We've been going more than an hour and we do want to talk about what it is to live well. And so to come back to that topic, I'd like to pick up the remark you made about what you told your daughter when she went to college. You said, be around the people who make you live the best you can. But she might have responded to that by saying, yes mum, but what is the best life that I can live? How do I decide if, you know, one group of friends would let me have a wonderful time, experience lots of fun during my college years, enjoy myself immensely, and I'd look back on those years and saying, wow, what a lot of fun I had. Whereas the other group of friends might help me develop my skills, might help me get better grades, help me have a future career, maybe help me use my talents to do more good in the world as a whole. Which of those lives is the best possible life I can live? How would you have answered your daughter if she'd responded that way?

Well, I think Peter, what I had said to her was spend time around people who make you the best version of yourself and who you are in any given moment can change. So, you know, if you want to have fun, hang around with the people who are really going to give you the most fun. If you want to learn skills, hang around with the people who are going to give you the most skills. But I take your meaning. I think I've thought a lot about this. and there's a tension, right? There's a tension in, um, in different goals, right?

Well,

let me just, before I answer this question, you want me to answer you as a scientist or as a person? I

think as a person. Okay. Do you agree with that response? Okay,

so I'll say that there are competing goals, but they're not what you might imagine. So I think we all have competing goals. You know, there are opportunity costs for everything you do. There are 25 things you can't do. So should I be spending time with my family? Should I be... It's after dinner. So should I be hanging around with my family, should I be back up at my office doing work, should I be watering my garden, like what should I be doing? And I think, certainly I feel those pressures like everybody else, but for me the tension is the following. I want to be present in the moment, and I also don't want to engage in actions or experiences? That I will regret at the end of my life and I think about those things actually on a fairly regular basis so Maybe it's just because I'm about to turn 61 But I don't think so. I think I've always kind of thought this way when it comes to big decisions, for example. I often will try to take the perspective of when I look back on this, like I try to take my future self into consideration. When I look back on this, will I regret doing this or regret not doing this? So for example, I may have many, many pressures at work. I may have deadlines that I have not met. I may have people yelling at me to get certain things done or pleading with me to get certain things done. But if my daughter who is now 25, wants to go for a walk, I'll probably go for a walk with them. Because at the end of my life, I will not have felt that I lived a good life if I went back to my office and worked. In the moment, the pressure is there to work. And there's more pressure there in some ways to work, but I need to be present with my daughter when they want me there. of her life or their life, but as much as I can manage it, because in the end, that will make me feel, I will feel as if I let a meaningful life that way. So I'm not, I don't actually optimize for pleasure in the moment. And as somebody who, I mean, don't get me wrong, I like pleasure as much as the next person. And sometimes I will eat that extra piece of chocolate, or I will sleep in that extra hour or what have you. But I think, I don't live my life by what will make me happy or what will make me feel good because I think there's a, speaking as somebody who studied affect almost my whole career, I think sometimes feeling unpleasant is useful and it doesn't mean something is wrong, it means that I'm doing something really hard.

But certainly we would agree with you, yes. So a

head on this. But not everybody would, you would, I think, yes, but not everybody would. But I guess what I'm saying is I actually, I really do, it's not exactly doing the counterfactual, but it's, I do think like the thing I don't want to ever feel is regret that to me, that's the scariest emotion of all the emotion of anything I could feel is regret. That one I dislike and I do feel it about some things. And I do dislike it as much as I expect that I would.

So let me understand science behind what you're talking now. So do I understand correctly that your brain is wired into a certain prediction about your future based on your past experiences that tell you that, for example, family life and your daughter and the time with them is really important and that you will value it the highest. Yes,

but it also tells you, you've also learned, so yes, so first of all, I love the phrasing, and in fact, I often use that phrasing, I will say, you brain is using the past to predict the future, which has consequences for your immediate present. So that's exactly right. But I would also say that you've also implicit in your summary, which I think is just bang-on, like you hit the bullseye. also a hidden thing which is not said yet. And that is that I'm very driven in my work. Like I'm very driven. And I'm not really competitive with other people because I'm actually more collaborative. People keep trying to have like adversarial collaborations with me. And I keep saying it's not adversarial. And they're like, well, we disagree. And I'm like, right, but we both don't care who's right. We just care about the way things are. Like we want to understand how things work. So it's not adversarial. It's collaborative. You know, I'm not I'm not competitive that way, but I am ambitious in my work. But that interferes. You can't be maximally ambitious in your work and also have a family unless you also have a lot of, like, staff. But

you sometimes seem to have already settled on the idea that what you would regret if you spent the time with your daughter when you could have been, let's say, furthering your research, bringing a paper to ready to submit, what you will regret is that you didn't spend time with your daughter rather than, oh, we didn't get that paper out as soon as we could. Well, yeah, don't get

me wrong. It's not that I don't regret not submitting the paper. It's really a matter of what I would regret more. Like, I think one of the things I came to the, you know, another thing for me that's really important to living a meaningful life is being truthful and honest with myself to the best of my ability, right? So one of the things, you know, after I had my daughter, I would go to these mother's groups, you know, because I was at home for some months and, you know, so all these mothers, new mothers would get together. And I thought to myself, like, I felt like an anthropologist in these meetings, right? Like, I would listen to that. And I would think, yeah, but my problem is not that I need to convince myself that I need to be home with her. And it's not that I need to, you know, convince myself that going back to work is the absolute thing I must do. It's that I want to be in two places at once and I'm ambivalent. And that ambivalence is the truth. When I'm at home, I want to be at work. When I'm at work, I want to be at home. It's not just that I'm unhappy with everything. I mean, some people might say that, but it's that I actually want both. I want, I want to do both things and I can't do both things. Thank you for saying it. Thank you. Because you just express

my thoughts from when I was, you know, a young mother with young

children. How old are your kids?

Now they are 18 and 20. So they are, you know, more or less on their own. I mean, they need me and I try to support them. But of course it's such a difference. But for example, when I wrote my PhD, my daughter was just born. So, you know, I fed her with my breasts and then put the hair into a bed and keep writing. I was such a stress. But in a way, I'm really happy now that I did both, that I could have both, of course, with help. And that's a great thing with help of my community, yes, so of my family, of my mother, for example, and my husband, and so on. Right?

Yes, exactly. But I think that just this idea of like, mostly people don't lie to you, you know, they just lie to themselves in your presence. Right? So these women were like, and it's not just women, men do it too, but I'm just, I was just talking about this one example. And I think like you, you know, I made certain decisions to do things certain ways. And did that impact my career? Oh, I'm sure it did. And did it impact my daughter? I'm sure it did. I mean, there are some times when, you know, I went to a conference and I missed her first word, you know, that happened. And there were times when deadlines really do matter, like a student's outcome is on the line, and I have to get something done, and I have to get it done. It's not that compromises are never made, but on average, I stopped traveling for a while when my daughter was suffering from depression because she needed me to be at home. And that meant I really couldn't travel. I couldn't do all the things that you needed to do. And when she was little, she went to Montessori school and it finished at three and she needed to be finished at three. And so what that meant was just like you, that I would, I was with her from three until seven, 30 or eight when she went to bed and then I went back to work. And was it good that I worked until one o'clock in the morning and then got up at six and did it again? Probably not great for, you know, I probably lost a few brain cells in the process. But I'm not sure that I would do it differently because I would say we both enjoyed her childhood very much. And so yes, I do think that I think, of you can never know really, you can never know what you will value later. But it's worth asking that question, I think. And really being honest with yourself about it to the best that you can, to the best of your ability.

Yeah, I think that's true. Also, I have three daughters, and they're now, the oldest is past 50, and the youngest is, and so they're all... Wait, what?

You have a 50-year daughter? I

have a 50-year daughter, yes. Did you have her when

you were 10?

Thanks very much, but I'm 78 now, so having a 50-year daughter doesn't equate to that. But yeah, and I have two daughters who are in their late 40s, and I have grandchildren now. So in a way that, you know, that problem was a real problem when they were small, and I was wanting to spend time with them. And for us to be a family that had a lot of time, and we did. But I'm really glad we did. I got some writing done, actually by getting up earlier in the morning before, usually before they were. Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

But yes, but I'm sure I could have got more, but obviously I'm happy the way things that, and then there was a period when they didn't need me that much and they didn't have their own children, but now I have four grandchildren. They actually all live quite close to me. So we see them and want to spend time with them too. And that was one of the reasons why I retired from Princeton at the end of the last academic year. So to be back in Melbourne and be closer to the grandchildren was a factor there. That's so wonderful. Yeah, there's all these compromises.

And I guess, I don't know, I mean, it's a truism. It's kind of trite. And it's been said before, but nobody at the end of their life ever wishes they worked more. Yeah. That's not, and I'm not the first person to say it and other people have said it better and probably in a way that's more funny than the way I just did it, but that to me is a guiding principle. That being said, it's also the case with my career. I think about, okay, I've probably got some number of years left before I lose all my marvels. And what what am I going to do at that time? I've published probably almost 300 peer review papers at this point. And my honest opinion is that the incentive structure in in science is really screwed up. And you could probably throw away two thirds, maybe even more of those papers and nothing bad would happen. I think that there's probably a handful of papers that I've written that have been really, really important, maybe a few more than a handful, but if I'm being kind to myself. But my point being that, so am I going to publish a bunch more empirical papers? How is that going to help anybody? Or would that be useful or would it be better for me to spend time thinking about other things that are important, like philosophy of science and psychology and why there's a real problem there, and producing conceptual tools for people to use? And then of course, maybe they'll use them, maybe they won't, but at least I'll have done what I think is right like I try to ask myself well if I've got a good number of years left x number of years how am I gonna spend those years yeah what am I gonna do with those years I'm going to come to the end of my life feeling that my scientific work or philosophical work or historical work whatever it is is incomplete. That's just a given But I just try to be more deliberate about it. Yeah,

it will certainly always be incomplete But if there are things that particularly interest you that you want to get into you know That's that's what I felt that I wanted to try doing I would say then then do them even if they're more speculative Maybe for you to go into the philosophy of science issue is somewhat more speculative, but if it's something, yeah.

Thank you. So, and I am. Yeah. And I am. Well, and you've done terrific things. I mean, your books are really amazing and you've moved so many psychological structures, you know, forward. And

I think help people in the way we started off talking, you know, the way you helped Kasia with her speaking anxiety problems. Understanding emotions, yeah. Understanding emotions in human nature. I think your books do help people to control, you know, to think about their emotions and what they can do rather than just sort of, if you like, let them be. I think that's an important aspect of your work too. Well,

thank you.

Great. So I think, you know, we usually ask our guests whether they have lived well, but I think you just in a way told us a lot about that, that you feel that what you've done has been worthwhile, what you've done with your daughter has been worthwhile. I don't know if there's anything you want to add to that before we wind up.

Well, I mean, all I would say is that, of course, I don't think everything is worthwhile that I've done. And I don't think I mean, I can if, you know, if we were sitting over coffee, I could give you a litany of things that I think I did wrong. I think in general, the kinds of questions, particularly in the second part of our discussion that you're asking are really important questions ask and and there are questions that I Don't think that we're encouraged to ask very often, you know And I think the questions you're asking about living a meaningful life are tools that people look you can use tools that you can use to live a more meaningful life even by just asking the question. You know, sometimes in science, certainly, progress is not answering questions, it's just asking better ones. Yes,

philosophers know it well, yes. Yeah. Yeah,

but thank you for what you said, because that really is what we're trying to do with the Lives Well-Lived podcast, to help people by exposing them to a range of different opinions. Obviously, scientists like you who work in relevant areas, but also some others who have simply lived their lives in certain ways, and we invite them to reflect on how well they've lived.

I think the main thing for me is that at a certain point, I think I realize that spending time is not a metaphor. You spend it and you can never get it back. So you just have to think about how can you spend it well. You've been given one life. What are you going to do with it? What is that life going to be? And I just think we don't, you know, like I said, we don't ask that. We're not given the opportunity to ask that question very often. So it's very I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you about this. It's been really fun. Thank you

very much. Great for us to.