The Mathematics of Happiness

prosperous in my relationships and other non monetary ways. Yeah. Okay, well, you know that's a it's a big question, right happiness At this very moment, I feel you, ammonia, So you feel happy right now? Right now? Okay, Well that's good. That's that's that's that's a good sign for the podcast episode. We should we should both be happy while we're doing it. I mean, you don't have to be, but it helps,

I guess. But that's pretty much life in general, right, I mean, from moment to moment, it's a question, am I happy? Is this making me happy? And should I be asking that question? To begin with? To what extent

is it a false construct? To what extent can we actually plan and manipulate our environment in our life in such a way that the end result is happiness, right, which is why this is such a sticky topic and why we haven't really like put our arms around it and really given it a big old squeeze, because, I mean, this is kind of a territory that gets into all sorts of variables. And as you had mentioned, happiness is from moment to moments. So to say are you happy?

Do you want to be happy? It's sort of like, yes, I do in five minutes, in a day, in a year, I want all of that for me. And then to even try to figure out what happiness is is a whole sort of Pandora's box of philosophies and pitfalls. Yeah, like when anyone asks you what it does X make you happy? Um, and unless unless X is something that's tied to a very in the moment experience, such as say does the sugar make you happy? You know you can say, well, yes, sugar makes me happy in a

very short term sense. But otherwise it you know, does does does any kind of artestic artistic endeavor that you you busy yourself with? Does does that make you happy? Well? Yes, their moments that it probably makes you really happy. There are moments where it will frustrate you there moments where where it will will bleed into other areas of happiness or frustration in your life. It's just it's it's such, it's so dependent on so many different things, and it's

such a subjective experience, right, subjective and ephemeral. Right, it's a fleeting feeling most times. And it's and you had mentioned this whole thing of like, even asking the question about happiness, what is it? Am I happy? Kind of takes you outside of the experience of being happy, and it's sort of one of the things that you start to take it apart. Can you put it back together again? You know? Does that does it make us unhappy to

even try to figure out what this un ammonia is? Well, you end up stabbing to step outside of the human experian's itself, because when you start realizing that that as humans we are ephemeral, As humans were not one thing from one second to the next. Where this weird, kind of odd shaped snake that's draped across the timeline, with all these weird unconscious things going on that we can't always pin down. And right, there's just so many different

states affecting nous. So one of the things you mentioned. You said, if X makes me happy, that made me

think about this equation. That we're going to talk about this happiness equation, which might sound a little reductive, and maybe it is, and we'll get to it, but we really wanted to use this as our sort of entree into the topic because we could go on and we may into this topic for episodes and episodes and episodes, but this at least gives us a place to start ad to figure out, you know, happiness in this transient state and what it means to us, because indeed, they're

constantly are studies coming out dealing with happiness and the human we for happiness, and uh it's and we've been trying to figure out what happiness is for a very long time. Uh So it's a deep topic. And today we're going to we're gonna talk a little bit about how are thinking about happiness has changed, and then we're gonna talk about this supposed happiness equation, which is when we get to it, you'll see it's a little more complicated than than than it sounds. Yeah, there's no X

plus Y equals. Yeah, there are many more variables. But let's start with Aristotle because He described happiness as an experience of the good life through virtuous action. Okay, so this is the idea. You spend your time doing things that are good, that are virtuous, that benefit humanity in some way. You're gonna you're gonna feel good about that. You're gonna feel uh this, this positive feeling in your life. Yes,

by being disciplined, by being virtuous. Yes, the byproduct is a sort of glow of happiness that that you're you know, a good person out they're doing good things. Okay, and I can see where, certainly later you can end up interpreting this, uh by by really drawing in more religious ideas of virtue as well. But but you know on the surface that that's this is a definition that seems

to ring true. When you're doing when you're helping others, when you're doing good things of that nature, you do feel a certain a bit of happiness is kind of you know, contentment. You know you're not you're not you don't feel like you're wasting your time. Yeah, there's a

sort of purpose in life. Right, And now you can sort of turn the dial a couple of degrees and you can see that you can go from being happy to feeling happy, which then kind of makes you change this perception of happiness as this pursuit, this thing that you have to have and a kind of pleasure that you want over and over again. In fact, we know that dopamine is released when we're feeling really happy, so you can kind of even tie that to a sort

of addiction to happiness. And I'm talking about hedonism, yeah, for talking about, of course, the hedonistic view of life, the idea that life is all about seeking pleasure and you're just jumping from one pleasure to the next, and that that is part and partial to the human experience itself, and anything else you're telling yourself is just a lie. So that's one way to look at it. Yeah, this one way to look at Yeah. Another and you kind of already touched on this is happiness can be associated

with a state of flow. And we've talked about this before that when you're really engaged in activity or just even thinking about something, it's pleasurable because you lose yourself inside of it and time sort of suspends itself. Yeah, we've talked about the default mode network before. You know that the voice in your head, it's constantly tied into

anxieties about past and the future. Uh. And then when you can shut that down, uh, you know, by meditation, by who knows medication, but also by just simply becoming the act that you're involved in, be that act howing the yard or writing a poem, or doing your job at work, or a gamy. And we're going to talk

about in our next episode. But according to Megan Keener, writing for the Huffington Post, neuroscientists and Buddhist monk Mathou Record teaches that durable happiness as a way of life requires training the mind and developing qualities like inner peace, mindfulness, and altruistic love and uh. She goes on to say that Dali Lama agrees, describing happiness as a skill requiring effort in time to develop an understanding of the true

nature of reality. And in a way, you kind of get back to Aristotle here, this byproduct of doing right by yourself, of doing good in the world, of of trying to come to the act in a very mindful way. Yeah, and a little bit there from the Dalai Lama about understanding the true nature of reality. Um, I kind of

enjoy taking that notion to a certain degree. Outside of the Buddhist construct there and think about, you know, just sort of having a good understanding, a good based understanding of how the brain is working, how the mind is working, and and and knowing, you know, however, we're gonna inevitably go from this happy moment to the next with dips in between, and there's a topography to uh, to our

emotional state in life. Like just knowing that there is a topography and realizing that there are going to be ups and downs. I feel like that is is is an important part of at least trying to maintain some sort of happiness in your life. Yeah, I kind of quit it with the ferret of the mind looking for everything that's shiny, you know, and just bouncing from one thing to another. Yeah, and just knowing that there's a ferret.

It's kind of half the battle. I mean that you can become aware of this, uh, this state of mind, then you can you can actually take some steps to deal with it. Yeah. And if you can say stop, that's fool schoold, it's not the real thing, then maybe you can back up for a second and kind of get back into yourself and back into that present moment. Now when did we humans really least think that happiness was worth pursuing an earnest because this hasn't always been

the aim of humanity. Oh yeah, I mean you just just in the Western tradition you look back at and it's certainly like Protestant thinking and and to a certain degree Catholic views of of life, where you you really get into this idea of this physical world as being a world of suffering and just you it's all about just enduring what the world is throwing at you, and you've got to keep your eyes in the prize and that being some form of happiness in the afterlife, if

you can even call it happiness. You can even I guess it base call it liberation. Uh, you know, to get a little Buddhist on it. But life sucks, and your only possibility out of the suck is to follow the rules and make it out in the next life. Right, there's the original sin, the idea of that, and everybody's gonna suffer for that in this lifetime, which when you

get out maybe not so much so. According to Peter Stearn's writing for the Harvard Business Review, this idea changed in the eighteenth century, and he said the fact is that the commitment to happiness in Western culture is relatively modern until the eighteenth century. Uh, if anything, you have that saddened approach to life. And so he says, what changed is you had the the Enlightenment. And we've talked

about this before. The Enlightenment not only just brought in this new circulation of ideas, but coffee houses which helped to circulate and really pump up everybody's energy to communicate those ideas like little virus, these little memes that began to distribute among everybody. And so then you have these ideas of well, hey, maybe you know the original sin

and suffering. Maybe it's a little bit different. Maybe God wants us to be happy, and he was coffee and all this energy, and I have all these thoughts and ideas and I want to talk about him. Maybe God really wants us to be cheerful. That's that's the idea there. And in addition to that, Stearn says that the air were advances and human comfort for the middle classes. This is really key, and he's saying that there is better home heating. I mean, imagine being chilled throughout the night

and how angry and depressed you might be the next day. Um. It's these little things that he said sort of move the needle for people to get into a position where they could begin to consider happiness. In other words, they were in this really nice, comfortable position. Um. And he even says that improved dentistry might have encouraged people to smile more. And you know, we've talked about this before. Just smiling, the act of it will communicate to your

brain that you're happy, even if that state. You know, right before that you were kind of feeling funky or in a funk, I should say. And then the just the act of your lips curling up can tell your brain, hey, you're smiling. You know that. In this of course, flows into the the theory that the Mona Lisa, for instance, might have had that unique smile because she doesn't want to show her teeth. Um, it's an it's an interesting theory.

But the thing is, it's kind of disappointing though. Yeah, you know, like, oh, she's the she's neither smiling or grimacing,

she's just doesn't want to show her teeth. Yeah, but you know what, I think we've all seen very genuine smiles on the part of people with imperfect, too too bad teeth, you know, and in a way like there's nothing better, because you know, that's a genuine smile, Like it's a smile where the the happiness of the moment supersedes any concerns about physical health or or or just

you know, basic appearance. Yeah, and it's you know, we kind of take dentistry for granted now, but think back to the eighteenth century, and this would be a clear marker of those who maybe had access to money and dentistry and those who did not. So all of a sudden to be able to have things in your mouth fixed, you know, maybe not have that rowan tooth or whatever it is. Um that might say, oh, look at me, I've got access to wealth, and I'm going to smile

about it all day. All right. So weally, we eventually get into this idea, uh, in large part, especially in the United States, so due to the Declaration of Independence UH and Thomas Jefferson's pen that everyone has the right to life, love, and the pursuit of happiness. Now, the Declaration of Independence is not provide additional details on exactly what happiness means and or how to obtain it, but we're told, oh, will you have a right to uh, to pursue it? So so what are we to make

of that? Like? Where where does that even come from? That's a that's a question that scholars have actually looked at quite a bit. Well. Thomas Jefferson, as we know, was really very well read and in many different areas, and as Josh Clark points out his article about this um, Jefferson was very interested in philosopher John Locke's ideas, and Locke had originally positive the idea that a person's right to live a healthy life, free to amass and maintain

property or life. Health, liberty, and property was sort of the bedrock on which Jefferson began to build his own philosophy for what the United States might want to pursue for itself. So we're not quite sure how happiness came to be in in his um final wording in in the Declaration of Independence, but we do know that this idea of health and wellness well being might have informed this idea of happiness. Yeah. Again, it's such a subjective thing that really if you try and and really dissected

too much, you just start running into dead ends. And especially when you think about the fact that that the American dream, as as it was back then, also entails being able to um to a new place and practice some sort of dreary take on Protestant theology again where life is not about happiness, and maybe that that that belief is in a sense your own sort of happiness.

That it gets complicated, it does, and then it's again it's interesting to see Thomas Thomas Jefferson and others during this period really bringing in these other ideas of what life is. So obviously in the United States there's a comfort level that has been reached in which Jefferson and others can begin to ponder what it means um to be this human in this society and what to expect.

And I think that's the fascinating thing, is that that turn from health and wealth being eking into this idea of happiness and that that should be accessible for people some people. You know, technology makes a lot of things easier, like using the st office, but stamps dot Com you can do everything that you do at the post office right from your computer. Best of all, it's super easy. You don't need to be a tech expert with stamps

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enter stuff. All right, we're back and we're talking about happiness, and we're gonna talk a little bit about something called the happiness industrial Complex, or something dubbed the happiness industrial complex. And for an example of this, you just need to look at pretty much anything in your surrounding world. U turn on the television, turn on the radio, listen to

a podcast, drive down the street. It's everywhere. Yeah. And according to Caroline Gregor, a features editor Huffington Post, a Google search for happiness yields seventy five million results and nearly forty thousand books on the topic. Now sitting atop this heap of books is Gretchen Rubens Happiness Book or The Happiness Project. I'm sure a lot of listeners have

probably seen this around. And Gretchen Ruben, she was very interested in trying to figure out what made her happy, and she began to sort of live this life of how she could achieve Um. It's a sort of like the six sigma Jack Doneghie, Like I'm going to attack happiness and it's going to be in you know, all these different areas of my life. And she lived it for like a year and then wrote about the successes and the failures of that, as well as some of

the studies and the science behind it. Um. But she says that she thinks that the reason why there is this happiness Industrial complex is because we live in a time of incredible prosperity, not of course globally, but in the West. This is probably one of the prosperous times in history. And so hearkening that to that idea that when you reach a certain comfort level, you began to really become more introspective and figure out how to move

that needle on your own happiness. Yeah, and then the media that you consume, the examples of life that you see around you, those kind of become the the sort of baseline happiness that you feel, on some level you should be able to achieve. So you have this, uh, you have this example of what your home should be, what your family should be, what your clothing should be, what your your nose should be, I don't know, and and and that that becomes the model that becomes something

that you you strive for. Um And there's and there's no end of people that want to sell you something that will help you reach that point where you have that house, where you have that nose, where you have that outfit, where you have whatever version of of of happiness you're having to pull out of the media ether all around you, which kind of gets you into this terrible place where you think that there's a standard of happiness that you must fulfill for yourself, even though knowing

can really define that for the community at large, it has to be defined individually. And so I think that's what fueling this industry. People are just saying, how if I just buy this book, if I just do this one thing, then I'll be happy, Which again, it's not a one size fits all, um, and it's taken hold. I think of people's imagine nation so much so that Uh, there is a one forty five million dollar Pentagon sort

of happiness program that was put into place. Uh and his PBS opinion piece The Tyranny of Happiness, Joshua Faust writes that Martin Silikman helped to create this program to teach optimistic thinking to veterans returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And it's a kind of resilience training that was also put into place for for other soldiers, not just veterans. And so on the one hand, you have detractors who say it's super reductive. Um, it's almost like

mind control. And it's also possibly not dealing with the concerns of veterans who have really had some very traumatic experiences returning from war. But on the other hand, I mean as as again as reductionists as it may seem to just sort of have this hey fight the horror with happiness kind of vibe. I mean, at least they're giving them some tools to work with, some something cling onto if you feel yourself drifting off into the deep

end of of trauma and post traumatic stress. Right, it's it's a step in the right direction for mental health, right, and to even addressing the fact that there are issues that um, a lot of people are dealing with when when they're at war. UM. But the other sort of murky thing about this is that Seligman is very much associated with torture tactics and techniques and he's he's kind

of actually got the corner on that. So here you have this guy who has has worked with the government UM and torture techniques, but is also on the flip side trying to help soldiers with positive thinking. And UM, it's it's very interesting, I should say, just if not um controversial. I mean, you could argue that he's very qualified for this since he is familiar with the the the opposite end of the spectrum. But but yeah, I

don't know it. It's still maybe it's just just a simple matter of anytime you have something that's referred to as the Pentagon Happiness program, it's going to ring a little Hollway. I think that's an informal take on it. I'm not sure if that's what they actually I think I know they refer to it as positive psychology. But you're right, it is interesting, like this is the guy who knows how to break an individual, so maybe this is the guy who knows how to fix an an individual.

So yeah, there's the interesting duality of course you can make there. You know, there's the the whole argument that those are the two movements you can take in life, either destroying and creating. And just because you can tear a car apart doesn't mean you can rebuild it. So I don't know. Indeed, I feel like this is fertile ground for another episode to even talk about this um. So we should talk about the mathematical happiness that we

referred to in the introduction this. I d you that those moment to moment um state through our mind might be able to be trapped and even predicted in terms of how contemp we feel and of course this uh, this falls logically based on any number of studies we've

discussed on this podcast. Right, we can always use an f m R. I we can look and see how blood is flowing through the brain and based on what associations are made with different parts of the brain and different parts of the brain in connection with each other, then we can and then we can compare the brain scans the FMR results to what kind of stimulized involved what you're asking the tests of you to think about, and you can start forming theories about um, you know

how to fill in that X and that y in various equations regarding human behavior. And I was thinking about this in terms of how we always say that the brain is this pattern seeking machine and um. Dr Rob Rutledge from the University of College London, who conducted the study, said, the brain is trying to figure out what you should be doing in the world to get rewards. So all the decisions, expectations and out comes or information it's using to make sure you make good decisions in the future.

All of the recent expectations and rewards combined to determine your current state of happiness and what's interesting about that is I don't think that people really thought about happiness in that context before, Like, oh, that's just my brain trying to predict what's going on and what it should expect. You know. We tend to think of happiness coming more

from the inside as opposed to external conditions. So this brings us to the the so called happiness equation, which if you look at it, and we'll i'll try to include a link to it or an image of it on the podcast page associated with this episode, you'll see that it again is not an X plus Y equals whatever. It is is a long equation with several different variables, different levels. Like if it were if this equation we're physically a house that would have several floor as there

were to be different places you could hide. It's a it's an elaborate equation, is but it is an equation nonetheless, So it's an attempt to mathematically understand this thing, and in this case, UH, the individuals trying to mathematically understand the Quest for Happiness researchers at University College London. So what they did is they analyze the results of twenty six people doing a task in which over repeated trials, they were asked to choose between definite and risky monetary rewards.

So we're, you know, we're talking basically the idea of do you stand to to to gain any kind of small monetary reward on this particular risk is that there's zero dollars involved? Is there one dollar, two dollars involved, that sort of thing, And what's your expectation as opposed to what really happened and when you were playing the game? Yeah, and so through these trials, they're asked to report their

level of happiness following the result. And of course the participants brains were also scanned using an f m R I. So looking at the brain scans, looking again how blood is flowing through through the noggin during all of this, they they noticed activity in two areas of the brain correlated positively with happiness scores. These were the ventral striatum, this is the main source of dopamine neurons, and the insula, an area of the brain that is associated with several emotions,

but especially happiness. So, yeah, let's say that a player made a decision and she thought, okay, there's you know, she wasn't sure what her reward would be monetarily, but she expected maybe zero dollars or one dollar. But let's say her reward was not those full six dollars, but four dollars. Hey, that was better than what she expected. She thought that on the lower end of the spectrum she'd get zero or one dollar. So you see that

activity in the brain spiking. So what they did is they took all of that information and then they had a second part of the study in which they developed that equation based on all of those reactions and the way the brain was behaving, and they applied it to eighteen thousand people playing a game that was very similar to what the volunteers were doing. So we're talking about a decision making task game. It's a smartphone game. And

the results were as the model had predicted. When players expected a reward, they were less happy to receive it than if they hadn't expected anything at all. Okay, So it all comes down to expectations and how appropriately low

or high those expectations might be. Yeah, which is kind of uh, that's a little bit of a dumb moment, But at the same time, it challenges our perception of how happiness sort of happens inside of us, So it doesn't depend on really how things are going, but on our perception of how they will go or how they

should go. Yeah. I feel like an area of my life where I see this in play the most is when I see a move of you when I go to check out a film, right, because you're coming into any given film with varying levels of of of information regarding its quality and how much you are supposedly going to like it, so you have a certain expectations set for it. Maybe so everyone's saying this is the big summer thrill ride, this is the best movie of the year, this one an Oscar, this one, this uh, this is

the film that all your friends are talking about. So you go into it perhaps thinking well, I will certainly love it, it it will be the greatest thing ever. Or you go into a film that everyone has dumped on and then it's better than you expected. So based on your expectations, you know, I find myself thinking at times, what was this film really that bad? Or was that just my expectations were just way too high for it?

And then likewise, I'll see something and I'll really enjoy it, and then I'll think, well, maybe that's just because I was really expecting nothing out of it, and it did have some some nuggets of gold hidden in there with

the poop. That's a nice way to say. Yeah, um and Ritledge says he even says like this isn't the way to pursue happiness, by the way, because we're talking about moment to moment, and he said, in contrast to this, you could actually even be thinking about stay an upcoming vacation and imagine yourself learning to serve or if that's something you really think you're going to do and you're committed to that and have pleasure from that, just from

imagining yourself being on vacation and doing things, so you can have expectations, he says, Um, but the trick moment to moment in your life is to try to um, as you can say, lower your expectations to the reality of the situation in order to not be disappointed. Right, Okay, Yeah, I mean that makes sense. You can set out, you can fantasize essentially about learning to serve on that vacation, but don't be upset when it rains every day and

you just end up playing scrabble in the beach house. Yeah, just just the out of being on vacation having those thoughts and yeah, maybe even being like, maybe this is the key fantasizing about surfing, but also saying that won't it be beautiful if it rains, then I'll be playing scrabble, So surfing settle for scrabble. That can be our new bumper sticker happiness equation that everybody can can use and we can put that in our stuff to blow your mind.

Store right Travel can license it and use it on all the products. There you go. Religeous also says that this is only a measurement for immediate reward. He says that it doesn't deal with long term satisfaction. And in fact um, when you look at all these short term spikes in debts and you account for them, people still have a baseline happiness point and they tend to follow that over the course of a lifetime. And perhaps that's

more dominated by your philosophy of life. Yeah, and also by the I mean sort of the the the icons and the role models you look up for too. I mean, those became the models of what you want to achieve, be that you know, you're one of your own parental units or some celebrity or whatever. You end up you end up kind of shackled to that model to some degree, and you are shackled to um, whatever your circumstances are at that very moment, the circumstances that you can't maybe change.

So I'm thinking health is one of them. Um. And this certainly doesn't even begin to touch on depressions. So again, reductionists at all. But these are just you know, this happiness equation is interesting to look at the happiness paradigm and try to figure out what's going on there in

the femeral states. So if we're to take something away from this, and again you can't really take away a quick, easy uh uh you know rocket ride to happiness but essentially aimed for the stars but settle for them in kind of a situation. Yeah, but even that, it's it's more complicated than it sounds like. If you start dissecting the the bumper sticker um simplicity of it, it is a lot like how do you set how do you aim big and still find yourself satisfied with with with

less impressive results? Uh? Like even my own life when I think about about my writing, uh, it's I feel like I've I've gotten to the point where I have a like a healthy level of expectation, but I still I am also at the same time, uh, staying ambitious with what I'm trying to do, and I'm not sure I can really break apart how I'm maintaining that, you know,

like because they seem like to contradictory feelings. Well, I think it's kind of one of those things, especially with fiction, is you do have that expectation I'm going to write the great American novel, and I'm doing it now, and it never happens, right, because that novel turns out into

something entirely different than what you expected. So I think when you come to the experience of flow, in this case, happiness, that you have to be willing to fail a lot or a little in order to reach some sort of stasis of happiness, right, because it's just in the effort of trying to do that and then square your expectations

with whatever comes out on the other side. Yeah. Again, when we're writing, requires that sort of like zen monk like mind, which makes it I think, very difficult, although not for Joyce Carol Oates. Oh yeah, she finds it easy. She's prolific, And I think it's because it's like a

muscle for her. She has written so much and she does it almost automatically when she comes to the table, because that is what she does, you know, every single day that you know, I think that you sort of maybe when you're doing it that much, you put away those fears or those thoughts that allow you to get to that page. Bottom line, though, expectations seem to play a major role in the pursuit of immediate happiness. So shoot for the moon, or if you shoot for the moon,

the shoot for the moon. Shoot for the moon is fine, but settle for low Earth orbit. There you go. That's our bumper sticker, all right, guys, Um, you know you can find us in other places, right, Oh yeah, yeah, we're available all over, but especially at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That is where you will find all of our podcast episodes streaming for

your pleasure. You will find all of our videos. You'll find our blogs as well as links out to various social media accounts that we frequent And if you have any thoughts on happiness, any sad thoughts on happiness differately, um, please do share them with us. We would love to hear from you, guys, and you can do that by emailing us at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com