Vsauce! Kevin here -- and happiness is depressing. There is no more seminal
human concept than the pursuit of happiness -- a nation was built around the right to do
it and even the international brigade of wine moms insists on living, laughing, and loving.
But people are miserable. And it’s getting measurably worse.
The data on pursuing happiness is in -- and it’s NOT GOOD. And it’s not just an economic
thing -- Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman found that even if we all had exactly the
same level of income, our differences in life satisfaction would be reduced by less than 5%.
And trying to increase social status correlates with depression, anxiety, and mental illness.
Life expectancy is higher, technology is advancing rapidly,
on paper we should be happier than ever -- and we’ve never been so sad.
We’re doing it all wrong. And no one cares.
Here’s who invented happiness as we think of it. YEAH. “Hap” is Old Norse for luck
or chance -- and English tacks on a y to mean “full of.” So happy is literally “full of luck.”
This is really important to understand.
In Happiness: A History, Darrin McMahon writes that:
“... in every Indo-European language, without exception, going all the way back to ancient
Greek, the word for happiness is a cognate with the word for luck.”
Happiness today has almost nothing to do with that -- and
our corrupted version of it is a constant desire.
Okay. So what things are supposed to make you happy? Knowledge, love,
money, food, status/respect, beauty, talent…
I asked you what matters – over
50,000 of you responded, with love, money, and knowledge winning by A LOT.
So here’s how happiness is going:
In “Games Primates Play,” Dario Maestripieri writes that "there is no correlation between
knowledge and happiness. People who are clueless about themselves and the world
can nevertheless be very happy." A 2022 study showed up to 85 million Americans
“suffer from politically induced fatigue, insomnia, loss of temper,
and impulse-control problems -- and 12 million people reported thoughts of self-harm.
A machine learning meta analysis of 43 studies involving over
11,000 couples revealed that nothing -- not age, wealth, education, values,
or anything else -- could predict how happy two people in a relationship would be.
Robert Jervis writes that when people fall short of expectations of themselves,
they’re less happy. And when they exceed them,
they’re more happy -- suggesting that relative changes to wealth matter more than wealth itself.
Half as many teens today meet up with their friends every day compared to when
I was a kid. The CDC reports since 2009 the percentage of teens who
say they’re persistently sad or hopeless has risen from 26 percent to 44 percent.
And a meta analysis of 258 studies showed that searching for extrinsic validation
through status, attractiveness, and talent recognition actually drives “depression,
anxiety, and general psychopathology.”
WHATEVER IT IS WE’RE DOING IS NOT WORKING.
We have a global self-help and “personal development” industry that costs us $40
billion a year and which is projected to grow at 5.5% compounded annually,
so people do care about the problem. But about 117 billion people have lived on planet Earth, for a
few trillion combined years of human experience -- so why aren’t we already amazing at happiness?
Well, we were better at it -- here’s some more research.
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Matthew Lieberman’s “Social” revealed that having one friend you see “on most days”
increases happiness as much as earning an extra $100,000 per year -- and even seeing
a neighbor is worth $60k. Being married? Another $100k. Good physical health? $400k.
His research suggests that despite Elon Musk being literally tens
of thousands of times richer than you, he’s not 40,000 times happier.
And we are terrible at judging other people’s happiness. Kahneman showed
that we think the wealthier are 3 times happier than they really are.
And we’re frequently wrong about others because of the focusing illusion -- we
tend to think about their problems more than they think about their problems.
Look, I know you’ve got a few objections here, and you should: some people have really bad
lives. Maybe you do, and it’s really hard to be happy. And there’s a causation/correlation
issue at play. Like, a decent income puts you in a position to live in a nice neighborhood,
be in better health, and have more time to hang out with friends. And seriously,
the concept of happiness is linguistically tied to luck in virtually every civilization ever for
a reason. Some people are just born with fewer problems than others -- for better and worse,
we all start as passive victims or beneficiaries of probability.
VIktor Frankl got dealt some really good cards -- and took some really bad beats.
Few people in the history of the world should have been as unhappy as Frankl. He
was brilliant -- as a teen, Sigmund Freud asked permission to publish one of Frankl’s papers,
and he was publishing in professional journals before he was 20. But in 1942, he and his family
were sent to a series of Nazi concentration camps -- Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Dachau.
His dad died of starvation, his mother and brother were victims of the gas chamber,
and his wife died of typhus in Bergen-Belsen. Prisoner number 119104 made it out alive -- and
the whole time he thought about happiness, what it is and how to do it:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing… the last of the human
freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
Despite losing everyone he loved, some in malevolent, horrific fashion,
and facing his own mortality by the minute, Viktor Frankl found meaning.
We know how to be happy -- and no one cares about that.
Well, they care about happy, but chasing happy doesn’t lead to happy.
In “The Paradox of Pursuing Happiness,” the authors concluded that the intense
valuing of happiness predicts short and long-term negative consequences
and greater levels of loneliness. The people obsessed with finding happiness
were less likely to achieve long-term happiness and psychological well-being.
We don’t even use the word anymore that gives us the best shot of feeling happiness in our lives:
eudaimonia. It’s a state of human flourishing,
it’s living well given your own unique set of circumstances.
But we’re so confused about understanding eudaimonia that
it’s often mistranslated simply as happiness -- but that’s wrong, it’s not happiness,
and it’s not even the pursuit of happiness. Happiness is the byproduct of living well,
the side effect of human flourishing, and every step we take towards the goal of happiness takes
us further from Eudaimonia -- a word we lost, for whatever reason, somewhere along the way.
Less than a year after the war, Viktor Frankl published Man’s Search for Meaning anonymously.
He wrote, "It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness."
Viktor Frankl seemed to figure out how to live well. Can you?
And as always – thanks for watching.