Happiness Lessons of The Ancients: Socrates and Self-Knowledge

Question everything... that's a key insight from the great Greek philosopher Socrates. We may think we know ourselves and what makes us happy... but that's not always true. 

Yale professor Tamar Gendler says that by harnessing our "inner Socrates" we can ask ourselves why we think or feel certain things. We might then find that deeply-held convictions that money or status or accolades are a reliable route to happiness aren't correct, and can then start to pursue the things that might really make us happier.  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. The science of happiness is progressing all the time.
Hardly a week goes by without some fascinating new wellbeing
finding hitting the news, and today's researchers have been able
to harness so many amazing new technologies, from complex MRI
scanners to new medical treatments, all to help unlock the

(00:38):
secret of how our minds work. But in spite of
all these new insights, it's important to remember that the
quest to feel better is much older than these modern
scientific tools. The pursuit of happiness is a challenge that's
occupied our species for a long time. In fact, many
long dead philosophers, thinkers, and spiritual leaders have had some
powerful ideas for improving our well being, strategies that are

(01:01):
just as relevant today in the age of the podcast
as they were back in the time of Caesar or
the Pharaohs. If you've listened to others for the Happiness Lab,
you probably know that I get a lot of inspiration
from ancient lives and insights, and that I love to
share all those old school tips with you. But our
past episodes have only just scratched the surface on all

(01:21):
the strategies that ancient wisdom can teach us, So get
ready to go old school and welcome back to Happiness
Lessons of the Agents with me, Doctor Laurie Sanders. In
today's episode, I want to share the happiness insights of
a towering figure in the history of Western thought. He's

(01:41):
the og disruptor, a philosopher who challenged everything, but someone
who is never so vain as to think that he
knew it all. He's a scholar who's beloved worldwide by
some of the most brilliant philosophers and academics around. A
thinker that I personally was lucky to be exposed to
all the way back in the nineteen eighties, but not
because I read his student, Plato's famous account of his teachings.

(02:05):
Now I learned of this famous scholars work from Bill
and Ted's X Adventures. The only true wisdom consists in
knowing that you know nothing. That's us, dude. Oh yeah.
For those uninitiated in adi cinema culture, Bill and Ted's
Excellent Adventure is a movie about Bill S. Preston Esquire

(02:25):
and Theodore Logan aka Bill and Ted. They're two san
Dimas high school students who, in an attempt not to
flunk their history exam head back in time to meet
the great thinkers of the past. Bill and Ted were
the first to expose me to the central doctrines of Socrates,
or as I would later get to know him, Socrates.
Socrates's famous idea, which very much appealed to Bill and Ted,

(02:49):
is that we know far less than we often think.
It may sound like a simple concept or a joke
out of some classic high school movie, but it's also
a hugely important insight, especially if you want to live
a happier life. There are rors in history where Socrates
was considered a figure alongside Jeez. This is my dear friend,

(03:10):
the Yale philosopher and cognitive scientist Tomar Gendler. Benjamin Franklin,
who has this wonderful autobiography which is full of really
good advice about happiness, wrote Humility, Imitate, Jesus, and Socrates.
Tomorrow teaches a popular class at Yale known as Philosophy

(03:31):
in the Science of Human Nature. You can check it
out for free on the Open Yale Course Network. The
class looks to ancient scholars for insights into the problems
we all face today, and Tomorrow agrees with Ben Franklin
that Socrates is a perfect model of intellectual humility, and
that his example, if we can follow it, will bring
lots of benefits to our daily lives. Socrates is a

(03:52):
fascinating figure. He lived about twenty five hundred years ago
in ancient Athens. He was born some time around for
seventy before the Common era, and though we don't know
his exact birth date, we do know his exact death dache,
because he was put to death in a very famous

(04:12):
public trial in Athens in three ninety nine BC, which
was recorded by his student, a man named Plato, who
described socrates intellectual integrity and bravery in his willingness to
be put to death for what he believed. What Socrates

(04:37):
was known for is sitting out in the public square
of Athens and drawing people into conversations about fundamental questions,
questions like what's the nature of truth, What's the nature
of justice? What is it for a society to be fair?

(05:01):
What should our attitudes be towards the gods? What should
our attitudes be towards religious rituals? What should our attitudes
be towards prisoners that we captured from other countries? And
because Socrates was willing to question everything, he was accused

(05:22):
of being a corruptor of the youth, and when he
was put on trial, he was put on trial for
corrupting youth by causing them to question the received wisdom
of their culture. So, like, what was his background? How
did he become the kind of guy that was questioning
all these things. Here's what we know about Socrates. We

(05:45):
know that his father was a stone worker and his
mother was a midwife, and those are roughly middle class
professions in ancient Athens. So he wasn't a super elite guy,
but he was born into a social class that gave
him access to the elite, so he didn't have many

(06:07):
financial concerns. He heerted his father's estate. That is, he
came from the part of society that had inherited wealth,
which allows a certain kind of security and stability, and
as a result, he was free to pursue ideas that
intrigued him. And he had been trained up in the

(06:28):
way that most middle class opinions of his time were.
He knew how to read and how to write, and
he knew a little bit about poetry and music. But
even though he was kind of this middle class dude
with some inherited wealth, he also kind of wasn't into
that wealth himself, right, Like, he kind of just didn't
dress as awesomely as other Athenian dudes and things. Yeah,

(06:49):
I would say one of the striking things about Socrates
is that he was a pretty idiosyncratic guy. He was
not conventionally attractive by the norm of his time. He
was being bellied and snub nosed, and he, let us say,
eschewed class to marry bathing practices. So he was kind

(07:14):
of a guy on the corner who engaged passers by
in conversation. He was a funny guy. So you can
imagine him as sort of an owner of a Brooklyn
corner store who just engages all of the people who
pass him by in really really really interesting conversation. But

(07:37):
instead of being about the Yankees or the Mets or
the lottery, his conversation is about the nature of mathematics
or the value of justice. But really what he is
is a guy at the corner store who's engaging everyone
going by in his quirky, idiosyncratic, individualistic way. And he

(08:00):
wound up being the corner store guy that got a
lot of followers, including some like really famous ancient philosophers,
right Socrates was the person who was the teacher of Plato.
Plato is the person who was the teacher of Aristotle,
and Aristotle taught Alexander the Great, So in his intellectual
legacy is all of ancient Greek history. But he was

(08:27):
really famous even at the time where he lived. If
you have heard of any of the ancient playwrights, they
wrote plays about Socrates in which he appears as a
character a gad fly or a funny guy on the corners.
So there are famous comic play about him by a

(08:50):
Greek dramatist called Aristophanes. He's also written about in historical works.
For example, the ancient historian Xenophon writes about him. So
he was, in some sense the person whom all of
the rich, cool kid of Athens hung out with a

(09:12):
contrary to their parents' desires. So imagine your Plato's parents.
You want him to go on to live a normal
Athenian life where he makes money and has a position
of honor, and instead he's hanging out on the corner
with this funny looking guy who is wearing ratty robes
and has a messy demeanor about him, who's asking him

(09:36):
to think about fundamental questions. And it's not just Plato,
it's all the fancy youth of Athens who are down
there hanging out with this dude, Stocrates. But the parents
didn't really like the fact that their kids were hanging
out on the corner with the slovenly guy, and that
was one of the reasons that his life played out
in a sort of unfortunate way and the end. Yeah,
so the parents really didn't like the fact that their

(09:59):
kids were hanging out on the corner with this slovenly guy.
And the stity of Athens decided to put Socrates on trial,
and they made three charges against him. The first was
that he was corrupting the youth, the second was that
he was worshiping false gods, and the third was that

(10:19):
he was defying the state religion. And the trial of
Socrates is documented in a dialogue written by his student Plato,
in which Plato allows the world to hear what happened
at the trial and what happened when Socrates accepted the

(10:43):
outcome of the trial. So famously, Socrates was condemned to death,
and the death was to take the form of drinking
poison hemlock. Socrates students offered him the opportunity to escape
Athens so that he could avoid what they viewed to

(11:05):
be an unjust penalty, and Socrates instead said, I have
lived within the city of Athens. I have thrived because
of its laws and culture, and therefore I am compelled
to take the penalty which is given to me, whether
or not it is the penalty I think appropriate. So

(11:27):
he spent his last day surrounded by his students and
then voluntarily took upon himself the penalty which had been imposed.
So one of the reasons Socrates is famous is for
this kind of drinking the hemlock corrupting the youth story.
But one of his main philosophical legacies is the way
that he went about his argument. And so this is

(11:49):
what's known as the Socratic method. What is the Socratic
method and why was it so kind of novel and important?
So the Socratic method is the method of asking questions
rather than giving answers, as a way of causing people
to think through their own commitments and allowing them to

(12:09):
bring them into some sort of equilibrium or harmony. So
there's a famous example in one of Plato's dialogues about Socrates,
which is a dialogue called the Mino, where Socrates encounters
a young, uneducated boy and he teaches that boy the

(12:32):
Pythagorean theorem. You may remember, that's the theorem from geometry
about a right angle in a triangle and the relation
between the sides of the triangle. And the way that
Socrates teaches this young boy about the Pythagorean theorem is
by asking him, the young boy, a series of questions

(12:53):
that cause the young boy to realize explicitly something which
he had already realized implicitly, which are certain facts about
geometrical relations. So you can see how that works in
the case of geometry, and we can think of our
own examples of teaching children basic facts of arithmetic. You

(13:16):
cause them to come to reason. If I have one
apple and I put one other apple on the table,
how many apples would we have. That's Socratic method. It's
eliciting from somebody a fact about the world or a
view about the world, which they held, but they didn't
realize they held. So what Socrates does is he uses

(13:39):
the method that you might use in arithmetic or geometry
about the sorts of things that matter most. So he
might ask you a question, why does truth matter, and
you might say truth matters because truth is a good

(14:00):
guide to the world. And then he would say, but
what if there were something untruthful that were an equally
good guide to the world. Would that matter to you
as much as truth? And you would engage in a
back and forth about it until you yourself come to
recognize either that you don't fully understand something, or that

(14:24):
your previous view about it was just based on assumptions
for which you don't have real justification. And the cool
thing about the syncratic method is that Socrates didn't just
ask these kinds of questions of other people. He also
applied the same method to what he himself knew, to
his own sets of knowledge. Right, that's right. So there

(14:45):
is a famous story about this, And to tell you
the story, I'm going to need could give you just
a little bit of background about ancient Greek religion and culture.
So one of the things the ancient Greeks believed is
that the gods could speak to human beings through what
we're called oracles. Oracles were basically mystical priest who interpreted

(15:11):
the words of the gods. And there was a very,
very famous oracle at a place called Delphi in Greece,
in the Temple of Apollo, and during the time this
is reported in Plato's Apology. During the time of socrates trial,
a young man named Hiraphon went to visit the oracle

(15:33):
at Delphi, and Kirafond said to the oracle oracle, who
is the wisest person? And the oracle answered Kairafon by saying,
very specifically, no one is wiser than Socrates. The Kiraphon
comes back and he says to Socrates, hey, I went

(15:55):
to see the oracle at Delphi, and it said that
no one is wiser than you. And Socrates responds as follows,
and I'm now giving you the exact words as transcribed
Into's Apology that are translated into English. When I heard this,
says Socrates, I said to myself, what can the oracle

(16:17):
mean when it says that no one is wiser than
I am? For I know that I have no wisdom,
small or great. And then Socrates continues, So I went
to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and I
began to talk with him, and I could not help
thinking that he was not really wise, although he was
thought wise by many and wiser still by himself. So

(16:41):
Socrates continues, So I left him, saying to myself as
I went away, although I don't suppose that either of
us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better
off than he is, for he knows nothing and thinks
that he knows, whereas I neither know nor think that

(17:04):
I know. So what Socrates saying here, he's saying, most
people who have a reputation for being wise and knowing
a lot of things have a mistaken degree of self confidence.
They not only act to the world as if they
know things, they are in their own minds more certain

(17:27):
than they ought to be. And so this is what's
been called the paradox of self knowledge, or the paradox
of Socratic knowledge. What is that the paradox of Socratic
knowledge is that the knowledge involves the recognition that Socrates
himself is unsure. So think back to what the oracle

(17:49):
said to Chirafon. The oracle didn't say in response to
the question who is the wisest person? Socrates is the
wisest person, the oracle said. One asked who is the
wisest person, No one is wiser than Socrates. And in
saying that, it emphasize that the way in which Socrates

(18:11):
is wise is that he knows just how much he
does not know. So this is cool. I mean, it's
really setting up this idea that to know ourselves is
to know that we don't know ourselves. Yeah, that's a
beautiful way of putting the paradox. To know ourselves is
to know that we do not know ourselves. It is

(18:33):
to know that, in many ways, we do not have
direct access to our motivations. We don't have direct access
to what it is that we are actually responding to
when we do something. And it's an endless process of

(18:53):
engaging in Socratic self question. So there's a way in
which each of us can give ourselves an inner Socrates
who says, why do you think that? Is it possible
that you think that for a different reason. Is it
possible that, even though you assume you value that, actually

(19:13):
that's just an old habit that you haven't questioned. Is
it possible that you think you're responding to a person
and in fact you're responding to a stereotype about people
of that kind. Those are the kinds of questions that
your inner Socrates tend to ask you. Harnessing your inner

(19:34):
Socrates isn't always comfortable. It involves intentionally questioning why you
think certain things and why you take certain actions. It
also involves admitting that you probably aren't as smart as
you think you are. But the science hints that channeling
this ancient thinker a bit more can be an important
step to becoming happier. The problem, as will explore when
the Happiness Lab returns from the break, is that our

(19:56):
brains don't always make that an easy task. The Happiness
Lab will be right back socrates is great insight is
that we don't really understand ourselves as well as we think.
It's an idea so radical that it got the great

(20:16):
thinker condemned to death. But you know, Professor to Mar
Gendler argues the Socrates might have been on to something.
Modern scientific studies show that there are real limits when
it comes to our self knowledge. In fact, some classic
experiments have found that we don't even know why we
feel the way we do. There's a fantastic study gun
in the nineteen seventies that was trying to figure out

(20:39):
whether people sometimes mistake what is going on around them
or what is going on inside them. And so here's
the study The study involved putting two people on a
bridge and the bridge was either a really solid bridge
and unthreatening, or it was a suspension bridge, and afterwards

(21:02):
they looked to see how likely the two people were
to think that they had physical attraction to one another,
That is, how likely they were to call the other
one and ask for a date. People were almost twice
as likely to ask the other person for a date
when they had been standing on an unstable bridge than

(21:24):
when they had been standing in a stable place. That
seems wild, right, that's a major major effect. Why are
people twice as likely to think they were attracted to
somebody if they met them on a bridge that was
unstable then if they met them in a place that
was stable. Think about what happens when you're on a

(21:46):
shaky bridge. Your heartbeats a little faster, Your breath gets
a little shallower, You notice a little bit of trembling.
What happens when you fall in love with somebody and
find them physically attractive. Your heartbeats a little faster, your
breath gets a little shallower, you notice your hands trembling.
That is, people can't distinguish whether the reason their heart

(22:10):
is beating fast is because they're on a shaky bridge,
or because they're attracted to a person. And that fact
about people that we cannot tell what's causing us to
respond in the way we do became the basis for
almost fifty years of psychological studies that looked at exactly

(22:33):
this question. And this is basically really falling prey to
the thing that Socrates was worried about that even in
the domain is fundamental is whether or not you're falling
in love with somebody. We just don't have access to
what it is. We really prefer what it is, We
really believe what it is, we really think and why Yeah,
imagine having an inner Socrates with you on the bridge, right,
So there you are and you're thinking, ooh, this person

(22:54):
across from me is really hot, and your inner Socrates says, hey,
why do you think they're really hot? And you say, well,
my palms are sweaty, and your inner Socrates says, is
there any other explanation for why your palms might be sweaty?
Did you notice you're standing on a bridge and all
of a sudden, the fact that you are willing to

(23:16):
doubt that you know yourself allows you to know yourself
better and our inability to know this stuff doesn't just
happen in these domains where you know, our heart is
racing and it's this big physiological effect. Sometimes it's really
just cognitive too. So tell me about these sort of
choice blindness studies. So here's a fabulous choice blend in study.
So you show people a pair of pictures and ask

(23:40):
them to judge which picture they think is more attractive.
So suppose they say the second picture is more attractive
to them than the first picture. A minute later, when
they show the pictures next, they've swapped them. You show
them the first picture, not the one they chose the
first picture, and you say to them, why did you

(24:02):
think this one is more attractive? And they offer a
rationalization where they say, oh, I thought picture one was
more attractive than picture two because I like the color
of the shirt, or I really like the shape of
the eyebrows. But notice they didn't think that picture one
was more attractive than picture two a minute ago they

(24:25):
had selected the second picture. So not only do people
have a really bad sense of why they make the
choices that they do, they may not even be in
a position to hold onto which choices they made. We
are not transparent to ourselves. We should have our inner

(24:45):
socrates check whether we mean what we just said. So
these are kind of funny examples about our choices, and
you know, who we might find attractive or what image
we might like better. But this is also a big
problem for our happiness, because our happiness also seems to
depend on our preferences and how we think we should behave.
If we don't have knowledge of that, that's going to
be a big problem for how we act in the world.

(25:06):
That seems exactly right. So when you ask the but
what makes them happy and they make their first guesses,
they give answers like, oh yeah, what makes me happy
is money, and what makes me happy is external approval.
And when people say those things, they're convinced of them.
And exactly the same way that the person on the

(25:26):
bridge was convinced that they were falling in love with
this other person and they didn't recognize that they were
wrong about what they thought they knew. In that same way,
we're wrong about a whole bunch of things we think
we know about what makes us happy. I mean, this
whole podcast is filled with them, right, You know, we
have episodes about how we think you know, spending money

(25:49):
in our ourselves will make us feel happy, but actually
we find out that spending money on other people is
really the way to go. We have episodes on how
trying to add to our workload will make us happy
because we want accolades at work, but then we find
that having more free time will make us happier. You know.
There's even a famous episode where I get lots of
critiques from people online where we tell people, hey to strangers,

(26:09):
that will make you happy, but people consult their self knowledge,
and their self knowledge says nah, that will make me
feel like crap. I mean, it just feels like the
whole field is one where we really need to recognize
that our minds seem to be lying to us if
we want to make some progress. But it's kind of
a problem because we don't really know what we don't know.
That's right, And the first step towards being able to

(26:30):
recognize what we don't know is being ready to accept
that any given moment where you seem to know something,
you might not. You might know it, but you might not.
And so let's walk through why we're so bad as
self knowledge. Right. One comes from the structure of the
way our minds work, which is like we kind of

(26:51):
just don't have access to everything in our heads. Yeah. So,
anybody who's ever heard of the notion of the unconscious,
or read a novel in which a character does something
for a reason that they themselves don't recognize, or anybody
who has ever been involved in therapy knows that one

(27:13):
of the fundamental ways of understanding human beings it is
to understand that a lot of what we do is
not for conscious reasons, it's for unconscious reasons. And what
it means for something to be unconscious by definition is
that it's not something to which we have direct, immediate,

(27:35):
automatic access as we move around in the world. And
so that's the problem of things in our minds being unconscious,
things we don't have access to. But there is also
a problem where our mind isn't just a unitary thing too, right, Yes,
so we sometimes act as if there's a single thing
that we're thinking at any moment, but it's never the

(27:57):
case that there's only one thing going on in your
head at once. Previously, Laurie, you and I have the
chance to talk about a metaphor from Plato which divides
the mind into three parts. It says that there are
two horses and a charioteer, a driver of those horses,
and one of those horses is interested in things like

(28:19):
food and reproduction. The second horse is interested in things
like honor and social approval, and then the driver of
these horses is interested in reason and rationality. And Plato's
image there is echoed by everything we now know about
the brain. So in the middle of all of our

(28:40):
brains is a lizard brain, which is responding to really
primitive things. When you are making a judgment about the world,
there's stuff coming in from your visual system, and there's
stuff coming in from your auditory system, but there's also
stuff coming in from your amigdala, which is giving you
a sense of your emotions, and there may be things

(29:01):
coming in from your memory. And all of these things
are coming in in lots and lots of different directions
and pulling you in different directions, and your mind has
to make a decision about what it's going to say
it sees. One of the nicest examples of this is
in an optical illusion. So if you're sitting in a

(29:22):
train looking out the window and the train next to
you starts moving, your visual system gives you a certain
kind of information, and it runs to the front of
your brain and it gets there to your conscious rational
part before the stuff from your somatosensory or your vestibular system,

(29:44):
And so you even though it's the other train that's
moving and you're sitting still, your eyes full you they
get to the front of your brain first. They tell
your brain what to think, and your brain thinks, oh
my god, my train is moving, but it's not. And
that kind of mistake happens endlessly in brains that are

(30:06):
built up of complex evolution nary layers, as every human
brain is. So our pesky minds make it hard for
us to really know ourselves. But don't disparage us yet,
because when we get back from the break, we'll learn
that we can get better at self knowledge if we
commit to harnessing our inner Socrates. We'll see how when

(30:27):
the happiness lab returns in a moment. When I first
watched Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure back in the nineteen eighties,
my childhood self was able to pick up tiny snippets
of the Socratic canon, mostly in the form of bad
punch lines from the movie Excellent. But it wasn't actually

(30:53):
until later in my education that I was introduced to
one of Socrates' key phrases, one that's super important for
feeling happier and one that I find to be, to
paraphrase Bill and Ted, most excellent. The quote that people
often think of and associate with Socrates is the unexamined
life is not worth living. So what does it mean

(31:17):
to say the unexamined life is not worth living? There
are two ways of thinking about that, both with regard
to one's relation to what we might call outer knowledge
that is the way the world is, and with regard
to what we might call inner knowledge, that is the
way we ourselves are. So let me start with the

(31:37):
outer knowledge. What does Socrates mean when he says the
unexamined life is not worth living? He means society as
we inherit. It isn't perfect. Your country may have a
religion which has landed on certain really important truths and
missed other really important truths. Your society may have some

(32:00):
values which are really important to human flourishing, but some
values which really impede human flourishing. And there are many
many discoveries to be made about the world. This is
the time when science as a way of making sense
of reality begins. For example, people begin to do astronomical

(32:20):
work and understand the relation between the stars and the
planets and the earth. All of those are what Socrates
we call the examined life in an external sense. And
so the unexamined life is the life where you aren't
curious about the natural world around you and you aren't

(32:40):
ready to challenge the social world around you. So that's
version one of the unexamined life. The second version of
the unexamined life that Socrates is concerned about is the
case where you trust your first impression instead of your
deeper self. That is the case where you don't awaken

(33:04):
your inner Socrates to ask yourself, Am I really in
love with this person? Or is it just that my
palms are sweaty? Am I really happier when I make
lots of money? Or am I just taking at face
value something that my brain is telling myself? Is my
train really moving? Or am I just responding to what

(33:26):
vision got into my body faster than the other senses.
So the second sense in which Socrates means the unexamined
life is not worth living is that he means we
need to examine our own assumptions about what we think
we want and about what we think we need. Another
way we can do this is through the practice of mindfulness.

(33:48):
Why does mindfulness help us kind of know ourselves better? So,
mindfulness is a practice whereby we try to authentically recognize
what is going on inside us. It's a process of
removing distraction and focusing liberately attention on something particular. And

(34:14):
there's a way in which you can think of meditation
as a non verbal analog of Socratic self examination. So
Socrates says, keep asking yourself, why do you think that?
But why do you think that? But why do you
think that? That's the verbal version of Socratic self questioning.

(34:37):
Meditation is the non verbal version of Socratic self question
It says, attend what's really going on, what's really going on?
What's really going on? So both of these are processes
of eliminating distraction and coming to authenticity. Neither of them

(34:57):
demands that you get all the way there. It just says,
here's a process that you can follow that's going to
bring you closer to the truth, close sure to understanding,
and that is being ready in the Socratic sense, to
challenge yourself and ask why, and being ready in a

(35:20):
meditation sense to focus yourself and eliminate distraction. So the
first way that we can really get better self knowledge,
according to Socrates, is through this idea of the Socratic
method and applying it to ourselves. What does this look like,
say in the context of, you know, maybe thinking that
money might bring us happiness when it might not. So
you might ask yourself in the way that Socrates would

(35:42):
ask you, why do you think that money is going
to give you happiness? Think back to a time that
you got money, what did you really feel? Think back
to other times when you were happy? What were those times? Like?
I think that took things that you've learned from science
about what it is that makes people happy. Why would
you think those scientific facts don't apply to you. It's

(36:05):
exactly like you come home and you have a fight
with your spouse. Spouse says, why are you yelling at me?
And you say blah blah blah, and your saust asks
you a question again and you realize, Oh, I'm yelling
at you because I was irritated by something that happened
to me on the bus on the way home, and
so I'm taking frustration that came from one source, and

(36:27):
I'm bringing it out in another source. That kind of
capacity to recognize that we're doing something for a reason
other than the reason we thought we were doing it's
familiar to all of us when we think about our
relations to other people, and so it shouldn't be surprising
that it's also the case when we're making decisions for ourselves.

(36:51):
I think a final way that we can really embrace
our inner Socrates is to really understand what the science
is telling us. Right that sometimes it's just really hard
to know our minds because of the unconscious makes us
our own selves impenetrable. But if we know what's going
on with other people, that that can kind of help
us make better decisions ourselves. Yes, So, one of the
amazing things about human beings is that each of us

(37:14):
is different from one another, but in certain fundamental ways,
we've each been given the same set of stuff to
work with. All of us have brains that were subject
to the same evolutionary process. All of us are affected
by features of our external environment. And therefore one of

(37:37):
the ways to understand yourself is to understand other people.
And it's really really unlikely that everybody else in the
world would be some way, and you, yourself would be
another way. You are unique. You're unique in the configuration

(37:59):
of facts which are true of you, but general tendencies
that if your skin is cut, you will bleed, that
if you are feeling sadness, your pupils will show a
certain kind of dilation. Those are fundamental facts about human beings.
And one of the many, very good ways to learn

(38:20):
about ourselves is to learn about others. And one of
the very many good ways to learn about others is
to use scientific understanding. I think another insight of kind
of finding our inner Socrates, is this idea that we
can sort of treat ourselves the way we would treat
a friend. Like if our friend was really struggling with something,
we might ask them questions, we might kind of get

(38:41):
curious with them, and ultimately what we're doing is just
treating ourselves in the same friendlike way that we might
treat other people when they're dealing with difficult situations. That's right.
It's sometimes said a friend is a second self, but
a self is a second friend. And just as when
we're asking a friend questions, why do you think that?

(39:02):
Why do you think that? Hey, that's inconsistent with that.
We don't do it in an accusatory way. We don't say, oh,
you loser, you were being mean to the cat because
you were angry at the bus driver. We say, hey,
that's so funny. You're being mean to the cat because
you were upset with the bus driver. Now that you
understand that, isn't it easier for you to be compassionate

(39:24):
towards the cat in the way that you wanted it
to be? So. One of the nice things about using
a friend to understand yourself, or using yourself to understand
your friend is that they're both ways of evoking simultaneously
compassion and responsibility. You say simultaneously, I'm not letting you

(39:44):
off the hook to yourself or your friend, and I
understand that it is challenging, and that simultaneous attitude of
compassion and responsibility towards self and other, through self and
other is a key lesson that we can take from

(40:05):
this Socratic image. Sometimes when people hear about this idea
that we don't know ourselves very well, it can be
a little bit destabilizing. How have you handled this? Heart
of what self knowledge requires is a certain kind of
humility that is really authentically understanding that you don't know

(40:26):
yourself brings with it a kind of vertigo. You have
this sense that I don't really know what's going on inside.
But then there's this reassuring sense that even though you
don't know what's going on inside, at least you're no
longer under the false impression that you thought you knew
what was going on inside when in fact you didn't.

(40:49):
And even though there is a certain kind of anxiety
which comes with recognizing that you really are opaque to yourself,
at least realizing that you're opaque to yourself is a
little more transparent than thinking that you're transparent to yourself.
Knowing all these practices and studying Socrates yourself, have you

(41:09):
been able to better turn on your inner Socrates to
promote happiness? Absolutely, when I find myself frustrated, one of
the tricks that I have tried to habituate in myself
is just an asking of why am I feeling this
emotion right now? Often it comes in the context of

(41:33):
a case where I have a project that I want
to engage in and I find myself procrastinating on it,
and I ask myself, why am I putting this off?
And often it's because I don't know what the next
step is, or I'm told and I'm staying where I
am because I have a Radian story in this room

(41:56):
and I need something in another room. And discovering that
these little things and make a difference that just likely
move me towards what I'm trying to do. I never
try to get all the way there all at once,
but Socratic self questioning can help me understand what direction

(42:17):
I need to go to take the very next step.
Socrates's ideas were so challenging in his own time that
he was put to death. Today, many centuries later, Socrates
is called to constantly question ourselves and our motivations can
still cause lots of discomfort, But as Tomorrow so eloquently
put it before, it really is better to know that

(42:38):
we don't know. So next time you're feeling a negative emotion,
a flash of anger, or a sense of arousal, or
a twinge of sadness, take some time to intentionally examine
the reasons you might be feeling that way and look
carefully at the steps you can take to address those emotions.
And if you're planning to do something that you think
will make you happy. Why not channel your inner Socrates

(42:59):
and ask if the path you're planning to follow is
really right for you, Does it fit with what the
science says truly makes for a happier life? Or are
you being fooled by the lies of your mind yet again?
And do remember the great advice of Socrates's later students
Bill and Ted, because harnessing your inner Socrates is yet
another great way to be excellent to one another and

(43:20):
to yourself. If you liked tearing about today's Ancient happiness insights,
you should make sure you're signed up for Pushkin Plus.
Pushkin Plus is our subscription service which allows you to
enjoy ad free listening to this another pushkin podcasts, and
as a special gift to pushkin Plus subscribers, I'll be

(43:41):
sharing some of my favorite passages from the original texts
that you heard about today, So be sure to sign
up today at Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot FM.
Our next edition of Happiness Lessons of the Ancients is
going to be a little different. We'll head deep into
the Happiness Lab's past episode archive to look at the
work of Socrates's famed pupils, Plato and Aristotle. We'll see

(44:03):
that we're not yet done with the deep wisdom we
can get from the ancient Greeks. Until next time, stay safe,
stay happy, and party on. The Happiness Lab is co
written by Ryan Dilley and is produced by Ryan Dilley,
Courtney Grano and Britney Brown. The show was mastered by

(44:25):
Evan Viola and our original music was composed by Zachary Silver.
Special thanks to Greta Kone, Eric Sandler, Carl Migliori, Nicole Morano,
Morgan Ratner, Jacob Weisberg, my agent, Ben Davis, and the
rest of the Pushkin team. The Happiness Lab is brought
to you by Pushkin Industries and by me, Doctor Laurie Santos.