E24 - The Happiness Hypothesis, Improving Happiness in the Midlife, and Childless Cat Ladies

In this episode we continue our series on happiness, focusing on how one might improve happiness in the midlife. In our opening potpourri/grab-bag segment, Jack gives a quick take on the movies Defending Your Life and Joe vs. the Volcano, which were on our top 5 list of movies related to existential happiness from our last episode. Jack also recommends an episode from The Nietzsche Podcast in which Keegan Kjeldson discusses The Four Great Errors in thinking identified in Nietzsche's book Twilight of the Idols, and Alvin briefly explains how a car crashed into his house and his recent experience taking his oldest child to college. In our main segment (28:00), we give an overview of the book The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. We discuss the framework of automatic processing vs. conscious decision making, factors that influence our baseline happiness, the Happiness Formula, and some of the practical tips that might help you improve your happiness proposed by Jonathan Haidt. We end the segment by explaining why we think JD Vance is wrong in asserting that childless cat ladies are unhappy, using evidence cited by psychologist Paul Bloom. As always, we thank you for listening, and please support the podcast by following us in your podcast feed, leaving us a five star review, and sharing the podcast with your friends and family. If you want to share your feedback or thoughts on specific topics from the episode, you can email us at [email protected] The Happiness Hypothesis: https://www.happinesshypothesis.com/ Article on the impact of having children on happiness by Paul Bloom: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/11/does-having-kids-make-you-happy/620576/