173: The Happy Equation

Welcome to classical stuff you should know. This is a podcast about books, philosophy, whatever. Who cares? I'm here with two people, Graham Donaldson.

Hey, hey, everybody, how's it going? And Thomas. Hi. He doesn't work here anymore.

He makes me sad. Sorry. And we talk about books and stuff, whatever. Do you seem a little down the dumps?

Yeah. Can I tell you something that I think might turn it around? Sure. What if we did an episode on happiness?

Oh, I'll just highlight my sadness. I know. Something like that. It feels so unnatural for me.

I am maybe the living opposite of Eor. Yeah. So you're a seven. Yeah, I'm a seven.

Yeah, I'm a seven. I mean, any of you are not out of 10. Maybe a little bit about. You know, I'd be happy just sitting right in there at seven.

You live in 10 in Helen of Troy. You'd be miserable. That's the thing is when you're at 10, you can never trust anybody. That's right.

You live in there's a three rock episode about that. What do they call it? The hot bubble? Hot bubble.

Yeah, where everyone like you don't know how normal people live because you're so attractive. I can never trust anybody. I like being a seven. Sorry, where I live.

It's cool. On that note. On that note. I'm going to be right.

I found out about him because he writes a column for the Atlantic. He plays French horn. He is at Harvard. I think he's teaching there.

Like a social scientist, musician, columnist, where they'd like to go. You can be at Harvard and not teaching there. Just go to campus. You can walk around.

Anyone can. Can you be installed at Harvard as just sort of a fixture that lives in a cabin? Is that a man that they do? No, maybe.

Like maybe artist and residence. Yeah, there's going to be resident thinkers. There's got to be. Anyway, at the beginning of COVID, he started writing an article, I got a column in the Atlantic based on human happiness.

And he's been involved in Harvard. And Harvard's got this really longstanding study on happiness. And they've got this real long, I think it started in the 30s, where they were tracking graduates. And it's this longstanding study trying to really figure out like, what are the factors that cause, how people self-report as being happy, being content?

What is a content settled life? Like, how do you get it? And so there's this long-standing study at Harvard. Are the brooks he's involved with it now?

Started writing this column for the Atlantic during COVID. And one of them, he outlined sort of these three equations for happiness that he says, takes into account a lot of the research and on happiness. And he's kind of put them into these little three equations. I like them.

I think they're really interesting. And I realized that you can kind of port them as a tool to help you with your reading of literature. So that's what I do at Veritas, I'm a literature teacher. And so I realized that this is a really sort of a little helpful heuristic that you can do to talk about the characters in stories, to really use it to pinpoint ways that you can use literature to speak to our own lives.

Because ultimately, education, scolay, school, is about the good life. And the good life is Aristotle says, the good life is when man is happy. Now what he means by that is not like he's got all his whims met, but that we have, we are sort of reaching our tell-offs. We are doing the thing that human beings are made for.

And much to AJ Sugarin, Aristotle says that what that is is like doing philosophy. What philosopher says that the happy man is the philosophic. I think that politics too. Yeah.

There are a few answers. But this idea being that happiness is that thing that we want, that human beings want to be happy. And these sort of little equations are these things that have a lot of research into them to talk about happiness. Now I'm going to talk about them.

We can agree or disagree with them. But I think that ultimately, for my purposes, and for the purposes for this podcast, I present them as helpful heuristics that you can take into books when you're reading them and to use the basis of asking questions from the story to talk to yourself. For example, is Hamlet ultimately happy? Do these kinds of things.

And then you can use it to get into a deeper understanding of that rhetoric level of literature. Does that make sense? So in this column, he presents three signs of happiness or three things that lead to happiness. He basically says, if you have these things.

Yeah, if you organize your life in this way, you are giving yourself the best chance for being happy. OK. Yeah. Let's talk about something else.

Yeah. So the first equation that he says is that happiness or subjective well-being is genes. So your genetic makeup plus your circumstances, things that happen to you plus your habits. So these three things taken together are major contributors to human happiness.

Now first of all, your genetic makeup is kind of a bummer to think about. Even according to Brooks, he says that when they take a look at the research, genetic makeup actually makes a really big amount of human happiness. I don't know how they quantify it, but he makes the claim that almost half of the self-reporting about happiness does come down to your genetic makeup. I don't know the details specifically here.

It's usually through twin studies. Oh, interesting. So you want twins. So the groups you want are twins that live together, who have shared genes and shared environment, twins raised apart, same genes, different environment.

And then you can do those comparisons. How much of it is do people living in a completely different environment still grow up and they both make the same amount of money right? So then you point to a genetic component. That's typically how you separate that stuff.

Yeah, interesting. That's cool. Smart. People are smart sometimes.

Now, even though genetics takes a big section of, it can be a big drag or a big boon to human happiness, my guess is that since we all kind of fall on the bell curve of genetics, for a lot of people, it's not the major. It's not a major thing. If you're on the wings of genetics, if you have really great genetics, I don't know, you're super attractive. So the hot goal.

Yeah, if you're Helen, you might be miserable. Your life may be miserable. And that may be a major contributing factor to your happiness. Or if you have, for example, the hot girls in my high school never got asked out because all the good guys were intimidated.

So they always had the dirtiest fellas, the only ones that had the confidence to talk to them. Yeah. Or none of the good guys ever asked them out because they were always really like, oh, I could never get her. She's too cute.

And then the guys would get them. We're like, let's go do drugs. Yeah. And then those girls think that only the best boys are the worst.

Yeah, it's weird. But it's a true thing. There we go. And then presumably, we can also think of examples on the other end of genetics where if you were in chronic pain, if you had some sort of disease where you were always hurting, that is going to be a major drag on happiness.

Yeah, absolutely. But with the bell curve idea of that we're not super, we don't have happiness, drugs, coursing through our bodies at all time, or if we're not in chronic pain, chances are we fall into some sort of range that does have a factor but is not this determining factor. And I also happen to think that there is a lot of human willpower that can overcome circumstances and genetic make-ups and these kinds of things. So then the second characteristic in this is circumstances.

And this is something you're talking about with people who have similar or identical genetic make-ups being in completely different circumstances. So this can be a boon or can be a drag, the kind of home that you grew up in, the kind of education that you had, your childhood, the accidents that befall you, the good opportunities that you're presented. You just so happened to meet somebody who said, you know what? You'd be a great fit at my company.

And all of a sudden, you get this opportunity that you never would have had before. The accidents and circumstances of life, they can be major benefits and they can be major detriments. But what they pointed out in a lot of the studies is that human beings also have a pretty good ability to get used to circumstances. And if they, at the beginning, have a big uptick or down-tick on happiness, eventually, you get used to your circumstances and they're not as powerful.

So the ultimate example or the classic example is you get a big raise at work. You get 20% raise and you come home and you're like, your happiness has a massive uptick. Everything is improved. You think life is great.

And then six months into it, your circumstances have improved, but maybe your happiness has not sort of tracked with that or you're now just squandered it or whatever. Or you have saved it and you were prudent with it. But it doesn't change the volume of living. Like the number in your bank accounts higher, but you're still living the same.

Yeah, and there are other factors in your life that you haven't taken into account. So they're like, your dog still hates you or whatever. That would roof us. So those first two ones, Genesum circumstance, those are completely outside of human control.

But human beings, we still need to be aware of these things and we need to, we still have the power to sort of have some measure of control over how we're gonna deal with it. Meg, me and I were talking before this episode, there was a Josh Gibbs who does the podcast, is it the proverbial? Just proverbial. He was talking about the proverb, God doesn't give with both hands, which is the proverb that generally means if God gives you a gift in one way, it's not going, God doesn't give only good things to some people and only bad things to other people.

There's always going to be a given to take with the skills and the gifts that you have. Is that a good summation? Sure, we'd heavens, that's bleak. No, no, no.

It's your example of the people who are attractive in high school, it's like, yeah, they're attractive, but they'll have some other problem. That's how I think it's- The happiness is that the attractiveness is also going to have a headwind to it as well. There's downsides to things. Or upsides the down things.

There's a story where the man broke his leg and he thought it was so terrible until it saved him from the draft, which he thought was great until his son got drafted. And he fell in the nurse or something. Yeah, yeah, like, there's this, you know, there's a good bet. That's right.

So the idea being, yes, that life gives you a hand and it all, it's in how you play that hand. Has nothing, it has less, you can complain about the hand, but it's all in how you play it. And the back can be good, then good can be bad, depending on how you play it. Two semopsuits, great, if the flop is 772.

Exactly. What'd I always say? What'd I always say? And so in that, in that proverbial podcast, like his ultimate point is he saying, like listen, you've gotta go with the things that you have some kind of natural disposition towards.

If you're super tall, don't be an airline, stewardess, right? Like it's just gonna be miserable. That was, maybe that's good, except he can help people put their bags up anyway. Very true.

But there's like each over at the seats. You know, like being tall isn't helpful. But you know, you're gonna be crunchy all day if you're on that airplane. But his point was, a big part of growing up is the self-awareness that you have to be able to say, what is this one thing that I have that I can leverage into having some kind of success in this world.

He tells the charming story of auditing a college level class when he was 17 on creative writing and the professor saying, the only person who's not terrible was this story. He was like, oh my word, I can do this. Right? And I think that's true.

That when it comes to our, you know, you need to leverage the circumstances, you need to sort of know your genetics or your nature, your things that you're predisposed to. And you need to be clever in how you utilize that thing. If you've got, don't be a baseball player, if you like have really bad depth awareness, right? Like you'll never be able to catch the grounder.

But then the big one also on this was habits. And this takes us to the second, the second equation. I'm just gonna say all three equations and we can come back and I can talk a little bit about how we can use this in analyzing literature. So habits, he says, the second equation for habits is, you're cultivating faith, family, friends, and work.

These are the four things that he says, is that the people who are the happiest all have a combination of these things, these four things. Faith, family, friends, and work. And many times family and friends can kind of be seen as like a core category. They very much go together.

People you love that love you. Yes, yeah. There is a really wonderful talk that Senator Ben Sasse, he is a Senator from Nebraska. He is on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

He is a friend of classical education. And he gave a really great talk. I think he quoted Josh Gibbs in one of his books. Yeah, yeah, he was on the back of, he was one of those called endorsements.

No. He quotes him in one of the books. Oh, he quotes him in one of his books. Yeah, yeah.

Cool. And then also he gave a talk at, I think the 2018 Gospel Coalition Conference. And he's, I think it was the 2018. And he talked on this topic, these four things.

Faith, family, friends, and work. And he was talking about like sort of modern life has in many ways really rocked the foundation for these four things. Less so faith, I mean, but family, meaningful relationships and meaningful work have had a hard time sort of in the modern world. That's his thesis.

You can go watch that talk. It's very interesting. But the way that this, yeah, so these four things, when they looked at the research for faith, it needed to have a couple of characteristics. One, it needed to have a framework for death.

And it needed to have some kind of framework for meaning in life and meaning after death. The research was pretty agnostic according to Brooks. This could be a framework of reincarnation. This could be a framework from a Hindu tradition.

This could be a framework of you slip into the great nothingness of Buddhism. This could be the Christian framework of that life after death is a relationship with God either in the positive or the negative. But there needed to be some sort of framework. If people did not have some kind of framework for life after death that they were, I presume, comfortable with, that ended up being like a drag on happiness.

That if you didn't have this, that even if all the other things were going to be aligned, and this was that open thing, then that was going to have, I call it a head one. I was going to have a bit of a drag on happiness. If a character or a person does not have a satisfying framework for death, then it's going to really fracture a lot of the things that you do in life. Because why do it?

Why work towards something? So the deep philosophy matters, even if you're not thinking about it all day. So the deep philosophy matters. And even if you just have it, you're not a contemplative person.

You're not a deep thinker. But you have it. To me, this is the thing. I'm cool with it.

And I've got that framework. And then you can kind of move on to other things. I often think about the character at the beginning of the Republic, when he's like, hey, what's justice? And the character at the beginning of the Republic, he's like, justice is the old rich man.

Do you remember what his answer is? The one that goes to bed at the beginning. The one that goes to bed at the beginning. But let me say, I think it is better to look just.

Oh, no, no, no. It's not him. It's not the other guy. That's the guy at the beginning has a, he just sort of quickly goes to bed.

But he's got a very simple answer. He's like, justice is just, he essentially says something like, well, it's just being good to other people and doing the right thing. He kind of gives this answer. And when Socrates presses on how you know that, he's like, I don't know, I'm going to bed.

I love that character because I think that that, you know, he gets it right. But he's also like, I'm not going to overthink this thing. I've got this framework that works now. He's talking about justice.

But it is a moral framework. And I think this is also what they're getting at with this. It doesn't mean that you need to be a theologian. It doesn't mean that you need to have this like, deep apology of faith.

It means that the research showed that the people who were settled in content by and large, one of the boxes that was ticked was they had a satisfying answer to death. So that was the first one. The other one was relationships, family and friends. And the relationship with family and friends needed to be one where people loved you and you loved them for more than what they could just get out of you or you get out of them.

The ultimate sort of litmus test for this was, they were happy when you were happy. They were happy at your good fortune and they were sad at your misfortune, even if it didn't mean anything for them. That's kind of the litmus test for happiness, according to sort of how Brooks and the research was framing it. Maybe we did an episode on Aristotle's friendship a long time ago.

Do you remember the highest form of friendship that Aristotle talked about? Friendship of excellence. RTA. What was the hallmarks of the friendships of excellence?

That your happiness, so the friendship of utility and friendship of pleasure, friendship of utility you enjoy what you get from the other person's like networking. Friendship of pleasure is activity you enjoy, you both hang gliding together. Friendship of excellence is that your happiness is the happiness of the other person. When the other person's happy, you are happy.

Yeah, and I think this is so Aristotle is describing what they were also sort of finding in their research, that this level of happiness is a necessary component in the people who are happy. Now, I'm sure that someone who had a framework for, someone had all these things, but they were missing a category. It's not going to be that they're ultimately miserable. They were just showing that, normatively speaking, these were the categories that had readings in someone's life.

And when they weren't present, the reports of either a self-reporting or whatever metric they used to talk about happiness and contentiveness was a lot lower. So take that for what it's worth. But. One of those findings over time too of the decreasing number of close friendships.

Yes. No. So he didn't go into it. I've only been a casual reader of his article.

But it did remind me of some findings. I think it was, I remember reading it was quite a while ago, but there were some studies about how men, as they get older, are increasingly having less and less friends. And the way that a lot of men think that they've got really great friends when they're 19, being like, these are like brothers. We die for each other.

But really, you're just like, drink. You drink and do stupid stuff. And then when one of your buddies gets cancer or his wife dies or leaves him and you got this like crisis, all of a sudden, doing stupid stuff and drinking doesn't really work anymore. I'm sure there's a new Jackass movie coming out with like the guys in their late 50s.

That's weird. I mean, they're old. But I'm sure while they're getting lots of money to do it, I'm sure that they're going to try to work in some kind of like, we're true friends because we've done this. Like we've let crocodiles bite our ears for 20 years or whatever.

But that's like the example of not actual authentic friendship. They might actually be friends though. They've got their stuff going on. And maybe they're defense.

Like a lot of them have dealt with serious addiction and things like that. And they're still together. Fair point. As bad as women.

Sure. In so far as like, there has been that actually feeling bad for the per, you know, it's outside of the like Jackassery. Yes. Yes.

Well, that's the name of the thing. But wait, right. Not just about it. Yeah.

And then this is true for family as well. Now family is kind of a built in relationship where this is, you're sort of stuck with your family. People who have your same, you all came from the same place. You grew up together with your siblings.

You've come from the home of these families. That creates an environment of understanding that is very different than your friends. He was saying that with this research, there also needs to be a element of responsibility. So your people are depending on you.

So family and friends really only works. And you can really only get to that Aristotelian level of friendship of excellence when the possibility of the friendship like failing because of your inactivity, right? Like you need to have skin in the game. They need to have skin in the game for your friendship.

This isn't just like your drinking buddies and you're going camping, you're going to get, you're going to do like fun stuff and hiking and fishing and drinking and then when if, you know, Bill doesn't come well, that's okay. No, this is the kind of friendship that Bill doesn't come, it's a problem. Sure. Here's what we've been talking about.

Those categories can change. That's the one you think is excellent, actually turns out to be. Pleasure. Yeah, exactly.

And then you can just change how you treat that person based on that. Yeah. So if you are sort of doing a self-report for yourself and you're thinking, do I have that level of friendship or not, I mean, that's a fruitful exercise for an individual person to go through. It's also a fruitful exercise to be able to sort of apply the syristic to characters and stories, right?

Like we are beginning the school year pretty soon here and we begin the school year. Hanenburg and I are going to be teaching crime and punishment. You know, and so the main character of Raskolnikov, here is a character that when it comes to friendship, does not have one. In fact, actively fights against having friendships.

Yet it is the stubborn love of somebody who for some reason holds Raskolnikov as somebody that he needs to take care of, that character's name is Razumikin. That that stubborn friendship, that Razumikin, has that loyalty where Raskolnikov's illness and sadness makes Razumikin sad. Ultimately is a major contributing factor to some good in Raskolnikov's life. Would you say that's fair, Hanenburg?

Yeah, and Mary's a sister. And Mary's a sister. No, that's a factor too. The Razumikin, you know, like Raskolnikov.

Oh, he's literally the best character in the book. Yes, he is. He's a lesbian. Mm-hmm, he's great.

But the point being that that sort of loyalty of friendship, even though Razumikov wants to hate it and wants to be miserable and wants Razumikin to go away, it ultimately has the effect of being a contributor to Razumikov's ultimate eventual contentment. Convalescence. Yeah, and exactly. His convalescence, his healing.

So there's an example of using that with a character. Hamlet and Horatio don't really have that friendship. Horatio's really is the only person that Hamlet can really unburden himself to. But it is not that that sort of, I'm sad when you're sad, relationship.

It became the play Hamlet's like, oh, you're Horatio, right? I know you. We kind of go to college together. Horatio's like, yeah, and I'm from Denmark too.

But they don't have this strong friendship. And the strong friendship that Hamlet is supposed to have with Rosenkranz and Gilderinztern ultimately gets destroyed when Hamlet suspects that Rosenkranz and Gilderinztern are treating him like a friendship of what was the first one, utility. That they're just being his friends so that they can get into the good graces of the king. And when Hamlet suspects that that's the case, it's unclear whether that is the case with Rosenkranz and Gilderinztern, I actually feel like they actually do care for Hamlet.

But it seems like they're trying hard. It's not saying they're trying hard. But the fact that Hamlet suspects some of it, he ends up then sort of poisoning the well of that friendship because he is not going to reciprocate. He is not going to have skin in the game.

In fact, what he's going to do is he's going to skin Rosenkranz and Gilderinztern at the end of the book. Quite almost literally. He marches them off to their death. So you can take that, this Aristotelian notion of friendship, know that is a major contributing factor of human happiness.

Ask those questions of Hamlet and say, does Hamlet have any true friends of excellence? And as you go through all the characters, it's like, no, it doesn't. Anyway, just an example of fighting. So you're proposing these as ways of reading literature of looking for whether characters have these different.

I'm supposing that insofar as we take these as being accurate descriptors of human nature, that they are insightful and talking about something that is true about human beings, that they can be helpful, interpretive tools for talking about stories insofar as those stories are also accurate descriptions of human nature. You find that this is an accurate model? I think so. I think it's how I do.

I'm sure you get to those interesting cases like a father's ossima and brother's caromas off. You get to somebody that removes himself from society and doesn't seem to have the faith, but doesn't seem to have the friends. Doesn't seem to have the other category, which is work. Maybe there's the work of being among.

But then it's interesting to apply it to those different kinds of cases and be like, well, here's somebody that seems to buck the trend. Here's somebody that is talking about deep human contentment and has removed a lot of things from his life. I'm sorry, French class. Yeah, but that's also the third equation.

We'll get there in a second. The other last one was faith, family, friends, and the other one is meaningful work, work that human beings were made to work. These categories of a framework for death and a framework for sort of more living, family and friends, real authentic relationships of people who really, truly love you and are dependent on you and count on you, and meaningful work are all things that God gives to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the obviously the relationship with God knowing, and also a framework, do not do this thing, is a necessary component. The authentic, the authentic, loving relationship between Adam and Eve, and the meaningful work.

You get a untended garden and you are to turn it into a garden. So there's the human happiness displayed in sort of the ancient story, founding story of human beings. The categories for meaningful work aren't our two of two, of one, you need to be earning success, or at least feel like you are in success. You are not just succeeding by randomness or by failure.

Like there needs to be the progress that you are doing the thing. That your work is actually benefiting and bringing about success. And that work needs to be meaningful for other people. You need to be able to have a defense as to why this work needs to exist or should exist in the world.

So the sort of case study that I came up with, or the little thought experiment that I came up with, was imagine you came into work every day, and your job was to push a button, and when you push that button, you got some sort of random distributed payoff, either in the positive or the negative. You made a hundred bucks or you lost 50 bucks. And every time you pushed the button, you had this random payoff. And the algorithm was created in such a way that at the end of the year, you had a salary of $60,000.

Every year, it didn't matter how many times you pushed that button. In what order you pushed it once one day, you pushed it a hundred times one day. At the end of the year, you had 60 grand. That would be an example of not meaningful work.

You are not earning your success and it has no meaning. It's just this random distributed payoff. That is going to be a drag on happiness. It's not gonna make you super miserable that you don't want to exist anymore.

You'd have to find work someplace else. If you figured that out, I would just go and impress it once a year, and then do something else my time. As soon as you did that, your natural human instinct would be to seek out that thing that you're not getting. Which is something meaningful to do with my time.

Exactly. And you see this play itself out that people give an exhorted amount of time to work that has that kind of meaningful progression and getting better at something. People do it play an instrument. As you talk about learn helplessness at all, is this something you want to try?

No, it's that. The research basis for it is horrible studies so I apologize in advance, but they take these dogs in the puttement box. Not like a big box, it's like a crate, whatever. And inside of that crate, there's a button, when you press the button, and some they press it, they get food every time.

And some they press it and they get shocked every time. And some it's random. So some it's you get food or you get a shock. And the ones who get food, they press it a lot, make it getting food, the ones who get shocked stop immediately.

And the ones who get a random result give up that just lay down and they quit the game because not knowing what is gonna come from, what they're doing is they can't like deal with that as an outcome. And they have to be like rehabilitated to be like healthy dogs again, it really messes with these pork reaches. That's the comparison to what you're talking about. This is, anyway, there's empirical backing to what you're saying.

That people give up in the face of that meaninglessness and the uncertainty of a positive or negative payoff. That's right. If you, if you, if your time spent is going to have this random, you don't know what you're gonna get. You don't know what you're gonna get.

Then it is not a game worth playing. You give it and you give it up. So the meaningful work. Now, it's not really tied to a number amount.

We'll talk about money in the last equation. But there needs to be, the person needs to be able to have some kind of defense as to why their job is a necessary thing. And so you think of the fame, you know, office space. The movie office space, right?

There's a main character who hates his job and he thinks his job has sort of like no meaning in the grand scheme of things. And that's why he hates it. And then the Jennifer Anderson character feels the same way about her job as a server at this like Applebee's or whatever. It's been a long time since I watched that movie.

Right, but there was like a whole genre of cubicle hating culture that was built in that sort of came of age in the 90s, right? Because that was sort of a time when we were, you know, the corporate structure was sort of turned into that way. It was before the Google campus where you had ping pong tables and bunk beds and things. It was a sterile environment for business.

Yeah, and then even that's going to have some kind of shelf life where people will realize like, oh gosh, this actually, you can't just, you can't put your life into the corporate. Or you can't just like smooth over some sort of sense of meaninglessness with like vending machines. Like the work itself needs to be able to have a an ability to sort of put it into the framework of meaning and feeling like you're earning your success. So those are the, and those we have control over.

Our faith, our family, our friends, our work. Those are things that we can put effort into to make better. So for the person who feels like they have no friends, putting yourself out there and actually having skin in the game is a hard thing to rehab, especially as time goes on. But you know, the lone wolfing it is going to be a drag on sort of human happiness, human flourishing, that kind of thing.

God says it is not good for men to be alone, right? That kind of thing. And then the last one, this third equation is that, and this is, do you review what we've got so far? So the first equation was, you know, the well-being was a mixture of gene circumstance and habits.

Okay, so well-being equals genes circumstance habits. And then the habits was faith, family, friends, and work. Okay, so Ellen's habits, faith, family, friends, work. Okay, and then this last one has to do with desires and has to do with appetites.

And it is a, what you have divided by what you want. And having that number be as big as possible. Now, the way that you can do this is you can either increase the numerator, what you have, or you can decrease the denominator, what you want. So I have some perfect value as one.

If I have everything I want, I'm satisfied with it. Yes, it's a one. If I have twice as much as you want, but that's what I mean, I can have more like a normal. So you're getting into the beta one half.

You're getting into the beta one half. So just to hold your horses. Because this is, I think actually, Thomas and I, or Thomas and AJ and I, we had a disagreement over ambition during my Satan episodes. Remember that?

And I think that the disagreement was, we were talking about different categories. I know you mean the podcast episode, but I'm referring to things like, the Satan episode? You're obsessed with the Satan episode. No, no, no.

The Satan podcast episode. And I think we were talking about different categories. That seems like a scary podcast. I wouldn't go there.

It's about some guy talking about how greedy it is. So, and I think we were talking past each other. So let me just outline this equation we can get back to the conversation. So, have you heard of the hedonic treadmill of the year for that term before?

So the hedonic treadmill is you get things, you want things, once you have things, the circumstance wears off and the sugar rush or however you want to call it goes down and you want more and more things and more and more things and then you're on the treadmill. I got to make more money. I need about two. Sure.

So there's hedonic. That's a very charitable way of saying you're wrong. I like to reinterpret your sentences. Imagine a scale from one to 10.

And let's take AJ. AJ is a very happy person. But he can't be at 10 all the time. Let's call him a nine.

Call him an eight for the sake of this example. Oh, seven, but you know what? That's seven. AJ's average happiness level is seven.

Graham's is five. Thomas is three. Whatever. Pick a number.

Well, let's say focus on AJ. AJ gets a raise. His number goes up to eight. But over time, he's going to come back to seven.

Well, let's say something bad happens to AJ. Someone punches him in the face. He goes down to a six. He's going to go back to seven pretty quickly.

That's the hedonic treadmill. Oh, I see. You have a happiness set point and you'll fluctuate but you'll end up back at that. It's incredibly difficult to change your set point to an eight.

Yeah, I mean, it's far as seven. It's, you know, somewhat, I was going to say it's easier to go down than it is to go. Sure. So like something like if you're if you're divorced, you're going to have a permanent decrease to your hedonic, your happiness set point.

No, the most dramatic events are holidays and divorces and things like holidays. Yeah, holidays count as things that are anyway, they're just stressful family situations. So anyway, it's easier to go down the seven to seven to seven. Yeah, but almost everything you'll end up back at seven.

Gotcha. That's the treadmill is that no matter what happens to you, you kind of end up at the same. Can you change your base score? Can you become a base?

Okay. That's how you change it. Your genes are part of it or environment is part of it. It's in theory, habit scan, you know, a radical weight loss for somebody's obese.

We tend to, you know, increase your happiness. Things like that, but it's hard. It's really hard. Yes.

Now with this one, this is a bit of a mindset shift. So with what you have with divided by what you want, that's the equation and lots of people spend their time increasing the what you have and thinking that that is going to be the thing that is ultimately filling. If you have this thing, if I decide to vote, if I decide to have bigger house, if I decide to have smarter kids, if I just had fancier skateboards, I don't know, then I would be happier. But one of the sort of the trouble with human appetites and the human life is that the growth weight of wants or the growth weight of wants is like greater than the growth weight of haves, right?

Like as soon as you have something your wants go up 1.2%. That just seems to be a thing that is baked into the human nature. It is probably a very beneficial thing that we have that baked into our nature. If you're talking, if you're a fan of evolution, it would be because it allows us to get more resources, survive better.

Right. If I was happy with what I had, I have a less chance of surviving than someone who is always wanting more and can build a cache of resources. If a baby is just content over an infant's understanding of the world and getting food by crying, then language is never going to be the thing that they strive for. We talked about this in our memetic episode of René Girard.

So there is a necessary component that you want to have the growth in this improvement. But it can become sort of like a weaponizer, it can become pathological when it turns into thinking, I want this thing, I want this thing, and then your appetites grow by feeding it. The other way to focus on it is to try to decrease the wants and say, do I really want this thing? The first desire that I have is can I curb it?

Can I really sort of analyze it and see if it's something that I really want? And this is probably, this low heuristic is what I was thinking about with someone like a father's ossima, where here's a character who is living the sort of simple monastic life. Or the opposite of this is Dorian Gray, who is somebody that says, I am going to completely enjoy and drive headlong into all the hedonic pleasures of life in order to find that contentment. And what it does to him over time is it corrupts his soul, which is symbolized in the painting.

He has a painting of his soul that he keeps hidden in his house. And when he goes and looks at it at the end of the book, it has become a hideous monster, because he has spent his life trying to chase after these wants to the detriment of everybody around him and it is a drag to his happiness. It brings him into ruin. So I hope that as I do this, I'm sort of peppering in examples from stories to see how either you as a teacher or you as a reader can use something like a Harvard study that has research backed by it on happiness and say, okay, let's bring this into our discussion of Hamlet or Raskolnikov or Dorian Gray or Father's Ossima or any of these kinds of characters.

And I think, Thomas, that this is kind of where AJ and I, and you were sort of at the impasse on that conversation, because AJ and I were advocating for lowering the wants, if I'm remembering the conversation correctly. And you were advocating by saying, if you throw out the desire for betterment, that is going to be a drag to have to society. You can't have people that don't want to improve things. And I think is that a fair...

I don't think I said that. I probably believe that. It would create huge problems for there to be no wants. Yes.

And we were saying, but it can cause such problems and you were saying it can cause such problems completely throw it at. So I think that's kind of where maybe our speaking past each other came from, because we were... I knew I was coming at it from a curb your desires, limit your passions. The very fact that Romeo thinks Juliet will make him happy and has this almost devouring desire, not for just for her sexually, but it's because it's not really that.

It's a devouring desire to be loved by this person ends up being this corrosive destructive thing. But you don't want to throw out love. I mean, as we talked about, the family and friends and the meaningful love is a necessary component to happiness. So how that gets deployed, you have Romeo devouring desire for that thing that's missing in his life.

He wants someone to be happy when he's happy and sad when he's sad. That's funny. But on the other hand, he doesn't go about it. Truly.

Because if I'm... Again, if I'm doing it the wrong direction, just tell me. But at some level, you're saying it'd be better if there wasn't adolescent lust because it wouldn't lead to such excesses as the end of Romeo and Juliet. That's probably like a true statement.

That doesn't seem like a feasible thing. And so instead, I think it prays a folly a lot, the book A to talk about Erasmus. Like, marriage happens because of folly. Well, Romeo and Juliet's folly lead to marriage.

And then if Romeo's next up is, I'm going to be the one, you know, his next folly is I'm going to fix the conflict between the capitalists and the monogues. It's an insane idea. But if you've worked toward it, like... It's a great folly.

It's a great folly. It's what makes him think folly is what pushes us forward in some way. Yeah, so oftentimes when students are presented with a character like a Romeo, they think that the opposite is best. Well, we should now be somebody who is detached or we should be somebody that doesn't love or doesn't fall in love or we should be somebody that like, you know, like, takes a slow...

They sort of give some sort of like, you know, Romeo's excess is his problem. And I think what you just described is no, it's better that it's not the opposite. We don't want a detached robot because what will be some suits we like? I told you, like being, like just being chills, like the best thing.

But that's not necessarily the case because you would have the story of how being overly chill ends up being like a drag on the happiness as well. Like, Romeo should be doing things in the right way. The great tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is how much of it is Romeo's fault, how much of it is his fate and just like the fault of the circumstance as opposed to the fault of the habits. And so that's the great sort of benefit that literature can bring is because you were reading stories of people who have circumstances that are out of their control, who are trying to do the right thing or at least do what they think is the right move in the midst of those circumstances.

They are trying to, you know, do the things that are in their control, their habits, their work, their their sense of morality right and wrong and their framing of death. And then in the end, based on the outcome, is it the circumstance that screwed them? Is it their being, what's the opposite of prudence? Imprudence?

Imprudence? Imprudence? They're being... They're folly them being imprudent.

And then chasing off the wrong kind of work, going off the wrong kind of loves, ignoring the questions of ultimate meaning. Is that what brings them down or is it circumstance? We don't really, in English class, talk about like the genetics of things. I don't really know how you would.

I guess you could if you were doing things like Richard III where he has the hunchback and super ugly and that seems to be a big country factor because I was like, oh, that guy's gotta be bad. He's ugly. Yeah. And he says that nature has made me this way but then he spends most of the play pushing away people that could be good and he's like, and women hate me because I look like this but then he gets a woman really quickly even though he just killed her husband.

He claims that women so apparently they don't hate him. Wow. Yeah. He just, he has sort of a self-affilling prophecy where he says everybody treats me so bad, nature is all against me and then he causes most of his own problems.

But yeah, so that's much more than that to that. But that's kind of the heuristic that the way that you can use something like a modern psychological study. And for me, when I sort of read the conclusions and sort of tested them against how characters are acting in stories and thinking that like, yes, these things line up, that to me adds more of the weight of sort of being something that seems commonsensical than if someone said, you know, happiness really is all about how much chocolate you get or some stupid study, right? Or they just sort of take one thing and say, happiness can be completely 100% boiled down to genetics, through genetics.

Or human beings, happiness is just dopamine and cortisone or whatever, not cortisone. Yeah, adrenaline and dopamine flowing through your body. So if we could do that artificially, everybody would be happy. This is, you know, the central question of another book we read at the school, Brave New World, which is like, okay, imagine if you could sort of bypass the hard ways of happiness and you could just sort of have the payoff.

Half the students say, yeah, you get the payoff and half the students are like, but something's lost, but they can't quite put their finger on it. Anyway, that's why, yeah, so that's the, my thoughts, that's using Arthur Brooks's happiness studies in English class. Okay, so wellbeing is habits? Gene circumstance habits.

Gene circumstance habits. Habits breaks down to faith, family, friends and work and then satisfaction. Well, I think they're, I don't think that these are separate categories. I think these are just other contributing factors.

Sure. Yeah. Like money can buy you money can buy you money can buy you hat satisfaction, but it is a necessary component for happiness. Okay.

But satisfaction would be what you. That would be correlated with the build up to about somebody thousand years. Yeah. And then after that, it doesn't increase.

And then after that, it doesn't increase. And below that, it is a drag. Yeah. Yeah.

Pretty tough. So it makes me think about, I just watched the man on the moon documentary about Jim Carrey when he was playing, what's his name? Coffin. Coffin.

And he, he character, he was, he method acted it. So he was Andy Kaufman for probably a year and a half and took it way further than anybody probably would. Yeah. Like Kaufman was almost a prankster and so he did things Jim Carrey never would have done.

And he even went and talked to the family. And after that, he had returned to his normal life and returned to who he was previously. And he, it was weird because he had to go back and adopt all of these problems that he had previously, all of these worries that Jim Carrey had that Andy Kaufman didn't have. And as Andy, he got to do stuff that people would normally get really angry about, like drive a car around the movie, lot and crash into buildings and play pranks on people and throw stuff and be ridiculous.

And he's like, why, why do I have to re-adopt all the problems of Jim Carrey? Right. And so it makes me think of this because at one point Jim Carrey was at the top of the heap. He had made $10 million, which was a check.

He had written himself three years prior, said like, I'm going to make $3 million, like $10 million at this amount of time. He did it. He had the highest grossing films of all time. He won crazy awards, even for Man on the Moon, he won crazy awards.

And he's like, I have accomplished everything anyone would ever want to. And I'm not happy. Like it's not there. And so now, like at the end, he's like, I'm just satisfied with disappearing.

He has not found necessarily a framework. His framework is that he has removed himself from all frameworks. He's like the framework of society I found to be illegitimate once I played Andy Kaufman. Right.

I did anything I wanted. And it was fine. And so I've thrown off that framework, not working up these people, not working for money. And I wonder how long that can work before despair.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he's just fine.

He's fine being himself and not wearing it. I think that his satisfaction has probably leveled off. I don't know how long happiness can remain when your framework is one of no frameworks. Yeah.

Right. I agree. So I don't know. It just makes me think about something like that, where he's accomplished everything somebody has ever wanted to.

And he wasn't happy. Well, why is the question? What was missing in his equation? Right.

I am very fascinated with, not hobo's, but like people who do that who just sort of like, decide to go off and live in the woods. So the Walden Pond. The, we had a lot of those people stopped by my coffee shop when I worked in Washington. I watched a documentary of when communist, when the communist revolution happened in Russia and they were killing all the Orthodox, this Orthodox family said, all right, we're going to Siberia.

And they went up and they lived in Siberia. And the youngest daughter, everybody died and youngest daughter was left. And she was dead in her like late 80s. And they found her in the 70s or 70s, I think.

And then brought her, and so she needed to go to a hospital and then brought her back to society. And then these people were like, she had no idea what had happened in the world. She'd be living in Siberia from like 1917 to 1970 something by herself and like doing all the Orthodox rights, her praying, doing everything. And it's just those kinds of stories I find absolutely fascinating.

And the fact is, of precisely these sorts of questions about, especially with those habits, faith, family, friends and work, like how is that mixture found in there? Is it found in there? The work is just for you. Yeah.

And family and friends aren't part of the exchange. If you're by yourself, they're not part of the exchange. But for people who are like religious anchorites, the relationship is then with God and cultivating that relationship. I don't know, I just always find that to be incredibly fascinating.

I don't know if I could be an anchorite or be somebody that goes off and by themselves. But I just find those stories to be fascinating, especially thinking about it in terms of this framework. Because they contradict the framework. Yeah.

Interesting. And part of that is, is there some personality difference between the type, you know, you're talking about the equation focused on decreasing what you want. Is that a certain type of person who will find happiness that way? And maybe just as well imagine someone tortured by the idea of having to do that.

Yeah. I don't know. I think when family and friends, I feel like most people who live in the woods either can't do it for very long or find relationship with God or you know, there is a relationship there somewhere. And there's people who are running from and there's people who are running too.

And my guess is the running two are the ones that that's the whom that is a life-giving thing and the running from or people for whom like they're ultimately running from probably that framework of death and that kind of thing. Well, Graham, I got to tell you really turn my day around. Awesome. Oh, I'm good.

You started off with a huge bumper and not anymore. I appreciate that. That's great. I'm glad.

He was always one in. I was always one in. I was being said. I'm back at seven boys.

I'm back at seven. He was like nothing to do with it. Let's be. So just to whet the appetite for people in between episodes, I want to get back to this question of changing that number because I don't want to be fatalistic and think once a seven always a seven.

So I want to have that. That's the discussion I hope you can happen in between episodes. Sure. Well, this has been classical stuff you should know.

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