Plain English BEST OF: How to Be Happy and the Science of Cognitive Time Travel

In the following excerpt, Derek talks to Laurie Santos about the difference between happiness with your life and happiness for your life.

Derek Thompson: You have an incredibly rich professional portfolio. You are a scientist. You host the popular Happiness Lab podcast. Your lectures on the psychology of happiness are immensely popular, whether it’s a course at Yale University or an online class at Coursera. I wonder, of all the jobs that you do and of all the tasks within those jobs, what makes you happiest? If I hooked you up to some happiness Geiger counter as you went about the typical month in the life of “Laurie Santos: happiness expert,” what part of your job would I discover brings you the most pleasure?

Laurie Santos: I think this is sort of an impossible question because there’s so many parts of my job that I love. I mean, I love chatting with students and talking with them about their goals. I really love the part of my podcast job where I get to do interviews with people. It’s so cool to learn about people’s work and hear about their theories and stuff. A funny one that you might not expect is I really love the part of the podcasting that involves listening to someone’s interview and figuring out exactly the choice quote where they said it in this perfect way, and then kind of scripting it together. I can do that for hours and hours, and it gives me tremendous flow, where time is passing really quickly, and I forget to go to the bathroom, and stuff like that. And so I’m lucky that I have a job where I have lots of the parts of it that are pretty good, but they wind up being parts that don’t fit together in the way you might expect.

Thompson: This is a bit of an aside from what I want to talk to you about the most, but as someone who does a lot of writing for The Atlantic and has occasionally done edited podcasts with The Atlantic—this show is more of a talking podcast, but I always thought of a distinction; I wonder if this connects for you, between writing and editing podcasts, as a distinction between painting and sculpting?

Santos: Mm-hmm.

Thompson: With painting, you start with a blank canvas and it’s all about what you add to the canvas. Just as in writing, you start with a blank page, and it’s all about the words that you add, and you can truly write anything. But with editing interview podcasts, you’re not starting with anything blank. You’re actually starting with the opposite—a huge, unwieldy chunk of marble. And there’s a David hiding inside of it that you have to extricate with your sculpting prowess. And I love the kind of opposite challenges of writing and editing in that way. I don’t know if that connects to you.

Santos: Yeah, no, totally. I see this analogy perfectly. And it’s so much fun to know that there’s the David in there, and to try to bring it out, and to really listen carefully to people’s quotes and stuff. When I got into podcasting, this absolutely was not part of podcasting that I thought would be so much fun. But honestly, it’s like if I could just pick one thing to do on some random rainy Thursday afternoon, it would be sculpting these beautiful audio files that we have into the perfect David. It’s so much fun.

Thompson: I’ve always been frustrated by the language that we have in this category. There’s something ephemeral and unsatisfying about the concept of happiness that I think might connect with its etymology. The idea that the word happiness, like the word happens or happening, has this old English root hap, meaning chance or luck, which is inherently fleeting. Some people prefer to talk about flourishing, others talk about well-being or contentment. I think one of my favorite treatments of the language here is your distinction between happiness in your life versus happiness for your life. What is this distinction and what work is this distinction doing for us?

Santos: Yeah. To be fair, this is a lovely distinction that I’ve stolen from the psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky. She defines happiness as having these two parts. Happiness in your life is what it feels like to be you right now. So this is the fact that you’re hopefully experiencing lots of positive emotions: joy and laughter and so on. And you get a decent ratio of those with negative emotions. Note that that doesn’t mean you want no negative emotions. I think a good life involves a little bit of both. But hopefully you’ve got a ratio such that the positive emotions are weighing out against the negative ones. That’s being happy in your life.

But there’s also the second part of being happy with your life or for your life. This is the sense that we have kind of a satisfaction with our life. It’s how we think our life is going. That’s another way to frame the distinction, how you feel in your life versus how you think your life is going. And of course that matters, too. We want to be satisfied with our lives. We want to think that things are going well. We want to feel like we have some meaning. And I like this distinction as pulling them both together because it encompasses, I think, what the lay notion of happiness is, that there is something fleeting. It’s about being happy in your life, about how it’s going right now.

But a true definition of happiness or a true definition of living a good life would involve the second part, too, where you really think your life is going well. And that gets closer to what I think a lot of the ancients, for example, thought about when they thought about happiness concepts like Aristotle’s eudaimonia and so on are more about this feeling like your life is going well.

Thompson: How am I distorting the concept of happiness in your life versus happiness for your life to say that essentially what we’re talking about here is pleasure and purpose? And it’s lovely to have pleasure, to be drinking a wonderful glass of wine, and it’s lovely to have purpose, to be doing work that you think has meaning in the world. But the real sweet spot of happiness is a kind of three-dimensional stacking of pleasure and purpose to end a day where you feel like you’ve done work that has extraordinary meaning in the world, and to have a dinner party with friends who make you laugh. And just as you finish laughing, you’re having a sip of your favorite Cabernet Sauvignon, and you’re feeling in that moment a kind of stacking of in-the-moment pleasure and broader eudaimonic … eudimoniac … I don’t know why I even attempted to say a Greek adjective there. But a broader sense of purpose in your life. How am I flattening this concept, if at all, by saying what you’re talking about is pleasure and purpose?

Santos: Yeah. I mean, I think that captures a lot of what we’re talking about there. I think that the issue is that when we think about being happy in our life, pleasure conveys maybe too narrow a view of what we want to be doing in our lives. I mean, we want emotions that are maybe nostalgic, or bittersweet, or kind of, for example, pleasure that comes not from the moment, but the idea that, like, “I’m pushing myself,” like a really hard run or a really hard yoga session might be that kind of being happy in your life ultimately, even though it’s not like pure pleasure in the moment. But I think overall, if you expand the notion of pleasure to include more complicated forms of pleasure, then I think, yeah, you’re kind of capturing it with this sort of joint idea of pleasure and purpose.

This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Laurie Santos
Producer: Devon Baroldi