If we just evolved in a meaningless fashion, maybe there is no meaning and purpose to my life. Maybe i'm just an organism that got randomly created,. will live randomly and will die randomly. That's very intimidating thought. And so our ancestors didn't have to word about meaning a purpose, because they always felt that there was one there at hadn't been taken away from them. But simultaneously, the way they achieved the meaning of that they knew about was by being interconnected with others, by co operating, by having friends and family, by doing those things that evolution wants us to do. It does follow that if we think about the things that we are evolutionarily hard wired to do,
#371: Psychology professor Bill von Hippel explains the evolutionary science behind how we’re hardwired as humans.
We’re wired to be social, to connect, to communicate and cooperate.
We’re wired to want to learn and teach, to build a collective body of knowledge that stretches beyond what any single individual could ever learn in their lifetime.
We’re wired to feel surges of happiness that fade, so that we’re intrinsically motivated to keep repeating behaviors that lead to additional surges of happiness.
Once we understand the evolutionary science behind what makes us happy, Dr. von Hippel explains, we can apply this knowledge to making better decisions for our work, money and lives.
Bill von Hippel is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Michigan. He’s currently a psychology professor at the University of Queensland in Australia. He joins us to share his insights into the history and science of happiness.
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