What

is the state of happiness? Can we quantify that where we are in terms of are we getting happier as a people or more unhappy as a people? We

can and we can't. So the United Nations and a lot of other places try to see the happiest country. You've seen those data a lot, the happiest country. It's always Denmark. It's always the Nordic countries. You can't do that. And that's like, the way that that happens is they go to a hundred countries and they survey a thousand people in each of a hundred countries and say, how do you evaluate your life? That's like asking people in every country how much you like the music in your country. And on the basis of the highest rankings internally, you would say, who has the best music? It doesn't really make sense. It's bad methodology. You can look at the average well-being across a population where people are having more or less the same experience. So inside countries, inside communities over time, willing to look at that. And that shows that in most of the OECD countries, including the United States and UK, our countries, happiness has been in decline since about 1990.

Since about 1990?

Yeah. Is that when you were born?

Yeah, 92.

It's not you. It's us. What

is, I always think when people commit their lives largely to a topic, that must have very personal roots with that individual.

Sure.

What are your personal roots with the subject

of happiness? It's hard for me. It's hard for me. I'm not a naturally happy person. I'm way below average in happiness. And at least 50% of that is genetic, by the way. So there's a lot of research looking at identical twins. There's a whole database of identical twins born between the mid-1930s and 1960s that were adopted into separate families at birth, then reunited as adults. This was not an experiment that was cooked up by some, you know, diabolical Harvard, you know, scientist like me. It happened naturally, just over the course of events. And when they were reunited, they were given personality tests. You can see some of these meetings where they were reunited on YouTube, and they're wonderful. They're joyful and funny. You find that you have an identical twin you didn't know about, and finding all these commonalities. But of course, there's always a bunch of social scientists, you know, with clipboards, you know, annoying them like me, you know, taking data. And so the personality tests all show that between 40 and 80% of your personality is genetic and the rest is environmental and experiential and circumstantial. But 80%, up to 80%, that's a lot. And that means your openness to experience, your conscientiousness as a person, your extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and happiness is about 50% genetic. Your mother literally made you unhappy, Steve.

Or happy. Your results may vary. Was your household a happy place? It

was a complicated place, but it wasn't terrible because my parents were good parents and they loved each other and they loved us. But my relationship by the time I was a young adult was cordial because they were busy with their issues. And, you know, this is one of the things that I talk about with a lot of people. Nobody has a perfect childhood. And a lot of people are troubled by their childhood, and they feel doomed to repeat the circumstances of their childhoods. But they're not. You can rewrite your own past history by looking back at what happened and deciding to change certain variables in the way that you're going to live your adult life. So Steve, you're going to get married and you're going to have children. And then you need to look at your own childhood and say, what are the things that I want to be the same? And what are the things that I want to be different? I'm designing my life right now, not just on the basis of the things that went right, but on the basis of the things that went wrong. You know, I wasn't close to my parents. They never lived close to me. My children, who are now growing up, never had an intense experience of a relationship with any of their grandparents. One side lived in Barcelona. The other side lived in Seattle. We were in New York and Washington, D.C. And so now, no. I'm going to live near my kids, and I'm a grandfather now. All three of my adult kids are hearing from me every day on FaceTime, whether they want to or not. I see my grandson as much as I can. Next week, I turned down a whole bunch of work because I get to babysit my grandson. Is there any research

that proves people who have hope in their lives have greater chances of survival, whether it's when they're suffering with illnesses? I often think about this sort of stereotype that when someone retires, or when they stop working, or when their partner dies in old age, so they might be, both of them might be 90 years old. When one of the partners dies, it seems that the remaining, the surviving partner has months left sometimes.

That's mostly true. When it's not true, this is depressing how that statistic, which is that if the husband dies, the wife is going to be fine. Really? Yeah. Widows are way happier than widowers. I told that to my wife and she's like, huh. Widowers do really poorly, generally. Men do very poorly. And part of the reason is because these data are disputed, but more or less they're directionally correct. 60% of 60-year men say their best friend is their wife. 30% of their wives say their best friend is their husband. Women have more relationships. They have closer, deeper love relationships with non-related kin and with the adult children typically than the husband does. The husband's most intense companion at relationship typically is with the wife. And that's why that's an asymmetric stat. And that's what the data say. But yeah, for sure. I mean, back to the main point, hope is super critical. On

illness.

On everything. I mean, hope actually affects all sorts of physiological processes. And we know that when people lose hope, they give up. And when they give up, they don't take care of themselves. They don't do what they need to do. They don't exercise like they should. They're not as active. They're not talking to other people. Their minds are not stimulated. They don't eat right. They might use substances in ways that they shouldn't. And all of those things compound. So just at the physiological level, you'd see that you'd have degradation when there is no hope. And when you're 90, you can't afford it. Actually, I'm 59. I can't afford it either. And neither can you at 31. We all need hope. This is huge. To the extent that you can actually bring hope to people by showing them they can do something as an agent in their own future, that's just giving them a longer, better, more successful life. That's what I want to do with my work. You know, because I've seen so much. I mean, since I've actually dedicated myself to this, I have very good protocols for measuring my own well-being and I don't game the numbers. I mean, I have, there's macronutrients to your happiness. You have to take the different elements. It's not a single measure thing. And there are micronutrients that you can aggregate up to it. And I follow this very carefully, month by month by month, semester by semester, year by year. And I take the same tests as my students do every year. And I am 60% happier than I was five years ago because of my work. Because of the work that you've done on yourself or because of your work as a... Both. Because here's the deal. If you want to be happier, you need to understand the science. You need to apply it to your life. You need to share it with others because you won't remember it and hold yourself accountable unless you're teaching it. That's why I teach people to be happiness teachers. Interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, so my guess is how long have you been in the podcast? Two years? We

launched on YouTube three years ago.

Yeah. It's, it's probably having a big effect on your life. Huge. Because you're talking about these ideas. And my guess is that you're in your private life, you're talking about the ideas that you learned with other people. And every time you share these ideas, you imprint them, not just sort of, they're not just limbic phantasms. They become, you use them with the executive centers of your brain. The more that you learn, the more you talk about what you learn, the better off you get. You're only talking about things that empower people and lift them up and make their lives better. These are the topics of what you do, right? Because you want people to be happier and more successful. That's the point of the show, right? And that's how you're getting happier and more successful. Is

there research that shows this point of agency correlates to happiness and survival? Yes. Like longevity. Yeah. And so agency essentially means that the belief that you have control over your life and your future, in essence.

Yeah. And that there are things that you can do so that you're not helpless. Helplessness is the problem. This gets back to the work of Marty Seligman in the late 60s, early 1970s. He's the father of positive psychology. He created the whole field of positive psychology. He's a great mentor and hero to me. He's done so much for me and intellectually and in my career and as a friend and just as a person. And when he was doing his early work, he was doing animal studies and work on human beings to take away their agency. So he would do things like people would be, you know, putting nickels into a slot machine and they would figure out along the way that it didn't matter if they pulled the handle or not, that they were getting the same outcomes. He took away just little tiny bits of agency. He had dogs in boxes where they would shock the floors of the boxes. This is hard to get through internal review boards now. But they would, because it seems cruel. It wasn't big shocks. But the whole point was that the dogs would, you know, step off the parts of the floor that were shocking them. But when they couldn't do that anymore, they would just like lie down and whimper on the shocking floor. They would give up. This is called helplessness. People will learn their helplessness when they realize that when they, when they, or they figure out, or they conclude, or they're told by politicians and media and activists and everybody else that there's nothing that they can do. And they're a victim. When you take on the identity of victim, you learn your helplessness and that will degrade your quality of life, make you less successful, less happy. And a lot of studies say that you won't even live as long. This

point of agency is so interesting. I had someone on the show at the very beginning of the show, and he said that he basically crowdsources his book, a guy called Mo Gorda. You might know the guy. He says he crowdsources his book and he gets 500 people to read his book before it comes out. And he goes, when we got down to the part in my book about personal responsibility, he goes, 8% of people drop off the Google document because

they don't want to read it. No, this is spinach. And it's interesting because I have this column that comes out every Thursday morning in the Atlantic, 12 or 1300 words on the science of happiness. And about once every two or three months, I have a spinach column, which says, you want to be happy? Be humble. You want to be happy? Change your mind. You want to be happy? Don't tell somebody that if they disagree with you that they're stupid and evil, listen, listen more than you talk. You know, just what your grandmother told you, right? About how to be a successful person. But it's all about humanity, about humility. But these are hard things in a society where all of our biases are, I'm right, you're wrong. I don't want to listen. La, la, la, la, la. If it goes against my, my whatever ideological biases that I happen to have, and I'll write a spinach column. And those are the ones that get way less, way fewer readers. Do

you know what's interesting? As you're speaking, I was thinking that nobody thinks they're a victim. They can spot victimhood in other people very successfully, but there's no one listening to this right now that would say, I am a victim. So how does one know if they're

a victim? Well, I mean, a lot of people will say, I am a victim of these institutional biases. A lot of people will, a lot of people really will say that. I mean, they will say that I'm a victim of capitalism or I'm a victim of powerful people. I'm a victim of, of conspiracies that are happening, the deep state, whatever it happens to be. A lot of people really will talk about it in that particular way. And that's sort of the problem. Now, of course, we're all victims of something, but we all have tons of power. And the really interesting thing in life is to show people the levels of power that they have, the levers of power that they have, that don't start with trying to change the outside world, that start with the inside of their heads. That's what I'm dedicated to doing, is showing people that the hope that they should have comes from the leverage they have over their circumstances, which starts with what they thought they had the least control over, their emotions, their happiness, their well-being, the love that they experience because the commitments that they make. If you really want to have power, start with managing yourself, not trying to manage the outside world. Is

happiness a choice? Happiness

is unattainable because it's a direction, not a destination. Is

being happier a choice? Yes. Being

happier is a choice on the basis of the commitment that you are going to make in your life and in your relationships, in the way that you manage yourself. Absolutely.