September 18, 2014 • 36 mins
Can money buy happiness? Find out if being flush with cash really makes a difference in your outlook. Join Robert and Julie once more for a fascinating examination of the human condition on the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to stuff to Blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie.
Live in the Dream, Douglas. You are You're You're living
the dream, the American Dream. Yeah. I have a roast
(00:23):
in the oven. I have my apron on right now,
I have my new Ford Etfel outside. And uh, you
know two and a half lovely children. And you you
probably arrived on a on a boat as an immigrant
and just fell off the boat right into a pile
of money. Right well, I'm second generation, right yeah. And
(00:46):
and hard scrabble worked for it. Really wanted that hard
scrabble life, the professional scrabble circuit. That's an entirely different
podcast episode. It's hard to make a living on that,
but but it does exist, and it's fascinating. From what
I understand. It's about as lucrative as entering into like
the Toddler beauty pageant circuit. Yeah, I think it. It
(01:09):
may be as comfortable to that, but but but slightly
less crazy. Slightly. I refer to this idea of this
nineties like ideal of the American dream, where you know,
you had the perfect lawn, you had just bought a
house in a car, and everything was okay because you
had those things right and and if you weren't happy,
(01:30):
it was achievable if you could only work hard enough
to buy these things. It was all about work hard
by the things that will give you the life that
is happiness. But does it really work like that? Does
money really buy happiness? Well, that's the big question, isn't it.
And it's certainly I threw this question out on Facebook yesterday.
(01:52):
I did a little blog post, and I found that
a lot of people just you know, instantly say no,
of course, that money didn't buy you happiness. Because that's
become an increasingly popular, uh, little bit of wisdom to
keep around in your head, especially as we live in
a world that is so fascinated with the lives of
(02:12):
celebrities and the wealthy and so you know, ruled over
by by that class of people. It's comforting to remind yourself, Oh,
they have all this money, they live this grand life,
but they're not really happy, and therefore I can feel
a little better about not having what they have. Ironically,
I feel like Oprah actually brought this idea to the masses. Yeah, right,
(02:34):
because she does a lot of self you know, introstruction
and work with her audience on what is happiness and
so on and so forth. So I feel like she
seeded this for a lot of people. Yeah, I think so.
And but it is such a tricky issue because if
you hear, because because we respond both ways to it, right,
even some level, you hear a rich person or a
(02:56):
celebrity complain about their life. On one level, you have
that voice that says, oh, well, money doesn't buy happiness.
There you go. But on the other side, there's a
voice that you want to say, oh, shut up, you
own an airplane. If you own an airplane, you don't
have the right to complain about your life. Like we
we kind of we kind of feel it both ways.
But found up in the is a little bit of
(03:16):
envy and this idea again that if if you just
had access to their money, you would spend it right
and you would do it in ways in which you
would be happy exactly. I mean, we think that even
as we we stare right in the face of studies
that say, of you know, the people that that win
the lottery um are either either it doesn't improve their
lives or makes them less happy. We we always think,
(03:38):
but if I want they won the lottery, I'd know
how to spend it. I would use it appropriately and
actually improve my life. I would be the exception of
the rule. So those are the types of things we're
going to explore today. But before we do that, we
should probably say that when it comes to happiness and wealth,
there is a major impact made when you are below
(04:00):
with the poverty line. That's right. The World Health Organization
is called poverty quote the world's biggest killer and the
greatest cause of ill health and suffering because when you
look at poverty, living below the poverty line in this
world brings increase risks of violence, infectious disease, chronic disease,
mental health problems, sleep disorders, and chronic stress. And in
(04:22):
many cases we're talking about an individual's financial inability to
meet their own basic needs or the basic needs of
their dependence. Yeah, and we were starting about basic needs.
We're talking about biological needs eating, right, Um, these are
things that we have to use to survive. So if
you can't meet that need, it's terrible, right, of course,
you would be very unhappy. The thing, though, is that
(04:44):
once you can meet those basic needs, and once you
can rise above that poverty level, it may not be like,
oh hey, it's it's smooth sailing from here on out.
But the effects of money begin to taper off. And
this is actually from a House to Works article that
we of on happiness and money, and it says that
homeless people in Calcutta, for instance, score a mere two
(05:05):
point nine on a seven point scale of happiness, while
multimillionaires in the United States rank around five point eight. However,
if you look at the Inuits in Greenland and Masai
ranchers in Kenya, they are just as happy as those
(05:26):
high society Americans, scoring around a five. So again, here's
that those effects of money tapering off. Yeah, it seems
to be diminishing returns. It's kind of like, uh, like
when you're when you're really hungry and you you dig
into that delicious meal. You know, that first bite is amazing,
and then as you begin to fill up, it becomes lesser.
I think I've seen sea studies that say that like
(05:46):
the seventh bite, after you take the seventh bite of
something and then you're just you're just eating. You're not
enjoying the food at all. In your you're in you're
beginning to get even, you know, even closer to that
level where you're not even hungry anymore. It's just pure
recreational eating without any actual value to you as an organism.
And if you think about it, to your your brain
really can sustain that anyway, because that first bite is
(06:08):
really um sort of the bells and whistles of the
dopamine in your system saying, oh, a reward. But if
every single bite was like that, you would never put
your fork down. Yeah. And in this we're getting into,
you know, kind of the complex notion of happiness that
we've touched on before. What what is happiness? We're talking
in this podcast about about potentially buying happiness, but that
in itself is elusive. Is a happiness? That moment that
(06:31):
you bite into that meal is happiness? The knowledge that
you created a recipe for that meal? Is it? Is happiness?
A moment in time? Is it an overarching theme that
covers a grand uh length of time? Well? And is
happiness forkful after forkful really sustainable even if it's been
(06:53):
bought on a silver spoon? Right? And So in order
to really get to this answer, we have to start
looking at meaning versus happiness because they're bound up in
each other. There's no way to to to talk about
one without the other, really right, So happiness we can
you know, as elucid as the term is, we can
(07:15):
say you can still say things like, ah, well this
neal makes me happy. Uh, this gadget makes me happy.
My family makes me happy. Uh, this trip makes me happy. Uh,
this pill makes me happy. But can you can you
plug in the word meaning in all those cases, this
gadget gives my life meaning, this pill gives my life meaning.
This uh, my family gives my life meaning. To to
(07:37):
what degree to these statements match up with each term? Yeah,
And so you have to start looking at this idea
of happiness or well being. And for some economists, well
being is seen as a rising when benefits outweigh cost.
For the centers for disease control and prevention, they've just
find it as requiring good living conditions and positive relationship.
(08:01):
For spiritualists, you see that it's a pleasurable state that
is the sum of the positive and negative thoughts and
feelings that arise when we reflect on our lives. When
we reflect on our lives, because that's when the meaning
part comes in. Yeah, and I think that goes beyond
spiritualists too and gets into areas of philosophy and even
psychology as well. But uh, but yeah, you start thinking
(08:22):
it's it's more about those moments in life when you
really reflect and ask yourself, what's the point of all
of this, what's what's what's the meaning? Why am I here?
What am I doing? And and that's where the meaning,
that's where the meaning comes into play as opposed to
the happiness, unless you're adhering to kind of a hedonistic philosophy,
in which case the worm kind of uh turns back
(08:46):
on itself. But if you think about it this way, happiness,
as we have discussed before, is ephemeral, it's leading at
the moment to moment thing. But meaning gives you context,
It gives you a sort of richness of that bite
of happiness. I think most people would think that meaning
is just nested within happiness, when in fact, it is
(09:06):
happiness that is nested within meaning. It's really sort of
a byproduct of it. Right, Like for instance, when I
when I say name somebody who has led who has
led a meaningful life? Like what are some of the
iconic examples exactly Gandhi or you know, or or a
mother Teresa type figure. These are the the individuals that
come to mind. But you don't necessarily think, oh, Gandhi
(09:28):
he was he was a happy guy. I mean, and
I don't think of Gandhi is an unhappy guy. But
you don't necessarily attach the happiness onto his meaningfulness. You
think more, uh, more about struggle. You think more about
about putting yourself second and putting happiness second to a
cause and to the you know, the betterment of the
world itself. Although you look at someone like the Dalai
(09:49):
Lama and you see perhaps he has both. Yes, indeed,
here's a man who is a meaningful life uh and
does seem to be rather jolly. Yeah, So keep that
example in your mind. Us as we go through these
sort of scales of wealth to happiness and scales of
wealth to meaningness. And we're gonna do this by taking
an example of a study by Shigihiro Oishi, who is
(10:12):
from the University of Virginia psychologists and Ed Deaner a
University of Illinois psychologists. They conducted a study to better
understand how wealth would influence both happiness and meaningfulness. And
they examine the reli relationship between a country's wealth and
the well being of its citizens. That we're talking about
thousands of people, um and these people completing an annual
(10:35):
Gallop survey in one hundred and thirty two countries, And
so they would report how happy they were and whether
or not that their life had some sort of purpose
or meaning. And then they would look at a scale
from zero, which would be the worst possible life, to ten,
which is the best possible life. And that's where they
(10:57):
got masses of data and takes eased out this idea
of happiness and wealth, and so in the scale, we
would easily imagine that a ten would be an almost
unattainable level of happiness, like no mortal human could contain.
That if you reached a ten, you would sprout golden
wings and ascend into the cosmos right whereas a zero
(11:20):
you your life would be so miserable that how could
you You You would just pop into non existence. There'd be
no way you could continue because your life would be
such um, such such a pool of suffering. So what
did they find? Overall, people from wealthier countries were generally
happier than those from poorer countries. Now again, think about
the ephemeral effects of happiness moment to moment, and so
(11:41):
I want and so forth. And to reach an average
life satisfaction score of four out of ten, people needed
to earn about seven hundred dollars a year. For a
score of five, they needed to earn three thousand dollars
a year, and for a score of six, they needed
to earn an average of sixteen thousand dollars per year.
For a seven, it's pretty good on the scale, right,
(12:03):
they needed to earn an average of sixty four dollars
a year. So all right, yes, we see that there's
an idea of more happiness in wealthier countries here, but
what about meaningfulness? Well, and not only let you say,
not only this the wealthy country, but here we see
the actual income level influencing happiness. Because it's easy to say, like, okay,
(12:28):
a rich country, obviously they're gonna arguably have have a
better support system in place, They're going to have better
resources for for everyone. Um, it's going to be safer.
You know, you can go down the list of all
the positive benefits there. But but what I like about
the cities that also and what is more problematic about
the study, especially to the whole money camp by the
happiness thing, is that it says that you actually see
(12:50):
the lineup of the money that's coming into the life
and the happiness enjoyed in that life. Indeed, right, but
it tells a good story of that. So the other
story is that they found is that between nine five
and of respondents from poverty stricken Sierra Leone, Togo, Kyrgyzstan,
(13:10):
Chad and Ethiopia reported leading meaningful lives on that scale.
Now only two thirds of the respondents and wealthy countries
like Japan, France and Spain believe that their lives had meaning.
So what is happiness without meaning? Here? Well, I think
we can we can probably all point to moments in
our own life where we can say, well, that was
(13:31):
a moment that was happy, but was it meaningful? You know? Um?
And maybe more than moments, maybe whole decades of our lives,
we can look back and say, well I had a
lot of fun, but did it mean anything? Um and uh.
And not to say that that meaning and and fun,
not to say that meaning and happiness can't line up,
but or that they're mutually exclusive, but but you can
(13:54):
well imagine someone setting in a you know, say a
fancy penthouse, Uh, you know, kick back, enjoying, say some
sort of video game on the latest system, the largest screen,
the coolest sound system, and uh, is it a meaningful experience? Though?
Is it something that they can look back, that they
can have that that moment of reflection and say, what
is my life about? Why? Why do I exist? What's
(14:16):
the purpose of everything? And I would argue that it's
it's hard to say that enjoying an awesome video game
on an awesome couch in front of an awesome television
set lines up with that that sort of existential reason
to be right. And we've talked about this, that's the
problem of consciousness. Why are we here? What are we doing?
So the question then becomes why would people in poverty
(14:40):
stricken countries have more meaning or feel that their lives
had more meaning? And Adam Altar, who wrote a New
Yorker piece on this, says, perhaps because poverty strips people
of happiness and the short term when those terms ding
ning ning that we've been talking so much about, Perhaps
because of that, it forces them to take the long
you to focus on the relationships they have with their children,
(15:03):
their gods, and their friends, which become more meaningful over time.
And indeed, you could you could probably argue that they're
they're they're forced to depend upon those social structures more.
You know, they're they're less financially self reliant, and therefore
it's more of a community situation as opposed to the
you know, the lone individual standing in line to get
(15:24):
the latest gadget and then taking it home to enjoy
in their in their cavernous den, which we'll talk about
in a moment, but just in case you're wondering if
there are any other studies that maybe are more Western
centric will Indeed there are. There's one by psychologist Roy Baumeister,
who we've talked about before in the context of willpower. Yes,
all those chocolate cake experiments where you would attempt somebody
(15:47):
with a chocolate retreat and see what could effect it
would have on your your willpower. Yes, all those interesting
experiments where you would you would see to what extent
various stimuli would have on your ability to exist the
temptation of delicious chocolate cake. Yeah, as you said before,
he's that guy in the street corner with a lab
coat and a chocolate cake, Beware Beware of Roy biomaster Um.
(16:10):
But he and a team of researchers asked four Americans
between the ages of eighteen and seventy eight about whether
they felt happy and or meaningful when it comes to
their life. Did they have meaning in their life? And
he found that people were happy when their needs and
desires were met in the present, but that this immediate
fulfillment was largely the relevant to meaningfulness, and that the
(16:33):
respondents derived meaning from considering the whole of their lives,
including the past, in the future, and happiness was generally
a reflection of how they felt in the present alone.
So Yes, the happier people, they were more likely to
report that they lead easy lives, that they were in
good health, and to feel good much of the time.
They could buy whatever they wanted without any financial stream um.
(16:55):
But people who felt that their lives were more meaningful,
on the other hand, were likelier to have experience fulfilling
social relationships, engaged in acts of charity, taking care of
the children, thought about struggles and challenges, challenges including you know,
the act of prayer in this as well as other
more community centered activities. So yes, you have this big
(17:19):
study from Shikhiro Oishi and at dinner, but you also
have Balmeister's smaller, us centric one, which is mirroring the
same effects of meaningfulness versus happiness. I like that you
mentioned struggle earlier, and it brings us back to this
idea of a meaningfulness being tied up with the story
of our lives and sort of the story shaped nature
(17:41):
of our own self awareness. Uh So at the end
of the day, you have to you have to place
yourself within a story and think also about the kind
of stories we actually engage with. The kind of stories
you would pay to see the movie theater or reading
a book. They're generally the stories of struggle. I mean,
it's the base of the basic plot line, the rise
(18:02):
and fall the Uh you don't want to see a
movie about about a man or a woman who had
everything uh they ever wanted, right, Um, you want to
see the movie about someone who lost everything and then
figured out what was important in their life, or someone
who rose from nothing to to achieve something. So these
(18:22):
are the archetypes that we have to fit our our
own lives in in order to find me At least,
I agree, because I think we are so much the
storytelling brain. That's how that's how we operate. We have
to have that story in order to make sense of
our lives and move forward. And I even think about
the fictional movie The Matrix, in which the storyline there
(18:44):
was that the alien overlords at some point had tinkered
around and made the human lives very easy. They had
no challenges and in essence, they had no meaning. So
what happened is that all the humans died off because
of course they were harnessing their their bodies energy right
um in those little pods, and so they had to
(19:07):
put into the stories of the humans lives some sort
of challenge obstacle in order to get to that idea
of why am I here? What? What is the point
of being alive? Indeed, yes, I think that's that's an
excellent example of it, just the idea that a life
without struggle is not really a life. Struggles are the
things that define our existence. To give us that story
(19:27):
and ultimly give us meaning. Alright, Uh, on that note,
we should probably take a break, and when we get back,
we're going to talk about like you've got some change,
you burning a hole in your pocket, and you want
to spend it and to try to be happier. Let
me talk about the ways in which you might be
able to do that. All right, we're back putting a
(19:50):
price tag on happiness, all right. So of course Forbes
has some some articles on this, right because Forbes is
very interested in in economics and um how to pursue
that in in the best way that you can. And
one of the articles talks with Elizabeth Dunn, who is
a co author of the book Happy Money, The Science
of Smarter Spending, and she talks about one of the
(20:13):
ways that has the most impact with money and happiness
is to purchase experiences, not things. Yes, buying an experience
as opposed to a material instead of simply going and
even waiting in line to buy that new gadget at
the store. It's about taking a trip to an exciting location,
(20:33):
or even even not that exciting a location, but but
taking a little adventure, right Or going to a concert,
checking out a new musical actor, an old favorite, going
to a play, that sort of thing. And she cites
in August two thousand and fourteen study called Waiting for
More low anticipatory consumption of experiential and material purchases, which
(20:55):
tracked about a hundred college students in twenty two hundred
randomly selected adults to see how they felt about material
goods and experiences, and they found that participants were excited
about both the thing and the experience, but they were
overall more positive about the experience. Moreover, material purchases were
more likely to be tinged with feelings of impatience. So
(21:18):
I think you had already mentioned before, like sitting in
line for something. Here's a good example. You're in line
for the newest gadget. Do you feel collaborative and easy
going with your fellow line waiters or do you feel
kind of like itchy and competitive? Yeah, I would I
would imagine it tends more towards the competitive side. Now. Certainly,
(21:39):
as we were discussing earlier, really savvy companies such as
Apple has tried to make it more of a community, right,
more but more almost a religion where you're not in
line with other consumers with whom you're competing, but rather
you're you're gathered with like minded individual wolves who were
(22:00):
there to to get another slice of the future, right,
Because then you can kind of look at it as
that line for the experience, right, So your in line
for for a you know, a theater ticket or a tour,
and all of a sudden you're talking with your fellow
line waiters about how cool it's going to be. You're right,
Apple has completely hacked into that because now we have
(22:21):
people in line for the experience of Apple. And did
you know that you can ask Serri her favorite color
and she will tell you it's this blue green color
that she can't quite articulate. So it's like waiting in
line to get into a fish show talking went to
your other your fellow fish fans and discussing, you know,
the set list at this show that came through last year,
(22:42):
that kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, at its essence,
it's about community and and and it's a highly social
bonding sort of experience. Yeah. And then I think the
the imaginative state going into it is key too, because
you think about you know, when you're looking forward to
a new video game coming out or a new gadget.
You know, you're you're reading these articles about it, you're
(23:04):
looking at screenshots, you're looking at some footage, but ultimately,
you to your point, you just impatiently wanted You're like,
I want that thing in my hand. I want to
I want it in my video game machine so I
can be playing it. Why am I not playing it already?
Why do I have to wait a year? Whereas when
you're getting excited about a trip, there may be a
little in patience. You might be thinking which might work
(23:25):
week or over? So I could, you know, actually let
the fun times begin. But you get to, uh, to
involve yourself in the planning of that trip, right and
picking out what you're gonna do and daydreaming about the
thing you're gonna do, kind of like daydreaming about how
you're going to spend that lottery money, except it's actually
going to happen. Yeah, And you can involve others in
that planning to exactly and their experiences. Oh I went
(23:48):
to you know, this beach or that beach, or you know,
to get excited themselves about your upcoming experience. Right, I mean,
you're it's you're you're engaging yourself with society on some level,
even if you're only traveling with one person and just encountering,
you know, people on the way. Uh. A trip is
an adventure that's going to forge a new story for you,
(24:10):
Whereas you know, a gadget, a video game, Uh, some
sort of material possession and new code. Those things are
gonna They may carve a story, but it's a much
smaller story. Indeed, and Done also says that a second
category isn't this this spending on other people is another
(24:31):
way to achieve happiness with money. And when I think
about this, I just think about this as being a
different version of the experience. Really, but you're you're buying
an experience for someone else, or you're creating an experience
for someone else, And that's the altruistic act again, a
community social based act here. Yeah, if nothing else, like
(24:52):
bare minimum, you're buying yourself that that that moment where
you give something to somebody else and you get to
see the look their face hopefully and you you'll get
to feel good about yourself. And uh and if nothing
else to you're you're taking your mind off of yourself
and putting it onto someone else. You know, you're you're
sort of breaking free of the default mode network for
(25:12):
just a moment and and putting the taking the spotlight
off of your own story and putting it on another's,
or at least having your story meet there's yeah, and
there are scouts of studies that support this this idea
that there's a link between happiness and um, your own
ability to provide that gift of happiness to someone. In fact,
done in one of her studies, It was a two
(25:33):
thousand and eight study gave college students either five dollars
or twenty dollars to them by the end of the day.
Now half were instructed to buy something for themselves and
then the other half were instructed to buy something for
someone else. And what do you think, you know, how
did they rate their levels of happiness for that day. Well,
it turns out that the altruistic endeavor was the one
(25:54):
that generated the most happiness. Yes, And they say that
that may be boil down to something called self determination theory,
which states that human well being depends upon satisfaction of
three basic needs relatedness, competence, and autonomy. So in this
circumstance where they were giving away that money or buying
(26:16):
something for someone else, it meant those three conditions. So
we're talking about bonding um, free choice, and just having
the ability to do it in the first place. And
this brings to mind an important point that's brought up
in the house Stuff Works article. Can money by happiness
by Jennifer Horton, which is a nice examination of some
of these same issues. UH. And this article points out
(26:39):
that you do see highly successful UH wealthy individuals who
are scoring highly on the on the the Happiness contentment
Um meter, but a lot of this generally stems from
from the success and enjoyment of one's job rather necessarily
than the size of the paycheck. So again it comes
(27:00):
more down to UH, to the the experience, and to
the into determinalism as opposed to just a fat check
at the end of the week. Indeed, now um in
terms of giving away money or buying experiences or even
getting a big fat page, one of the things that
(27:21):
Done says is that you have to restrict access or
make something special. In other words, buying something for someone
every single day could diminish your feelings of happiness. Right.
It's just sort of again that analogy of forkful of cheesecake.
You know, first it's going to be the best. Yeah,
you know, no matter what the fantasy is, no matter
(27:43):
what the the dream is, if you have enough of it,
it's gonna get old, it's gonna get sick. It's you're
going to adapt to that environment and you're going to
want a different environment. You're gonna need something greater and
greater to to thrill you or at least satisfy you
and give you that feeling that you're leaving leading this
happy life, which taps into two things. Here will power
(28:05):
and as you said already, fantasy. And if you think
about those two terms side by side and you think
about watery winners, wow, you have a really great discussion
or even study about how happiness plays out. Right, Yeah,
Because suddenly you go from zero to five, right, You're
you're you suddenly have all of this money to buy
(28:27):
the happiness that you've wanted, and you start spending on things, right.
You get that, you get that car that you think
you need, You get that the house that you think
you need, um, and pretty soon you you just have
to keep buying things to maintain that level of newness
and happiness. Right. Yeah. And there's this idea that you'll
have more choices, Yes you will, but that doesn't necessarily
(28:48):
make someone happier. In fact, we've talked about that before.
It's you go depletion, and which you have all of
these things in front of you, and you spend so
much mental energy on it that you are depleted for
making good decision in the future. And again here comes
the short term long term thing, because if you are
trying to fill that void by buying, buying, buying, your
(29:09):
serving constantly the short term. And that's where you see
that lottery winners are something like twice as likely to
declare bankruptcy than the general population. And it also just
ties back into that old adage. You know, you know,
at the end of the day, if you you're still
going to be the same person, right, You're just gonna
be surrounded by more stuff, or maybe you'll be in
(29:30):
a fancy your house, but you still have to look
at yourself in the mirror. You still have to ask
those questions about meaning, why am I here? I have
a really fancy car that I just bought, But how
does that change my story? Yeah? In fact, that gets
down to this idea of perhaps all of us are
pre loaded with the set point of happiness that can
change over time. Right. I guess if you were to
(29:53):
do that in a in a way that was really intentional,
but if you didn't, there there may be sort of
a set point that we all gravitate to. And again,
lottery winners were examined for this. It was in nineteen
eight study by a team of psychologists from from Northwestern
University in the University of Massachusetts, which was published in
the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and they found
(30:16):
that lottery winners were not significantly happier than control group participants,
and that patients with spinal cord injuries did not appear
nearly as as unhappy as might be expected. Yes, I
mean the spinal injury thing comes into play because on
some of you could say, individuals are sustained as a
sufficient injury have fewer choices, whereas money seemingly brings more choices.
(30:42):
Money money's free speech, right, money is more freedom to
do things in the world, And yet it doesn't really
pan out that way when you look at these statistics. Yeah,
And to further this idea of set point happiness, psychology,
professor Gildrick Schmack found that once couples married, their life
satisfaction measures generally changed in the same direction, suggesting that
(31:03):
environmental factors like child's birth or a job loss would
affect their well being. But with you again, if you
take the long term view of them, he found that
their participants happiness level was relatively stable over a course
of twenty two years, So again perhaps the influence of
this set point. All right, but at this point you're
(31:23):
probably wondering, well, what can I do if I have
the money to spend and I want happiness, I want meaningfulness,
I want all of these things, and I have a
little money set aside, how do I spend it? You
would go big. You would look for three things. You
would you would look for a time, You would look
for giving all truism, and you would look for experience,
(31:45):
and you would try to wrap all three of those
things up into one thing. Yeah, like an example that
comes to mind, and this is not something big on
a financial level. But so you're giving a gift to
a child. You don't just give them a thing. As
much as they want that thing, would pray and would
prob be happy to run off in the next room
with that thing, but you give them something that you
do together. You give them the experience of building said
(32:07):
thing or playing said thing if it's a game, right
and uh, and so you're getting there, getting that gift
giving rush. You are getting the experience of doing something
with the with the child. The socialization as well as
the story of doing it. Um, all these things that
wound up into one and you're giving of your own
(32:28):
time and so investment. Yeah, and so what this all
underscores is that there is some sort of meaning achieved.
As you said, there's a story to go along with this.
Perhaps it's this is my grandchild and I'm and I'm
helping to add to you know, his or her life
in this way. And maybe it's even a life lesson
that they want to impart. So you know, that's this
(32:49):
hopefully a good one, right. Yeah, there's the Fisher Price
Life Lesson series you can get. It's some of them
are pretty rough, but but they're important. Well they're all plastic. Yeah,
so that's good. Um. Yes, I think it just all
boils down to the ability to take stock of your life,
find meaning, and also be thankful for the things that
(33:11):
you do have because, as we know, just you might
get that quick dopamine surge from buying something, but again
that that's ephemerals, that's not gonna last. Yeah. So, I
especially as we begin to sadly enter into another holiday season,
I would advise everyone when you when you add something
to that Animazon wish list, when you buy that gift
(33:32):
for someone else, or you know, buy something for yourself. Think,
think about it in terms of meaning and story, like
what what is the what meaning am I adding to
my life for someone else's with this purchase? All right, well, hey,
let's we've got a little time here. Let's call over
the robot and read through some listener mail. All right,
this one comes to us from I'm gonna say p
(33:54):
s K for sure. I don't want to butcher your name,
so we'll just go with initials. Um PSK says. Hey, guys,
I'm a longtime listener. I love the show. I'm writing
to you because I just heard your podcast on the
flow state. I'm a practic practitioner and performer of what
are called the flow arts. Basically, it's prop manipulation using poi,
hula hoops, contact balls, and a lot of other objects
(34:14):
too many of the name here. The reason we are
called flow artists is because the main purpose of our
art is less entertainment and more about achieving a flow state,
a feeling of perfect synchronicity and awareness with our chosen prop,
a way of losing ourselves in our flow. For years,
I thought this was something new that people were latching onto.
I had no idea there was legitimate research into flow states,
(34:35):
or that a flow state could be achieved through other
tasks besides prop manipulation. Now that I think of it, though,
it makes perfect sense, and now I'll try to achieve
flow more in my daily life. Anyways, thanks for the podcast.
It was very informative, even for someone who considers himself
well versed in flow. If you or your audience would
like to see some of the things that people are
doing through flow, I invite you all to search POI
(34:55):
that's p o i uh in YouTube or even visit
my own groups you tube channel the Way of the Circle.
Thanks guys, take care by all right, So that was awesome.
I love that we have a flow artist among our listeners. Um.
You guys are always amazing us with all these different
things that you do. Um. I will try to butcher
(35:17):
PSK's name. Okay, p send kiddo. I think P is
the initial Okay, all we had was the email address
on this one. Yeah, we apologize in advance anyway. Thank
you for running in. Yes indeed, so hey, you want
to find out more about happiness, well, head on over
to Stuff to Blow your mind dot com because we
will get it to you, um happiness. That is, in fact,
(35:38):
I visit the landing page for this podcast episode and
will include links out to other podcast episodes that deal
with happiness and our quest for happiness, as well as
links up to blog post videos. On the page yourself,
you'll find links to all of our social media pages.
You can go follow those accounts and keep track of
what we're up to, and you can also get in
touch with us, share your thoughts with us. Maybe even
(36:00):
have an unusual experience that brought you a lot of happiness.
It wasn't a trip, it was unexpected. Let us know
about that, and you can email us at blow the
Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff
works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to stuff to Blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie.
Live in the Dream, Douglas. You are You're You're living
the dream, the American Dream. Yeah. I have a roast
(00:23):
in the oven. I have my apron on right now,
I have my new Ford Etfel outside. And uh, you
know two and a half lovely children. And you you
probably arrived on a on a boat as an immigrant
and just fell off the boat right into a pile
of money. Right well, I'm second generation, right yeah. And
(00:46):
and hard scrabble worked for it. Really wanted that hard
scrabble life, the professional scrabble circuit. That's an entirely different
podcast episode. It's hard to make a living on that,
but but it does exist, and it's fascinating. From what
I understand. It's about as lucrative as entering into like
the Toddler beauty pageant circuit. Yeah, I think it. It
(01:09):
may be as comfortable to that, but but but slightly
less crazy. Slightly. I refer to this idea of this
nineties like ideal of the American dream, where you know,
you had the perfect lawn, you had just bought a
house in a car, and everything was okay because you
had those things right and and if you weren't happy,
(01:30):
it was achievable if you could only work hard enough
to buy these things. It was all about work hard
by the things that will give you the life that
is happiness. But does it really work like that? Does
money really buy happiness? Well, that's the big question, isn't it.
And it's certainly I threw this question out on Facebook yesterday.
(01:52):
I did a little blog post, and I found that
a lot of people just you know, instantly say no,
of course, that money didn't buy you happiness. Because that's
become an increasingly popular, uh, little bit of wisdom to
keep around in your head, especially as we live in
a world that is so fascinated with the lives of
(02:12):
celebrities and the wealthy and so you know, ruled over
by by that class of people. It's comforting to remind yourself, Oh,
they have all this money, they live this grand life,
but they're not really happy, and therefore I can feel
a little better about not having what they have. Ironically,
I feel like Oprah actually brought this idea to the masses. Yeah, right,
(02:34):
because she does a lot of self you know, introstruction
and work with her audience on what is happiness and
so on and so forth. So I feel like she
seeded this for a lot of people. Yeah, I think so.
And but it is such a tricky issue because if
you hear, because because we respond both ways to it, right,
even some level, you hear a rich person or a
(02:56):
celebrity complain about their life. On one level, you have
that voice that says, oh, well, money doesn't buy happiness.
There you go. But on the other side, there's a
voice that you want to say, oh, shut up, you
own an airplane. If you own an airplane, you don't
have the right to complain about your life. Like we
we kind of we kind of feel it both ways.
But found up in the is a little bit of
(03:16):
envy and this idea again that if if you just
had access to their money, you would spend it right
and you would do it in ways in which you
would be happy exactly. I mean, we think that even
as we we stare right in the face of studies
that say, of you know, the people that that win
the lottery um are either either it doesn't improve their
lives or makes them less happy. We we always think,
(03:38):
but if I want they won the lottery, I'd know
how to spend it. I would use it appropriately and
actually improve my life. I would be the exception of
the rule. So those are the types of things we're
going to explore today. But before we do that, we
should probably say that when it comes to happiness and wealth,
there is a major impact made when you are below
(04:00):
with the poverty line. That's right. The World Health Organization
is called poverty quote the world's biggest killer and the
greatest cause of ill health and suffering because when you
look at poverty, living below the poverty line in this
world brings increase risks of violence, infectious disease, chronic disease,
mental health problems, sleep disorders, and chronic stress. And in
(04:22):
many cases we're talking about an individual's financial inability to
meet their own basic needs or the basic needs of
their dependence. Yeah, and we were starting about basic needs.
We're talking about biological needs eating, right, Um, these are
things that we have to use to survive. So if
you can't meet that need, it's terrible, right, of course,
you would be very unhappy. The thing, though, is that
(04:44):
once you can meet those basic needs, and once you
can rise above that poverty level, it may not be like,
oh hey, it's it's smooth sailing from here on out.
But the effects of money begin to taper off. And
this is actually from a House to Works article that
we of on happiness and money, and it says that
homeless people in Calcutta, for instance, score a mere two
(05:05):
point nine on a seven point scale of happiness, while
multimillionaires in the United States rank around five point eight. However,
if you look at the Inuits in Greenland and Masai
ranchers in Kenya, they are just as happy as those
(05:26):
high society Americans, scoring around a five. So again, here's
that those effects of money tapering off. Yeah, it seems
to be diminishing returns. It's kind of like, uh, like
when you're when you're really hungry and you you dig
into that delicious meal. You know, that first bite is amazing,
and then as you begin to fill up, it becomes lesser.
I think I've seen sea studies that say that like
(05:46):
the seventh bite, after you take the seventh bite of
something and then you're just you're just eating. You're not
enjoying the food at all. In your you're in you're
beginning to get even, you know, even closer to that
level where you're not even hungry anymore. It's just pure
recreational eating without any actual value to you as an organism.
And if you think about it, to your your brain
really can sustain that anyway, because that first bite is
(06:08):
really um sort of the bells and whistles of the
dopamine in your system saying, oh, a reward. But if
every single bite was like that, you would never put
your fork down. Yeah. And in this we're getting into,
you know, kind of the complex notion of happiness that
we've touched on before. What what is happiness? We're talking
in this podcast about about potentially buying happiness, but that
in itself is elusive. Is a happiness? That moment that
(06:31):
you bite into that meal is happiness? The knowledge that
you created a recipe for that meal? Is it? Is happiness?
A moment in time? Is it an overarching theme that
covers a grand uh length of time? Well? And is
happiness forkful after forkful really sustainable even if it's been
(06:53):
bought on a silver spoon? Right? And So in order
to really get to this answer, we have to start
looking at meaning versus happiness because they're bound up in
each other. There's no way to to to talk about
one without the other, really right, So happiness we can
you know, as elucid as the term is, we can
(07:15):
say you can still say things like, ah, well this
neal makes me happy. Uh, this gadget makes me happy.
My family makes me happy. Uh, this trip makes me happy. Uh,
this pill makes me happy. But can you can you
plug in the word meaning in all those cases, this
gadget gives my life meaning, this pill gives my life meaning.
This uh, my family gives my life meaning. To to
(07:37):
what degree to these statements match up with each term? Yeah,
And so you have to start looking at this idea
of happiness or well being. And for some economists, well
being is seen as a rising when benefits outweigh cost.
For the centers for disease control and prevention, they've just
find it as requiring good living conditions and positive relationship.
(08:01):
For spiritualists, you see that it's a pleasurable state that
is the sum of the positive and negative thoughts and
feelings that arise when we reflect on our lives. When
we reflect on our lives, because that's when the meaning
part comes in. Yeah, and I think that goes beyond
spiritualists too and gets into areas of philosophy and even
psychology as well. But uh, but yeah, you start thinking
(08:22):
it's it's more about those moments in life when you
really reflect and ask yourself, what's the point of all
of this, what's what's what's the meaning? Why am I here?
What am I doing? And and that's where the meaning,
that's where the meaning comes into play as opposed to
the happiness, unless you're adhering to kind of a hedonistic philosophy,
in which case the worm kind of uh turns back
(08:46):
on itself. But if you think about it this way, happiness,
as we have discussed before, is ephemeral, it's leading at
the moment to moment thing. But meaning gives you context,
It gives you a sort of richness of that bite
of happiness. I think most people would think that meaning
is just nested within happiness, when in fact, it is
(09:06):
happiness that is nested within meaning. It's really sort of
a byproduct of it. Right, Like for instance, when I
when I say name somebody who has led who has
led a meaningful life? Like what are some of the
iconic examples exactly Gandhi or you know, or or a
mother Teresa type figure. These are the the individuals that
come to mind. But you don't necessarily think, oh, Gandhi
(09:28):
he was he was a happy guy. I mean, and
I don't think of Gandhi is an unhappy guy. But
you don't necessarily attach the happiness onto his meaningfulness. You
think more, uh, more about struggle. You think more about
about putting yourself second and putting happiness second to a
cause and to the you know, the betterment of the
world itself. Although you look at someone like the Dalai
(09:49):
Lama and you see perhaps he has both. Yes, indeed,
here's a man who is a meaningful life uh and
does seem to be rather jolly. Yeah, So keep that
example in your mind. Us as we go through these
sort of scales of wealth to happiness and scales of
wealth to meaningness. And we're gonna do this by taking
an example of a study by Shigihiro Oishi, who is
(10:12):
from the University of Virginia psychologists and Ed Deaner a
University of Illinois psychologists. They conducted a study to better
understand how wealth would influence both happiness and meaningfulness. And
they examine the reli relationship between a country's wealth and
the well being of its citizens. That we're talking about
thousands of people, um and these people completing an annual
(10:35):
Gallop survey in one hundred and thirty two countries, And
so they would report how happy they were and whether
or not that their life had some sort of purpose
or meaning. And then they would look at a scale
from zero, which would be the worst possible life, to ten,
which is the best possible life. And that's where they
(10:57):
got masses of data and takes eased out this idea
of happiness and wealth, and so in the scale, we
would easily imagine that a ten would be an almost
unattainable level of happiness, like no mortal human could contain.
That if you reached a ten, you would sprout golden
wings and ascend into the cosmos right whereas a zero
(11:20):
you your life would be so miserable that how could
you You You would just pop into non existence. There'd be
no way you could continue because your life would be
such um, such such a pool of suffering. So what
did they find? Overall, people from wealthier countries were generally
happier than those from poorer countries. Now again, think about
the ephemeral effects of happiness moment to moment, and so
(11:41):
I want and so forth. And to reach an average
life satisfaction score of four out of ten, people needed
to earn about seven hundred dollars a year. For a
score of five, they needed to earn three thousand dollars
a year, and for a score of six, they needed
to earn an average of sixteen thousand dollars per year.
For a seven, it's pretty good on the scale, right,
(12:03):
they needed to earn an average of sixty four dollars
a year. So all right, yes, we see that there's
an idea of more happiness in wealthier countries here, but
what about meaningfulness? Well, and not only let you say,
not only this the wealthy country, but here we see
the actual income level influencing happiness. Because it's easy to say, like, okay,
(12:28):
a rich country, obviously they're gonna arguably have have a
better support system in place, They're going to have better
resources for for everyone. Um, it's going to be safer.
You know, you can go down the list of all
the positive benefits there. But but what I like about
the cities that also and what is more problematic about
the study, especially to the whole money camp by the
happiness thing, is that it says that you actually see
(12:50):
the lineup of the money that's coming into the life
and the happiness enjoyed in that life. Indeed, right, but
it tells a good story of that. So the other
story is that they found is that between nine five
and of respondents from poverty stricken Sierra Leone, Togo, Kyrgyzstan,
(13:10):
Chad and Ethiopia reported leading meaningful lives on that scale.
Now only two thirds of the respondents and wealthy countries
like Japan, France and Spain believe that their lives had meaning.
So what is happiness without meaning? Here? Well, I think
we can we can probably all point to moments in
our own life where we can say, well, that was
(13:31):
a moment that was happy, but was it meaningful? You know? Um?
And maybe more than moments, maybe whole decades of our lives,
we can look back and say, well I had a
lot of fun, but did it mean anything? Um and uh.
And not to say that that meaning and and fun,
not to say that meaning and happiness can't line up,
but or that they're mutually exclusive, but but you can
(13:54):
well imagine someone setting in a you know, say a
fancy penthouse, Uh, you know, kick back, enjoying, say some
sort of video game on the latest system, the largest screen,
the coolest sound system, and uh, is it a meaningful experience? Though?
Is it something that they can look back, that they
can have that that moment of reflection and say, what
is my life about? Why? Why do I exist? What's
(14:16):
the purpose of everything? And I would argue that it's
it's hard to say that enjoying an awesome video game
on an awesome couch in front of an awesome television
set lines up with that that sort of existential reason
to be right. And we've talked about this, that's the
problem of consciousness. Why are we here? What are we doing?
So the question then becomes why would people in poverty
(14:40):
stricken countries have more meaning or feel that their lives
had more meaning? And Adam Altar, who wrote a New
Yorker piece on this, says, perhaps because poverty strips people
of happiness and the short term when those terms ding
ning ning that we've been talking so much about, Perhaps
because of that, it forces them to take the long
you to focus on the relationships they have with their children,
(15:03):
their gods, and their friends, which become more meaningful over time.
And indeed, you could you could probably argue that they're
they're they're forced to depend upon those social structures more.
You know, they're they're less financially self reliant, and therefore
it's more of a community situation as opposed to the
you know, the lone individual standing in line to get
(15:24):
the latest gadget and then taking it home to enjoy
in their in their cavernous den, which we'll talk about
in a moment, but just in case you're wondering if
there are any other studies that maybe are more Western
centric will Indeed there are. There's one by psychologist Roy Baumeister,
who we've talked about before in the context of willpower. Yes,
all those chocolate cake experiments where you would attempt somebody
(15:47):
with a chocolate retreat and see what could effect it
would have on your your willpower. Yes, all those interesting
experiments where you would you would see to what extent
various stimuli would have on your ability to exist the
temptation of delicious chocolate cake. Yeah, as you said before,
he's that guy in the street corner with a lab
coat and a chocolate cake, Beware Beware of Roy biomaster Um.
(16:10):
But he and a team of researchers asked four Americans
between the ages of eighteen and seventy eight about whether
they felt happy and or meaningful when it comes to
their life. Did they have meaning in their life? And
he found that people were happy when their needs and
desires were met in the present, but that this immediate
fulfillment was largely the relevant to meaningfulness, and that the
(16:33):
respondents derived meaning from considering the whole of their lives,
including the past, in the future, and happiness was generally
a reflection of how they felt in the present alone.
So Yes, the happier people, they were more likely to
report that they lead easy lives, that they were in
good health, and to feel good much of the time.
They could buy whatever they wanted without any financial stream um.
(16:55):
But people who felt that their lives were more meaningful,
on the other hand, were likelier to have experience fulfilling
social relationships, engaged in acts of charity, taking care of
the children, thought about struggles and challenges, challenges including you know,
the act of prayer in this as well as other
more community centered activities. So yes, you have this big
(17:19):
study from Shikhiro Oishi and at dinner, but you also
have Balmeister's smaller, us centric one, which is mirroring the
same effects of meaningfulness versus happiness. I like that you
mentioned struggle earlier, and it brings us back to this
idea of a meaningfulness being tied up with the story
of our lives and sort of the story shaped nature
(17:41):
of our own self awareness. Uh So at the end
of the day, you have to you have to place
yourself within a story and think also about the kind
of stories we actually engage with. The kind of stories
you would pay to see the movie theater or reading
a book. They're generally the stories of struggle. I mean,
it's the base of the basic plot line, the rise
(18:02):
and fall the Uh you don't want to see a
movie about about a man or a woman who had
everything uh they ever wanted, right, Um, you want to
see the movie about someone who lost everything and then
figured out what was important in their life, or someone
who rose from nothing to to achieve something. So these
(18:22):
are the archetypes that we have to fit our our
own lives in in order to find me At least,
I agree, because I think we are so much the
storytelling brain. That's how that's how we operate. We have
to have that story in order to make sense of
our lives and move forward. And I even think about
the fictional movie The Matrix, in which the storyline there
(18:44):
was that the alien overlords at some point had tinkered
around and made the human lives very easy. They had
no challenges and in essence, they had no meaning. So
what happened is that all the humans died off because
of course they were harnessing their their bodies energy right
um in those little pods, and so they had to
(19:07):
put into the stories of the humans lives some sort
of challenge obstacle in order to get to that idea
of why am I here? What? What is the point
of being alive? Indeed, yes, I think that's that's an
excellent example of it, just the idea that a life
without struggle is not really a life. Struggles are the
things that define our existence. To give us that story
(19:27):
and ultimly give us meaning. Alright, Uh, on that note,
we should probably take a break, and when we get back,
we're going to talk about like you've got some change,
you burning a hole in your pocket, and you want
to spend it and to try to be happier. Let
me talk about the ways in which you might be
able to do that. All right, we're back putting a
(19:50):
price tag on happiness, all right. So of course Forbes
has some some articles on this, right because Forbes is
very interested in in economics and um how to pursue
that in in the best way that you can. And
one of the articles talks with Elizabeth Dunn, who is
a co author of the book Happy Money, The Science
of Smarter Spending, and she talks about one of the
(20:13):
ways that has the most impact with money and happiness
is to purchase experiences, not things. Yes, buying an experience
as opposed to a material instead of simply going and
even waiting in line to buy that new gadget at
the store. It's about taking a trip to an exciting location,
(20:33):
or even even not that exciting a location, but but
taking a little adventure, right Or going to a concert,
checking out a new musical actor, an old favorite, going
to a play, that sort of thing. And she cites
in August two thousand and fourteen study called Waiting for
More low anticipatory consumption of experiential and material purchases, which
(20:55):
tracked about a hundred college students in twenty two hundred
randomly selected adults to see how they felt about material
goods and experiences, and they found that participants were excited
about both the thing and the experience, but they were
overall more positive about the experience. Moreover, material purchases were
more likely to be tinged with feelings of impatience. So
(21:18):
I think you had already mentioned before, like sitting in
line for something. Here's a good example. You're in line
for the newest gadget. Do you feel collaborative and easy
going with your fellow line waiters or do you feel
kind of like itchy and competitive? Yeah, I would I
would imagine it tends more towards the competitive side. Now. Certainly,
(21:39):
as we were discussing earlier, really savvy companies such as
Apple has tried to make it more of a community, right,
more but more almost a religion where you're not in
line with other consumers with whom you're competing, but rather
you're you're gathered with like minded individual wolves who were
(22:00):
there to to get another slice of the future, right,
Because then you can kind of look at it as
that line for the experience, right, So your in line
for for a you know, a theater ticket or a tour,
and all of a sudden you're talking with your fellow
line waiters about how cool it's going to be. You're right,
Apple has completely hacked into that because now we have
(22:21):
people in line for the experience of Apple. And did
you know that you can ask Serri her favorite color
and she will tell you it's this blue green color
that she can't quite articulate. So it's like waiting in
line to get into a fish show talking went to
your other your fellow fish fans and discussing, you know,
the set list at this show that came through last year,
(22:42):
that kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, at its essence,
it's about community and and and it's a highly social
bonding sort of experience. Yeah. And then I think the
the imaginative state going into it is key too, because
you think about you know, when you're looking forward to
a new video game coming out or a new gadget.
You know, you're you're reading these articles about it, you're
(23:04):
looking at screenshots, you're looking at some footage, but ultimately,
you to your point, you just impatiently wanted You're like,
I want that thing in my hand. I want to
I want it in my video game machine so I
can be playing it. Why am I not playing it already?
Why do I have to wait a year? Whereas when
you're getting excited about a trip, there may be a
little in patience. You might be thinking which might work
(23:25):
week or over? So I could, you know, actually let
the fun times begin. But you get to, uh, to
involve yourself in the planning of that trip, right and
picking out what you're gonna do and daydreaming about the
thing you're gonna do, kind of like daydreaming about how
you're going to spend that lottery money, except it's actually
going to happen. Yeah, And you can involve others in
that planning to exactly and their experiences. Oh I went
(23:48):
to you know, this beach or that beach, or you know,
to get excited themselves about your upcoming experience. Right, I mean,
you're it's you're you're engaging yourself with society on some level,
even if you're only traveling with one person and just encountering,
you know, people on the way. Uh. A trip is
an adventure that's going to forge a new story for you,
(24:10):
Whereas you know, a gadget, a video game, Uh, some
sort of material possession and new code. Those things are
gonna They may carve a story, but it's a much
smaller story. Indeed, and Done also says that a second
category isn't this this spending on other people is another
(24:31):
way to achieve happiness with money. And when I think
about this, I just think about this as being a
different version of the experience. Really, but you're you're buying
an experience for someone else, or you're creating an experience
for someone else, And that's the altruistic act again, a
community social based act here. Yeah, if nothing else, like
(24:52):
bare minimum, you're buying yourself that that that moment where
you give something to somebody else and you get to
see the look their face hopefully and you you'll get
to feel good about yourself. And uh and if nothing
else to you're you're taking your mind off of yourself
and putting it onto someone else. You know, you're you're
sort of breaking free of the default mode network for
(25:12):
just a moment and and putting the taking the spotlight
off of your own story and putting it on another's,
or at least having your story meet there's yeah, and
there are scouts of studies that support this this idea
that there's a link between happiness and um, your own
ability to provide that gift of happiness to someone. In fact,
done in one of her studies, It was a two
(25:33):
thousand and eight study gave college students either five dollars
or twenty dollars to them by the end of the day.
Now half were instructed to buy something for themselves and
then the other half were instructed to buy something for
someone else. And what do you think, you know, how
did they rate their levels of happiness for that day. Well,
it turns out that the altruistic endeavor was the one
(25:54):
that generated the most happiness. Yes, And they say that
that may be boil down to something called self determination theory,
which states that human well being depends upon satisfaction of
three basic needs relatedness, competence, and autonomy. So in this
circumstance where they were giving away that money or buying
(26:16):
something for someone else, it meant those three conditions. So
we're talking about bonding um, free choice, and just having
the ability to do it in the first place. And
this brings to mind an important point that's brought up
in the house Stuff Works article. Can money by happiness
by Jennifer Horton, which is a nice examination of some
of these same issues. UH. And this article points out
(26:39):
that you do see highly successful UH wealthy individuals who
are scoring highly on the on the the Happiness contentment
Um meter, but a lot of this generally stems from
from the success and enjoyment of one's job rather necessarily
than the size of the paycheck. So again it comes
(27:00):
more down to UH, to the the experience, and to
the into determinalism as opposed to just a fat check
at the end of the week. Indeed, now um in
terms of giving away money or buying experiences or even
getting a big fat page, one of the things that
(27:21):
Done says is that you have to restrict access or
make something special. In other words, buying something for someone
every single day could diminish your feelings of happiness. Right.
It's just sort of again that analogy of forkful of cheesecake.
You know, first it's going to be the best. Yeah,
you know, no matter what the fantasy is, no matter
(27:43):
what the the dream is, if you have enough of it,
it's gonna get old, it's gonna get sick. It's you're
going to adapt to that environment and you're going to
want a different environment. You're gonna need something greater and
greater to to thrill you or at least satisfy you
and give you that feeling that you're leaving leading this
happy life, which taps into two things. Here will power
(28:05):
and as you said already, fantasy. And if you think
about those two terms side by side and you think
about watery winners, wow, you have a really great discussion
or even study about how happiness plays out. Right, Yeah,
Because suddenly you go from zero to five, right, You're
you're you suddenly have all of this money to buy
(28:27):
the happiness that you've wanted, and you start spending on things, right.
You get that, you get that car that you think
you need, You get that the house that you think
you need, um, and pretty soon you you just have
to keep buying things to maintain that level of newness
and happiness. Right. Yeah. And there's this idea that you'll
have more choices, Yes you will, but that doesn't necessarily
(28:48):
make someone happier. In fact, we've talked about that before.
It's you go depletion, and which you have all of
these things in front of you, and you spend so
much mental energy on it that you are depleted for
making good decision in the future. And again here comes
the short term long term thing, because if you are
trying to fill that void by buying, buying, buying, your
(29:09):
serving constantly the short term. And that's where you see
that lottery winners are something like twice as likely to
declare bankruptcy than the general population. And it also just
ties back into that old adage. You know, you know,
at the end of the day, if you you're still
going to be the same person, right, You're just gonna
be surrounded by more stuff, or maybe you'll be in
(29:30):
a fancy your house, but you still have to look
at yourself in the mirror. You still have to ask
those questions about meaning, why am I here? I have
a really fancy car that I just bought, But how
does that change my story? Yeah? In fact, that gets
down to this idea of perhaps all of us are
pre loaded with the set point of happiness that can
change over time. Right. I guess if you were to
(29:53):
do that in a in a way that was really intentional,
but if you didn't, there there may be sort of
a set point that we all gravitate to. And again,
lottery winners were examined for this. It was in nineteen
eight study by a team of psychologists from from Northwestern
University in the University of Massachusetts, which was published in
the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and they found
(30:16):
that lottery winners were not significantly happier than control group participants,
and that patients with spinal cord injuries did not appear
nearly as as unhappy as might be expected. Yes, I
mean the spinal injury thing comes into play because on
some of you could say, individuals are sustained as a
sufficient injury have fewer choices, whereas money seemingly brings more choices.
(30:42):
Money money's free speech, right, money is more freedom to
do things in the world, And yet it doesn't really
pan out that way when you look at these statistics. Yeah,
And to further this idea of set point happiness, psychology,
professor Gildrick Schmack found that once couples married, their life
satisfaction measures generally changed in the same direction, suggesting that
(31:03):
environmental factors like child's birth or a job loss would
affect their well being. But with you again, if you
take the long term view of them, he found that
their participants happiness level was relatively stable over a course
of twenty two years, So again perhaps the influence of
this set point. All right, but at this point you're
(31:23):
probably wondering, well, what can I do if I have
the money to spend and I want happiness, I want meaningfulness,
I want all of these things, and I have a
little money set aside, how do I spend it? You
would go big. You would look for three things. You
would you would look for a time, You would look
for giving all truism, and you would look for experience,
(31:45):
and you would try to wrap all three of those
things up into one thing. Yeah, like an example that
comes to mind, and this is not something big on
a financial level. But so you're giving a gift to
a child. You don't just give them a thing. As
much as they want that thing, would pray and would
prob be happy to run off in the next room
with that thing, but you give them something that you
do together. You give them the experience of building said
(32:07):
thing or playing said thing if it's a game, right
and uh, and so you're getting there, getting that gift
giving rush. You are getting the experience of doing something
with the with the child. The socialization as well as
the story of doing it. Um, all these things that
wound up into one and you're giving of your own
(32:28):
time and so investment. Yeah, and so what this all
underscores is that there is some sort of meaning achieved.
As you said, there's a story to go along with this.
Perhaps it's this is my grandchild and I'm and I'm
helping to add to you know, his or her life
in this way. And maybe it's even a life lesson
that they want to impart. So you know, that's this
(32:49):
hopefully a good one, right. Yeah, there's the Fisher Price
Life Lesson series you can get. It's some of them
are pretty rough, but but they're important. Well they're all plastic. Yeah,
so that's good. Um. Yes, I think it just all
boils down to the ability to take stock of your life,
find meaning, and also be thankful for the things that
(33:11):
you do have because, as we know, just you might
get that quick dopamine surge from buying something, but again
that that's ephemerals, that's not gonna last. Yeah. So, I
especially as we begin to sadly enter into another holiday season,
I would advise everyone when you when you add something
to that Animazon wish list, when you buy that gift
(33:32):
for someone else, or you know, buy something for yourself. Think,
think about it in terms of meaning and story, like
what what is the what meaning am I adding to
my life for someone else's with this purchase? All right, well, hey,
let's we've got a little time here. Let's call over
the robot and read through some listener mail. All right,
this one comes to us from I'm gonna say p
(33:54):
s K for sure. I don't want to butcher your name,
so we'll just go with initials. Um PSK says. Hey, guys,
I'm a longtime listener. I love the show. I'm writing
to you because I just heard your podcast on the
flow state. I'm a practic practitioner and performer of what
are called the flow arts. Basically, it's prop manipulation using poi,
hula hoops, contact balls, and a lot of other objects
(34:14):
too many of the name here. The reason we are
called flow artists is because the main purpose of our
art is less entertainment and more about achieving a flow state,
a feeling of perfect synchronicity and awareness with our chosen prop,
a way of losing ourselves in our flow. For years,
I thought this was something new that people were latching onto.
I had no idea there was legitimate research into flow states,
(34:35):
or that a flow state could be achieved through other
tasks besides prop manipulation. Now that I think of it, though,
it makes perfect sense, and now I'll try to achieve
flow more in my daily life. Anyways, thanks for the podcast.
It was very informative, even for someone who considers himself
well versed in flow. If you or your audience would
like to see some of the things that people are
doing through flow, I invite you all to search POI
(34:55):
that's p o i uh in YouTube or even visit
my own groups you tube channel the Way of the Circle.
Thanks guys, take care by all right, So that was awesome.
I love that we have a flow artist among our listeners. Um.
You guys are always amazing us with all these different
things that you do. Um. I will try to butcher
(35:17):
PSK's name. Okay, p send kiddo. I think P is
the initial Okay, all we had was the email address
on this one. Yeah, we apologize in advance anyway. Thank
you for running in. Yes indeed, so hey, you want
to find out more about happiness, well, head on over
to Stuff to Blow your mind dot com because we
will get it to you, um happiness. That is, in fact,
(35:38):
I visit the landing page for this podcast episode and
will include links out to other podcast episodes that deal
with happiness and our quest for happiness, as well as
links up to blog post videos. On the page yourself,
you'll find links to all of our social media pages.
You can go follow those accounts and keep track of
what we're up to, and you can also get in
touch with us, share your thoughts with us. Maybe even
(36:00):
have an unusual experience that brought you a lot of happiness.
It wasn't a trip, it was unexpected. Let us know
about that, and you can email us at blow the
Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff
works dot com
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