I want to run a marathon and I'm really hoping to get blisters and to get ill and to fail or whatever. It's not like that at all. I don't think people court suffering in that sort of way. But at the same time, people know that if it didn't have the possibility of failure and difficulty and struggle, it wouldn't be seen as meaningful.
You don't want to fail. But on the other hand, the chance of failure has to be part and parcel of the thing. Paul Bloom, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me back.
My pleasure, man. Why are we talking about suffering today? I have come up with a new book called The Sweet Spot, The Pleasures of Suffering, A Search for Meaning. And it is a topic which I have been occupied by for many years.
And I think it's absolutely fascinating. I think suffering connects to all sorts of bright and nice explanations for some very odd and puzzling behavior, connects to movies, connects to sex, connects to purpose in life. And I think it also just tells us some interesting things about human nature. You're a man to talk to this.
Yeah, true. What's the core message of the book? Well, when I started the book, I was interested in puzzles about what psychologists call the non-masochism. So why people like spicy foods or hot bass or scary movies or sad movies and all that.
And I was just focusing on the role of explaining the message to me. Here's why we use pain and suffering to increase the amount of pleasure in our lives. But as I began to do this more and more and look at this and be philosophers and be psychologists, I began to realize a lot of the suffering we choose isn't in the service of pleasure. But in the service of other goals, like meaning and morality.
So pretty late into working on the book, I think the message is what you call motivational pluralism, which is people want more than one thing. We want pleasure, but we also want morality. We want meaning. And that's one bit of message.
The rest of the message is that sometimes chosen suffering of the right sort is just what we need to get us there. How do you define pleasure, meaning, and morality? It's a good question. You could start off by defining it in kind of a rough and intuitive way.
So roughly, pleasure is things we seek out. We go, make us smile, make us happy, give us a glow. So if you're hungry, hot for Sunday, it's pleasure for most of us. Sex, being loved, nice artwork, a beautiful walk, a beautiful day.
That's pleasure. Morality is doing the right thing and doing the right thing, which could mean involve fairness and justice. Could mean helping somebody, could mean harming somebody, applying some sort of moral rule or principle. And meaning is a different animal altogether, connected to the other two.
But meaning is a pursuit connected to that has significance, that takes a while, that influences other people, that involves goals and sub-goals, and most of all requires some degree of difficulty, sometimes physical pain, sometimes anxiety, sometimes suffering. If you have a pursuit and you find it easy and natural and fun, it probably isn't a meaningful one. It could be a fun one. So a fun pursuit is eating some M&Ms, going for a nice walk.
A meaningful pursuit could be raising children, starting a business, going to war. A moral pursuit could be helping a friend in trouble, trying to punish somebody who did something wrong, trying to fight for justice. And they're all related, but they take you in different directions. What are some of the ways that people use suffering to get pleasure, then?
Yeah, there's a lot of ways. The simplest answer is probably simply contrast. So one of the tricks we can do is we can experience a bit of chosen pain, and so as to make the subsequent experience more pleasurable. You know, you eat really spicy food that burns your mouth, and you take a sweet of beer, and that feels magnificent.
You go into a really hot sauna, a hot finished sauna. You dive into a cool lake, and then you are in bliss. Or take a broader time scale. You must have seen John Wick.
Yeah. John Wick. So the beginning of the movie is, they kill his dog. No, it's in the trailer.
Not as far as they kill his dog. And it's actually very sad. He loved that dog. He's a retired assassin.
He has a dog. He's dead white. He gives him a dog. He loves his dog.
They kill the dogs. I'm one of the Russian monsters. This bad thing happens. But then he goes and takes his revenge and kills everybody in a comic explosion of homicide.
And the second two-thirds of the movie is enjoyable, because the first third sets up the contrast. And it would be a mistake for you to say, oh, John Wick, great movie. You know what would have made it better? If you took away the dog part, which is really a bummer, because it got to be so much fun because you had a contrast in the beginning.
And there are people who do these big data analyses of movies and stories and novels in place. And a very typical pattern is, things get bad, bad, bad, and then they get better. And there's a pleasure to that. Inherent in that, you talk about the importance of the ordering or the sequence of suffering and pleasure.
Can you dig into that? There's all these interesting facts about ordering in time that I think we know in our gut, intuitively. We often play with it. But here's the simplest.
You have bad stuff. You have good stuff. That's the order you want in it. So I'm doing movies today.
So, you know, Shawshank Redemption. This guy spends 20 years in prison for a crime. Presumably didn't commit. Although there's weird interpretations of the movie where it's unclear.
But, and then, and this is spoiler day, but he escapes and spends the rest of his wonderful life in a Mexican beach. And that's, and you feel wonderful at the home. Imagine it will reverse. You know, he's living on a Mexican beach having a wonderful time with his friend.
And at the end, he's aggressive his life. The same amount of time. That would suck. And in general, there's sort of the balance.
We want things to get better. There's these studies which ask people about the kind of jobs they want. So you want a job that starts off low paying and gets higher paying, higher paying, higher paying, or to reverse. And imagine, it so happened that this is calibrated so that maybe the one that went down gives you more money in total.
Still, who wants that? You want things to get better. And so there's sort of the dance of time. And sometimes we do the dance of time to give ourselves pleasure in a kind of clever way.
So one of my favorite studies is by George Lohenstein. He asks people this great question. He says, imagine you would kiss your favorite movie star in the lips fully, consensually, and pleasurably. And then he says, when do you want to do it?
Now, psychology 101 says, right now. Self-control is hard. We're greedy for time. Economics 101 says, right now.
Because, you know, the same sort of temporal discounting. Better get $10 today and $10 tomorrow. That's why we have interest. And so on.
People say, two days. Two days. And it turns out that what people want to do is they want to savor the idea. They want to take some time to savor in anticipation of the pleasure they're going to get.
Similarly, for bad things, even though economics and psychology says put them off as long as you can. Sometimes we do that. Sometimes we try to get them all the way because we're worried about the experience of greed. What like?
Pardon me? What like? In what ways would you do it? Oh, I take a dentist appointment.
So under some circumstances, you just put it off, put it off, put it off, put it off. But sometimes things weigh on you. And if you ask people, you want to do it now, you want to do it tomorrow, they'll get me with it now. Let's get it all the way.
And it's true there's a little bit of rationality to doing it tomorrow because maybe you'll die or something and then you're lucky not to get the appointment. But if you do it now, at least you'll have to live through the dread. I wrote a newsletter about this a little while ago and turned it anxiety cost. So in the same way as the opportunity cost, the anxiety cost of, it was a justification for me, if someone has a daily habit that they want to do, let's say it's meditation or it's stretching or it's walk the dog or whatever it is, I argued that because your daily requirement resets essentially every morning as soon as you wake up, that's the beginning of your day to complete this.
If you spend most of the day reminding yourself you still need to do that thing later on in the day, you've spent that day suffering this anxiety cost. Whereas if you get your morning routine locked in and you meditate first thing, you just get to bathe in the fact that there's self-righteousness up on your high horse for the rest of the day being so congratulatory about the fact that you meditated and did your stretching first thing. I love giving advice and it's the primary bit of advice, which is do your most important thing right away in the morning. And most of the time it's also the hardest.
If it's easy and fun, you can wait a bit. But for me it's writing, which is I want to write an hour each day and if I don't do it in the morning I can put it off and I feel bad and so on. But you just want to get it done right away. And there's a satisfaction in it.
It's an example of something. There's all sorts of activities working out and writing are two real go-to examples that aren't that much fun when you do them. You know, I don't know, maybe your mileage may vary, but you know, there's always email or Twitter or hanging out with friends and so on. But having done them gives you a certain satisfaction.
And that's another reason for the contour that we want. Yeah, so that's contrast. But you also talk about singling and mastery as well. Yes.
There's all sorts of things. So one reason, and then there's one other which I'll mention, but one way you get pleasure from suffering is the pleasure of a good name, Jeremy Bentham's term, of good reputation. So sometimes we choose to suffer to impress others with how tough we are. You know, I once sat with my son and some of his friends and they started having a wasabi eating contest.
And, you know, they wouldn't have done it by themselves, but all the guys are there and they want to show how tough they are. In a religious context, you may want to show how pious you are. And there's all sorts of religious rituals involving a lot of suffering and pain and deprivation, but you do them to show, you know, look what a believer in, look how faithful I am to God. Sometimes a very different thing is when people will cut themselves or harm themselves as a cry for help.
And there you're not signaling strength, you're signaling need. So you have signaling as one thing. You have the joy of mastery. It feels good to be in control of something, to be able to exert your will over your body.
And this is one important contrast I make in the book, which is absolutely critical. I'm talking about chosen suffering, unchosen suffering, bad stuff that happens to you is a very different thing. So C.S. Lewis gives a great example of fasting, where he says, you know, if you're not eating because you have no free time to afford any food or someone's locked in a room with no food, that just sucks.
That's just, you just suffer. Try to make the most of it, but that's awful. But if you're not eating because you're fasting, then you can feel proud. In fact, C.S.
Lewis, being C.S. Lewis, disapproves and says, you know, you shouldn't be so proud of yourself. Just, you know, worship God and get over yourself. But still, there's a sense of pride.
And one of the things that's going through the list that pain could do is it could be an escape from yourself. It can be an escape from consciousness. You know, I described my book the first time I ever sparred in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and rolled with somebody who, you know, was like everybody else in the gym younger and stronger than me. And so it's like two minutes, three minutes.
And I realized afterwards that during that period, I thought of nothing else. I didn't worry about like the class I have to teach or the embarrassing thing I said to my partner or money problems, whatever. I didn't think, I wonder how I'm looking and everything like that. I was totally immersed in this.
And difficulty does that for you. You know, pain does that for you. Of all the bad things to be said about pain, one good thing is it certainly focuses the attention. You told me a story the last time we spoke about a dominatrix who said, was the quote, nothing catches attention like a whip?
You have a good memory. Yes. Yes. I don't know why we'd have that.
I wasn't even studying Salem as a guest. That's such a good quote. Yes. Yes.
You know, he said something like you hold it up and people's eyes cannot move away from it. And this is, you know, there's a deep insight here. There's a wonderful theoretical paper on art asking the question, why is so much art through history grotesque and unpleasant? And the answer is because art is in a constant battle for eyeballs.
You know, you want people to notice your artwork. And something that's grotesque or unpleasant captures it. You know, you look at something like that, I don't know, something, a grotesque scene of cannibalism or torture, and it just captures you. And of course, movies work in the same principle.
Why do we like scary movies? I think there's different reasons, but I think that there's one general answer to that, which extends to why we like scary things in general, which is our mind is naturally drawn to worst case scenarios. In some way, it'd be a lot of fun. You know, you're free, you have nothing to do.
You just need to think about good stuff. Don't imagine yourself winning a prize or somebody falls in love with you and everything. But those don't pose any puzzles. If I win a great prize, I'll say thank you.
I accept it. That's great. But what's useful, and I think this is one part of my book where I do get sort of adaptation, I think where there's a Darwinian advantage to thinking about that stuff, to think about what happens when the world goes to hell, to think about what happens when your life gets messed up in some way. An advantage to thinking about these things is that it basically gets you to prepare and ruminate and deliberate.
And there's some evidence that people who have positive fantasies actually make it less well in the world than people with negative fantasies. Oh, you're thinking about bad stuff. Well, this is some stuff by a psychologist, blank in her name, at NYU. So she tests these people who are looking for romantic relationships.
They're single. They like to find a partner. And she asks them, how often do you fantasize about being in love? How often do you fantasize about being in love?
The man or woman of your dreams? And the people who say a lot tend to be the same people that six months later don't have a part. The people who are, in another study she asks people, if you want to lose weight. And she says, do you ever think of yourself being fit and strong and everything?
Yeah, a lot of it. And the people, again, the people who think about that a lot tend to be the people who don't lose as much weight. And her theory of it is that for these positive fantasies, what you do is you sort of, you kind of consume the pleasure in your imagination and you're less motivated to do it in real life. If I'm really fantasized a lot about having a girlfriend, then maybe I try less hard to have a girlfriend.
I got my fantasies after all. Now, negative ruminations don't have that problem. They're always focused on the worst case. And I think, to go back to your question, one reason why we like scary movies is that they are imaginary and imaginative depictions of worst case scenarios.
So take zombie films, zombie TV shows. You know, you can make fun of the idea and say, you really need to prepare for zombie apocalypse. But these movies and TV shows are never about zombies, actually. What they are is what happens when the world goes out.
And there's no government, there's no police. The dangers in zombie movies are almost always people, not zombies. And so we're drawn to this. And then there's other ingredients.
So you might think fear is negative. And in fact, there were some early theories that said that the people who like horror movies aren't as afraid as the people who hate them. That's going to be total nonsense. People who like horror movies are just as afraid as people who don't like them, but they enjoy being afraid.
And for any negative emotion, in the right context, particularly a context where it's imaginary, so you know there's no real danger, it's a source of pleasure. You can enjoy being afraid, you can enjoy being angry, you can enjoy being sad. You can enjoy physical pain under the right circumstances. Well, there's people who go out of their way to watch sad movies, that want to make them cry and make them bawl their eyes out at the end.
It is interesting to think about the fact that there's this, it's almost like a sandbox, a safe playpen in which we can indulge ourselves in some of the emotions that are the extreme areas of life. You know, I would wait to that there'll be some people that will go through life and some of the most extreme emotions perhaps that they feel in their entire lives will be during watching movies. Yes, yes, or, that's right, or related to this will involve events that are so far away from them to be effectively fictional. When Princess Diana was killed, died in this car crash, people mourned to an extraordinary degree, and there were people who went on TV and said, you know, this was the worst thing that's ever happened.
When my mom died, that was sad, but when Princess Diana died, that was really sad. We consumed these emotions, and I think there's a safety to it. You know, the death of my child would destroy me, but the death of a child in a movie, I can inherently feel sadness. At the same time, I know nothing bad has really happened.
I can feel afraid, but I know nothing scary, nothing dangerous is really about to happen. So, you're safe. In some way, people have described the pleasures of imagination as a form of safe play. I suppose that BDSM is kind of similar to this, but it's acting on a number of the different pathways.
So, you have the contrast effect, that you have something that is painful, and it continues, and it continues, and then the relief is the moment at which the pain no longer is pain, and therefore that's pleasure. But you also have this presence, this escape from self. Perhaps you have a signaling aspect to whoever it is that you're with. Look at how perhaps strong or resilient I am.
you can't hurt me and then maybe there's even an essence of mastery in that you are put into a situation that you know your physiology should be responding to with panic um let's say asphyxiation or let's say that it's being hit the usual response should be something other than the one that you are giving which is arousal yes in some way bdsm is a perfect storm where all of the different theories of the pleasures of pain kind of come in and click and and that raises the question that i do not have an answer to which is what do some people like and some people don't um and same with some people i know like the cry of movies some people not not not even close some people like spicy foods others don't and i'll be i'll be totally honest because i often think about this um we have no theory as to why some people are this and some people are that you know it used to be thought that bdsm is kind of pathological and you can look for people with other disorders that are not to be true you know people who engage in it are no more likely to suffer psychological problems or have in some way bad personalities than people who don't and at some level the appetite for it is very popular more often in imagination than they're doing so you know as i was doing research for the book i was looking at uh 50 shapes of gray just bdsm story and it was the most popular book of the last decade like this from 2010 to 2020 that was the most popular book the second most popular book was the sequel the third most popular book was end of the trilogy so there's definitely an audience for this sort of stuff though i imagine that the vast majority of these people wouldn't engage in anything serious you looked at the sexual fantasies and how they differ between men and women i think that was steph stevens's work and he's a past guest on the show that guy's an animal of a data scientist what do you what do you find out from his work weird stuff um you know it's weird weird stuff um there's from his book there's another book called like 10 billion wicked thoughts and basically you know sex research into what people like uses as people and you know it's very difficult people to be honest they're often embarrassed or sometimes confused but maybe one of the purest um manifestations of what people like is what they look at when looking at pornography and so what uh so what this data analyst did was he got hold of porno data which was a lot and that porno data not only um looks at the search terms but um but it also does google analytics and make a very good guess as whether you're a man or woman how old you are whether you're gay or straight or bi or whatever and and there's all sorts of surprises um but the biggest surprise to me which i don't have such a good story about is that contrary to everything well anything i would have expected um he finds that women tend to search out violent sex or humiliating sex far more frequently than men do and this is weird because men are just on the whole far more violent or more violent pace and entertainment in general um a lot of these evictions involve the victimization of women and you would imagine that women would just naturally stare away from it and i don't actually fully know what's going on it may be again a worst case scenario thing which is you're drawn into things which are sort of worse things and it exerts a pull over you and that's what i might be saying there's definitely an element of this i think with certain women where domination and the strength of a partner and the power of a partner is a turn-on and perhaps seeing that and experiencing it vicariously is something that they find arousing it may be in some cases there's some evidence that women have that some women have all these friends having great fantasies and but one thing there's two things about obviously you know there's a distinction between reality and fictionaries are not real life desires but also they're highly stylized the dresser is typically very handsome um there's some degree of mutual attraction to start with and some ways some things that's a fantasy that both men and women have which are being so attracted that others lose control around you and they connect with notions of playing with notions of domination and submission honestly you know i could give you a thousand papers on a lot of i'm saying i give you 10 000 papers on effective money on happiness when it comes to questions like like sexual desires and so on the data is for the most part pretty poor we just don't know that much and i think this topic's been taboo for a long time i wish there's more research into them what is the efforts paradox uh the effort is actually um developed by the term game from a friend of mine micky inslet who's at university toronto not far from me and the paradox goes like this typically creatures obey the law of least effort and this is um this was an animal psychology world for a long time so you know if there's food in front of a dog and the dog's hungry it will go to the food it won't walk around in circles around the food and it makes sense if you seriously reach for a glass of water you won't like move your hand and do figure eights around you pick the least effort you know you go the most direct path and we and animals humans avoid effort um so you know if there's if a dog is hungry and there's two bones and it wants equally and one's close to it and one's far away from it it's common sense the paradox is sometimes it's not true so sometimes we seek out effort um and everyday life is full of it i mean here's an entirely unsexy example i do crossword puzzles i sit around on my ipad and i do crossword puzzles and i try to spend some time trying to figure it out i do not do it uh i'm not going to attract any mates to my crossword puzzle skills because it's a it's not really a maybe tracking kind of thing and b not good at it and but i enjoy it it's kind of fun and then you know and that's such a paradox why would i why would i exert effort and and you know deal the opportunity cost of all the other things i should be doing just just to do crossword puzzle and you know put aside people who train for marathons or triathlons you know it makes sense if you're doing it because you know you have a chance to become a world champion well there's a logic to that but the vast majority don't just do it in order to do it it's an effort paradox is um why sometimes is effort attractive as opposed to just something which one avoids and there's different answers um one answer is what you talked about before involving the feeling of mastery and accomplishment um another answer connects to um the feeling of flow when this is um this is a work of uh nahali who sadly passed away a couple weeks ago and he points out that there's a sort of special positive feeling not exactly pleasure but a feeling of satisfaction to be engaged in an activity at a level that's you're not bored but also you're not freaking out you're not too anxious it's right in between um the best definition of flow i've heard is you're in a state of flow if um if you just forget you lose track of time you forget to eat you get to get to school you're in a state of flow there's something to flow states which are immensely attractive to people those are very hard to get so he does these interviews and some people say they never have in their whole life because it requires effort and work to get to a flow and it's very easy to sit on the sofa and watch netflix and eat corn chips you know getting some rock climbing in art sustained musical practice or writing poetry or even a deep discussion with a friend that could be tough but that's that's what we find worthwhile are you familiar with steven kotler's work no i'm not okay so he is a researcher in the area of flow but he comes at it from a much more biological perspective so what he's doing is he's trying to find the biological prerequisites that cause us to fall into flow and he's got a book out that came out earlier this year called the art of the impossible and it's a primer a peak performance primer for how to get into flow it's interesting that you said that you like to write early in the morning because they've done studies and they've identified a particular type of brain wave patterns that you have when you're in flow and his argument is that it is significantly easier to get yourself into flow if you are doing the thing that you're required to be in flow for as short after waking as possible because you're nearly there i'm sure you've heard some of the stories i think it was was it newton used to go to sleep with ball bearings in his hand on a chair and then as he finally dropped off the ball bearings would fall out of his hand and fall on the floor and that would be his little way to kickstart himself into a flow state because it got him into those brain waves switched off the default mode network allowed him to see different connections that he wouldn't have done usually but the art of the impossible by steven kotler is a really good primer for understanding flow states from a much more biological perspective really good i'll check that out i mean i read flow when i was young and man my feeling reading the book uh reading his first popular book was envy he describes these these rock climbers who spend hours and hours just lost in activity expert musicians or these dancers and it's just and you know i would love to aspire even close to life of flow he describes and the inside of a morning seems right my own thoughts the first thing i don't wake up is i make myself coffee or else i just fall back asleep but before the coffee kicks in there's this somewhat rousy state where you can just get lost in something it's like you know meditation for people who are crap at meditation and you just find yourself just flowing into it and then um and so yeah that sounds great i mean the more you get that the better another thing i found when i wake up i wake up to the same radio station every morning which is classic fm in the uk and when i wake up the news always comes on for about two minutes and if i let myself stay awake with the radio on the alarm on for longer than two minutes whatever the song is the first song that they choose that song is in my head i shit you not for the next three hours it is fucking imprinted in there it's like someone's seared into the back of my mind and i'm so i'd love to see i must email steven about it and find out what it is about the imprinting time that you have first thing in the morning it is like nothing it's like virgin fresh snow with a couple of footprints in it and i can't hear anything except for whatever that song was on the morning and that's it i'll hear it as i walk as i'm doing my morning walk it'll be to the rhythm of my feet on the floor i'm like oh my god this is like being trapped inside of my own mind it's crazy it's a great metaphor it's a sunny time when we wake up it is just fresh fresh snow sometimes you wake up and for the first at least for me for the first second two seconds i don't know where i am sometimes you wake up at the very morning waking up you may be caught in the dream you don't know who you are and then the day accumulates and it piles up on you and um and pretty soon by the end you're uh your snow that you know that a whole elementary school this song go over okay so the theory is why we need to sleep why is suffering important for meaningful life yeah so we've been talking about about pleasure and and that's not all so so here's the wrong way to think about it i think the wrong way to think about it is oh i want a life of meaning so i want to suffer you know i want to run i want to run a marathon and i'm really hoping to get blisters and to get ill and to you know to fail or whatever it's not like that at all i don't think people of course suffering in that sort of way you know you might paint for a marathon you just really want to get better and run a marathon but at the same time people know that if it didn't have the possibility of failure and difficulty and struggle it wouldn't be seen as meaningful you don't want to fail but on the other hand the chance of failure has to be part and parcel of the thing you and i are playing poker and and um and if i sit down with poker i want to win obviously but if i knew i was going to win if failure was impossible i wouldn't even bother playing it's too boring you know and there's this insight uh all shows up all over the place uh twilight zone episodes and zen parables and everything i'll tell you this is my favorite one alan watts um is a guy who brought zen to um to the uk or to the united states i'm not sure anyway yes yes i don't know where he landed but uh but so he tells a story uh and i remember this because my partner and i were watching adventures endgame and it came up at the beginning i had a commercial for for a bank and i'm watching it wow they had a voiceover saying the story what the hell so i google google and the story is imagine you fall asleep and you found yourself in a lucid dream you can dream whatever you want for 75 years you said well you have so much fun you do everything you wake up you live your day and then it happens again you say well this is only a lot of fun this is getting the boring i want to throw some struggle some obstacles some failure some difficulty you know he goes on he talks about it and he says and if you think about it maybe that's the life you're living now you know the life you would have chosen you could choose any life and all the difficulties and failures and disappointments that's part of part of the best life and i think instinctively we appreciate that we appreciate that a life full of meaning is a life full of risk and struggle and pain can you remember the twilight zone story that you put in the book because that yeah that is awesome you get all the good ideas from the twilight zone this um this mobster this thug i mean a killer dies and to his surprise he's seemingly in it he's in like some gorgeous hotel suite and everything and he has a little angel by his side and and he's saying what is this i love that right as well i'm hungry i wish there was a feast in front of me boom there's a feast in front of me and he he bets on sports and he always wins beautiful women flock to him and he just loves it and he stops playing and says this is this is ridiculous i can't play again i can't i'm going insane here and finally he says to his guy he says you know i want to go to the other place that's where i belong and he says this is the other place this is hell and hell is where you get everything you want i mean it's kind of it's a little bit twilight i think hell would involve you know hot boogers and being burnt in sulfur and that sounds pretty bad too but but it's certainly not heaven it's certainly not heaven and i try to remind myself you know life life contains a thousand disappointments and for each one you wish i wish this wasn't happening you know my book number one would snap my fingers i would do that but you got to realize and as you become an ally you realize it can't work that way it's this great paradox you need you need the specter of failure and difficulty and struggle and disappointment you know um and this shows up all over the place it shows up it sounds like i'm just kind of telling stories but it shows up and they did this study of two million people uh and asked people what their jobs and then they asked them how meaningful is your job and the most meaningful jobs are hard jobs that the most meaningful jobs being a number of clergy working as a medical professional of all different sources meaningful social worker educator and often these jobs are low status they are often low pain but they're meaningful because you're helping people you're making a difference because it's tough the countries that um that where citizens say the most meaningful i mean there's so much happiness research saying what countries are the happiest and answers the richest countries the richest safest best countries are the happiest no surprise at all but the countries that have the most people say have the most meaning are important countries a meaningful life is positively correlated with low gdp not high gdp and with with you know political turmoil and it's hard to make a living and you don't trust people around you and i think there's different argument different theories as to what's going on here but one thing is that struggle and meaning are intertwined and if i had to choose i'd rather live a life in a sort of prosperous country where things are going well but but um there's some human needs that don't necessarily get scratched uh in a prosperous world what was the least fulfilling job i think it was parking lot attendant no one likes a parking lot attendant no one likes it like you know i should or worse jobs but it does feel like you know it's hard to do a track meeting credit i mean i'm gonna go all zen here uh it's it's one of those zen things to say that any activity you know scrubbing toilets cleaning dishes everything in the hands of the right person can have meaning there's a story that's probably applicable of president john kennedy turning um uh nasa and he stops by mr janitor sweeping in the corner and he says what do you do here and the janitor says i helped put men on the moon and you know that's there are stories of people who do um who do clean up in hospitals who see their job as they should see it as a job of dignity we're helping sick people and um and then i've seen people i have had three people close to me quit a tenured professor jobs and i'm thinking this is a job of unlimited freedom autonomy pays pretty good you know and you have to pursue whatever you want and and and each of the three said i find nothing of value here no meaning no purpose and so your mileage may vary what's the relationship between meaning and pleasure um you you you can they are separable there are people who live lives that they say are of great meaning and they don't have much pleasure and other people who are who are will describe themselves as heatness and say it'll be like great pleasure but there's no no meaning thank you you purpose but they tend to be correlated actually it's kind of good news um you might imagine you have to choose one or the other but if you ask people how happy are you and how much fun are you having and you also ask them how meaningful is your life how much purpose is your life the answers will tend to correlate there are people who are kind of high in both now there's always trade-offs this is one of the this is one of the things about motivational pluralism if motivational pluralism was wrong all that mattered was eudonic pleasure then um then life would be simple to seek out eudonic pleasure but you have to balance it you have to decide whether or not to um you know jump in a cool swimming pool or visit your sick aunt or you know or practice the violin you got these different priorities clashing with each other and people differ in how they they establish the balance there's an interesting conflict between dan kahneman's insights and dan gilbert's views on happiness can you go through that yeah um gilbert's a gilbert's a friend of mine and a huge help with the book because he thinks my book is total nonsense he thinks motivational pluralism is ridiculous he didn't send us the way to go and uh and he's like pushing me as he wrote the book you know you there's no better person than dan to one to be duking it out with as you try to make your way through so here's the issue and this is this is the insights of danny kahneman which is um there's two when we say happiness or pleasure there's two very different things so one thing is what you call experienced experienced happiness and the typical way to do this is you get somebody an iphone and have it go off at random times every day and when it goes off to say how happy they are and so you have one and i have one and five other people have this and then for each of us we just we just sum up how happy we are from scale one to ten maybe whenever yours goes off you're an eight whenever mine goes off i'm a four and i'm average eight on average four you have more experienced happiness in your life than i do but then there's something else we do which is we can just ask you how happy are you how satisfied are you with your life where does it scan on scale of one to ten you know if ten is a perfect life and zero is a life not worth living where are you people give you a number than that too maybe your number is seven maybe my number is six these numbers correlate so your experience happiness you remember happiness um uh not surprising and they're both starting to respond to the same thing so as your income goes up they both go up diminishing returns but they both go up but they're different you could be high in one and low in another you could say i am living the best life but most of the time in your life you're doing difficult unpleasant things so you're low in that or you could say you live this this you know this orgy of fun all the time having tremendous time and then i sit and i ask you so what do you think of your life and you say man my life sucks you know i'm having a lot of pleasure but i'm not adding anything to one but parasite i'm a loser if you're really sad and then you go back to your your sex and your drugs and your rock and roll and you're really happy so the question is which one should we maximize if you choose and kahneman says uh you should maximize your remembered happiness your judgment that's what people want to do people don't just want to party and have a good time they want to um they want to be thinking they're living a worthwhile valuable life uh dan gilbert says you should maximize the day-to-day stuff your day-to-day experience you know if you spend 95 percent of your time having a really good time and then five percent time i ask you so how's your life you say oh my life is disappointing that sucks well i'm balanced you're way ahead of the game don't take too seriously your contemplative perspective and i'm more on that on the side but because i'm not eating this i think i think there's a real if me or somebody i loved um lived their life say totally blistered on your own and somebody could do it in such way had no side effects and grueling with the light the whole time i'd say man what a waste that's not a good way that's a crap way you know do you know an example from robert nozick of the experience machine this is a great example where he asked people i could you know here's the deal i got a machine here you lie down i plug you into the machine and you will experience this life of extraordinary pleasure and satisfaction for the rest of your life the rest of your natural life you lie here while food is giving you food and you'll have this best free number do you want to do that and nozick says absolutely not he says i don't want to think i fell in love i want to fall in love i think i climbed down i want a difference in the world and many people including me wouldn't go into the machine even though we get less pleasure now i got to admit there's some people who say yeah put me in there um i would but i think most of us would would you no i wouldn't i thought about this long and hard one of the things i've got in my head so the dan gilbert thought experiment he says if you are contemplating five percent of your life and you're reminded of the fact that you've lived in a swimming pool for ages and you're going to feel bad then you've got 95 that's good this seems to be a selection effect for the sort of people typically that i associate with hedonists the people who are less ruminative the ones that do less contemplation the ones that are less introspective whereas the people that i know who are more introspective seem to be more concerned with meaning now perhaps that's the outcome they've managed to find a mode of attaining meaning over pleasure because pleasure would be reflected on more which would not give them an actual sense of being well-lived have you considered that if you're right it's all everybody gets what they want the hedonist is doesn't reflect at all and lives a life of pleasure um but somebody focused on meaning and purpose wouldn't enjoy a lot of time anyway because they'd be too busy thinking about meaning and purpose so then they get what they want i think that's clever i like that but you can't make the problem go away so here's one from today it turns out that you have a really fun one week vacation you have a really fun two week vacation and later on i ask you how was your vacation how do you remember it and you would think if we were in some way rational and our remembered happiness was based on some experience happiness um you would think that um you would remember the second the two week one is twice as good as the one week one because it's twice as much fun but we don't so nice vacation it was good it was what he called duration neglect same for bad experiences you know i've sometimes been on a plane with you know no wi-fi and i'm uncomfortable in the middle seat and everything like that and eight hours is twice as bad as four hours but you're back at the hotel all you remember was that flight sucked and it doesn't suck twice as much so again you know the question of what an absence so some people say wow that means i should take short vacations because i don't remember them the same anyway and other people say are you crazy who cares what you remember what you experience the interesting thing i thought about remembering and the experiencing self a lot and i came to the perhaps incorrect conclusion that because the remembering self lasts for far longer than the experiencing self that optimizing for the remembering self makes sense especially when you're younger so there's actually an argument to be made you should become more hedonic as you get toward old age also because you run out of time to reflect precisely if i have another six months to go i should be piling up good memories everybody knows this everybody knows this what would you do oh i'd steal a car and i'm getting an airplane and i do this thing well what is that it's because you're going to sacrifice suffering and meaning in place of pleasure so everyone intrinsically understands this but yeah i think certainly for me with my constitution i would just optimize as much as possible for living a life that when remembered it feels like a life that was well lived um but i wonder whether this i wonder whether i'm missing something now i wonder whether no well here's what dan gilbert would say you're missing which is there are some experiences we go back over and over and over again and we savor them and the amount of time we spend savoring is actually longer than experience itself yes you know um sometimes i don't know i've done things that now this is so arduous and unpleasant but i think i've looked at them off so often in my head i spend more time looking at them than experiencing them and then it's even as a hedonist everybody's happy because it's a hedonist it's to remember yourself you're maximizing but then there's something like the vacation so think of a vacation you took two years ago maybe think about it a few times but you don't spend a week of your life thinking about that vacation you took two years some experiences are barely referred back to and then somebody like dan gilbert would say it's a mistake to try to maximize how to remember it as opposed to have their experience then you get into i'm sure you're aware of these examples these true freaking paradoxes so and you know this is why they give connor a nobel prize because things like this so there's the ones involving pain where he actually did this with real world colonoscopies back when they were more painful so you take one that's excruciatingly painful and you stop it and happy people get back the other half get the same amount of pain excruciatingly painful and you stop it then some more mild pain and then you ask them later the two groups say uh which experience was worse you know within group in some cases between group in other ones and what people you find is that the experiences which had more total pain are remembered more positively than experiences that less total pain because they ended on a on a on a better note and we tend to remember endings it's like it's suggesting when you go to a dentist and it's really freaking painful and say okay we're done you should say doc could you like poke me just a bit so i'll remember it better and it's crazy i remember reading something off the back of that might be written by kahneman or someone just interpreting his work saying one of the most compassionate things you can do for your child the first time they go to the dentist is to do exactly that to ask them to extend the procedure just a little bit to try and downregulate the emotional trauma but what's coming through in all of this is that we're not rational creatures and every experience whether it be to do with meaning morality pain pleasure whatever all of it is mediated by our interpretation of it and then our interpretation of our interpretation of it both in the moment and after the event and this framing response the fact that we are at the mercy of what we thought happened and the story that we tell ourselves about it that's the second order challenge that i think a lot of people have to get past it's not just what happened to you it's what you tell yourself about what happened to you that's the difference that you're talking about earlier on between the difference between being homeless and going camping ostensibly isn't all that much but one of them you chose to do it the other one you have to do it i agree with every word of that except for one word i'm not sure it's not rational i'm not sure there's some cases where something is irrational if it takes you away from your goals if it violates axioms of logic if it's internally inconsistent the fact that how you see something affects how you experience it it seems to be neither rational or more irrational in itself it's just a way of doing it you know and one of my interests is the pleasures we get from art and our pleasures in general and you know if you look at the face of somebody you love they look more attractive than if you look at the face of a stranger even if it's the same face the people you love grow to look more attractive it's not just that you say you love them more they just honestly look more attractive to you is that irrational well i don't know if there was like a rule saying that judgments of attraction has to be made on bone structure and symmetry and everything like that yeah then you messed up but who made that rule if i say that my kids art looks is the best looking art in the world i guess that sounds kind of extreme but if i enjoy art more if i know it was made by my kid than by a stranger or by picasso than by a forger again it seems to be neither rational nor irrational it's just the way in which we enjoy things we we focus on contrast we focus on context fasting feels different and camping camping is a lot of ways because i hate camping i think you just summed up exactly why i hate camping because i can't i can't get the mental switch i always feel like i'm in a greatly unfortunate part of my life where i've lost my house and so so it's that talking about um wealth and the relationship between wealth and meaning and happiness and satisfaction what's the true red pill story about the relationship between wealth and happiness because i didn't realize that there was another there was another element to the after a particular level your happiness doesn't increase anymore story it's so it used to be and soon enough it used to be uh even when i taught intro psych many years ago i used to say isn't it amazing money is unconnected to happiness which is what people believe and then it turns out no that's not true more money you have the happier you are both as individuals and also countries individual countries have happier people and if you think about it it's kind of weird we could have ever imagined it would be otherwise money buys you all sorts of things it buys you in a country like the united states it helps to buy you health it buys you and everywhere it buys you security safety travel time with friends freedom from exploitation cool stuff it's just it's a lot of things to be said for money but then the story was uh that it tops out at a certain amount i think in the united states when study was done it was about 80 000 a year and then more money doesn't help and uh that would be like maybe 120 000 right now and um and then more studies started to come in and it's by no means clear it's true there were studies finding that millionaires are happier than people have a million and even study finding that people have over 10 million dollars are happier than people who have between one and 10 million dollars the difference is not huge i mean it makes sense that money would matter the difference between making 20 000 and 40 000 is enormous the difference between making you know 500 in 20 000 540 000 is tiny they're just diminishing returns kind of doing on a log scale but still there's reason to believe that the more money you get the happier you are all the way up as far as we can measure and i think part of this is because that money is tied to status and status makes us happy you know if you know if you have 100 million and i have 50 million and um and we both know this you might be happier you might just say man i got more money this guy even though it may be hard to think of anything tangible you could do that i can't do i was talking about universal basic income with a behavioral geneticist called catherine page hardin and she's great i really really enjoyed that conversation with her um but i put to her the one of the challenges around her proposed safety net for people that they shouldn't fall below with regards to income because there is a minimum level of humanness that everybody is allowed to have my argument was and this is something i hadn't thought of before because we are inherently status seeking creatures i don't think that there is a level of ubi that will make people satisfied i think that you get status seeking immediately from everybody and as soon as you see the person that decides to work as well as get ubi or work instead of get ubi gets more than you immediately until you've completely flattened that curve there is an argument to be made that no one's going to be happy until we have everybody at whatever it is number seven billion seven hundred um yeah that was an interesting one thinking about how status plays into status is contrary to this utilitarian approach for money yes and in some way i think it's a good thing so put aside the details of ubi because there's a lot of debate over this and how to do it but imagine ubi or any sort of excellent safety net welfare system uh the argument there is people will come out of it um you know well fed and get medical care and have housing you don't have to go camping they just and everything is all the basic needs are satisfied your children are safe and that's terrific will make them happy um certainly happier than you know if you're dying of an untreated infection um but happy i don't know i think a lot of happiness is tied into um status and also tied into accomplishment in ways which which cross cut um you know i would rather be um i have a guess that somebody wanted a Nobel Prize in literature even if she doesn't make that much money is a lot happier and satisfied than some hedge fund manager but you're right money itself will not satisfy your basic needs and it's plainly a plus but there's more and and ubi will the problem with status by the way which is is that it's inherently zero sign it gets complicated the only thing i mean so so if you're at the top i'm not as well and somebody that'd be the bottom the only thing that that ameliorates that concern which is kind of like it's a position that will look at who's a policy expert pointed out i think he now doesn't believe it is that one of the good things about capitalism is that there could be a whole lot of status hierarchies so you know maybe um maybe you make more money than me but uh my kids are better looking maybe you know maybe you're in better shape but check out all the pokemon uh cards i collected you know and and so in a good world any show can find a place where they get at least they do they do fair enough to get respect and um and none of very little this has to do with money and money will satisfy the basic needs but but it's nice to have a world and i don't think i'm disagreeing page hard here nice to have a world where the the very the very uneven distribution of gifts that people possess is set up so that everybody has a chance to do pretty well in some domain or not yeah it was an interesting conversation i really really enjoyed i found her fascinating because she comes at behavioral genetics which the better or worse is a subject area that has been adopted by people that are more right-leaning and she has a quite a left-leaning perspective about how she wants the country to be run and so on and so forth one of the things i realized was that a lot of the problems that she was highlighting could just be fixed by having a better government so for instance she brought up healthcare and she said that healthcare should be available to all to make it available to all you need to have sufficient money and ubi so that people can pay their healthcare i thought we fixed that problem in the uk and we don't have ubi we just nationalize healthcare so then if you can nationalize a bunch of other things and you end up with everyone's got a soup kitchen that delivers direct to their door through some fancy teleporting technology in 100 years time you can just teleport food into everyone's houses then you go okay there could be a point where you get to where you don't need ubi and all of her requirements for this minimum level of humanness is met but you still have this desire for status and it's inherently going to be unfulfilling i don't think that ubi can counter against status and as you said as well this desire for accomplishment and to feel like you're actually into the fields and start writing poetry um i think that there is i know that the the helplessness and the sense of uh pointlessness is potentially going to come in some people find even from a shitty job they find meaning you know some of the ones i've got friends that are nurses and doctors and they will self-describe their job to shitty they'll tell me they're doing a 70-hour week and they'll hate it but they get a huge amount of meaning from it so it's a it's an interesting blend you talked about something i thought was quite interesting it's all the role of sacrifice what is the place of sacrifice why does it play a role here you think in a religious context no um so i have a discussion of sacrifice in context of religion and in a context and again i mean when i talk about it i get into a topic you and i haven't discussed yet which is um which is what do you do with unchosen suffering so right now we've been just talking about the trade-offs people get the way people choose in order to get pleasure the choices people make in order to get meaning and morality and purpose but um but often a lot of stuff we have in life is unchosen and there i'm actually a lot less optimistic i'm not one of these people who think oh chosen you know bad stuff happens to you you get stronger you get more resilient people's dramatic growth i don't think that this happens some of the time but um but it is uh by far not a regular psychological rule we tend to be more resilient than we think we are but growth i'm skeptical about it and then you get frameworks where we try to explain this we try to make sense of things you know some people think that we've invented religion because we want to figure out where the universe came from where animals came from and and natural phenomena but i don't think we care that much about those things sometimes scientists scholars do but we care deeply about why we suffer and why is it you and not me or me it's not you um why did this person die not that person and religion provides a framework and a lot of religious rituals and religious activities are attempts to manipulate the laws of faith this includes sacrifice includes a lot of chosen suffering in the context of religion where you're trying to sort of take away randomness from the world you want to land a cohesive narrative that explains why something's happened yeah and you know so one narrative is everything happens for a reason that's not a narrative there is a narrative and and um i think i've done actually some research with this uh wonderful person like conic of energy he's my student and we um we ask people to remember significant events the last couple years where um you know good events like weddings children being born bad events like death of loved ones and we ask them is there a narrative doesn't happen for a reason it happens to send you a message and um and what we find is religious people are much more likely than atheists to say yes but even atheists um will often say yes to this will often see a narrative behind it and of course religion provides a narrative it wasn't random god is testing you you are reliving the suffering of christ um god we ignore god when he whispers but but it comes in loud and clear when we suffer and it's a way of calling his attention calling our attention to him and so on and so forth um it's what to go back to dan gilbert part of what we call the psychological immune system which is we're often much better than we think we are at dealing with bad stuff because we're very quick to tell a story in which it actually isn't bad but i want to say i actually think you know it happens for a reason is kind of a often a very corrosive very bad thing to believe i think it can reassure us but it could also lead us to be cruel to others you know you have cancer man happens for a reason what do you deserve that or maybe it'll make you grow good news pal you know it's just it leads to i think we have to acknowledge between adults that often the best response is man that sucks that just bad shitty luck i'm so sorry um and it also leads to sort of passivity where there's a whole lot of suffering in the world and to say that suffering is there for a reason it's god's will is a recipe for doing nothing there's a part of me that feels a little bit uncomfortable when someone goes through something and they look back on it and say that this happened for a reason because look at the position i'm in now and the reason i don't like it when people give those explanations is it takes away the agency and the glory from what they did to turn that bad situation into the good one that they're now in you know you'd say that this thing happened you got into a car everybody got into a really bad car wreck three years ago and now he's in this awesome design position at apple and he's got all this stuff and he's never said that but i can imagine in a different world somebody that said you know look at look at where this particular accident got me to and now i'm in this amazing situation i'm working for apple and i've got my strength back and i'm running i'm training i'm doing stuff well what's the difference between that caused you to be in the situation and you overcame that situation to now have this life that you're so happy about leading i agree it that sort of narrative takes the credit away from the person who um you know to think the thing that i got this car and that catapulted me into my career it strips you of the credit you've served for the fact that that no you you ended up having to struggle and having to recover but so that in one way it's an awful thing for somebody to say on the other hand if you don't say something like that it forces you to confront the terrible randomness of life which is just just freaking terrible i mean anybody you love to be snatched away in a second no anytime your phone rings maybe the worst news in the world and if there's no narrative that's what we're stuck with have you heard of compensatory control i can guess what it is but uh make me not guess i saw this a year ago so it's matthew syed he wrote a piece in the times uh why conspiracy theories and demagogues spread in times of worry and uncertainty psychologists have conducted experiments to shed light on why people lose or at least suspend rationality one experiment asked people to imagine going to a doctor to hear an uncertain medical diagnosis such people were significantly more likely to express the belief that god was in control of their lives another asked participants to imagine a time of deep uncertainty when they fit for their jobs or the health of their children they were far more likely to see a pattern in meaningless static or to infer that two random events were connected this is such a common finding that psychologists have given it a name compensatory control when uncertain when randomness upon our life intrude upon our lives we respond by reintroducing order in some way superstitions and conspiracy theories speak to this need it is not enough to accept that important events are shaped by random forces this is why it makes much more sense to believe that our lives are threatened by the grand plan of some aligned scientists than the chance mutation of a silly little microbe yeah that makes sense that makes sense that rings true it explains you know what would otherwise be paradoxical which is after terrible things happen you would imagine people abandon their faith you know if you believe in a loving god protecting you and then you lose family 9-11 or the pandemic or whatever just kind of makes sense to say well i'm a lower lower to priors on that belief of a loving protective but it's exactly the opposite you know bad things happen to people and people's belief strengthens and i think it is a desire for um for control for a narrative and uh and more of a willingness or propensity to see it and then sometimes you get i think this is adam kolinsky's work you get um you get this sort of hoping to fiddle with things hoping to use karma productively so in some studies before somebody's about to go through discover um whether or not they have an illness or before they go to apply for a job they're more likely to donate to charity kind of thinking at some level maybe not even consciously that well this will tip the goods you know this will uh this will get the dee's attention and his love will shine upon me and give you good fortune and that and you know we push back and forth about rational irrational i think a lot of that's fairly irrational but it is a powerful tendency are there any stories from the book that were your favorites that we haven't touched on oh gosh we um we hit a lot of them um i think we i think we uh we know you know like i love that the fact that uh over and over again the same things converge victor frankel and um are we talking about victor frankel you and i no yeah so so we'll end with that then um because this is um my subtitle the search for meaning is a shout out to his book man's search for me so he was a jew in austria was a psychiatrist who um worked for suicide suicide in my lessons and uh when he came to power he could have left but he didn't his elderly parents were uh were there and they couldn't leave and he ended up getting swooped up and caught in concentration camps in dachau and oschwitz and he was always a scientist and he asked himself the question what distinguishes the people who kill themselves or give up they just stop eating or they actively kill they run you know they make a run for it knowing they're gonna be shot and so on for those who are resilient and those who hold on and he said it's not like cheerfulness or any obvious personality faith it's whether or not you possess meaning and uh that you have a reason to live you know some sort of quote that uh those who find a why in life can bear with almost any how and um and i feel this uh this drives a lot of the way people are thinking about it and the way i sort of build my book around the story is it victor frankel that talks about the stories of when they were made to move bags of wet salt or sand from one side of the encampment to the other and then once they had done they were just told to move it back is that from i don't remember that story i know that the story i'm pulling it from is some jewish concentration camp in world war ii and the point was that there was no inherent meaning in the work because once you moved it it was moved back and i'm not the most diy handyman person in the world i'm waiting for whatever switch my dad has to drop in the back of my head but my business partner is opening a bar in newcastle where i live and i offered my time useless as it is to say look i will come and paint walls and clean up and sand things and do whatever and as i was doing i don't i haven't done work like this for a long time you know two full days of manual labor of sanding concrete walls to give them a shine or cleaning stuff or whatever it might be and um upon doing that i reflected on the work of jewish concentration camp uh prisoners being made to do something that is so pointless because even at the end of the day of this work that was pretty mind-numbing apart from the fact i was able to look at this wall and say that's the that's the back wall of this bar and it looks it looks really quite nice actually and i've i didn't paint it and i didn't plaster it and i didn't do any of this but i had a tiny little bit of contribution and now every time i go into this bar i'll be able to look at that wall and think i i did that for a day and a half i did that you helped put a man on the moon you're like i helped open up yeah exactly yeah um we were looking at the the british cover the uk cover is that is a book so thank you but it's a gorgeous gorgeous cover but the american cover thank you i'll send you a picture of it's different and it is a picture of a system of the famous the famous myth and the myth is is the story of telling the concentration camps of someone condemned to roll a boulder up the hill and when it and before guests at the top it rolls down and you know rinse and repeat for eternity and you know meaning requires an endpoint you don't make it that endpoint you know you're working to be satisfying even if the barber's shuttered halfway through but you're working towards the endpoint you're working towards the goal and without that you know work ceases to be satisfying and just becomes misery if you're going to apply the sweet spot if you're going to apply the sweet spot are there any takeaways that you think should inform people of how they live or view their lives or is it affected the way that you look at yours at all i'm not i'm not a takeaway kind of guy for this uh the book is really honestly it's an exploration of why we do what we do unless i tell my last book about empathy was more in your face and telling people to do stuff and i just wanted to say that however um yeah i've become more appreciative of flow i want to read a book uh you recommended uh of getting flow and i've also became more familiar with the literature suggesting that regardless of what heedness and pleasure happiness is the right goal um seeking pleasure happiness seems to be kind of a dead end uh you know there's a strong relationship between people who think seeking happiness is very important and people end up depressed and anxious and very unhappy i think happiness and pleasure is a goal but it's the kind of goal you get while you're doing other things so um so so working on a book has made me appreciate more the parts of my life that aren't that much fun but are directed towards the purpose of the goal i love it paul bloom ladies and gentlemen the sweet spot suffering pleasure and the key to a good life will be linked in the show notes below and if people want to harass you on the internet where should they go uh you should probably hit me up on twitter i'm still uh paul bloom at you know paul bloom at you i lose my blue check mark if i change it so and on my webpage paul bloom.net amazing thanks this has been tons of fun thank you