Caring What You're Sharing

lovely scene himself. He wanted all his friends to see how pretty the lake was too. The problem, of course, was that this was eighteen thirty three, no smartphone cameras. If Fox Talbot wanted to share this beautiful scene with his friends back home, he had to draw it. Fox Talbot tried sketching the lakeside with the help of a camera Lucida, the nineteenth century equivalent of the best smartphone camera,

but his result wasn't all that great. It was so bad, in fact, that he called it a melancholy to behold. It was in this moment of vacation disappointment that fox Talbot had some inspiration, how charming it would be. He later wrote, if these natural images could imprint themselves durably upon the paper, within just two years, fox Talbot would invent an early way to do this. He developed the negative positive technique that later became photography, just because he

wanted some honeymoon picks to share with the folks back home. Now, let's fast forward to a different October fifth, exactly one hundred and seventy seven years to the day that fox Talbot drew that awful picture. On this October fifth, twenty ten, another inventor, software engineer, Kevin Seistroum, is just about to launch the new photo sharing app he's developed with partner Creaker.

It's a sleek new tool that lets users take interesting photos to share with friends what Cystrom called an instant Telegram of storts, so they christened it Instagram. Sistrom launched the app just after midnight. Within hours, Instagram servers crashed too many downloads. In twenty four hours, Instagram had twenty five thousand users. Today, the site boasts a thousand new

uploaded photos every single second. When asked why Instagram was so successful, Cystrom said that the app gave users a way to turn ordinary, everyday scenes into magical moments, magical moments that were not only captured but instantly share. Humankind now had the perfect way to satisfy Fox Talbot's original urge on the shores of Lake Como, the desire to share what we're experiencing. Now we can do it anytime

we want. These stories show how far a technology can come in less than two hundred years, but they also illustrate something more profound, the power of a very basic urge to record a moment so that we can brag about, excuse me, share that experience with our friends and family members, everyone who wasn't there. Nowadays, most of us have devices in our pockets powerful enough to record pretty much every

single experience in vivid detail. We also have tools that Fox Talbot probably couldn't even imagine, ones that let us share those captured images broadly, not just with our family and friends, but with millions of strangers at the click of a button. For the first time in human history, our best moments in life aren't just preserved, they're broadcast for all to see. But is all this sharing making us as happy as we think our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what

if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what would really make us happy. The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santas. I moved to New York City when I was sixteen, and I was dropped on Union Square

in a dorm, and I had no one. Marie Ellis bun Is a young entrepreneur that many have called the millennial Walt Disney, but long before she earned it that nickname, she was just another college student and younger than most alone in New York City. So I would sit most days in the parking Union Square, and I played chess, and I kind of just watched people. Marie Ellis wanted to connect with people in a huge, unknown city, so

she turned to something she loved, ice cream shops. And I would go on map Quest and I would start finding places in the Bronx and in Brooklyn and Queen's and these ice cream shops felt to me as the places that were safe. They held accessible, and my understanding of the city was by way of ice cream shops. Mapping the city in terms of the most delicious ice cream helped Mary Ellis learn about her new urban home, but it also brought her something more important, real human connection.

Everyone's happy and ice cream shops people aren't depressed, and ice cream was able to just for me, like, undress my social anxieties and put me in a place where I feel like I can converse and be my best social self. Mary Ellis Is foy into New York ice cream shops made her realize how powerful shared experiences can be. Doing something with other people, it just makes us feel good. People share experiences with other people all the time in

their daily life. This is Cornell University researcher Erica Boothby. When you watch a movie with somebody or a TV show, or if you are at a concert, or even just in your house and you have the radio on, or you're listening to music or looking at visual stimuli such as paintings or photographs, things like that. Erica is an expert on the psychology behind all these tiny shared moments. People are naturally drawn to share experiences in this way.

I think you know, even if you look at infants, you know under a year old are already trying to basically co opt their carriver's gaze and share moments with them. If you have a young child, or have ever hung out with one, you probably know this phenomenon. Well, mommy, look, mommy, mommy, come on, look. What's amazing is that babies don't need to be taught to do this. Research shows that our human motivation to share is an instinct, one that kicks

in automatically during the first year of life. In one study, psychologist Mike Thomasello and his colleagues brought parents and young toddlers into the lab and staged weird events, like having a strange looking puppet pop out of a wall unexpectedly. The kids notice the puppet naturally, but the parents pretended not to see it, and so the kids did what they'd normally do. They pointed at the weird thing. But

what were they trying to achieve? Did they just want their parents to see the puppet or did they want to share the experience to see it at the same time together. To test this, thomas Ella varied how parents reacted. Some parents looked both at the child and what they pointed at, but other parents only looked at the objects they did what the kids were asking. They looked, but

they didn't really share the experience with their child. What happened Thomas Ella found that babies whose parents didn't share stopped pointing over time. Getting the parents to look wasn't the objective. It was about the act of sharing. I think that we go through life doing this, and it's something we may not be thinking about all the time, but it's something that is playing an underlying role in how we situate ourselves with others and how we go

about all of our daily life. The fact that we're so sensitive to that is something that really sets us a part as a species. Erica became interested in why I shared experience is so powerful? What are we getting out of it? She hypothesized that sharing an event with someone else might change the way we ourselves experience that event,

even if we don't realize it. You're just simply attending to the same thing at the same time as this person, and just knowing that their mind is also full of the same contents as your mind changes that experience for you both. Erica devised a cool way to test this new idea with a chocolate tasting. So we had people come in. They sat down at a table side by side with another person who actually happened to be a

Confederate who was working for us. We told people that they were going to be experiencing several different kinds of experiences. We rigged it so that we could assign people to share an experience or not share an experience. They were either both tasting chocolate at the same time, or the participant was tasting chocolate while we had the confederate instead do something else. So the Confederate, for example, looked at some paintings while the participant ate chocolate, and then we

had them evaluate these chocolates. We had them report how much they liked the chocolate, how flavorful it tasted. People thought they were trying different kinds of chocolates, but they were actually identical. This way, we could tell if they raided the chocolates differently, if they experienced them differently, if they thought that one tasted better than the other, for example, that it had to be because of whether the experience

was shared or not. The only thing Erica varied was whether subjects tasted the chocolate at the same time as another person or not, it shouldn't have mattered, but in the end it did a lot. So what we found is that when people tasted a pleasant chocolate simultaneously with somebody else, they liked that chocolate more and thought it tasted more flavorful than when they ate that same chocolate

while the other person was doing something different instead. And what you're not realizing is that what the other person sitting next to you happens to be doing is affecting your own experience of the chocolate. It actually is tasting different to you when the other person happens to also be tasting it versus not, and you just aren't at all aware of that. Then Erica did another experiment. She was the same setup as before, but this time people

tasted yucky, unsweetened baking chocolates. What happened, Sharing the experience made it worse. A bad chocolate tastes more awful when someone else is tasting it too. What this tells us is that experiences aren't necessarily always enhanced or improved when you're experiencing them together with somebody else. They're actually amplified. They get more intense. Researchers have found similar effects with

other kinds of sensations. Scientist at McGill University had subjects stick their hand in super cold water, which hurts a ton, but the cold hurts even worse if a second subject was standing there going through the same event at the same time. So misery doesn't really love company? Is that

what this work is suggested? One sense? That's true, these negative experiences get more intense when they're shared, but that might actually not be all that bad because it could actually help to serve a function of bonding people together. Feeling more pain when someone else is hurting isn't the best experience at the time, but it might allow us to empathize with that other person, to bond in the face of a shared trauma. That's kind of the other

interesting side of shared experiences. What is it doing to our interpersonal relationships? But what about experiences we can't ever share. Some amazing event like having the chance to travel to space alone or getting to sample some super expensive but really rare food. Does the uniqueness of an experience make it feel worse? Erica told me about a study by another Coronell researcher, Gus Cooney, who also happens to be

her partner. He set up a study where a bunch of people came to the lab to have a relatively orinary experience. They got to watch a movie. One of the subjects, however, got picked to have an extraordinary experience. He got to watch a really special viral video involving a magician doing incredible tricks. Gus had subjects predict which type of event they'd enjoy more, the extraordinary one or

the boring one. People thought the extraordinary movie would make them happier, but what happened when subjects actually experienced the different events. The boring events were fine, but the extraordinary events experienced alone made people feel kind of isolated. They even felt a little guilty. That could have been an awesome experience when they read it really highly. But then it has this other social cost of well, they haven't shared this with other people. Other people can't relate, they

can't really talk about it. They feel like they're bragging, right. They just have difficulty expressing that to other people, and so that detracts from the social bonding potential that there is there, And that might be one of the reasons that so many of us have that Fox Talbot urge. When we experienced something incredible, we want other people to experience it too. We want to share all the awesome moments that we're not able to share at the time.

That's why there's so many vacation posts with hashtag OMG, hashtag incredible, hashtag yacht, and so on. Erica says these findings have changed her. They've made her more conscious of how her own behavior affects other people. It's even changed her family life, like how she and Gus share experiences together as a couple. For watching TV at night and I'm distracted looking at something else, right, maybe I'm on

my phone, I'm responding to a text or whatever. I realize now that that is actually going to affect my partner's experience of the show we're watching and cause him to pay less attention to it. I'm just more aware of this constant interpersonal dynamic where we're affecting one another in all kinds of ways. Just even being aware of it makes life a little more interesting. I love Eric's work because it shows the power of sharing, how it

intensifies our lives. It makes the good things better, and even though it makes the bad things a little worse, they're more bearable since someone is by our side. Experiencing stuff together can be a powerful tool for shaping our happiness. This same insight led mary Alice Bun, the woman we met earlier, to develop a million dollar new concept. There's just this line down the street. I was like, Wow, what are they waiting for it? And lo and behold

there's an ice cream shop. And that was kind of the moment where it was like, I need to start building places in the world that people actually want to be in and spend time with, and places where people can come together. How do I build something that people just want to go to? The Happiness Lab will be right back. I would walk around the city and the spaces around me just weren't offering or afforded me a

place that I really wanted to go. Even after finding rich social connections sharing a cone in those New York ice cream shops, may Ellis was searching for something more. Where do people Where are my peers, where are they spending their time, and what is actually filling them up? Mary Ellis realized that the modern world doesn't give her generation many opportunities to share events together. My peer groups weren't going to church my peer groups weren't going to

other community focused spaces. I was like, how do I build something that people just want to go to. What could possibly bring people together? Ice cream? Ice Cream is made to be shared. And this was the realization that led Mary Ellis to develop a completely new kind of venue for people to gather together, one that gave her a rather unconventional job title. I am the founder and CEO of the Museum of ice Cream. Just in case you're not lucky enough to already be familiar with the

Museum of ice Cream. I asked Mary Ellis to explain what it was. It wasn't easy. Great question. At Museum of ice Cream, we have one goal mission and that is to bring people outside together under one single piece, which is ice cream. Visitor enters a Museum of ice Cream. They're going to go through a series of journeys and stories,

all celebrating the acts of ice cream. And so there's a lot of both world building and story building that is built into the experience, and of course you get to eat a bunch of my favorite food, which is ice cream. It sounds really interesting, but despite Mary Ellis's best efforts, I was still confused about what exactly the Museum of ice Cream is. So I decided to go check it out in person with my friend from college, Sandy Stringfellow. We headed to a pop up location in

San Francisco. Together. We have just entered the Museum of ice Cream. First thing, it's not actually a museum. It's kind of like a pepto bismol has exploded in this building and like covered all surfaces with this incredibly bright pink color. And I'm really into the sprinkles up there. The neon life, you are about to answer a completely new world, not the world you're used to, not the

one you grew up in, something different. Okay. That became pretty clear when we had to enter the first exhibit by jumping into a huge fusia hole in the wall, one that led to a pink plastic slide winding two stories down. So if you take O, you have gone to yell scoop, scoop when you reach the bottom. Okay, scoop, scoop, scool, scoop, let's do it. Okay, all right, let's go first. I was the host, which meant I had to go first.

Scoop scoop, All right, you can do it. Okay, Jesus, all right, but screaming Scoop scoop while sliding down a huge pink slide was nothing compared to the rest of the museum. Sandy and I spent an entire hour taking in a completely surreal sensory experience. There was a fifties diner that served French fries and ketchup made of ice cream, an entire room filled with pink refrigerator magnets where you could write your a stable filled with life size glittery unicorns.

Each room was more over the top than the last. We're now in a room filled with animal cracker carousels that people can ride a Sandy, how does it feel to be on a large pink animal cracker? And then there's the piece to resistance, a four foot deep swimming pool filled with rainbow sprinkles. Ideas like these are why Mary Ellis is constantly compared to Walt Disney. She's designing incredible,

fantasy filled spaces for the next generation. But unlike Disneyland, the Museum of ice Cream didn't start out with hundreds of staff members and a huge team of designers. In the beginning, it was really a two person labor of love. For Mary Ellis and her co founder Manish Vora. I built the pool with my two hands. I painted every wall, I worked the door. Miniche and I were serving ice cream and it was twenty two hours a day, seven days a week. Their first New York City museum sold

out instantly for months. Then Mary Ellis started making similar museums in other cities. Her creation has now been visited by millions of people around the world. It's also become a darling of celebrities and Instagram influencers. I saw Beyonce's feed and she posted like nine posts and that was like, I mean, it's Queen Bee, It's Beyonce. That was a big deal. But the product, if you'll call it, that

has selled itself. We've had I don't know, almost two million people and they've all swam through these pools of sprinkles, which sounds sounds ridiculous, but it brings so much joy and it takes people out of a place of you know, we're also serious, and it brings them to a place where you just have to you have to have fun. But it's also a place where people get to be social, to connect with others. The everything Mary Ellis was missing

when she first moved to the city. And so what happens a Zaou's interactions start to become more and more easy or comfortable is people start to open up and they leave with an understanding of other people. And that's when the connections start to happen. It really starts to happen outside of our doors. I couldn't tell you how many people leave and go grab a drink together, just as a response to them talking about that they both love vanilla ice cream. Sandy and I saw this firsthand

during our visit. We chatted for a while with a local ten year old birthday girl and her mom, as well as a group of dressed to the nine twenty some things who had traveled all the way from North Carolina to celebrate their college graduation. It's the social aspect of the museum experience that has made Mary Ellis most proud, the way people from all walks of life get to share this surreal, ice cream filled experience together. One of the best parts of her job is eavesdropping on these

tiny new encounters people have sharing her incredible space. There was an older fellow and there was a mom and a son, and they were talking about how they all love chocolate chip ice and then they continue to talk, and then they both couldn't do to talk that they both live on fifty seventh Street, and in any other circumstance, I couldn't imagine these, you know, this mom and his son and this older gentleman coming together and having conversation.

We were able to like start to break down these barriers. And I think they continued on and they took the sun Way back uptown together, and it was this beautiful moment. And I was like, why don't we have more of these moments? Why aren't we able to break down? And the answer is because no one's getting us the opportunity to get off our phones or like to look up, ah, yes,

our phones. Even back when she was a sixteen year old of visiting ice cream shops, Mary Ellis noticed that phones made it harder for people to actually connect with one another. It was one of the reasons she tried to make the Museum of ice Cream so over the top for me or our mission is how do we build the world that is so compelling that it outshines the world that we're able to live within within our devices.

You need to build something that visually stimulates you know, I need to go see this because it looks so fantastic. The problem, though, is that when you build something that fantastic, something as incredibly cool looking and crazy as the Museum of ice Cream, people don't just want to share it with the people who happen to be around them at

the time. People get that old foxtailberge, they also want to hold on to that experience to share it with other people after the fact, which means phones, lots of phones. It's a double edged sword. That was what hit me most while I was at the museum. Every single person in the museum had their phone out, including me and Sandy.

Sandy and I left with so many ridiculous photos. Picks of us riding strange fictional animals, posing with our thumbs up in a tiny room filled with glittery mirrors, Photos of us buried up to the neck in sprinkles. But all those photos meant I was paying more attention to the small window in my phone than to the actual lived experience, the one I was supposed to be sharing with sand who I hadn't seen in months, the one Mary Ellis wanted me to be sharing with, the other

patrons too. The tragic irony is that the very human urge to capture and share was causing people to miss the best aspect of the Museum of ice Cream experience, the social part. But there was a second dark side to all this photo taking at the Museum of ice Cream. It made the place hard to navigate. The most instagrammable spots were often blocked by a big group of people standing around and trying to get the perfect photo, taking pics over and over again to get one that looked

just right. Sandy and I ended up bypassing entire displays because there were too many people posing nearby. It was pretty frustrating, and I realized that the frustration was a familiar one because I didn't just have this experience at the Museum of ice Cream. I've felt the same thing at concerts I've been too recently, where I couldn't see the band behind a sea of smartphone lights, and at a national park where I couldn't even get near a

gorgeous waterfall because too many people we're taking selfies. It even happens at weddings and graduations. Our obsession with capturing moments means not just missing them. Ourselves, but causing other people to miss them too. Mary Ellis has a complicated relationship with the fact that her creation is one of the most instagrammed places in the world. It's difficult because so much what you see are these perfectly curated, edited

photographs that appear on your feed. You're not going to be able to understand or translate the feeling, the emotion, the experience far surpasses the things that you can capture on a you know, a small square. She stall her staff members all kinds of techniques for getting people to put their phones down, but as I learned in the museum, they don't always work. Is it frustrating to see how many people are like just looking at their phones a whole time. We try to engage with the guests who

come through. We have like little games obviously if you want you to interact into space. But you know, when I first heard about Fox Talbot's story, the one I started this episode with, I thought about it from his perspective, how he was one of the first in human history to satisfy that urge to document and share. But as I did more research about the science of sharing for this episode, I started to think about the Fox Talbot tale from a different perspective, that of Missus Fox Talbot.

Imagine arriving at the most beautiful lake in the world, a young newlywed hoping for a bit of romance with your overworked husband. Imagine how annoying it must have been to watch him spend hours on his damn camera Lucida trying to get the perfect sketch. Missus Fox Talbot was perhaps the first of thousands upon thousands of spouses to watch their partners stare at their own honeymoon through a camera.

Len's She was probably one of the first to feel that special frustration you experience when someone you care about is missing the opportunity to actually share a moment with you because they're so worried about being able to capture it. When we're about to take a bite of our food, or we're saying something really deep and the person takes out their phone to capture a photo of the food before we eat it, those things can be disruptive, and

they can decrease enjoyment of our experience. The Happiness Lab will be back in a second. There's an urge. We all have an urge to capture special moments I'm talking with Alex Barrish, a professor at NYU. Alex is an expert on how photography affects our well being. I decided to meet with her to get to the bottom of all this sharing. Is it helping us or hurting us? But we also have that intuition that when we do that, we're taking something away from the other individual in the interaction.

Alex got interested in the topic while she was pursuing a pH abroad. She was taking a lot of pictures while exploring her new home. It was really beneficial in some ways because I was taking in more aspects of the environment or noticing things that I might not otherwise have noticed because I was capturing these aspects with a camera. But the other side of the equation was that I was sometimes feeling like the camera took me out of an experience, that I was focusing too much on getting

the perfect photo. Alex started looking into the empirical work on how phototaking affects our experience of an event. Does taking photos make us feel better? Does it help our memory for the event. Despite the ubiquity of phototaking in our daily lives, surprisingly little scientific work had actually addressed any of this. So Alex decided to study these questions. Starting with memory, She recruited a group of subjects to

take part in a real world, photo worthy experience. We had them go through the Etruscan exhibit inside the Pen Museum in Philadelphia. So they are going through, they're looking at the artifacts or listening to their audio guide, just like they would if they were visiting a museum on their own. What she varied was whether or not her

subjects were able to take photos. Half of the subjects could have their phones with them and we're told to take photos as they normally would, but the others were told to leave their phones at the main desk at the end of the exhibit. She gave subjects in both groups a surprise memory test. Which artifacts had they seen? Could they remember all the subtle details. The big question was which group did better, the folks taking the photos or the ones who didn't. The answer is it depends.

The phototaking condition actually does better on the visual memory test. They remember more of the visual aspects of the experience in the museum, the artifacts that they saw inside the cases, but that is not without a cost. And when they are attending more to those visual aspects of the museum. They weren't able to focus as much on what the

audio guide was telling them. You see that phototaking has a positive effect on one aspect and a negative effect on the other, and that, of course, whether that's good or bad depends on your goals as a consumer. Alex has now looked at this memory question in a bunch of ways, from trips to museums, to bus tours to virtual safari's taken on an experimental computer screen. She finds

the same thing time and again. If your goal is to really see all the visual aspects of a scene, then taking photos is a really good way to boost your memory. But if you want to remember something that's not visual, what you heard on the audio tour, or that joke your friend said, what the amazing neal tasted like, then taking photos is a hindrance. You don't have the cognitive bandwidth to pay attention to all that other stuff, which means you don't remember. It makes sense, well about

our enjoyment of the experience. Does taking photos make us happier? This time the results were less nuanced. People in the photo condition they showed significantly more enjoyment. You imagine going on a bus tour. If you're just sort of taking in the sights, that's definitely enjoyable. But if you're capturing photos, you're noticing new things, You're more immersed, and it can

make you enjoy and experience more. Taking photos makes us pay attention, and that simple act noticing the details, attending to what the experience feels like. That can draw us into an experience which feels good, but only for the visual details, which means we have to be careful not to miss all the non visual good stuff. What our partners said at dinner, what the hot fudge Sunday tasted like,

what the concert guitar solo sounded like. Our enjoyment of the non visual stuff doesn't necessarily increase when taking photos. But Alex discovered a second, even bigger caveat when doing this research, because phototaking doesn't always draw us into the visual aspects of an experience. It depends on what those photos are for. People take photos for many different reasons, and one of those is to take photos for yourself so that you can remember and kind of revisit those

experiences and photos in the future. And the other, of course, as we all know, is to take photos so that we can share them with others to post on our social media accounts. Ah. Yes, that old fox talbot urge the reason thousands of photos are shared every second on Instagram. What effect does that sharing urge have on our enjoyment? To test this scientifically, Alex varied why people took photos

for keepsake or to put on social media. We actually showed that the benefits that you get from capturing photos are actually diminished or undermined when you take photos to share.

That takes us out of the moment and actually ultimately decreases how much we get out of the experience in terms of our enjoyment if we get obsessed with it, if we were thinking about how to get the perfect shot to show somebody else an impression, manage, and to curate or identity online, that's where the costs come into play. And that must be really tricky because it seems like a lot of our photographing right now is to share.

I mean to the point that people don't just take a photo, they photoshop it and you know, cut it and edit it after the fact. Like the sharing process is not new, but what is definitely new is that that's active in our minds while we go through the experience. Every time we take a photo with the intent to share it, we lose the positive effects of capturing the moment. Every time we get in a oh this will be fun to post a mindset, we stop paying attention to

the right stuff. We're thinking about how to get the perfect photo, not what the moment feels like, and that fox talbot urge in the moment. It's an attentional buzzkill, and our enjoyment takes a hit. I find these scientific findings so ironic because the sharing part is good, it intensifies the experience, and the taking photos part is good. It makes us pay more attention. But as soon as we put sharing and the photos together, all those positive

effects go away. Seriously, the way our mind works can be so annoying. Sometimes Alex who's a business school professor, realizes it's getting harder and harder to avoid thinking about sharing. Companies are pushing us to share all the time now

they post hashtags on their menus. Of course, that has a lot of advantages in terms of free advertising and word of mouth, but I show in this work that there's a cost that it's actually going to also undermine consumers enjoyment if they're really thinking a lot during the experience about capturing that best photo so that they can post it and share it later on. Alex's comment made me think back to my conversation with Mary Ellis bun

that double edged sword. She mentioned the complicated relationship she has with how Instagram the Museum of ice Cream has become. Mary Ellis knows all those celebrity tweets are great for business, but they can also ruin her patron's enjoyment of the space, and that's why she's now trying something radical. She's explicitly redesigning the Museum of ice Cream in an effort to

end all the Instagram posts. She's now trying all kinds of new techniques to get people to put their phones down, like exhibits with hands free eating, so if you have no hands to eat, you also have no hands to photograph. And she's rearranged the flow of experiences inside the museum. Previously we ended with the sprinkle pool because as oftentimes the most desired capture moment, and then by reversing it, what happened is that all the anticipation and angst to

go and capture that photo. Now that it happened at the beginning, becomes removed. They weren't so involved at having take the photo they had already taken it that they could really enjoy the experience. Finally, she's beta testing a new idea she's especially excited about. The first thing that came out of everyone's mouth was it was the best experience we've had to date. What was that best ever experience? Mary Ellis took a page out of Alex Barrish's studies.

She didn't let her patrons have their phones at all. People are able to come for free, and I think he asks them to turn in our cell phones at the beginning. And the reason why it was most successful in our minds is there so many details that we think about that you're gonna miss. It's like, you know, to really think about all the taste and the notes and whatnot. But if you're so consumed in capturing that

those things all go away. And they didn't have that clutch of a phone to guide them through the experience. So what's the takeaway from this episode? Our urge to share is an instinct one that brings us a lot of joy, but it can lead us astray in the modern world. Science shows that sharing experience is good for our happiness. All the wonderful things in life, yummy food, a nice view, the warm sunshine, they're even more awesome in the company of another human being, and it's a

two way street. Your presence will also make other people's moments richer. Documenting those awesome moments is also good for our happiness. You'll look at that scenic vista or that cool museum object a bit deeper if you have a camera in your hand. Like sharing in the moment, photo taking also makes our lives richer. But when we put the two urges together, when we start thinking about sharing that sunset while we're looking at it, when we focus on who we'll see our dessert pick when we posted,

our minds get pulled away. We get obsessed with the tiny image in the camera, not the moment. So to become happier, we need to fight that Instagram urge. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't get out there and share. We should be sharing the wealth of life, but in the moment with a live person, If at all possible, get out there. Any lunch with a friend not at your desk, make the effort to go to the cinema

rather than watching Netflix alone. You could even start up a podcast brunch club, and if you do, maybe you could share the Happiness Lab with me. Doctor Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written and produced by Ryan Dilley. The show is mixed and mastered by Evan Viola and edited by Julia Barton, fact checking by Joseph Friedman, and our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Mao La Belle, Carl mcgliori, Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor,

Maya Kanig, and Jacob Weisberg. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Doctor Laurie Santos.