July 19, 2024 • 48 mins
Making shows about her own happiness challenges was both fun and instructive for Dr Laurie, but it also took guts to be so vulnerable and open. She later spoke to her close friend at Yale Dr Tamar Gendler about the experience. This private chat threw up lots of interesting insights, so when the duo were asked to speak at the 2024 International Festival of Arts and Ideas... they decided to share parts of that private conversation with the public.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Thanks to everyone who listened to the most recent season
of The Happiness Lab, which was all about the well
being challenges that I struggle with most. I've learned a
lot from making that series, but I got to admit
at times it was pretty hard. I know it's healthy
to be vulnerable and talk about your problems, but it's
often easier said than done, which is exactly what I'll
be discussing on this week's episode with my dear colleague,
(00:44):
the Yale philosopher and cognitive scientist ta mark Endler. I'm
guessing you've probably heard Tamorro and The Happiness Lab before.
In the past, we've talked about what famous philosophers like
Socrates and Aristotle said about happiness. But as my close friend,
Tamar also had lots of interesting ideas about the problems
I decided to tackle in the last season.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
So when Tomorrow and I were.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Invited to give a joint talk at the twenty twenty
four International Festival of Arts and Ideas, New Haven, Connecticut,
we thought, why not reflect.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
On what we've both learned from these personal shows.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
The first of Little Arts and Ideas kindly allowed us
to share our conversation, so now you can listen to
I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Thank you so much to all of you who are
joining us here. It really feels like we are among friends.
But one of the things you may or may not
know is that, in addition to being professional colleagues who've
done a lot of work together, Laurie and I are
actually very close friends. And in fact, we're such close
(01:45):
friends that we often finish one another's sentences. So what
we want to do today is actually have a conversation
with you that's much more intimate and personal than we
have ever done before in a public setting. Everything that
(02:06):
we say to one another is going to be in
warmed by the academic research that we do. But our
goal in speaking before you today is really to give
some autobiographical information about our own experiences, our own struggles,
and our own challenges. And Laurie has set the tone
(02:29):
for doing this with her recent podcast.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
The Happiness Lab is my podcast where I talk about
so many things in the science of happiness. We focused
on lots of different topics, but just this summer we
started a new season. It's a whole season about the
happiness challenges that I face personally, and this is a
spot where you might be saying, like wait a minute,
hang on, Like I signed up really early for this
event to talk to a happiness expert.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
How is the happiness expert.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
So messed up when it comes to having a challenges
like you know, did I not train?
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Like what's going on?
Speaker 2 (03:00):
And it turns out that that's in part because I'm human, right,
we all struggle with happiness challenges. But it also comes
about do I to A kind of funny puzzle that
comes up in cognitive science is actually a puzzle that
Tomorrow and I have written about.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
I believe it was.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
In fact, I think it was our first paper that
we ever wrote together. And it's basically about how it
is possible to have theoretical knowledge and lack practical knowledge.
So there's a great tradition in ancient Greek philosophy of
(03:34):
distinguishing between knowledge of abstract things, a kind of theoretical
wisdom which goes by various names, a knowledge of practical things,
of how to flourish, of how to live, which is
in certain parts of the Greek tradition called phronesis practical wisdom.
(03:55):
And what's interesting about practical wisdom is that it comes
about through different sorts of activities than theoretical wisdom does.
And so Laurie and I were at the late Great
La Fitness, who belonged to La Fitness in Hamden, right
(04:16):
near the Stop and shop. So we were at La
or La Fitness, engaging in bodily exercise, and I was
talking to Laurie about this ancient philosophical tradition and basically
telling her how in ancient Greek philosophy there's a distinctionion
roughly between book smarts and street smarts.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
And Laurie said, oh, my.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
God, did you know there's also an eighties television show
about that? And of course I did not know there
was an eighties television show because I grew up with
parents who bought a TV to watch Nixon resign and
then put it away.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
But it was that eighties.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Television show, which Laurie will describe, that gave us the
idea for the first joint paper that we wrote, which
is about why Laurie, even though she's the world's happiness expert,
is still having trouble making it work in her life.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Anybody who want to guess to get guess what the
eighties TV show was, it was actually Gi Joe.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
It was eighties cartoon.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
To be fair, why is the Gijo television show about
this disconnect between kind of head knowledge and street knowledge?
If you remember the g I Joe? How many you
have actually seen the g I Joe TV show? Okay,
we're seeing some hands some of you. Some of you
are a little older than eighties TV shows.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
That's cool. Some of you are a little younger.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
They're like, So g I Jo was the show with
a bunch of like army guys who did kind of
army guy heroic things. But it's most famous for how
each cartoon episode ended. It ended some of you're not
It ended with this public service announcement which taught kids
really important things in the eighties, like don't talk to
strangers or look both ways when you cross your street.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
It was really basic stuff.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
But Gi Jo would explain this big public service message
to their kids and the kids would say, thank you,
g I Joe.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Now I know, and g I Jo would say and
knowing is half the battle, and go gi Joe, Now
that's all.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
I would be like, oh, now I remember. But this
was the catchphrase, Knowing is half the battle. When you
know a thing, you're most of the way there, and
what tomorrow I wrote in our you know now pretty
well known. I think paper is the idea that that
statement knowing is half the battle is a fallacy, one
that we've christened the g I Joe fallacy.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Knowing is not half the battle, right, you know? Take
take my fitness.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
I know what I should be eating, I know I
should get to the gym all the time.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
That doesn't mean I do it right.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
We know so many things about the stuff that we
should be doing, but that doesn't translate into the practical
doing those things. And this is what I feel like
I'm struggling with a little bit when it comes to
the happiness science. Obviously I know about this stuff, right,
I teach an Ivy League institution, all these tips and
strategies that we should be using to feel better and
protect our mental health and so on. But it's still
(06:51):
really hard to put those strategies into practice. And so
this is what we wanted to get intimate about today.
Does that sound good a reason to it?
Speaker 4 (06:58):
Not that, right?
Speaker 3 (07:01):
So one of the really cool things about the GI
Joe fallacy is that it's self referential. It applies to itself.
So I traced it through the entire Western philosophical tradition,
all the places where somebody had noticed this.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
The Gi Joe fallacy is true of itself.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
The fact that we know that knowing is less than
half the battle doesn't mean that we thereby assimilate that
knowledge into our behavior. And the key challenge of flourishing
in the ancient philosophical tradition of the West, in Greece
(07:44):
and Rome, and I would say the key challenge of
flourishing and happiness in contemporary cognitive science discourse is the
question of how you speak, how you train, how you
control the aspects of yourself that are not subject to
(08:05):
rational control.
Speaker 4 (08:08):
It's really easy.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
To understand the Gi Joe fallacy. It's really easy to
listen to Laurie's podcast. It's really easy to read a
bunch of neuroscience articles, and doing that is less than
half the battle. So a lot of ancient wisdom tradition
work in Western philosophy, things like Plato and Aristytle, are
(08:31):
actually about how you make things stick in a way
that you have them present at the moment that matters
in lots of ways. The challenge of understanding in a
practical sense is the challenge of having the thought that
you want to have the reaction that you want to
(08:53):
have ready to hand at the moment that you needed
You can do all the rehearsing you want of staying
calm in the face of things that enrage you. And
if that skill is not ready to hand at the
(09:14):
moment where you are in a conversation with a loved
one who says something painful to you, it has not
properly served you. So the very first explicitly self help
book was actually called the ready to handbook.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
It's a little book by.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
A philosopher named Epicteitis, was written about two thousand years ago.
It was called in Greek the Enchiridion. What that means
is handbook, ready to handbook. It was meant to give
you a bunch of skills that would be available to
you at the moment that you needed them. And what
Laurie has been working on in the most recent aspect
(09:58):
of her podcast is really a set of reflections on
making things ready to hand. She's been focusing on five
topics and what we want to try to do today
is to get through at least three of them. We
may make it to four, we may even we'll see
not if I keep going on like this make it
(10:20):
to five.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
But let me just let you know what.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
They are so that you have a sense of the
issues that we want to discuss today. So the first
is the topic of perfectionism and how we deal with
expectations that we have for ourselves that are hard to meet.
The second is the question about the relation between your
present and future self. How do we rightly decide what
(10:43):
we do now that will help us later, what we
do now that will harm us later? How do we
balance ourself across ten third is the issue of stress
and how we represent it to ourselves and manage it.
The fourth is the issue of busyness and how we
(11:05):
manage in a world where we may feel over committed.
The fifth, because this is arts and ideas and we
don't want to shy away from the biggest ones, is
the question of how we think about our own mortality
and the ways in which reflecting on our own mortality
can help us to live each moment of our non
(11:27):
mortality as well as we can.
Speaker 4 (11:31):
So I want to start.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
By asking Laurie to say a few words about perfectionism.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
How many folks and audience think of themselves as a
little perfectionists. A show of hands. I'm seeing a lot
of hands. Okay, yeah, I mean I don't need to
even explain, right, Like, I'm a type AIVY League professor
who cares about a lot, and I set really high
standards for myself. That's the way I say, in a
kind way, Oh, I set high standards for myself. It
sounds like the kind of thing you say in an
interview when someone asks what's your worst trait and you say, oh,
(12:02):
that sounds good. But the reality out of it inside
is much different. The reality of it inside is that
I'm incredibly self critical. It's really hard to figure out
anything I do that feels like it's above bar right.
Everything I do is like, well, I could have done
that better, I know, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
And that causes me to do a couple things that
I don't like.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
When is it causes me to shy away from anything
where I feel like I might screw up. Right, there's
always like new hobbies or new cool things I want
to try to be like, oh, I'm not gonna be
good at that, and I kind of run away. It
also means that I constantly feel kind of yucky because
my internal monologue is this sort of terrible, mean drill
sergeant who's kind of yelling at me all the time.
And so even though it's kind of in some ways
(12:42):
something that we get a little bit proud of, the
person I interview for my episode, Thomas Kurrn says it's
our society's favorite flaw, perfectionism. Like, it's actually something that
makes me feel kind of crappy on a regular basis
and something that I've wanted to fix.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
So I had a wonderful example of perfectionism hit me today.
So I actually have to be in Denver tonight, and
so right after this event, I'm going to go down
to look Hard Airport and fly out. So while I
am away, I have a house sitter who is a
student who's probably going to listen to this podcast and
(13:18):
hear this story. So I'm incredibly anxious that my house
be super clean and organized, and I can't bear for
her to open my fridge and not see the shelves
perfectly polished. And for some reason, I got obsessed this
morning with the fact that I had an extra head
of ridicio in the fridge, which I had purchased it
(13:41):
had been very expensive. I bought it at Nika's and
I hadn't eaten it, and I literally called Laurie and said,
could you come over before and ideas talk to take
the ridicio so that I don't let it go to
waste in my fridge in a way that is visible
(14:03):
in this undergraduate research assistant who's going to be house sitting. Now,
what's funny about that story is that both my anxiety
and my instinctive reaction were due to a particular deep
fact about human beings, which is what other people think
(14:27):
of us matters to us. The philosopher Plato spoke of
our soul as having three parts. He called them reason, spirit,
and appetite. Reason is the part of you that responds
to rational concerns and information and facts. Appetite is the
part of you that basically responds to your need to
(14:48):
keep going that's roughly food and procreation. And spirit is
the part of you that responds to the social world
around you. So Plato recognized that a deep segment of
our motivation as human beings results from our desire to
(15:10):
be judged affirmatively by others.
Speaker 4 (15:14):
And what's really.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Cool is that just as that led to detriment this
morning as I was anxiously polishing the coffee filter, polishing
the coffee filter because I was sure that this lovely
nineteen year old young woman must come from a home
with a polished coffee filter, not with a dirty coffee
(15:37):
written coffee filter.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Shacsay had like coffee filters, I caro when I showed up,
and I'm like, fixed this before we go on stage.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Anyway, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
I was so concerned with the gaze of another that
I lost track of a lesson that Plato's student Aristotle
puts forward, which is the idea that a friend can
serve as a second self. Aristotle says, a friend is
(16:07):
a second self. It magnet defies our joy and cuts
in half our sorrow.
Speaker 4 (16:14):
So I want to.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
Let Laurie give you a sense of the science behind
why the right thing for me to do when I
was anxious about my ridicio was to reach out to
someone else and say the shameful words.
Speaker 4 (16:30):
I bought a.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
Head of ridicuo at Nika's that I.
Speaker 4 (16:34):
Did not eat.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
The most sad thing was it because we were prepping.
We actually didn't end up eating still in the fridge,
but we're working on the grace that comes with that.
Speaker 4 (16:45):
No, I mean I think you know.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Tomorrow pointed out that this issue of being worried about
what other people think is part of human nature. But
one of the things we also learned in the science
is that this particular aspect of our perfectionism is getting
worse over time. Doctor Curran, who I had on the show,
did this very famous paper where he's a professor in
the UK. He deals with students just to the way
(17:07):
that Tomorrow and I do, and he started having this
sense that, like, the modern college student is like a
little bit more perfectionists than they were five years ago,
ten years ago, and so on.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
And he said, well, could that really be?
Speaker 2 (17:17):
I wonder if there's survey data about that, And so
he went all the way back to the eighties and
looked at every paper that gave college students a survey
about perfectionism, and just like tight traded up over time.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
And what he's found is that since the nineteen eighties, since.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Gijoe was on the air, overall perfectionism has gone up
in young people about thirty percent, which is pretty intense.
But he also found that there's one part of perfectionism
that's going up the most. We have different parts of perfections,
is like I have these high standards for myself, right,
or perhaps I hold high standards for other people. We
often talk about like a perfectionist boss who expects you
(17:52):
to do too much. But the part that's most going
up in young people today is the opposite of that.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
I assume that other people expect a lot of me.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Right, if my students coming over my house, they're going
to judge me for what my coffee pop looks like
and so on. That's the part that's gone up the
most since the nineteen eighties, which is a problem. It
means not only do we have the kind of human
nature that is really worried about what other people are thinking,
our misconception about that has gotten worse over time. And
you can probably make guesses about why that is, things
like being on social media all the time and having
(18:23):
the gaze of others on you in a very special way.
But the way you solve this, of course, is to
try to harness not some like general kind of misconceived
idea of the other who's really being judge of you.
You bring to mind a real second friend, right to
mark think about, well, what's Lauria're going to really think
about the Ridicia if it was her staying in my house,
which she really judged me, and she'd be like, actually,
(18:44):
probably I'm not back. I actually don't have any vegetables
in my frider now, so I definitely would have be judging.
But yeah, I should be like, oh, when I think
about myself and my own achievements from the perspective of
a friend, now all of a sudden, I can give
myself grace. And it turns out that this is the
practice that you bring to mind if you want to
fight your perfectionism. You actually think, you know this terrible voice,
(19:06):
this inner drill sergeant in your head is kind of
yelling at you. You give them a voice like, okay,
you know our drill sergeant voice. I'm going to summon
the Tomorrow voice, like what would Tamorrow tell me?
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Right?
Speaker 2 (19:16):
And just the instant of doing that is a really
key way to fight your inner critic and bring in
somebody who cares about you. And I love this idea
of kind of using self talk as though you're hearing
from a friend, because that kind of self talk isn't coddling, right,
Tomorrow wouldn't judge me for having a erdicio in my fridge.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
But if I was truly messing something up tomorrow, woul
want to talk to me about it.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
She wouldn't scream at me like a drill sergeant in
the way I often do with my perfectionist voice. But
she'd get curious. She'd be like, what is going on?
We need to address this, Let's talk about it. And
so harnessing that friend voice allows you to do something
really important. You're shutting off the drill sergeant perfectionist voice
that's demanding too much of you, But you have a
curious voice there that's wise, that really is going to
(20:00):
push you if you needed. And so it's this perfect
balance between kind of overcddling but kind of being too
drill sergeanty. On the other hand, ability to adopt a
different persona in order to talk to yourself is an
important skill.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
It's also one that can improve your happiness.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
But I'll let Tamar explain more when the Happiness Lab
returns in a moment. So far, in our talk at
the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, my friend Tamar
Genler and I have discussed why talking to yourself like
(20:36):
a compassionate friend can help you fight perfectionism, but tomorrow
thinks this technique can apply and lots of other situations too.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
It's actually the most important general skill that we can acquire,
because it's roughly a skill of perspective taking. We spend
our entire lives viewing the world from inside our own heads,
from the perspective of the world that is unique to us,
(21:06):
and when we're young children, infants, we're so certain that
the world is in accord with our perception of it
that when we cover our own eyes, we think we're invisible.
The moment of coming to be a social being is
(21:26):
the moment of recognizing that, in addition to your own eyes,
there are eyes of others, and the capacity to have
ready to hand the eyes and voices of others. The
other perspectives that might be taken at both the instance
(21:47):
when you are being too easy on yourself and the
instance of when you are being too hard on yourself
is perhaps the deepest way to take advantage of our
ability to perspective. Take notice that even as perfectionists are
(22:08):
super with the self whose viewpoint they are sitting in,
all of us, including perfectionists, are remarkably able to make
exceptions for ourselves to recognize that something that objectively speaking
would be wrong or problematic or unfair is, in our
(22:30):
particular case, being done for this enormous set of reasons
to which only we have access. So the observation that
the way we deal in a very practical sense with
perfectionism is to have ready to hand at all times
the voice of another right. It's like wearing a bracelet
(22:53):
that says, what would LORI say, or if you are
a member of a faith tradition, what would the figure
who represents goodness and truth and understanding in my faith
tradition do?
Speaker 4 (23:06):
Or say?
Speaker 3 (23:07):
That capacity to use the perspective of another the very
practical advice think about what your friend would say is
part of the general skill of being able to recognize
that there are multiple perspectives in the world. Now, one
of the interesting ways that this plays out is actually
(23:27):
with regard to the second dilemma that Laurie has been confronting,
which is that, in addition to being friends with other people,
that is, beings who exist at the same moment we do,
but aren't us, we're kind of also stuck forever being
(23:47):
friends with, or at least being affected by our past
selves and our future selves. Roughly speaking, most of the
stuff that our past self does renowns on our present self,
and most of the things that our presence self does
is going to determine what happens to our future self.
And the question of how to think of selves across
(24:10):
time is the second fundamental issue that Laurie's been addressing
in her podcast.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
And when I started thinking about this issue, I realized
that even though I'm very kind to other people, you know,
I'm not judging about tomorrow, about what she has in
fridge and so on, there's actually like one person out
there that I'm really mean to future Laurie. I assume
future Laurie loves going at the gym. She's not gonna
mind taking on that terrible task that I agreed to
(24:36):
over email, because I just want to get the person
over email, like she's happy to do this, like a
really big work project. She is moral and not so
busy and really excited to do all the stuff that
President Laurie doesn't want to do at all.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
But of course, you know, true perspective taking would lean
to this. This is fact that that Laurie doesn't want
to deal with this stuff.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Either, And so what happens is that it's kind of
like the Lauri's are all at this like negotiation table,
but I President Laurie and the only one with a voice.
I'm like, oh yeah, future Laurie would love to do that,
and somewhere she's off in some like other dimension. So
the episode was an attempt to deal with like my
myopia right the fact that I'm really near sighted. I'm
(25:16):
thinking about me right now and how can I get
nicer to my future self. But what I wound up
realizing in this episode is that I was focused on
all these cases of myopia right like present Laurie is
like kind of really messing with future Lari.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
But as I did the episode, I started to think.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
About other cases where I'm not being myopic, but I
might instead be being hyperopic, very far sighted. All those
evenings were trying to send one more email off, but
present Laurie could be hanging out with her husband. All
those cases where I got something nice and nice bottle
of wine or like a new dress, I feel like, oh,
it's not the right time right now to enjoy that.
(25:53):
I'll wait for future Lauri to enjoy that. There's all
these times where I'm kind of assuming future Laari will
get to enjoy this thing.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
That means I'm kind of missing out on the present.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
And so the episode is an interesting one because it
helped me realize I messed up both ways. I assumed
it was mostly being unkind to future Lauri, but sometimes
President Lauria is being unkind to herself on behalf of
future Laurie.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
But if I could just talk to future Laurie, you'd
be like, don't do that on behalf of the either.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
And so we in an episode talk about solutions, but tomorrow,
first I want to hear about you know, what did
the ancients say about this?
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Did they have some insight?
Speaker 3 (26:25):
Yeah, So the ancients are really interested in actually developing
habits that allow your past self, your present self, and
your future self to kind of equally divide both the
costs and the benefits of the things that are going
to be of long term value to you, So eating
(26:49):
healthy food, being deeply connected to those around you, being
an individual who exhibits character virtues like braveness or honesty
or justice. What the ancient philosopher Aristotle says to do
is to act like you already were the thing that
(27:11):
you wish to become fake it till you make it,
as the contemporary version calls it. But notice that that
is about creating intertemporal fairness.
Speaker 4 (27:24):
Across sells. There is a set.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
Of activities that may be locally unpleasant. The local activity
of engaging in exercise until your muscle hurts, the local
activity of holding back your desire to indulge in a
particular way, the local activity of tamping your emotion. If
(27:48):
you practice doing that now, it becomes natural to you.
It becomes part of who you are, and it solves
some of the intertemporal problem. Notice that, as with self regulation,
so with self care. Both Laurie and I laughed when
(28:09):
Laurie said, whenever I buy a bath bomb, I think, well,
but I can't use that now.
Speaker 4 (28:15):
How many of you have beside your bathtub?
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Yes, Shelley Kalum, my next door neighbor has beside our bathtub,
many many bathballs. What Aristotle would tell you to do
is to create a ritual. On Thursdays, I take a
warm bath with my bathball. I'm not going to use
them up too fast. I'm not going to use them
up too slowly. I've made them part of a routine.
(28:39):
I've made them part of a ritual. I've made them
part of a habit. When you are trying to distribute
things across as Lori points out, individuals, only one of
whom is at the table at that given moment, only
present you is there. The best way for present you
(29:02):
to relate both to past you and to future you
is to engage in these processes where the world causes
you to split the resources across time. You can use ritual,
you can use habit, you can use routie.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
And so I think that those are the kind of
things that we talk about in the episode. I actually
tried a different hack that was probably not available to
Aristotle at the time, or at least not in the
way I tried it, but it does get back to
one of his insights. It goes back to the importance
of perspective taking. Right, if I could really bring Futulaari
to the negotiating table and like talk to her and
(29:42):
really see what she wanted, maybe I would do better.
And the technology that wasn't available at Aristotle's time, even
though he kind of realized this whole second self thing,
was to go on, say Snapchat and use a future
filter where you can look at himself Aristotle, young Aristotl
and fast forward to what he looks like when he's seventy.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Aristotol obviously didn't have iPhones, but I did.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
And so I could go on there and use these
How many people in the audience have used these kind
of aging filters and looked at you if you're a
there's like three college students and they're like, I had
never done this either, but I did this. I encourage
you to kind of try it out. If you've never
done this. You basically are looking at a little video
of yourself as a selfie, and you become like thirty
(30:24):
or forty years older, like through these aging filters. And
I stay had a very interesting reaction, which is like,
you know, I'm looking at this picture of future Lauria
as though I would be looking at a FaceTime call
with tomorrow, Like she's there, she's my friend, and she
has preferences. And so this is actually some lovely work
by hal Hirshfield, who's done this in experimental context. He
shows people older versions of themselves, and he finds that
(30:47):
they wind up solving the same kinds of like temporal
choice problems that Aristotle was so concerned with. They wind
up saving more for retirement and one experiment for the
next month. After they've done this, they wind up eating
healthier and so on. And so this was maybe like
the high tech version of the ritualistic thing that Aristotle
wanted us all to do. But given that it's available
(31:09):
on all of your smartphones, worth trying out.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
And one of the crazy things that that brings out
is how powerful how we represent the world as being
is to how we experience the world. Right, it wasn't
a fact already that thirty years from now, Laurie is
going to be thirty years older, but bringing that vividly
before your mind, bringing that into active awareness, causes it
(31:36):
to play a role in your thinking. And one of
the really cool things in Laurie's episode on We'll turn
to our third example now, stress is the work of
a contemporary psychologist helps.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
Show how powerful how we.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
Represent an experience as being can be on how that
experience affects us. Do you want to talk about some
of the alio chrom work on stress.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Yeah, And first, maybe this is one I don't need
to set up right. I was going to tell you,
like I'm really stressed out, but I'm guessing.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
A lot of you are about to laugh right now.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
Anybody out there feel a little stressed out right now?
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Yeah, that's what I thought, right, Like.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Stress, it affects us all, And I think one of
the reasons that you're all laughing is like it affects
us all.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
But it's we don't think.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
Of it as this wonderful experience, right, It's not like
we think of being stressed out as our body's reaction
to protect us against the bad things and pump luclose
into our blood.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
When we need it the most.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Like it's not especially designed evolve system to give us
the energy we need. Well, we really need to push
it to the metal. That's not how we think about stress.
But if you're a biologist looking at the autonomic nervous system,
you might say exactly that about stress. We think of
stress as debilitating, right. We think it's there to kind
of mess us up and it's going to destroy us.
(32:58):
And that's impart because if you don't regulate your stress,
it does. Right. Chronic stress is really terrible for so
many aspects of our biology. But it turns out that
the act of thinking about stress as bad might be
one of the reasons that chronic stress is so bad.
This was an insight by the Stanford psychologist Alia Crumb,
who incidentally was a student here back in the day.
(33:19):
She actually worked with, you know, this unknown psychologist Peter Salada,
who is right now president of Yale.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
But Alia had this insight.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
You know, there's so many ways that our mind, if
we think about something in a certain way as good
or bad, in some ways, that thinking makes it.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
So I wonder if that works the same way for stress.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
And so she brought students into the lab gave them
some like stressful situation.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Often this is what's called the Streer stress test.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
It means you bring a student into lab and like, great,
You're going to give it impromptu speech with no preparation.
There's going to be a really mean panel of judges
that watches you go for it. And what happens is
that immedia stress Reactually, you know, stress worm was like
cortusol kick in.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
It's really scary.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
Some students got the primer that tells them, rinds them
and remember how stress usually feels. It's pretty debilitating, right,
It's usually bad. Your heart's going to raise, it's not great.
The second group of students got a different way to
think about stress. They said, you know, you might feel
stressed out right now, but that's actually great. That means
your stress hormones are really pumping energy into your blood.
Like literally, there's going to be more glucose in your blood,
(34:19):
which will get more kind of energy up to your brain.
It will make you think a little bit better. It'll
help you out right. Stress can be enhancing. What she
didn't looked at is students' performance. They wind up performing better,
but more they wind up having not the same reaction
as the folks in the other condition whose chronic stress kind.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Of kept them going.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
They performed badly, but then they showed these harsh effects
kind of days on when you look at them later.
Those students who thought that stress was good, all of
a sudden they experienced the stress, they do better and
they shut the stress off. One of the reasons that
our chronic stress is there is we might be thinking
about it in a way that it's going to really
harm us. One of the researchers I interview for the podcast,
(35:00):
David Yaeger, who's at UT Austin. He took this in
a different direction. He said, well, that's true maybe with
these messages about the fact that stress isn't actually that
bad when you look biologically, maybe we can actually stop
chronic stress in a population that we know experiences a
lot of stress. He actually worked with low income high
school students from marginalized identities, right, so these are students
(35:21):
who are just experiencing all kinds of stresses financial, social,
and these kinds of things in high school. He started
by giving them this primer that said, hey, you know,
stress can be really good when you experience it, and
it's good over time, you'll kind of get better at
dealing with it, a little bit of a growth mindset too.
And what he finds is that those high school students,
when they give journal entries later about the things that
are going on in their life, they wind up saying
(35:43):
on days where their journal says I was experiencing something
really stressful today, something that was really hard, they say,
but it's going to be all right, I'll deal with it.
They also show lower cortisol, which is a stress hormone,
throughout the semester. Right. So, just this reframing of how
we think about stress can affect whether or not a
truly objectively stressful situation right, like growing up as a
(36:05):
low income high school student and a tough neighborhood, whether
or not that's really kind of stress you out. And
so this was really powerful for me because it brought
up exactly the same thing that the ancients were kind
of thinking about that like, in some sense, thinking does
make it so.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
So that brings us and I believe we are actually
going to make it through all five are okay, and
we are going to make it through all five because
I allowed myself to succumb to both the benefits on
the costs of the fourth of Lori's topics, which is
the topic.
Speaker 4 (36:36):
Of being busy.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
I'm putting too much into a limited period of time.
Speaker 4 (36:44):
Laurie Santos take it away.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Yeah, I mean I think we're all subject to being
a little bit busy these things, and I think busy
and especially the way that tamarg just said is being
which is putting too much into a limited period of time.
In the episode, I talk with the journalist Oliver Berkman,
who has a fantastic book which you haven't read it,
(37:06):
you should check it out. It's called four thousand Weeks
Time Management for Mortals, and.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
His idea was that you know, when you really.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
Come to terms with the fact that you are finite,
it really changes the amount of stuff that you feel
like you can reasonably put on your plate, right, Like,
really true time management is recognizing there's just never going
to be enough time for stuff. There's never going to
be enough time for stuff this summer. There's never going
to be enough time for stuff in this life, right,
(37:35):
which is scary. But the question is like, given that,
how do we decide what to put on our plate?
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Right? How do we navigate like how to be the
most productive?
Speaker 2 (37:45):
And this is another spot where the scholars haven't really
helped us out because there were historically not as far
back in history as Tomorrow was thinking about, but there
were historically like good ideas about what counted as productivity.
Right back in the day we had agriculture, we could
easily figure out how we should be spending our time, right,
how much should we plant?
Speaker 1 (38:05):
How much should we work to deal with the crops?
Speaker 4 (38:07):
Right?
Speaker 1 (38:08):
You know you count bush corn that you get per
your time?
Speaker 2 (38:10):
You know?
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Okay, however I maximize that I'm doing good?
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Or imagine you work on an assembly line, how many
like little widgets should you build? Well, it's like we
can figure out like the amount of work that goes
into making a maximum number of them. So many of
us these days don't work in agriculture. Many of us
don't work on an assembly line. Many of us do
the kind of thing that Tomorrow and I do, which
you might call knowledge work. I'm a podcaster, I'm a professor.
(38:33):
I come up with lectures. We're both academics. We come
up with ideas and books. But it's not like Tomorrow
and I at the end of our day have like
a big pile of widgets, like you know, academic paper
widgets that we produce.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Papers take different amounts of the time. You have to
think about the ideas you have to work on.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
You have to noodle it, fill of bit. Sometimes we
get more intense periods and so on. And this is
an insight that one of my podcast guests, cal Newport
comes up with. He's like, the problem is that we
don't have great ideas of productivity right now. He thinks
that we came up with one though, because of course
we want a kind of assembly line model for everything
we do. And his argument is that we've come up
with what's known as soon productivity. Basically, instead of counting widgets,
(39:12):
we count the visible activity that it looks like we're
engaged in. So you answered that Slack message, you're applied
to that email, you're at work, you know, typing away.
And that's what we use because figuring out like what
means to be productive on the big stuff, like how
many good podcast episodes come out, or how many academic articles,
or the number of good ideas your doctors.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Come up with when he's trying to heal you.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Those are too hard, right, So we use visible productivity.
But then what happens Then you're trying to maximize that metric.
You're answering all these emails, you're being at all those
standing meetings, you're looking at those Slack messages. But what
does that do to the actual amount of time you
have free to work on the big projects?
Speaker 1 (39:48):
It goes away Yanks.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
She has this lovely phrase that he uses where he
says that those kind of little tasks become what he
calls productivity termites that eat away at your schedule. You know,
So you look at your calendar and it's just like
this crumbling building of this schedule because you don't have
time to do any of the big stuff. And so
the podcast is in an attempt to say, Okay, how
do we do this, how do we kind of answer
(40:11):
to the fact that we have the wrong metric when
it comes to what it means to be productive.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
And what's fascinating is that when Laurie and I were
talking about this, I realized that in many ways this
touches on the most fundamental philosophical distinction that Plato makes,
which is the distinction between what is and what seems
(40:38):
to be, what is actual and what we use as
its surrogate representation, what is most fundamental and deep and
what is on the surface. And the entire warning of
Plato's philosophical work is an attempt to warn us against
(41:01):
taking seriously what Plato calls the shadows in the cave,
rather than what it is.
Speaker 4 (41:08):
That the shadow in the cave are reflections of.
Speaker 3 (41:11):
That is, Plato's warning is a warning against falling for
surface rather than deep features, for the smoke, which is
a typical indicator of the fire, rather than the fire itself.
And in a lot of ways we are subject to
(41:32):
teaching to the test for ourselves, right we get this measure?
The measure is how many things did I get taken
off my checklist today, and we use that surface feature,
the platonic shadow, rather than focusing on the fundamental object,
which is how deeply did I come to understand something
(41:56):
about the world. Notice that, as in Plato's Republic, what's
true of the individual is true of the society, and
vice versa. There are so many structures in sociat society.
Teaching to the test is a literal example of it,
whereby we have something we care about, we have a
(42:17):
mechanism by which we measure it, and then we devote
our attention and effort to the mechanism rather than to
that which the mechanism is meant to be an indicator of.
Speaker 4 (42:32):
I want to.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
Point out that that general structure is the fundamental philosophical
distinction between being that is, the way things really are,
and seeming that is the perfectly reasonable, superficial features that
you make use of most of the time to make
(42:56):
sense of the world. And when you are in a
situation where you can trust the world, seeming and being coincide.
You're in your own house, and if the serial box
says cheerios, unless you're someone who moves around your cereal,
you can assume that inside that box is a set
of cheerios. Right, you set up your world in such
(43:20):
a way that the surface features indicate the deep features
that you care about mistrust where you can't count on
surface and deep features aligning. It's actually one of the
most disruptive experiences.
Speaker 4 (43:39):
That we can have.
Speaker 3 (43:41):
And what this work on busyness shows is that we've
been put into a situation where we have to be
distrustful of our own sites of accomplishment. Because even though
it says cheerios on the outside, right, it says accomplishments
when you open it up inside it's just full of
all of these tiny bits that are eating up our time.
(44:04):
And so I was really struck when Laurie and I
were talking about these data that have been observed by
this empirical scientist at how deep a question they are
getting at. But in many ways, there's no deeper question
than the question we have come to twice already, one
(44:25):
when Laurie pointed out that thinking about herself thirty years
later altered the relation between her present and future self,
and the second when she pointed out that the subtitle
of the book four thousand Weeks Thriving for Mortals, so Lauren,
let's talk about mortality.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
I'm really spooked by death. I don't like it. I
don't like when anything ends.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
I don't like when a nice meal ends or a
vacation ends. When I was a little kid, this is
a very famous video of me when I'm three years
old and my family is watching a really nice fireworks display.
And I used to get really upset when fireworks end,
especially because you only see them on July fourth, and
it's a nice fireworks display and it ends. You see
my dad really trying to distract me, like, oh, look
at look at this, guys, and here's little Laurie.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
Voice goes, Daddy, are the fireworks all done? How the
fireworks are done?
Speaker 2 (45:17):
And then eventually he admits screaming, Dad, scream is the
scream I want to give every time I think that,
you know, eighty ninety years from now, I won't be here, right,
I won't be here in the year twenty one hundred, right,
probably maybe medical technology being what it is, we'll see.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
But that really spooks me.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
And that means that I kind of ignore the fact
that I'm finite. But what the research shows is that
might not be such a hot thing because recognizing that
things are final make you appreciate them more. One of
my favorite studies on this worked with college students that
got to college students not to think about their own death,
which is really far away, but the fact that college
was going to end. They brought seniors in and reminded them, oh, hey,
(45:57):
you only have this many weeks left, versus another condition
where they kind of made it seem like, oh, it's
a really long stretch of time. And what they found
is that by the end of this semester, those seniors
who've been reminded of how short the time they had
was the sort of temporal scarcity is the word they
use for it, they wound up happier at the end
of the year. But that was in part because if
you measured the number of kind of cool activities they did,
(46:18):
they wound up doing more because they felt like, it's
so sure, I got.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
To get them in right.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
And so temporal scarcity, when we think about our own
lives seems to do the same thing. We wind up
making time for the things that really matter, the people
that really matter, the stuff we really want to get to.
If we think the time horizons too long, we just
kind of put it off right. We talked about these
temporal biases before, but recognizing that things are scarce, as
existentially scary as it might be, kind of makes us
(46:45):
do a little bit better.
Speaker 3 (46:46):
And speaking of temporal scarcity, we have fifty three two
one seconds left. The philosopher Don Stewart Male developed a
moral theory that basically said, the most important feature of
happiness is that the joy of others brings joy to you,
(47:10):
and thereby the conflict between individual happiness and communal happiness collapses,
because what brings individual happiness is the capacity to take
joy in the experience of others. And I will say
this hour has been an opportunity for me, and I
(47:31):
believe for my second self, Laurie, to feel exactly that.
Thank you for being present with us as we thought
and talked together. Thank you for being a group of
people to whom we felt connected and ready to feel
vulnerable in.
Speaker 4 (47:51):
Front of.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Huge thanks to my friend Tamar Ginler and the amazing
staff and sponsors of the International Festival of.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
Arts and Ideas.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
If you're in New Haven, Connecticut next summer, you should
definitely check out the festival. I know I'm not the
sportiest of podcast hosts. Next week, I'll be bringing out
my inner athlete because the Happiness Lab and other Pushkins
shows will be going to the Olympics. We'll meet a
track and field athlete who fell out of love with running.
We'll learn how she hung up her shoes, only to
explode back into the sport years later as one of
(48:23):
the fastest women in the world.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
I just genuinely go into races so excited.
Speaker 2 (48:29):
You know, I could be in office right now, but
I'm said, I'm going into this massive race with huge athletes, Like, how.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
Cool is that.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
That's all next time on the Happiness Lab with me
Doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Thanks to everyone who listened to the most recent season
of The Happiness Lab, which was all about the well
being challenges that I struggle with most. I've learned a
lot from making that series, but I got to admit
at times it was pretty hard. I know it's healthy
to be vulnerable and talk about your problems, but it's
often easier said than done, which is exactly what I'll
be discussing on this week's episode with my dear colleague,
(00:44):
the Yale philosopher and cognitive scientist ta mark Endler. I'm
guessing you've probably heard Tamorro and The Happiness Lab before.
In the past, we've talked about what famous philosophers like
Socrates and Aristotle said about happiness. But as my close friend,
Tamar also had lots of interesting ideas about the problems
I decided to tackle in the last season.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
So when Tomorrow and I were.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
Invited to give a joint talk at the twenty twenty
four International Festival of Arts and Ideas, New Haven, Connecticut,
we thought, why not reflect.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
On what we've both learned from these personal shows.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
The first of Little Arts and Ideas kindly allowed us
to share our conversation, so now you can listen to
I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Thank you so much to all of you who are
joining us here. It really feels like we are among friends.
But one of the things you may or may not
know is that, in addition to being professional colleagues who've
done a lot of work together, Laurie and I are
actually very close friends. And in fact, we're such close
(01:45):
friends that we often finish one another's sentences. So what
we want to do today is actually have a conversation
with you that's much more intimate and personal than we
have ever done before in a public setting. Everything that
(02:06):
we say to one another is going to be in
warmed by the academic research that we do. But our
goal in speaking before you today is really to give
some autobiographical information about our own experiences, our own struggles,
and our own challenges. And Laurie has set the tone
(02:29):
for doing this with her recent podcast.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
The Happiness Lab is my podcast where I talk about
so many things in the science of happiness. We focused
on lots of different topics, but just this summer we
started a new season. It's a whole season about the
happiness challenges that I face personally, and this is a
spot where you might be saying, like wait a minute,
hang on, Like I signed up really early for this
event to talk to a happiness expert.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
How is the happiness expert.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
So messed up when it comes to having a challenges
like you know, did I not train?
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Like what's going on?
Speaker 2 (03:00):
And it turns out that that's in part because I'm human, right,
we all struggle with happiness challenges. But it also comes
about do I to A kind of funny puzzle that
comes up in cognitive science is actually a puzzle that
Tomorrow and I have written about.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
I believe it was.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
In fact, I think it was our first paper that
we ever wrote together. And it's basically about how it
is possible to have theoretical knowledge and lack practical knowledge.
So there's a great tradition in ancient Greek philosophy of
(03:34):
distinguishing between knowledge of abstract things, a kind of theoretical
wisdom which goes by various names, a knowledge of practical things,
of how to flourish, of how to live, which is
in certain parts of the Greek tradition called phronesis practical wisdom.
(03:55):
And what's interesting about practical wisdom is that it comes
about through different sorts of activities than theoretical wisdom does.
And so Laurie and I were at the late Great
La Fitness, who belonged to La Fitness in Hamden, right
(04:16):
near the Stop and shop. So we were at La
or La Fitness, engaging in bodily exercise, and I was
talking to Laurie about this ancient philosophical tradition and basically
telling her how in ancient Greek philosophy there's a distinctionion
roughly between book smarts and street smarts.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
And Laurie said, oh, my.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
God, did you know there's also an eighties television show
about that? And of course I did not know there
was an eighties television show because I grew up with
parents who bought a TV to watch Nixon resign and
then put it away.
Speaker 4 (04:52):
But it was that eighties.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
Television show, which Laurie will describe, that gave us the
idea for the first joint paper that we wrote, which
is about why Laurie, even though she's the world's happiness expert,
is still having trouble making it work in her life.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Anybody who want to guess to get guess what the
eighties TV show was, it was actually Gi Joe.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
It was eighties cartoon.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
To be fair, why is the Gijo television show about
this disconnect between kind of head knowledge and street knowledge?
If you remember the g I Joe? How many you
have actually seen the g I Joe TV show? Okay,
we're seeing some hands some of you. Some of you
are a little older than eighties TV shows.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
That's cool. Some of you are a little younger.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
They're like, So g I Jo was the show with
a bunch of like army guys who did kind of
army guy heroic things. But it's most famous for how
each cartoon episode ended. It ended some of you're not
It ended with this public service announcement which taught kids
really important things in the eighties, like don't talk to
strangers or look both ways when you cross your street.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
It was really basic stuff.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
But Gi Jo would explain this big public service message
to their kids and the kids would say, thank you,
g I Joe.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Now I know, and g I Jo would say and
knowing is half the battle, and go gi Joe, Now
that's all.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
I would be like, oh, now I remember. But this
was the catchphrase, Knowing is half the battle. When you
know a thing, you're most of the way there, and
what tomorrow I wrote in our you know now pretty
well known. I think paper is the idea that that
statement knowing is half the battle is a fallacy, one
that we've christened the g I Joe fallacy.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Knowing is not half the battle, right, you know? Take
take my fitness.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
I know what I should be eating, I know I
should get to the gym all the time.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
That doesn't mean I do it right.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
We know so many things about the stuff that we
should be doing, but that doesn't translate into the practical
doing those things. And this is what I feel like
I'm struggling with a little bit when it comes to
the happiness science. Obviously I know about this stuff, right,
I teach an Ivy League institution, all these tips and
strategies that we should be using to feel better and
protect our mental health and so on. But it's still
(06:51):
really hard to put those strategies into practice. And so
this is what we wanted to get intimate about today.
Does that sound good a reason to it?
Speaker 4 (06:58):
Not that, right?
Speaker 3 (07:01):
So one of the really cool things about the GI
Joe fallacy is that it's self referential. It applies to itself.
So I traced it through the entire Western philosophical tradition,
all the places where somebody had noticed this.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
The Gi Joe fallacy is true of itself.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
The fact that we know that knowing is less than
half the battle doesn't mean that we thereby assimilate that
knowledge into our behavior. And the key challenge of flourishing
in the ancient philosophical tradition of the West, in Greece
(07:44):
and Rome, and I would say the key challenge of
flourishing and happiness in contemporary cognitive science discourse is the
question of how you speak, how you train, how you
control the aspects of yourself that are not subject to
(08:05):
rational control.
Speaker 4 (08:08):
It's really easy.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
To understand the Gi Joe fallacy. It's really easy to
listen to Laurie's podcast. It's really easy to read a
bunch of neuroscience articles, and doing that is less than
half the battle. So a lot of ancient wisdom tradition
work in Western philosophy, things like Plato and Aristytle, are
(08:31):
actually about how you make things stick in a way
that you have them present at the moment that matters
in lots of ways. The challenge of understanding in a
practical sense is the challenge of having the thought that
you want to have the reaction that you want to
(08:53):
have ready to hand at the moment that you needed
You can do all the rehearsing you want of staying
calm in the face of things that enrage you. And
if that skill is not ready to hand at the
(09:14):
moment where you are in a conversation with a loved
one who says something painful to you, it has not
properly served you. So the very first explicitly self help
book was actually called the ready to handbook.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
It's a little book by.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
A philosopher named Epicteitis, was written about two thousand years ago.
It was called in Greek the Enchiridion. What that means
is handbook, ready to handbook. It was meant to give
you a bunch of skills that would be available to
you at the moment that you needed them. And what
Laurie has been working on in the most recent aspect
(09:58):
of her podcast is really a set of reflections on
making things ready to hand. She's been focusing on five
topics and what we want to try to do today
is to get through at least three of them. We
may make it to four, we may even we'll see
not if I keep going on like this make it
(10:20):
to five.
Speaker 4 (10:21):
But let me just let you know what.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
They are so that you have a sense of the
issues that we want to discuss today. So the first
is the topic of perfectionism and how we deal with
expectations that we have for ourselves that are hard to meet.
The second is the question about the relation between your
present and future self. How do we rightly decide what
(10:43):
we do now that will help us later, what we
do now that will harm us later? How do we
balance ourself across ten third is the issue of stress
and how we represent it to ourselves and manage it.
The fourth is the issue of busyness and how we
(11:05):
manage in a world where we may feel over committed.
The fifth, because this is arts and ideas and we
don't want to shy away from the biggest ones, is
the question of how we think about our own mortality
and the ways in which reflecting on our own mortality
can help us to live each moment of our non
(11:27):
mortality as well as we can.
Speaker 4 (11:31):
So I want to start.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
By asking Laurie to say a few words about perfectionism.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
How many folks and audience think of themselves as a
little perfectionists. A show of hands. I'm seeing a lot
of hands. Okay, yeah, I mean I don't need to
even explain, right, Like, I'm a type AIVY League professor
who cares about a lot, and I set really high
standards for myself. That's the way I say, in a
kind way, Oh, I set high standards for myself. It
sounds like the kind of thing you say in an
interview when someone asks what's your worst trait and you say, oh,
(12:02):
that sounds good. But the reality out of it inside
is much different. The reality of it inside is that
I'm incredibly self critical. It's really hard to figure out
anything I do that feels like it's above bar right.
Everything I do is like, well, I could have done
that better, I know, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1 (12:17):
And that causes me to do a couple things that
I don't like.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
When is it causes me to shy away from anything
where I feel like I might screw up. Right, there's
always like new hobbies or new cool things I want
to try to be like, oh, I'm not gonna be
good at that, and I kind of run away. It
also means that I constantly feel kind of yucky because
my internal monologue is this sort of terrible, mean drill
sergeant who's kind of yelling at me all the time.
And so even though it's kind of in some ways
(12:42):
something that we get a little bit proud of, the
person I interview for my episode, Thomas Kurrn says it's
our society's favorite flaw, perfectionism. Like, it's actually something that
makes me feel kind of crappy on a regular basis
and something that I've wanted to fix.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
So I had a wonderful example of perfectionism hit me today.
So I actually have to be in Denver tonight, and
so right after this event, I'm going to go down
to look Hard Airport and fly out. So while I
am away, I have a house sitter who is a
student who's probably going to listen to this podcast and
(13:18):
hear this story. So I'm incredibly anxious that my house
be super clean and organized, and I can't bear for
her to open my fridge and not see the shelves
perfectly polished. And for some reason, I got obsessed this
morning with the fact that I had an extra head
of ridicio in the fridge, which I had purchased it
(13:41):
had been very expensive. I bought it at Nika's and
I hadn't eaten it, and I literally called Laurie and said,
could you come over before and ideas talk to take
the ridicio so that I don't let it go to
waste in my fridge in a way that is visible
(14:03):
in this undergraduate research assistant who's going to be house sitting. Now,
what's funny about that story is that both my anxiety
and my instinctive reaction were due to a particular deep
fact about human beings, which is what other people think
(14:27):
of us matters to us. The philosopher Plato spoke of
our soul as having three parts. He called them reason, spirit,
and appetite. Reason is the part of you that responds
to rational concerns and information and facts. Appetite is the
part of you that basically responds to your need to
(14:48):
keep going that's roughly food and procreation. And spirit is
the part of you that responds to the social world
around you. So Plato recognized that a deep segment of
our motivation as human beings results from our desire to
(15:10):
be judged affirmatively by others.
Speaker 4 (15:14):
And what's really.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Cool is that just as that led to detriment this
morning as I was anxiously polishing the coffee filter, polishing
the coffee filter because I was sure that this lovely
nineteen year old young woman must come from a home
with a polished coffee filter, not with a dirty coffee
(15:37):
written coffee filter.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
Shacsay had like coffee filters, I caro when I showed up,
and I'm like, fixed this before we go on stage.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Anyway, go ahead.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
I was so concerned with the gaze of another that
I lost track of a lesson that Plato's student Aristotle
puts forward, which is the idea that a friend can
serve as a second self. Aristotle says, a friend is
(16:07):
a second self. It magnet defies our joy and cuts
in half our sorrow.
Speaker 4 (16:14):
So I want to.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
Let Laurie give you a sense of the science behind
why the right thing for me to do when I
was anxious about my ridicio was to reach out to
someone else and say the shameful words.
Speaker 4 (16:30):
I bought a.
Speaker 3 (16:31):
Head of ridicuo at Nika's that I.
Speaker 4 (16:34):
Did not eat.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
The most sad thing was it because we were prepping.
We actually didn't end up eating still in the fridge,
but we're working on the grace that comes with that.
Speaker 4 (16:45):
No, I mean I think you know.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
Tomorrow pointed out that this issue of being worried about
what other people think is part of human nature. But
one of the things we also learned in the science
is that this particular aspect of our perfectionism is getting
worse over time. Doctor Curran, who I had on the show,
did this very famous paper where he's a professor in
the UK. He deals with students just to the way
(17:07):
that Tomorrow and I do, and he started having this
sense that, like, the modern college student is like a
little bit more perfectionists than they were five years ago,
ten years ago, and so on.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
And he said, well, could that really be?
Speaker 2 (17:17):
I wonder if there's survey data about that, And so
he went all the way back to the eighties and
looked at every paper that gave college students a survey
about perfectionism, and just like tight traded up over time.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
And what he's found is that since the nineteen eighties, since.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Gijoe was on the air, overall perfectionism has gone up
in young people about thirty percent, which is pretty intense.
But he also found that there's one part of perfectionism
that's going up the most. We have different parts of perfections,
is like I have these high standards for myself, right,
or perhaps I hold high standards for other people. We
often talk about like a perfectionist boss who expects you
(17:52):
to do too much. But the part that's most going
up in young people today is the opposite of that.
Speaker 1 (17:58):
I assume that other people expect a lot of me.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
Right, if my students coming over my house, they're going
to judge me for what my coffee pop looks like
and so on. That's the part that's gone up the
most since the nineteen eighties, which is a problem. It
means not only do we have the kind of human
nature that is really worried about what other people are thinking,
our misconception about that has gotten worse over time. And
you can probably make guesses about why that is, things
like being on social media all the time and having
(18:23):
the gaze of others on you in a very special way.
But the way you solve this, of course, is to
try to harness not some like general kind of misconceived
idea of the other who's really being judge of you.
You bring to mind a real second friend, right to
mark think about, well, what's Lauria're going to really think
about the Ridicia if it was her staying in my house,
which she really judged me, and she'd be like, actually,
(18:44):
probably I'm not back. I actually don't have any vegetables
in my frider now, so I definitely would have be judging.
But yeah, I should be like, oh, when I think
about myself and my own achievements from the perspective of
a friend, now all of a sudden, I can give
myself grace. And it turns out that this is the
practice that you bring to mind if you want to
fight your perfectionism. You actually think, you know this terrible voice,
(19:06):
this inner drill sergeant in your head is kind of
yelling at you. You give them a voice like, okay,
you know our drill sergeant voice. I'm going to summon
the Tomorrow voice, like what would Tamorrow tell me?
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Right?
Speaker 2 (19:16):
And just the instant of doing that is a really
key way to fight your inner critic and bring in
somebody who cares about you. And I love this idea
of kind of using self talk as though you're hearing
from a friend, because that kind of self talk isn't coddling, right,
Tomorrow wouldn't judge me for having a erdicio in my fridge.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
But if I was truly messing something up tomorrow, woul
want to talk to me about it.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
She wouldn't scream at me like a drill sergeant in
the way I often do with my perfectionist voice. But
she'd get curious. She'd be like, what is going on?
We need to address this, Let's talk about it. And
so harnessing that friend voice allows you to do something
really important. You're shutting off the drill sergeant perfectionist voice
that's demanding too much of you, But you have a
curious voice there that's wise, that really is going to
(20:00):
push you if you needed. And so it's this perfect
balance between kind of overcddling but kind of being too
drill sergeanty. On the other hand, ability to adopt a
different persona in order to talk to yourself is an
important skill.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
It's also one that can improve your happiness.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
But I'll let Tamar explain more when the Happiness Lab
returns in a moment. So far, in our talk at
the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, my friend Tamar
Genler and I have discussed why talking to yourself like
(20:36):
a compassionate friend can help you fight perfectionism, but tomorrow
thinks this technique can apply and lots of other situations too.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
It's actually the most important general skill that we can acquire,
because it's roughly a skill of perspective taking. We spend
our entire lives viewing the world from inside our own heads,
from the perspective of the world that is unique to us,
(21:06):
and when we're young children, infants, we're so certain that
the world is in accord with our perception of it
that when we cover our own eyes, we think we're invisible.
The moment of coming to be a social being is
(21:26):
the moment of recognizing that, in addition to your own eyes,
there are eyes of others, and the capacity to have
ready to hand the eyes and voices of others. The
other perspectives that might be taken at both the instance
(21:47):
when you are being too easy on yourself and the
instance of when you are being too hard on yourself
is perhaps the deepest way to take advantage of our
ability to perspective. Take notice that even as perfectionists are
(22:08):
super with the self whose viewpoint they are sitting in,
all of us, including perfectionists, are remarkably able to make
exceptions for ourselves to recognize that something that objectively speaking
would be wrong or problematic or unfair is, in our
(22:30):
particular case, being done for this enormous set of reasons
to which only we have access. So the observation that
the way we deal in a very practical sense with
perfectionism is to have ready to hand at all times
the voice of another right. It's like wearing a bracelet
(22:53):
that says, what would LORI say, or if you are
a member of a faith tradition, what would the figure
who represents goodness and truth and understanding in my faith
tradition do?
Speaker 4 (23:06):
Or say?
Speaker 3 (23:07):
That capacity to use the perspective of another the very
practical advice think about what your friend would say is
part of the general skill of being able to recognize
that there are multiple perspectives in the world. Now, one
of the interesting ways that this plays out is actually
(23:27):
with regard to the second dilemma that Laurie has been confronting,
which is that, in addition to being friends with other people,
that is, beings who exist at the same moment we do,
but aren't us, we're kind of also stuck forever being
(23:47):
friends with, or at least being affected by our past
selves and our future selves. Roughly speaking, most of the
stuff that our past self does renowns on our present self,
and most of the things that our presence self does
is going to determine what happens to our future self.
And the question of how to think of selves across
(24:10):
time is the second fundamental issue that Laurie's been addressing
in her podcast.
Speaker 2 (24:15):
And when I started thinking about this issue, I realized
that even though I'm very kind to other people, you know,
I'm not judging about tomorrow, about what she has in
fridge and so on, there's actually like one person out
there that I'm really mean to future Laurie. I assume
future Laurie loves going at the gym. She's not gonna
mind taking on that terrible task that I agreed to
(24:36):
over email, because I just want to get the person
over email, like she's happy to do this, like a
really big work project. She is moral and not so
busy and really excited to do all the stuff that
President Laurie doesn't want to do at all.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
But of course, you know, true perspective taking would lean
to this. This is fact that that Laurie doesn't want
to deal with this stuff.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Either, And so what happens is that it's kind of
like the Lauri's are all at this like negotiation table,
but I President Laurie and the only one with a voice.
I'm like, oh yeah, future Laurie would love to do that,
and somewhere she's off in some like other dimension. So
the episode was an attempt to deal with like my
myopia right the fact that I'm really near sighted. I'm
(25:16):
thinking about me right now and how can I get
nicer to my future self. But what I wound up
realizing in this episode is that I was focused on
all these cases of myopia right like present Laurie is
like kind of really messing with future Lari.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
But as I did the episode, I started to think.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
About other cases where I'm not being myopic, but I
might instead be being hyperopic, very far sighted. All those
evenings were trying to send one more email off, but
present Laurie could be hanging out with her husband. All
those cases where I got something nice and nice bottle
of wine or like a new dress, I feel like, oh,
it's not the right time right now to enjoy that.
(25:53):
I'll wait for future Lauri to enjoy that. There's all
these times where I'm kind of assuming future Laari will
get to enjoy this thing.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
That means I'm kind of missing out on the present.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
And so the episode is an interesting one because it
helped me realize I messed up both ways. I assumed
it was mostly being unkind to future Lauri, but sometimes
President Lauria is being unkind to herself on behalf of
future Laurie.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
But if I could just talk to future Laurie, you'd
be like, don't do that on behalf of the either.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
And so we in an episode talk about solutions, but tomorrow,
first I want to hear about you know, what did
the ancients say about this?
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Did they have some insight?
Speaker 3 (26:25):
Yeah, So the ancients are really interested in actually developing
habits that allow your past self, your present self, and
your future self to kind of equally divide both the
costs and the benefits of the things that are going
to be of long term value to you, So eating
(26:49):
healthy food, being deeply connected to those around you, being
an individual who exhibits character virtues like braveness or honesty
or justice. What the ancient philosopher Aristotle says to do
is to act like you already were the thing that
(27:11):
you wish to become fake it till you make it,
as the contemporary version calls it. But notice that that
is about creating intertemporal fairness.
Speaker 4 (27:24):
Across sells. There is a set.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
Of activities that may be locally unpleasant. The local activity
of engaging in exercise until your muscle hurts, the local
activity of holding back your desire to indulge in a
particular way, the local activity of tamping your emotion. If
(27:48):
you practice doing that now, it becomes natural to you.
It becomes part of who you are, and it solves
some of the intertemporal problem. Notice that, as with self regulation,
so with self care. Both Laurie and I laughed when
(28:09):
Laurie said, whenever I buy a bath bomb, I think, well,
but I can't use that now.
Speaker 4 (28:15):
How many of you have beside your bathtub?
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Yes, Shelley Kalum, my next door neighbor has beside our bathtub,
many many bathballs. What Aristotle would tell you to do
is to create a ritual. On Thursdays, I take a
warm bath with my bathball. I'm not going to use
them up too fast. I'm not going to use them
up too slowly. I've made them part of a routine.
(28:39):
I've made them part of a ritual. I've made them
part of a habit. When you are trying to distribute
things across as Lori points out, individuals, only one of
whom is at the table at that given moment, only
present you is there. The best way for present you
(29:02):
to relate both to past you and to future you
is to engage in these processes where the world causes
you to split the resources across time. You can use ritual,
you can use habit, you can use routie.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
And so I think that those are the kind of
things that we talk about in the episode. I actually
tried a different hack that was probably not available to
Aristotle at the time, or at least not in the
way I tried it, but it does get back to
one of his insights. It goes back to the importance
of perspective taking. Right, if I could really bring Futulaari
to the negotiating table and like talk to her and
(29:42):
really see what she wanted, maybe I would do better.
And the technology that wasn't available at Aristotle's time, even
though he kind of realized this whole second self thing,
was to go on, say Snapchat and use a future
filter where you can look at himself Aristotle, young Aristotl
and fast forward to what he looks like when he's seventy.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Aristotol obviously didn't have iPhones, but I did.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
And so I could go on there and use these
How many people in the audience have used these kind
of aging filters and looked at you if you're a
there's like three college students and they're like, I had
never done this either, but I did this. I encourage
you to kind of try it out. If you've never
done this. You basically are looking at a little video
of yourself as a selfie, and you become like thirty
(30:24):
or forty years older, like through these aging filters. And
I stay had a very interesting reaction, which is like,
you know, I'm looking at this picture of future Lauria
as though I would be looking at a FaceTime call
with tomorrow, Like she's there, she's my friend, and she
has preferences. And so this is actually some lovely work
by hal Hirshfield, who's done this in experimental context. He
shows people older versions of themselves, and he finds that
(30:47):
they wind up solving the same kinds of like temporal
choice problems that Aristotle was so concerned with. They wind
up saving more for retirement and one experiment for the
next month. After they've done this, they wind up eating
healthier and so on. And so this was maybe like
the high tech version of the ritualistic thing that Aristotle
wanted us all to do. But given that it's available
(31:09):
on all of your smartphones, worth trying out.
Speaker 3 (31:11):
And one of the crazy things that that brings out
is how powerful how we represent the world as being
is to how we experience the world. Right, it wasn't
a fact already that thirty years from now, Laurie is
going to be thirty years older, but bringing that vividly
before your mind, bringing that into active awareness, causes it
(31:36):
to play a role in your thinking. And one of
the really cool things in Laurie's episode on We'll turn
to our third example now, stress is the work of
a contemporary psychologist helps.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
Show how powerful how we.
Speaker 3 (31:57):
Represent an experience as being can be on how that
experience affects us. Do you want to talk about some
of the alio chrom work on stress.
Speaker 2 (32:07):
Yeah, And first, maybe this is one I don't need
to set up right. I was going to tell you,
like I'm really stressed out, but I'm guessing.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
A lot of you are about to laugh right now.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
Anybody out there feel a little stressed out right now?
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Yeah, that's what I thought, right, Like.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Stress, it affects us all, And I think one of
the reasons that you're all laughing is like it affects
us all.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
But it's we don't think.
Speaker 2 (32:25):
Of it as this wonderful experience, right, It's not like
we think of being stressed out as our body's reaction
to protect us against the bad things and pump luclose
into our blood.
Speaker 1 (32:36):
When we need it the most.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
Like it's not especially designed evolve system to give us
the energy we need. Well, we really need to push
it to the metal. That's not how we think about stress.
But if you're a biologist looking at the autonomic nervous system,
you might say exactly that about stress. We think of
stress as debilitating, right. We think it's there to kind
of mess us up and it's going to destroy us.
(32:58):
And that's impart because if you don't regulate your stress,
it does. Right. Chronic stress is really terrible for so
many aspects of our biology. But it turns out that
the act of thinking about stress as bad might be
one of the reasons that chronic stress is so bad.
This was an insight by the Stanford psychologist Alia Crumb,
who incidentally was a student here back in the day.
(33:19):
She actually worked with, you know, this unknown psychologist Peter Salada,
who is right now president of Yale.
Speaker 1 (33:25):
But Alia had this insight.
Speaker 2 (33:27):
You know, there's so many ways that our mind, if
we think about something in a certain way as good
or bad, in some ways, that thinking makes it.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
So I wonder if that works the same way for stress.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
And so she brought students into the lab gave them
some like stressful situation.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
Often this is what's called the Streer stress test.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
It means you bring a student into lab and like, great,
You're going to give it impromptu speech with no preparation.
There's going to be a really mean panel of judges
that watches you go for it. And what happens is
that immedia stress Reactually, you know, stress worm was like
cortusol kick in.
Speaker 1 (33:56):
It's really scary.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
Some students got the primer that tells them, rinds them
and remember how stress usually feels. It's pretty debilitating, right,
It's usually bad. Your heart's going to raise, it's not great.
The second group of students got a different way to
think about stress. They said, you know, you might feel
stressed out right now, but that's actually great. That means
your stress hormones are really pumping energy into your blood.
Like literally, there's going to be more glucose in your blood,
(34:19):
which will get more kind of energy up to your brain.
It will make you think a little bit better. It'll
help you out right. Stress can be enhancing. What she
didn't looked at is students' performance. They wind up performing better,
but more they wind up having not the same reaction
as the folks in the other condition whose chronic stress kind.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Of kept them going.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
They performed badly, but then they showed these harsh effects
kind of days on when you look at them later.
Those students who thought that stress was good, all of
a sudden they experienced the stress, they do better and
they shut the stress off. One of the reasons that
our chronic stress is there is we might be thinking
about it in a way that it's going to really
harm us. One of the researchers I interview for the podcast,
(35:00):
David Yaeger, who's at UT Austin. He took this in
a different direction. He said, well, that's true maybe with
these messages about the fact that stress isn't actually that
bad when you look biologically, maybe we can actually stop
chronic stress in a population that we know experiences a
lot of stress. He actually worked with low income high
school students from marginalized identities, right, so these are students
(35:21):
who are just experiencing all kinds of stresses financial, social,
and these kinds of things in high school. He started
by giving them this primer that said, hey, you know,
stress can be really good when you experience it, and
it's good over time, you'll kind of get better at
dealing with it, a little bit of a growth mindset too.
And what he finds is that those high school students,
when they give journal entries later about the things that
are going on in their life, they wind up saying
(35:43):
on days where their journal says I was experiencing something
really stressful today, something that was really hard, they say,
but it's going to be all right, I'll deal with it.
They also show lower cortisol, which is a stress hormone,
throughout the semester. Right. So, just this reframing of how
we think about stress can affect whether or not a
truly objectively stressful situation right, like growing up as a
(36:05):
low income high school student and a tough neighborhood, whether
or not that's really kind of stress you out. And
so this was really powerful for me because it brought
up exactly the same thing that the ancients were kind
of thinking about that like, in some sense, thinking does
make it so.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
So that brings us and I believe we are actually
going to make it through all five are okay, and
we are going to make it through all five because
I allowed myself to succumb to both the benefits on
the costs of the fourth of Lori's topics, which is
the topic.
Speaker 4 (36:36):
Of being busy.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
I'm putting too much into a limited period of time.
Speaker 4 (36:44):
Laurie Santos take it away.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
Yeah, I mean I think we're all subject to being
a little bit busy these things, and I think busy
and especially the way that tamarg just said is being
which is putting too much into a limited period of time.
In the episode, I talk with the journalist Oliver Berkman,
who has a fantastic book which you haven't read it,
(37:06):
you should check it out. It's called four thousand Weeks
Time Management for Mortals, and.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
His idea was that you know, when you really.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
Come to terms with the fact that you are finite,
it really changes the amount of stuff that you feel
like you can reasonably put on your plate, right, Like,
really true time management is recognizing there's just never going
to be enough time for stuff. There's never going to
be enough time for stuff this summer. There's never going
to be enough time for stuff in this life, right,
(37:35):
which is scary. But the question is like, given that,
how do we decide what to put on our plate?
Speaker 1 (37:42):
Right? How do we navigate like how to be the
most productive?
Speaker 2 (37:45):
And this is another spot where the scholars haven't really
helped us out because there were historically not as far
back in history as Tomorrow was thinking about, but there
were historically like good ideas about what counted as productivity.
Right back in the day we had agriculture, we could
easily figure out how we should be spending our time, right,
how much should we plant?
Speaker 1 (38:05):
How much should we work to deal with the crops?
Speaker 4 (38:07):
Right?
Speaker 1 (38:08):
You know you count bush corn that you get per
your time?
Speaker 2 (38:10):
You know?
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Okay, however I maximize that I'm doing good?
Speaker 2 (38:13):
Or imagine you work on an assembly line, how many
like little widgets should you build? Well, it's like we
can figure out like the amount of work that goes
into making a maximum number of them. So many of
us these days don't work in agriculture. Many of us
don't work on an assembly line. Many of us do
the kind of thing that Tomorrow and I do, which
you might call knowledge work. I'm a podcaster, I'm a professor.
(38:33):
I come up with lectures. We're both academics. We come
up with ideas and books. But it's not like Tomorrow
and I at the end of our day have like
a big pile of widgets, like you know, academic paper
widgets that we produce.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Papers take different amounts of the time. You have to
think about the ideas you have to work on.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
You have to noodle it, fill of bit. Sometimes we
get more intense periods and so on. And this is
an insight that one of my podcast guests, cal Newport
comes up with. He's like, the problem is that we
don't have great ideas of productivity right now. He thinks
that we came up with one though, because of course
we want a kind of assembly line model for everything
we do. And his argument is that we've come up
with what's known as soon productivity. Basically, instead of counting widgets,
(39:12):
we count the visible activity that it looks like we're
engaged in. So you answered that Slack message, you're applied
to that email, you're at work, you know, typing away.
And that's what we use because figuring out like what
means to be productive on the big stuff, like how
many good podcast episodes come out, or how many academic articles,
or the number of good ideas your doctors.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Come up with when he's trying to heal you.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Those are too hard, right, So we use visible productivity.
But then what happens Then you're trying to maximize that metric.
You're answering all these emails, you're being at all those
standing meetings, you're looking at those Slack messages. But what
does that do to the actual amount of time you
have free to work on the big projects?
Speaker 1 (39:48):
It goes away Yanks.
Speaker 2 (39:50):
She has this lovely phrase that he uses where he
says that those kind of little tasks become what he
calls productivity termites that eat away at your schedule. You know,
So you look at your calendar and it's just like
this crumbling building of this schedule because you don't have
time to do any of the big stuff. And so
the podcast is in an attempt to say, Okay, how
do we do this, how do we kind of answer
(40:11):
to the fact that we have the wrong metric when
it comes to what it means to be productive.
Speaker 3 (40:16):
And what's fascinating is that when Laurie and I were
talking about this, I realized that in many ways this
touches on the most fundamental philosophical distinction that Plato makes,
which is the distinction between what is and what seems
(40:38):
to be, what is actual and what we use as
its surrogate representation, what is most fundamental and deep and
what is on the surface. And the entire warning of
Plato's philosophical work is an attempt to warn us against
(41:01):
taking seriously what Plato calls the shadows in the cave,
rather than what it is.
Speaker 4 (41:08):
That the shadow in the cave are reflections of.
Speaker 3 (41:11):
That is, Plato's warning is a warning against falling for
surface rather than deep features, for the smoke, which is
a typical indicator of the fire, rather than the fire itself.
And in a lot of ways we are subject to
(41:32):
teaching to the test for ourselves, right we get this measure?
The measure is how many things did I get taken
off my checklist today, and we use that surface feature,
the platonic shadow, rather than focusing on the fundamental object,
which is how deeply did I come to understand something
(41:56):
about the world. Notice that, as in Plato's Republic, what's
true of the individual is true of the society, and
vice versa. There are so many structures in sociat society.
Teaching to the test is a literal example of it,
whereby we have something we care about, we have a
(42:17):
mechanism by which we measure it, and then we devote
our attention and effort to the mechanism rather than to
that which the mechanism is meant to be an indicator of.
Speaker 4 (42:32):
I want to.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
Point out that that general structure is the fundamental philosophical
distinction between being that is, the way things really are,
and seeming that is the perfectly reasonable, superficial features that
you make use of most of the time to make
(42:56):
sense of the world. And when you are in a
situation where you can trust the world, seeming and being coincide.
You're in your own house, and if the serial box
says cheerios, unless you're someone who moves around your cereal,
you can assume that inside that box is a set
of cheerios. Right, you set up your world in such
(43:20):
a way that the surface features indicate the deep features
that you care about mistrust where you can't count on
surface and deep features aligning. It's actually one of the
most disruptive experiences.
Speaker 4 (43:39):
That we can have.
Speaker 3 (43:41):
And what this work on busyness shows is that we've
been put into a situation where we have to be
distrustful of our own sites of accomplishment. Because even though
it says cheerios on the outside, right, it says accomplishments
when you open it up inside it's just full of
all of these tiny bits that are eating up our time.
(44:04):
And so I was really struck when Laurie and I
were talking about these data that have been observed by
this empirical scientist at how deep a question they are
getting at. But in many ways, there's no deeper question
than the question we have come to twice already, one
(44:25):
when Laurie pointed out that thinking about herself thirty years
later altered the relation between her present and future self,
and the second when she pointed out that the subtitle
of the book four thousand Weeks Thriving for Mortals, so Lauren,
let's talk about mortality.
Speaker 1 (44:46):
I'm really spooked by death. I don't like it. I
don't like when anything ends.
Speaker 2 (44:49):
I don't like when a nice meal ends or a
vacation ends. When I was a little kid, this is
a very famous video of me when I'm three years
old and my family is watching a really nice fireworks display.
And I used to get really upset when fireworks end,
especially because you only see them on July fourth, and
it's a nice fireworks display and it ends. You see
my dad really trying to distract me, like, oh, look
at look at this, guys, and here's little Laurie.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
Voice goes, Daddy, are the fireworks all done? How the
fireworks are done?
Speaker 2 (45:17):
And then eventually he admits screaming, Dad, scream is the
scream I want to give every time I think that,
you know, eighty ninety years from now, I won't be here, right,
I won't be here in the year twenty one hundred, right,
probably maybe medical technology being what it is, we'll see.
Speaker 1 (45:34):
But that really spooks me.
Speaker 2 (45:36):
And that means that I kind of ignore the fact
that I'm finite. But what the research shows is that
might not be such a hot thing because recognizing that
things are final make you appreciate them more. One of
my favorite studies on this worked with college students that
got to college students not to think about their own death,
which is really far away, but the fact that college
was going to end. They brought seniors in and reminded them, oh, hey,
(45:57):
you only have this many weeks left, versus another condition
where they kind of made it seem like, oh, it's
a really long stretch of time. And what they found
is that by the end of this semester, those seniors
who've been reminded of how short the time they had
was the sort of temporal scarcity is the word they
use for it, they wound up happier at the end
of the year. But that was in part because if
you measured the number of kind of cool activities they did,
(46:18):
they wound up doing more because they felt like, it's
so sure, I got.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
To get them in right.
Speaker 2 (46:22):
And so temporal scarcity, when we think about our own
lives seems to do the same thing. We wind up
making time for the things that really matter, the people
that really matter, the stuff we really want to get to.
If we think the time horizons too long, we just
kind of put it off right. We talked about these
temporal biases before, but recognizing that things are scarce, as
existentially scary as it might be, kind of makes us
(46:45):
do a little bit better.
Speaker 3 (46:46):
And speaking of temporal scarcity, we have fifty three two
one seconds left. The philosopher Don Stewart Male developed a
moral theory that basically said, the most important feature of
happiness is that the joy of others brings joy to you,
(47:10):
and thereby the conflict between individual happiness and communal happiness collapses,
because what brings individual happiness is the capacity to take
joy in the experience of others. And I will say
this hour has been an opportunity for me, and I
(47:31):
believe for my second self, Laurie, to feel exactly that.
Thank you for being present with us as we thought
and talked together. Thank you for being a group of
people to whom we felt connected and ready to feel
vulnerable in.
Speaker 4 (47:51):
Front of.
Speaker 2 (47:55):
Huge thanks to my friend Tamar Ginler and the amazing
staff and sponsors of the International Festival of.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
Arts and Ideas.
Speaker 2 (48:01):
If you're in New Haven, Connecticut next summer, you should
definitely check out the festival. I know I'm not the
sportiest of podcast hosts. Next week, I'll be bringing out
my inner athlete because the Happiness Lab and other Pushkins
shows will be going to the Olympics. We'll meet a
track and field athlete who fell out of love with running.
We'll learn how she hung up her shoes, only to
explode back into the sport years later as one of
(48:23):
the fastest women in the world.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
I just genuinely go into races so excited.
Speaker 2 (48:29):
You know, I could be in office right now, but
I'm said, I'm going into this massive race with huge athletes, Like, how.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
Cool is that.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
That's all next time on the Happiness Lab with me
Doctor Laurie Santos
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