact about money and happiness is said
having more money on average will make you happier, but
having friends or neighbors that make more money than you
will tend to make you unhappier. In one study, researchers
from the London School of Economics look at data from
a survey of Americans from nineteen seventy two to two
(17:46):
thousand and eight that ask three questions, how happy are you?
How much money do you make? Do you think you
make more or less money than other Americans? The analysis
found that people who tended to think they made less
money than others also tended to be unhappier, no matter
how much money they actually made. In general, making more
(18:07):
money than your friends and neighbors will make you happier,
and making less will make you unhappier. There is good news, though,
which is what happens when you think about why money
brings us happiness.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
When I look at why is there this positive relationship
between money and happiness, and what I find is that
about eighty percent of that relationship, even for that emotional component,
can be explained by the fact that as people earn
more money, they feel more in control of their lives.
So if you have someone with a low income but
feels very in control of their life, they psychologically look
(18:42):
a lot like a very well off.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Person Whoah, it comes down to control and not having
to worry about the future.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
I haven't necessarily looked at it in terms of like
the future in quotes, but yeah, the more money you have,
the more you tend to feel in control of your life,
and that seems to be uniquely able to explain this relationship.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
In other words, doctor Killingsworth also asks people, how in
control of your life do you feel? And the people
who said they felt more in control of their lives
tended to be the people who had more money, and
they also tended to be the people who were happier,
which tells you that most of the value of having
money is just having more control of your life.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
So I looked at lots of other factors as well,
and it's kind of fueling in control of your life.
That's the biggest one. Another one is the simply the
more money you earn, the less likely you are to
have trouble paying bills. So when I look at the
lowest income people in my study, almost half of them say, yeah,
I had trouble paying a bill in the last two weeks,
(19:44):
Whereas if you go to the people with very high incomes,
it's like seven percent of them. So you get a
seven x difference in the likelihood that bills are a
source of uncertainty and riskiness for you. So those two
things together are at least within the set of things
that I measured, those were kind of the biggest expl
natory factors.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Now, this is probably not surprising to you. If you
have money, you don't have to worry as much about
what's going to happen to you or how are you
going to pay your bills. But the point doctor Killingesporre
says is that once you know that's the real reason
money affects your happiness, you can work around it.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
However, and I think this is part of what is
a little bit empowering. While if you look at this
relationship between money and happiness, about eighty percent of that
can be explained by people who earn more money feel
more in control of their lives, but the flip side
of that is that only about twenty percent of how
in control of you feel of your life is due
to money.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
What what do you mean? What do you mean?
Speaker 2 (20:41):
What I think that points to is the fact that, well,
what money brings us perhaps is control over our life.
There are ways that we can get control over our
life that have nothing to do with money. And so
you could kind of have a workaround for money itself
by finding ways to kind of take control of your life,
like what kind of life do you want to live?
And how could you reorient your life to live that life?
(21:05):
And so the more you find the ways to do that,
perhaps suggestively, speculatively, it might be possible that you could
end up kind of getting the life of someone who's
richer without necessarily having to earn more money.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
What doctor Killy Sporth is saying is that, yes, having
more money will make you happier. That's mostly because it
gives you the feeling of being in control of your life.
So if you can figure out other ways to get
that feeling, then maybe you don't need as much money.
All Right, when we come back, we're going to tackle
the last piece of the happiness puzzle, and then I'm
(21:40):
going to ask each of our experts if they're happy.
So stay with us, we'll be right back. Welcome back.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
One thing that we should talk about is depression. There
are certainly a case of individuals with treatment resistant depression.
And as much as we can affect the way our
brains work by how we think, there are individuals who
cannot do that or are their brains are not wired
in such a way that will allow them to take
these tools and do something with them. So that we
(22:19):
have to really step back a little bit to say
that disorders of brain circuits, like disruptions in how areas
like the frontal lobes or the amygdala and the hippcamp
is how they communicate. If those are disrupted, then it's
really difficult for you to think your way out of
that and to think yourself into a happy set of circumstances. Right,
(22:39):
So there's a limit to which these things can be
very helpful and effective. But I think if you have
treatment resistant depression, then that's something that you have to
go and get seen about by professional all.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Right, the lassie slip puzzle we're going to tackle here
is what does this all need? And to do that,
I want to go back to the question of what
happiness is and whether it's what we feel in the
moment or what we feel when we take a step
back to think about how our lives are going. Because
as we learn, how you answer the question are you
(23:13):
happy can be different depending on when you're asked that question,
but according to our experts, that difference is not totally random.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
One of the things that I've seen to some degree
is that I think happiness is simpler than we realize,
and its causes are more complex than we realize.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2 (23:32):
So you've hit on I think one of the key
sort of features of all of this. There's one element
of this that's really how good or bad our moments are,
But then there are also these other more kind of
slower moving elements, like is your life fulfilling and meaningful
and satisfying? Overall? When I look across all the different
things that matter, for happiness. It turns out pretty similar
(23:53):
things matter for all the different flavors. You know, a
fulfilling life overall is also tends to be produced by
the kinds of things. Things that you know, drive good
experiences in the moment, and I think the reality to
some extent is that both of those things are going
to come together. Those stable factors that we think of
as affecting things like how satisfied you are, tend to
affect your moment, and having good experiences in the moment
(24:16):
that you have over and over again also produce kind
of a good life in the overall sense.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
So when I told you that my cork is floating,
that's the best analogy that I can come up with,
because you can kind of imagine your emotional life as
a quirk bobbing on the ocean, and every wave that
lifts that cork, maybe it's a moment of joy or pleasure.
It's like a little burst of dopamine, and then the
(24:42):
troughs of disappointment or sadness could reflect some kind of
dip in the brain's reward circuitry.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Okay, what doctor Killing's Worth and doctor Gotwyn are saying
is that there's a certain simplicity about the experience of happiness.
If you're having a lot of good moments in your life,
your brain is wired to recognize that and tell you, hey,
things are going well, keep it up, and you feel happy.
Or if you're having a lot of bad moments, your
(25:10):
brain is wired to tell you, Hmmm, something's not right
here and you feel unhappy. And I think this tells
you two things about happiness. The first is that variations
in how happy you feel are inevitable.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
So even people that are pretty happy will have some
really miserable moments, and even people that are pretty unhappy,
you'll have some really great moments, like how can someone
who's so unfulfilled have such a happy moment? Or if
I'm supposedly living such a great life, why am I
having this moment where I feel so terrible? But I
think that's just kind of a feature of being human,
(25:45):
is that we have this dynamic element of happiness that
really does change.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Into the words nobody has a perfect life. We all
have our ups and downs. And the second thing I
think all of this tells is is that if there
is something wanted to change about your life and your happiness,
a good place to start is to pay attention to
those day to day moments. Happier people do have ups
and downs, but according to doctor Killingsworth's data, those ups
(26:13):
and downs are better quality. So you can look at
your own moments and see what's costing them and potentially
change them, or if you can't change them, maybe you
can work around them. Because as we've learned in these episodes,
there are a lot of things that affect your happiness,
and I.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
Think that's emblematic of kind of a general tactic and
strategy for thinking about happiness is if there's some part
of it that you're kind of blocked on, Like I
want to have the happiness that that thing would give me,
but maybe that's a hard thing for me to change.
I'm in a job that has some future, but for
whatever reason, I can't really change that job. Or you know,
I earn this amount of money and you know I'm
(26:53):
a teacher. There's just no way I'm going to start
earning six hundred thousand dollars a year. Or I have
a challenging relationship with this family member. I'm not going
to stop interacting with them. It's important enough for me
to sustain that. Can we find workarounds for the things
that we maybe can't change by understanding the kinds of
happiness and the ways that they might bring us happiness
if they were different. I see, you know, how can
(27:15):
we be the river flowing around the rock?
Speaker 1 (27:17):
I see? I see sometimes in our lives we find
that there's this lever that we just can't pull, and so,
understanding more about the whole picture, let's just work around
that by pulling other levers.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Absolutely, when I was saying earlier that measuring happiness is
simpler than we think, but the causes of happiness are
more complicated than we realize. There's a downside to that,
which is there's no one silverable to happiness. But the
upside is it gives us a lot of options for
how we pursue it. There are all of these different
levers we can pull. So if for you one of
those levers is really sticky you can't move it, that's okay,
(27:52):
just find a different one.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
There. Are you happy now? I mean, are you happy?
That we're coming to the end of the k So
I thought i'd end things by asking our two experts
if they're happy? All right, Matt, thank you so much.
Last question, are you happy.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
I am pretty happy.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
You know.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Like I said, happiness is a wiggly line. So I
have moments that are amazing and moments that are challenging,
and lots of moments in the middle. But overall, I
love my life. I love getting to work on this problem.
I also get to take all the things that I
learn and try to apply them myselves.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
And think your happiness changed before and after this project.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Definitely, I mean, I've learned a lot from it. One
of the biggest warnings for me was the very first
one that I talked about and discovered, which was this
relationship to mind wandering by nature. I think and spend
a lot of time thinking and in my head, and honestly,
wasn't until I both collected the data and looked at
all of the results that I started to recognize when
that was helpful and when that wasn't so helpful.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
All right, that was pretty good, Dwayne. Do you feel
pretty happy about that conversation?
Speaker 3 (28:55):
I'm content with it.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Well, well, don't get too excited there.
Speaker 3 (29:03):
Well that's my wife saying. You know, this is what
I did. So I went to a restaurant my wife,
and it was a new restaurant that we hadn't eaten
at before, and at the end of it, it's like,
you know, what did you think? And my standard response
is I wasn't too bad. I have this sort of
glitch where I can't like fully invest in it. And
(29:24):
it was great. It was hash Browns and an omelet
and it was wonderful. But my normal response is I
wasn't bad. I'm sort of like a Larry David. I
guess pretty pretty, pretty good.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Well, I think we make a good team then, because
my wife tells me I'm too positive all the time.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
Oh really, so you're you would say, wow, that was
the best ever.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
I love everything. I love every mine of air I read.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Well, that's a good way to be. That's true happiness
if you can reach that state.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Well, I'm also a cartoonist. I think that helps. All right.
Thanks for joining us. See you next time. And hey,
if you want to join doctor Killingsworth's Study of Happiness,
just go to track your Happiness dot org. And if
you want to read the book Doctor Godwin and I Rode,
just search for Out of your Mind The Biggest Mysteries
of the Human Brain in your favorite bookstore. Thanks for
(30:17):
joining us, See you next time. You've been listening to
Science Stuff the production of iHeartRadio, written and produced by
me or Ycham, edited by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland,
and audio engineer and mixer Kasey Peckram. And you can
follow me on social media. Just search for PhD Comics
(30:37):
and the name of your favorite platform. Be sure to
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friends We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode.
Hello, it's or Hee. Before we get started, I wanted
to tell you that my new book, Oliver's Great Big
Universe Evolution Changes Everything, is coming out September sixteenth. It's
a great read for smart kids and smart adults with
lots of science, humor and heart. Check it out at
Great Big Universe dot net. Thanks a lot. Hey, welcome
(00:25):
to sign Stuff. Reproduction of iHeartRadio. I'm Poritchhim and Doday
were answering the question does money make you happy? Now?
This is the second part of a two part series
on happiness, so be sure to listen to part one.
In this episode, we're going to continue our conversation with
a couple of experts about what science says are the
(00:46):
factors that affect our happiness. We're going to talk about purpose,
stoicism and money. Does money make you happy? Or is
it the case as they say that more money means problems?
The answer is coming up. Hey everyone, all right. In
(01:09):
the last episode, we talked about some of the main
factors that affect our happiness. Genetics is one of them,
and in a study that tracked the happiness of hundreds
of thousands of people, doctor Matt Killingsworth at the University
of Pennsylvania found three main factors that play a role
in how happy we feel. One living in the moment,
(01:30):
two having in person interactions with others, and three staying
physically active. But these are not the only things that
make us happy. Here's more of my conversation with doctor Killingsworth. Now,
I wonder these three factors you mentioned. Are those the
three main factors because they have the highest impact on
(01:50):
our happiness? But do you mention these because these are
three that we have some control over.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
It's some of both, but I think those are some
of the biggest and most unified things I see, And
there are things that we could conceivably control. But you know,
there's other stuff that matters too.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Okay, we're going to spend the rest of the episode
talking about some of the other factors that affect our happiness,
starting with having a purpose in life? Does that make
you happy? Here's my friend and co author of the
book Out of Your Mind, Professor Dwayne Godwin of Wake
Forest University. Let's talk about purpose, this idea that finding
(02:28):
purpose in your life will somehow lead to your happiness.
What do we know from psychology about purpose?
Speaker 3 (02:33):
Well, purpose is important to a sense of well being.
For the most part, our psychology is wired to seek purpose.
There is a story about Victor Frankel, and Victor Frankel
famously wrote A Man's Search for meeting. He was in
a concentration camp during World War Two, you know, held
captive by the Nazis, and while he was imprisoned there,
(02:56):
he noticed that the people who survived often had some reason,
some purpose in their life to live, whether it was
taking care of a loved one, taking care of unfinished business,
or you know, their spiritual beliefs. And he wrote that
those who have a why to live can bear almost
me How so, you know that idea of being able
(03:18):
to find purpose even in the context of suffering is important.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
How would you define purpose as it'sychology.
Speaker 3 (03:24):
You know, helping others, you know, working on projects that
I find personally very satisfying. From a neuroscience perspective, purpose
activates again the brain's reward system. It does so more
consistently than something like a fleeting pleasure. Purpose driven individuals
tend to show higher activity in the prefrontal cortex because
(03:48):
again that's the place where you're doing these sorts of
assessments of positive emotional valance, and that's associated with things
like long term planning, moral reasoning, and overall levels of satisfaction.
Speaker 1 (04:02):
In other words, the idea of purpose, when your actions
align with a greater goal that you think has value,
is one way to activate your brains reward center, because
that's kind of how your brain is wired. This doctor
Garmin speculates probably came from how our brains evolved. But
I think what you're saying is that somehow our brain
(04:24):
evolved to need purpose to be happy.
Speaker 3 (04:28):
Well, our brain found a way to be happy when
we were being purposeful. You know, it could be that
from an evolutionary perspective, that having purpose. If you think
about now communities of early humans, Now that was a
trait that was selected for because having a purpose and
contributing to the community was obviously a great survival benefit
(04:49):
for the collective. And you can imagine that the opposite
of that, not having a purpose, would be somewhat counterproductive
to the community.
Speaker 1 (04:57):
But I guess sometimes in our modern lives we can
get kind of stuck because we don't have a purpose.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
I think that's right. I think that a real danger
in our society when we have become so disconnected from
one another. You're not going to, you know, be scrolling
through Facebook and necessarily find your purpose.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
I asked doctor Killingsworth if purpose was something he's seen
in the data from the thousands of people who sign
up on Track Yourhappiness dot org. People mention things like
purpose a lot. Does that volunteer your non objective category.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Yeah, I mean I think to me, that's almost more
like an outcome than a predictor. I think a lot
of the things that bring us happiness, like living a
purposeful life, for a meaningful life, for all kinds of
other things to some degree or kind of satisfying fundamental
human needs because we're a social species, and so you know,
when you engage with other people, when you feel respected
(05:52):
by them, when you have all of these other like
social features, that would show up on all these other
different forms of happiness outcomes as well.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
What doctor Killingsworth is saying is that a happy life,
in a way will have its own purpose. Meaning you
can think of having a purpose or aligning your actions
to your values as making you happy, or you can
think that finding things that make you happy aligns your
actions with your values, giving you a purpose. It's all
(06:20):
a feedback loop in your brain, so you can look
at it both ways. And this brings up another factor
that affects your happiness, which is how your brain reacts
to events. Let's talk about stoicism. What is that.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Yeah, Stoicism is one of my favorite philosophical concepts. It
was popularized by Marcus Aurelius, and for people who don't know,
he was the emperor in Gladiator, So at the beginning
of Gladiator he was the guy that was in charge
of Rome. So he was a Roman emperor. Russian here,
not Russell Crowe. They were buddies, you know, at least
(06:57):
that's my memory of Gladiator. Marcus Aurelius was a Roman
emperor and he was a Stoic philosopher, and he was
very much into self regulation and how to regulate his
own emotions and his responses to things, because he felt, hey,
I have this important position. I need to be on
(07:19):
top of my game. And so he wrote down a
lot of reflections in the form of a journal. He
to remind himself how to deal with the world, how
to accept pain, how to accept change, and how to
deal with things like loss. He lived during a time
of plagues war, he lost several of his children that
(07:39):
his writings are filled with reminders to welcome challenges and
to focus on what is within one's own control.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Okay, you might be wondering what does ay Roman philosopher
have to do with science, and the answer is that
Stoicism and Marcus Aurelis's writing have become the base is
for something called cognitive behavioral therapy.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
Yeah. Kinditive behavioral therapy is really one of the most popular,
i would say, and most widely subscribed counseling therapies where
you assess the world and what happens in the world
somewhat dispassionately, and negative self talk is diminished in your perception.
(08:26):
I think we an example. You know what happens if
you lost one hundred dollars out, Well, if I lose
this money, you know, there are two responses to it.
One is, oh, I'm stupid. I shouldn't have lost that money.
I really needed that money. I'm not going to be
able to make my rent, or I'm not going to
be able to buy those shoes that I really wanted.
Those sorts of things, those sorts of negative self talk
(08:48):
bits that can help to really drive our mood and
our emotions to a negative place. But the other way
to look at it is, hey, you know it is money.
It's replaceable in the ground scheme of things. You will
probably get that one hundred dollars back through some way
or another. And yes, I lost one hundred dollars, but
someone else, perhaps someone who really needed that money, will
(09:10):
will find that money. Now, it doesn't really blunt the
fact that you lost a hundred bucks. But what it
does do is allows you the emotional space to process
that and not allow it to drive your total emotional response.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
It's about taking a step back and that that gives
you the power to kind of choose how you're going
to interpret what happened.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
I think that's a good way to put it.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
If you've been to therapy, this idea of changing the
way you look at things might be familiar to you.
And this is important because you might remember from the
Happiness Tracking project that mind wandering, especially mind wandering negative thoughts,
is highly correlated with unhappiness. Well, according to doctor Godwin,
the solution is not to stop having negative thoughts, but
(09:58):
to train your brain to change how you view those thoughts.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
You know, if you talked about the neuroscience of cognitive
behavioral therapy. I think that there are two elements to it.
One is engaging these sort of logical based areas of
the brain, areas like prefrontal cortext but it's also the
process of slowing things down so that you have time
to process. We know from the neuroscience literature that activity
(10:25):
and patterns of activity actually are capable of rewiring the brain.
So learning to take a step back and providing different
thought patterns that can effectively change your response should the
same set of circumstances arise in the future.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
In other words, you can train your brain to see
things on the bright side, which the data shows will
make you happier. All right, Now, we're going to get
to the question of money. And here I'm going to
guess you believe one of two things, One that money
doesn't really make you happy, or two that money does
make you happy, but only up to a certain point. Well,
(11:04):
if you believe either of those things, I'm here to
tell you that the size of happiness says you're wrong.
We're going to get into that after the break, will
be right back and we're back right. We're talking about
(11:27):
the different factors that affect your happiness, and now we
get to the topic of money. Does money make you happy? Well,
According to doctor Killingsworth, for a long time, the conventional
wisdom in scientific circles was that the answer was no.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
So if you go back to the state of the
scientific literature, I think the kind of common narrative amongst
happiness researchers is that money doesn't really matter very much
for happiness, like especially given how much people seem to
care about it. While there's something that's true about that
that I'll mention in a minute, I think we actually
got that kind of wrong. It turns out that people
who make more money are pretty consistently happier. You know,
(12:10):
on average, people who earn more tend to be happier.
You could be rich and miserable, you could be poor
and very happy, but on average, flipping the money switch
up without making other things worse probably is going to
nudge you in a positive rather than a negative direction. Least,
that's kind of the shape of the correlation that I observe.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Now I know what you're thinking at this point, which
is yes or Hey, of course money helps make you happy.
He need some money to survive, to have something to eat,
and to have a roof over your head. But surely
at some point money stops being useful, And that's what
I thought too, So I asked doctor Killyesworth this question.
Is there an amount after which money will not make
(12:50):
you happier? Or is having more money always better?
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Well, that's a good question. You've hit on one of kind
of the key topics here. Starting around twenty ten, there's
this very famous paper by Dannykanneman and ingus student where
they found that while cognitive aspects of well being seemed
to keep rising with income, they argued that the emotional
component of happiness rises up to around seventy five thousand
(13:13):
dollars a year in income, and then it plateaus. And
when I run into regular people, if they know like
one thing about the signs of happiness or what is
the data show, it's probably that finding. That's like the
one thing that probably the most people know.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Yeah, you might have heard about it in the news.
The study from Dustin and ten supposedly found that making
more money makes you happier, but only up to about
making seventy five thousand dollars in income a year, and
after that it doesn't make you any happier. And this
finding was very popular, I think because it confirms what
we all want to believe, which is that money isn't everything,
(13:51):
that rich people are not necessarily happier than the rest
of us. But actually, when doctor Killingsworth looked into it,
this turned out to be not quite true.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
One of the things that I've been working on in
the last few years is kind of unpacking this relationship.
So I've now run this big set of using experience
sampling a really really great way to measure how people
are actually feeling. And it turns out in my big study,
when I look at the relationship between how much money
people earn and how happy they really feel in the
moments of their lives, happiness in the moment just keeps
going up. There wasn't an inflection point at seventy five
(14:24):
thousand dollars or any other particular level of income. There
didn't seem to be any threshold where that relationship change.
It just sort of kept going modestly but steadily.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Upward, meaning people with more money have fewer negative in
the moment happiness.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Yeah, just kind of their average moment gets a little
bit better and a little bit better the more money
they tend to be earning. So people are more satisfied
and more fulfilled and find life more meaningful on average
to a modest degree. When they earn more money, I
see and their day to day experiences seem to be
better as well.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
So more money, not more problems, More money, fewer problem
on average. What doctor Klein'sworth found was that an average,
having more money always makes you happier. That's true if
you're poor or if you're already rich. Getting more money
in general will make you even happier. This doesn't just
(15:17):
show up in doctor Kleinsworth data. There have been natural
experiments that prove this.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
Money is hard to experiment with compared to lots of
other things, but we have pretty good evidence that when
people are like randomly assigned more money, they actually become
substantially happier as well. There are some nice natural experiments,
for example, called lotteries, So there are some great studies
that have been done where they've looked at people who
play the lottery a similar amount. But then some people
(15:44):
win and some people don't. Uh, and when you follow
those people up later, the people who want and got
more money actually turn out to be happier and sometimes
quite a bit and sometimes for quite a long time.
There was a great study I think it was in
Sweden where they looked at people ten years later after
they won. It's a pretty decently sized effect.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
Now, to be fair, one thing that doctor Kellingsworth found
that doesn't get better with more money is stress.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
However, when I look at like, what is like the
emotional profile of people who are earning more money, they're
not necessarily less stressed. That's kind of the one emotion
that doesn't really get better when you earn more and
more and more money. So if you think, hmm, it'll
be great, you know, when my income is doubled, you
might not be any less stressed. But pretty much every
aspect of kind of your emotional life, at least my
(16:34):
data would predict, are probably going to be better.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
In other words, if someone offers you money, you should
take it. On average, having money will only increase your happiness,
even if it doesn't make you less stressed. Now, of course,
there are several caveats here. Number one, this relationship between
money and happiness is on average, having more money doesn't
(16:57):
guarantee you're going to be happier. And number two, money
isn't everything. It's just one of the many things that
contribute to your happiness.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
It's just one of the many leavers. So I think
the part that's really true and importantly true is that
tons of things matter for happiness, and money and income
is just one of them. So if you sacrifice all
kinds of other sources of happiness and make more money,
you're probably going to be less happy, even if money
is helpful.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Now, one interesting fact about money and happiness is said
having more money on average will make you happier, but
having friends or neighbors that make more money than you
will tend to make you unhappier. In one study, researchers
from the London School of Economics look at data from
a survey of Americans from nineteen seventy two to two
(17:46):
thousand and eight that ask three questions, how happy are you?
How much money do you make? Do you think you
make more or less money than other Americans? The analysis
found that people who tended to think they made less
money than others also tended to be unhappier, no matter
how much money they actually made. In general, making more
(18:07):
money than your friends and neighbors will make you happier,
and making less will make you unhappier. There is good news, though,
which is what happens when you think about why money
brings us happiness.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
When I look at why is there this positive relationship
between money and happiness, and what I find is that
about eighty percent of that relationship, even for that emotional component,
can be explained by the fact that as people earn
more money, they feel more in control of their lives.
So if you have someone with a low income but
feels very in control of their life, they psychologically look
(18:42):
a lot like a very well off.
Speaker 1 (18:44):
Person Whoah, it comes down to control and not having
to worry about the future.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
I haven't necessarily looked at it in terms of like
the future in quotes, but yeah, the more money you have,
the more you tend to feel in control of your life,
and that seems to be uniquely able to explain this relationship.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
In other words, doctor Killingsworth also asks people, how in
control of your life do you feel? And the people
who said they felt more in control of their lives
tended to be the people who had more money, and
they also tended to be the people who were happier,
which tells you that most of the value of having
money is just having more control of your life.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
So I looked at lots of other factors as well,
and it's kind of fueling in control of your life.
That's the biggest one. Another one is the simply the
more money you earn, the less likely you are to
have trouble paying bills. So when I look at the
lowest income people in my study, almost half of them say, yeah,
I had trouble paying a bill in the last two weeks,
(19:44):
Whereas if you go to the people with very high incomes,
it's like seven percent of them. So you get a
seven x difference in the likelihood that bills are a
source of uncertainty and riskiness for you. So those two
things together are at least within the set of things
that I measured, those were kind of the biggest expl
natory factors.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
Now, this is probably not surprising to you. If you
have money, you don't have to worry as much about
what's going to happen to you or how are you
going to pay your bills. But the point doctor Killingesporre
says is that once you know that's the real reason
money affects your happiness, you can work around it.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
However, and I think this is part of what is
a little bit empowering. While if you look at this
relationship between money and happiness, about eighty percent of that
can be explained by people who earn more money feel
more in control of their lives, but the flip side
of that is that only about twenty percent of how
in control of you feel of your life is due
to money.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
What what do you mean? What do you mean?
Speaker 2 (20:41):
What I think that points to is the fact that, well,
what money brings us perhaps is control over our life.
There are ways that we can get control over our
life that have nothing to do with money. And so
you could kind of have a workaround for money itself
by finding ways to kind of take control of your life,
like what kind of life do you want to live?
And how could you reorient your life to live that life?
(21:05):
And so the more you find the ways to do that,
perhaps suggestively, speculatively, it might be possible that you could
end up kind of getting the life of someone who's
richer without necessarily having to earn more money.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
What doctor Killy Sporth is saying is that, yes, having
more money will make you happier. That's mostly because it
gives you the feeling of being in control of your life.
So if you can figure out other ways to get
that feeling, then maybe you don't need as much money.
All Right, when we come back, we're going to tackle
the last piece of the happiness puzzle, and then I'm
(21:40):
going to ask each of our experts if they're happy.
So stay with us, we'll be right back. Welcome back.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
One thing that we should talk about is depression. There
are certainly a case of individuals with treatment resistant depression.
And as much as we can affect the way our
brains work by how we think, there are individuals who
cannot do that or are their brains are not wired
in such a way that will allow them to take
these tools and do something with them. So that we
(22:19):
have to really step back a little bit to say
that disorders of brain circuits, like disruptions in how areas
like the frontal lobes or the amygdala and the hippcamp
is how they communicate. If those are disrupted, then it's
really difficult for you to think your way out of
that and to think yourself into a happy set of circumstances. Right,
(22:39):
So there's a limit to which these things can be
very helpful and effective. But I think if you have
treatment resistant depression, then that's something that you have to
go and get seen about by professional all.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Right, the lassie slip puzzle we're going to tackle here
is what does this all need? And to do that,
I want to go back to the question of what
happiness is and whether it's what we feel in the
moment or what we feel when we take a step
back to think about how our lives are going. Because
as we learn, how you answer the question are you
(23:13):
happy can be different depending on when you're asked that question,
but according to our experts, that difference is not totally random.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
One of the things that I've seen to some degree
is that I think happiness is simpler than we realize,
and its causes are more complex than we realize.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2 (23:32):
So you've hit on I think one of the key
sort of features of all of this. There's one element
of this that's really how good or bad our moments are,
But then there are also these other more kind of
slower moving elements, like is your life fulfilling and meaningful
and satisfying? Overall? When I look across all the different
things that matter, for happiness. It turns out pretty similar
(23:53):
things matter for all the different flavors. You know, a
fulfilling life overall is also tends to be produced by
the kinds of things. Things that you know, drive good
experiences in the moment, and I think the reality to
some extent is that both of those things are going
to come together. Those stable factors that we think of
as affecting things like how satisfied you are, tend to
affect your moment, and having good experiences in the moment
(24:16):
that you have over and over again also produce kind
of a good life in the overall sense.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
So when I told you that my cork is floating,
that's the best analogy that I can come up with,
because you can kind of imagine your emotional life as
a quirk bobbing on the ocean, and every wave that
lifts that cork, maybe it's a moment of joy or pleasure.
It's like a little burst of dopamine, and then the
(24:42):
troughs of disappointment or sadness could reflect some kind of
dip in the brain's reward circuitry.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Okay, what doctor Killing's Worth and doctor Gotwyn are saying
is that there's a certain simplicity about the experience of happiness.
If you're having a lot of good moments in your life,
your brain is wired to recognize that and tell you, hey,
things are going well, keep it up, and you feel happy.
Or if you're having a lot of bad moments, your
(25:10):
brain is wired to tell you, Hmmm, something's not right
here and you feel unhappy. And I think this tells
you two things about happiness. The first is that variations
in how happy you feel are inevitable.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
So even people that are pretty happy will have some
really miserable moments, and even people that are pretty unhappy,
you'll have some really great moments, like how can someone
who's so unfulfilled have such a happy moment? Or if
I'm supposedly living such a great life, why am I
having this moment where I feel so terrible? But I
think that's just kind of a feature of being human,
(25:45):
is that we have this dynamic element of happiness that
really does change.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Into the words nobody has a perfect life. We all
have our ups and downs. And the second thing I
think all of this tells is is that if there
is something wanted to change about your life and your happiness,
a good place to start is to pay attention to
those day to day moments. Happier people do have ups
and downs, but according to doctor Killingsworth's data, those ups
(26:13):
and downs are better quality. So you can look at
your own moments and see what's costing them and potentially
change them, or if you can't change them, maybe you
can work around them. Because as we've learned in these episodes,
there are a lot of things that affect your happiness,
and I.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
Think that's emblematic of kind of a general tactic and
strategy for thinking about happiness is if there's some part
of it that you're kind of blocked on, Like I
want to have the happiness that that thing would give me,
but maybe that's a hard thing for me to change.
I'm in a job that has some future, but for
whatever reason, I can't really change that job. Or you know,
I earn this amount of money and you know I'm
(26:53):
a teacher. There's just no way I'm going to start
earning six hundred thousand dollars a year. Or I have
a challenging relationship with this family member. I'm not going
to stop interacting with them. It's important enough for me
to sustain that. Can we find workarounds for the things
that we maybe can't change by understanding the kinds of
happiness and the ways that they might bring us happiness
if they were different. I see, you know, how can
(27:15):
we be the river flowing around the rock?
Speaker 1 (27:17):
I see? I see sometimes in our lives we find
that there's this lever that we just can't pull, and so,
understanding more about the whole picture, let's just work around
that by pulling other levers.
Speaker 2 (27:29):
Absolutely, when I was saying earlier that measuring happiness is
simpler than we think, but the causes of happiness are
more complicated than we realize. There's a downside to that,
which is there's no one silverable to happiness. But the
upside is it gives us a lot of options for
how we pursue it. There are all of these different
levers we can pull. So if for you one of
those levers is really sticky you can't move it, that's okay,
(27:52):
just find a different one.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
There. Are you happy now? I mean, are you happy?
That we're coming to the end of the k So
I thought i'd end things by asking our two experts
if they're happy? All right, Matt, thank you so much.
Last question, are you happy.
Speaker 2 (28:09):
I am pretty happy.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
You know.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
Like I said, happiness is a wiggly line. So I
have moments that are amazing and moments that are challenging,
and lots of moments in the middle. But overall, I
love my life. I love getting to work on this problem.
I also get to take all the things that I
learn and try to apply them myselves.
Speaker 1 (28:25):
And think your happiness changed before and after this project.
Speaker 2 (28:29):
Definitely, I mean, I've learned a lot from it. One
of the biggest warnings for me was the very first
one that I talked about and discovered, which was this
relationship to mind wandering by nature. I think and spend
a lot of time thinking and in my head, and honestly,
wasn't until I both collected the data and looked at
all of the results that I started to recognize when
that was helpful and when that wasn't so helpful.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
All right, that was pretty good, Dwayne. Do you feel
pretty happy about that conversation?
Speaker 3 (28:55):
I'm content with it.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
Well, well, don't get too excited there.
Speaker 3 (29:03):
Well that's my wife saying. You know, this is what
I did. So I went to a restaurant my wife,
and it was a new restaurant that we hadn't eaten
at before, and at the end of it, it's like,
you know, what did you think? And my standard response
is I wasn't too bad. I have this sort of
glitch where I can't like fully invest in it. And
(29:24):
it was great. It was hash Browns and an omelet
and it was wonderful. But my normal response is I
wasn't bad. I'm sort of like a Larry David. I
guess pretty pretty, pretty good.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Well, I think we make a good team then, because
my wife tells me I'm too positive all the time.
Speaker 3 (29:43):
Oh really, so you're you would say, wow, that was
the best ever.
Speaker 1 (29:47):
I love everything. I love every mine of air I read.
Speaker 3 (29:51):
Well, that's a good way to be. That's true happiness
if you can reach that state.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
Well, I'm also a cartoonist. I think that helps. All right.
Thanks for joining us. See you next time. And hey,
if you want to join doctor Killingsworth's Study of Happiness,
just go to track your Happiness dot org. And if
you want to read the book Doctor Godwin and I Rode,
just search for Out of your Mind The Biggest Mysteries
of the Human Brain in your favorite bookstore. Thanks for
(30:17):
joining us, See you next time. You've been listening to
Science Stuff the production of iHeartRadio, written and produced by
me or Ycham, edited by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland,
and audio engineer and mixer Kasey Peckram. And you can
follow me on social media. Just search for PhD Comics
(30:37):
and the name of your favorite platform. Be sure to
subscribe to Sign Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts, and please tell your
friends We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode.
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