Doing things that enhance our survival are superimportant, and they tend to make us very happy. But if you live for ever a thousand years but you never have a baby, well, you're evolutionarily irrelevant. Evolution only cares about you to the degree that you reproduce. There's iva photo of me when my first child, his son, was born, and he's a brand new baby, and i'm patting him, and i look young and full of beans,. And just a few years later i'm desicated and worn out and thrashed because he was so biologically expensive in order to do that. It's what my kids are now, adults, but when they
#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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