The Happiness Hypothesis – Book Notes

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Great book. Enjoyed the variety of research and ideas, all weaved into a comprehensive view of human nature. Full of secular wisdom.

View all my reviews

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TLDR – Main Takeaways

1. The Elephant Rider metaphor:
   • The rider is our System 2 rational system and the elephant is our System 1 emotional system.
   • Change is hard. The rider needs:
     • a clear vision of where to go,
     • to know how to motivate the elephant by working with emotions,
     • to reduce the friction along the way.
   • This connects with James Clear’s Laws of Behaviour Change.
   • The goal is to unite and align the rider and the elephant to draw on each other’s strength.
   • “They all knew that virtue resides in a well-trained elephant. They all knew that training takes daily practice and a great deal of repetition.”
2. An integrated individual is aligned at the 3 levels of their personality:
   • Basic traits (big five and two meta-traits of stability and plasticity)
   • Characteristic Adaptions (personal goals, defense and coping mechanisms, values, beliefs)
   • Life Story (having a coherent and useful narrative of the past, present, and future)
3. There are three main ways to change our affective style and repertoire of available thoughts:
   • Meditation
   • Cognitive Therapy
   • Prozac and other SSRIs
   • All three are effective because they work on the elephant. See Lisa Feldman Barrett for more on changing affect via bottom-up and top-down approaches.
4. “The human mind is extraordinarily sensitive to changes in conditions, but not so sensitive to absolute levels.”
   • The adaptation principle states that we are very good at adapting to stable pleasant or unpleasant stimuli.
   • Variety is the spice of life.
   • Beware of consumption as it is a zero-sum game. We only care about the relative change compared to others.
   • ” In the long run, it doesn’t much matter what happens to you. Good fortune or bad, you will always return to your happiness setpoint—your brain’s default level of happiness—which was determined largely by your genes.”
   • “The second biggest finding in happiness research, after the strong influence of genes upon a person’s average level of happiness, is that most environmental and demographic factors influence happiness very little.”
   • This confirms my findings using thousands of daily mood entries and habit tracking.
   • This is the story of Buddha’s farmer.
5. H(appiness) = S(etpoint) + C(onditions) + V(oluntary activities)
   • “When life is unpredictable and dangerous (as it was for the Stoic philosophers, living under capricious Roman emperors), it might be foolish to seek happiness by controlling one’s external world. But now it is not. People living in wealthy democracies can set long-term goals and expect to meet them. We are immunized against disease, sheltered from storms, and insured against fire, theft, and collision. … Although all of us will get unwanted surprises along the way, we’ll adapt and cope with nearly all of them, and many of us will believe we are better off for having suffered.”
   • “…there are two fundamentally different kinds of externals: the conditions of your life and the voluntary activities that you undertake.33 Conditions include facts about your life that you can’t change (race, sex, age, disability) as well as things that you can (wealth, marital status, where you live). Conditions are constant over time, at least during a period in your life, and so they are the sorts of things that you are likely to adapt to. Voluntary activities, on the other hand, are the things that you choose to do, such as meditation, exercise, learning a new skill, or taking a vacation.”
   • “The final version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness comes from between. Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality.”
   • “It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.”
   • Conditions worth pursuing. They are like the soil for a plant to grow.
     • Find work that lines up with your character strengths and your values. Job craft and design your career to minimize the mismatch.
     • Avoid abject poverty, shame, lack of control, or regular interactions with sociopaths.
     • Invest in your relationships. See Harvard’s longest study of happiness.
   • Voluntary activities:
     • “As a first step, work less, earn less, accumulate less, and “consume” more family time, vacations, and other enjoyable activities.”
       • Take more time off and spend it with family and friends, even if it means earning less.
       • Reduce your commuting time, even if it means living in a smaller house.
       • Buy basic, functional appliances, automobiles, and wristwatches, and invest the money saved for future consumption.
     • Give back to the community. This kills two birds with one stone with meaning and relationships. It also connects with Durkheim’s constraints finding.
6. The danger of freedom
   • “In the late nineteenth century, one of the founders of sociology, Emile Durkheim, performed a scholarly miracle. He gathered data from across Europe to study the factors that affect the suicide rate. His findings can be summarized in one word: constraints. No matter how he parsed the data, people who had fewer social constraints, bonds, and obligations were more likely to kill themselves.”
   • This aligns with Oliver Burkeman’s chapter in 4000 Weeks about digital nomads
7. Attachment Theory & Cybernetic Systems
   • “Attachment theory begins with the idea that two basic goals guide children’s behavior: safety and exploration. A child who stays safe survives; a child who explores and plays develops the skills and intelligence needed for adult life.”
   • “If you want your children to grow up to be healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, cuddle them, and love them. Give them a secure base and they will explore and then conquer the world on their own.”
   • Connects with Deyoung’s Cybernetic Big Five Theory.
8. Redefining Wisdom:
   • “But wisdom is based—according to Robert Sternberg,46 a leading wisdom researcher—on “tacit knowledge.” Tacit knowledge is procedural (it’s “knowing how” rather than “knowing that”), it is acquired without direct help from others, and it is related to goals that a person values. Tacit knowledge resides in the elephant.”
   • “The wise are able to see things from others’ points of view, appreciate shades of gray, and then choose or advise a course of action that works out best for everyone in the long run. Second, wise people are able to balance three responses to situations: adaptation (changing the self to fit the environment), shaping (changing the environment), and selection (choosing to move to a new environment).”

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

Serenity Prayer

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Tests

• Personality Test
• Implicit Biases (peer into the elephant)
• Character Strengths (need to create a free account)

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Book Notes

Introduction: Too Much Wisdom

• “This ancient idea deserves respect, and it is certainly true that changing your mind is usually a more effective response to frustration than is changing the world. However, I will present evidence that this second version of the happiness hypothesis is wrong. Recent research shows that there are some things worth striving for; there are external conditions of life that can make you lastingly happier.”
• “I’ll suggest that the happiness hypothesis offered by Buddha and the Stoics should be amended: Happiness comes from within, and happiness comes from without. We need the guidance of both ancient wisdom and modern science to get the balance right.”
  • And from between.

We sometimes fall into the view that we are fighting with our unconscious, our id, or our animal self. But really we are the whole thing. We are the rider, and we are the elephant. Both have their strengths and special skills.

Jonathan Haidt – The Happiness Hypothesis

1 – The Divided Self

If Passion drives, let Reason hold the Reins.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Analogies of the Mind

• “The metaphor I use when I lecture on Freud is to think of the mind as a horse and buggy (a Victorian chariot) in which the driver (the ego) struggles frantically to control a hungry, lustful, and disobedient horse (the id) while the driver’s father (the superego) sits in the back seat lecturing the driver on what he is doing wrong. For Freud, the goal of psychoanalysis was to escape this pitiful state by strengthening the ego, thus giving it more control over the id and more independence from the superego.”
• “We assume that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each more like a committee whose members have been thrown together to do a job, but who often find themselves working at cross purposes.”

The Elephant Rider – Video

• “The image that I came up with for myself, as I marveled at my weakness, was that I was a rider on the back of an elephant. I’m holding the reins in my hands, and by pulling one way or the other I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop, or to go. I can direct things, but only when the elephant doesn’t have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something, I’m no match for him.”
• “This finding, that people will readily fabricate reasons to explain their own behavior, is called “confabulation.” … The interpreter module is good at making up explanations, but not at knowing that it has done so.”
• “Gazzaniga’s “interpreter module” is, essentially, the rider.”
• “The automatic system has its finger on the dopamine release button. The controlled system, in contrast, is better seen as an advisor. It’s a rider placed on the elephant’s back to help the elephant make better choices. The rider can see farther into the future, and the rider can learn valuable information by talking to other riders or by reading maps, but the rider cannot order the elephant around against its will.”
• “An emotionally intelligent person has a skilled rider who knows how to distract and coax the elephant without having to engage in a direct contest of wills.”
• “The rider evolved to serve the elephant.”
• “Epiphanies can be life-altering,8 but most fade in days or weeks. The rider can’t just decide to change and then order the elephant to go along with the program. Lasting change can come only by retraining the elephant, and that’s hard to do.”
• “The most important words in the elephant’s language are “like” and “dislike,” or “approach” and “withdraw.””
• “The rider acts like a lawyer whom the elephant has hired to represent it in the court of public opinion.”
• You can test your own elephant at: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/.
• “The elephant was shaped by natural selection to win at the game of life…”
• “The elephant cares about prestige, not happiness,59 and it looks eternally to others to figure out what is prestigious.”
• “We can’t stop ourselves from creating what McAdams describes as an “evolving story that integrates a reconstructed past, perceived present, and anticipated future into a coherent and vitalizing life myth.”18 Although the lowest level of personality is mostly about the elephant, the life story is written primarily by the rider.”
• “The rider can be successful only to the extent that it trains the elephant.”
• “It is important to note that the self is not exactly the rider—much of the self is unconscious and automatic—but because the self emerges from conscious verbal thinking and storytelling, it can be constructed only by the rider.”

No Rationality Without Emotions

• “This growth of the frontal cortex seems like a promising explanation for the divisions we experience in our minds. Perhaps the frontal cortex is the seat of reason: It is Plato’s charioteer; it is St. Paul’s Spirit. And it has taken over control, though not perfectly, from the more primitive limbic system—Plato’s bad horse, St. Paul’s flesh. We can call this explanation the Promethean script of human evolution, after the character in Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans.”
  • “There is, however, a flaw in the Promethean script: It assumes that reason was installed in the frontal cortex but that emotion stayed behind in the limbic system. In fact, the frontal cortex enabled a great expansion of emotionality in humans.”
  • “When you feel yourself drawn to a meal, a landscape, or an attractive person, or repelled by a dead animal, a bad song, or a blind date, your orbitofrontal cortex is working hard to give you an emotional feeling of wanting to approach or to get away.18 The orbitofrontal cortex therefore appears to be a better candidate for the id, or for St. Paul’s flesh, than for the superego or the Spirit.”
• “So what happens when these people go out into the world? Now that they are free of the distractions of emotion, do they become hyperlogical, able to see through the haze of feelings that blinds the rest of us to the path of perfect rationality? Just the opposite. They find themselves unable to make simple decisions or to set goals, and their lives fall apart.”
• “Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality.”
• I believe the Scottish philosopher David Hume was closer to the truth than was Plato when he said, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
• “Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior, but emotion (a major part of the elephant) does most of the work. When the neocortex came along, it made the rider possible, but it made the elephant much smarter, too.”
• “There is a two-way street between emotions and conscious thoughts: Thoughts can cause emotions (as when you reflect on a foolish thing you said), but emotions can also cause thoughts, primarily by raising mental filters that bias subsequent information processing.”
• “Many people change their goals in the wake of adversity; they resolve to work less, to love and play more. If in those first few months you take action—you do something that changes your daily life—then the changes might stick. But if you do nothing more than make a resolution (“I must never forget my new outlook on life”), then you will soon slip back into old habits and pursue old goals. The rider can exert some influence at forks in the road; but the elephant handles daily life, responding automatically to the environment.”

Made Up Justifications

• “Two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other. When you refute a person’s argument, does she generally change her mind and agree with you? Of course not, because the argument you defeated was not the cause of her position; it was made up after the judgment was already made.”
• “In moral arguments, the rider goes beyond being just an advisor to the elephant; he becomes a lawyer, fighting in the court of public opinion to persuade others of the elephant’s point of view.”

2- Changing Your Mind

The Power of Interpretation

• “Events in the world affect us only through our interpretations of them, so if we can control our interpretations, we can control our world.”
• “The whole universe is change” Aurelius had said.”
• “No man can ever be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune.”
• “Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”

The Like-O-Meter

Life is indeed what we deem it, but the deeming happens quickly and unconsciously.

Jonathan Haidt – The Happiness Hypothesis

• “We humans have a like-o-meter too, and it’s always running. Its influence is subtle, but careful experiments show that you have a like-dislike reaction to everything you are experiencing, even if you’re not aware of the experience.”
• “You can test your own elephant at: www.projectimplicit.com.”
• “Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures.”
• “We can’t just will ourselves to see everything as good because our minds are wired to find and react to threats, violations, and setbacks.”
• “Though the amygdala does process some positive information, the brain has no equivalent “green alert” system to notify you instantly of a delicious meal or a likely mate. Such appraisals can take a second or two. Once again, bad is stronger and faster than good. The elephant reacts before the rider even sees the snake on the path. Although you can tell yourself that you are not afraid of snakes, if your elephant fears them and rears up, you’ll still be thrown.”

The Cortical Lottery

• “In fact, happiness is one of the most highly heritable aspects of personality. Twin studies generally show that from 50 percent to 80 percent of all the variance among people in their average levels of happiness can be explained by differences in their genes rather than in their life experiences.”
• “People showing more of a certain kind of brainwave coming through the left side of the forehead reported feeling more happiness in their daily lives and less fear, anxiety, and shame than people exhibiting higher activity on the right side. Later research showed that these cortical “lefties” are less subject to depression and recover more quickly from negative experiences.29 The difference between cortical righties and lefties can be seen even in infants: Ten-month-old babies showing more activity on the right side are more likely to cry when separated briefly from their mothers.30 And this difference in infancy appears to reflect an aspect of personality that is stable, for most people, all the way through adulthood.”
• “You can change your affective style too—but again, you can’t do it by sheer force of will. You have to do something that will change your repertoire of available thoughts. Here are three of the best methods for doing so: meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac. All three are effective because they work on the elephant.”
  • “Buddha got it exactly right: You need a method for taming the elephant, for changing your mind gradually. Meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac are three effective means of doing so.”

Meditation

Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory. Suppose, finally, that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now would you take it? The pill exists. It is meditation.

Jonathan Haidt – The Happiness Hypothesis

• “For Buddha, attachments are like a game of roulette in which someone else spins the wheel and the game is rigged: The more you play, the more you lose. The only way to win is to step away from the table. And the only way to step away, to make yourself not react to the ups and downs of life, is to meditate and tame the mind. Although you give up the pleasures of winning, you also give up the larger pains of losing. In chapter 5 I’ll question whether this is really a good tradeoff for most people.”

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)

• “For depressed patients, however, Beck found little evidence in the scientific literature or in his own clinical practice that this approach was working. The more space he gave them to run through their self-critical thoughts and memories of injustice, the worse they felt.”
• “Depressed people are convinced in their hearts of three related beliefs, known as Beck’s “cognitive triad” of depression. These are: “I’m no good,” “My world is bleak,” and “My future is hopeless.””
• “Cognitive therapy works because it teaches the rider how to train the elephant rather than how to defeat it directly in an argument.”
• “When cognitive therapy is done very well it is as effective as drugs such as Prozac for the treatment of depression,38 and its enormous advantage over Prozac is that when cognitive therapy stops, the benefits usually continue because the elephant has been retrained. Prozac, in contrast, works only for as long as you take it.”
  

The Dialectics of Change

• “Our culture endorses both—relentless self-improvement as well as authenticity—but we often escape the contradiction by framing self-improvement as authenticity.”
• “why exactly should she be true to a self she doesn’t want? Why not change herself for the better? When I took Paxil, it changed my affective style for the better. It made me into something I was not, but had long wanted to be: a person who worries less, and who sees the world as being full of possibilities, not threats.”
• “Far from being a betrayal of that person’s “true self,” contact lenses can be a reasonable shortcut to proper functioning.”

Mental Health Medication

• “I therefore question the widespread view that Prozac and other drugs in its class are overprescribed. It’s easy for those who did well in the cortical lottery to preach about the importance of hard work and the unnaturalness of chemical shortcuts. But for those who, through no fault of their own, ended up on the negative half of the affective style spectrum, Prozac is a way to compensate for the unfairness of the cortical lottery.”

3 – Reciprocity with a Vengeance

A theme of the rest of this book is that humans are partially hive creatures, like bees, yet in the modern world we spend nearly all our time outside of the hive. Reciprocity, like love, reconnects us with others.

Jonathan Haidt – The Happiness Hypothesis

Ultrasociality

• “Animals that fly seem to violate the laws of physics, but only until you learn a bit more about physics. Flight evolved independently at least three times in the animal kingdom: in insects, dinosaurs (including modern birds), and mammals (bats). … Animals that live in large peaceful societies seem to violate the laws of evolution (such as competition and survival of the fittest), but only until you learn a bit more about evolution. Ultrasociality4—living in large cooperative societies in which hundreds or thousands of individuals reap the benefits of an extensive division of labor—evolved independently at least four times in the animal kingdom: among hymenoptera (ants, bees, and wasps); termites; naked mole rats; and humans.”
• “Because nearly all animals that live in cooperative groups live in groups of close relatives, most altruism in the animal kingdom reflects the simple axiom that shared genes equals shared interests. … They are all siblings. Those species each evolved a reproduction system in which a single queen produces all the children, and nearly all the children are either sterile (ants) or else their reproductive abilities are suppressed (bees, mole rats); therefore, a hive, nest, or colony of these animals is one big family.”
• “We humans also try to extend the reach of kin altruism by using fictitious kinship names for nonrelatives, as when children are encouraged to call their parents’ friends Uncle Bob and Aunt Sarah.”

Tit for Tat

• “We want to play tit for tat, which means starting out nice without being a pushover, and we want to cultivate a reputation for being a good player.”
• “Vengeance and gratitude are moral sentiments that amplify and enforce tit for tat.”
• “A species equipped with vengeance and gratitude responses can support larger and more cooperative social groups because the payoff to cheaters is reduced by the costs they bear in making enemies.14 Conversely, the benefits of generosity are increased because one gains friends.”
• I highly recommend this game to learn more about tit for tat.

Gossip is good?

Gossip paired with reciprocity allow karma to work here on earth, not in the next life.

Jonathan Haidt – The Happiness Hypothesis

• “Robin Dunbar19 has demonstrated that within a given group of vertebrate species—primates, carnivores, ungulates, birds, reptiles, or fish—the logarithm of the brain size is almost perfectly proportional to the logarithm of the social group size. In other words, all over the animal kingdom, brains grow to manage larger and larger groups. Social animals are smart animals.”
• “Gossip elicits gossip, and it enables us to keep track of everyone’s reputation without having to witness their good and bad deeds personally. Gossip creates a non-zero-sum game because it costs us nothing to give each other information, yet we both benefit by receiving information.”
• “Gossip is overwhelmingly critical, and it is primarily about the moral and social violations of others. … People do occasionally tell stories about the good deeds of others, but such stories are only one tenth as common as stories about transgressions.”
• “A second study revealed that most people hold negative views of gossip and gossipers, even though almost everyone gossips.”
• “Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance.”

Pathological Reciprocity

• “So the next time a salesman gives you a free gift or consultation, or makes a concession of any sort, duck. Don’t let him press your reciprocity button. … Accept the gift or concession with a feeling of victory—you are exploiting an exploiter—not mindless obligation.”
• “Concession leads to concession. In financial bargaining, too, people who stake out an extreme first position and then move toward the middle end up doing better than those who state a more reasonable first position and then hold fast.27 And the extreme offer followed by concession doesn’t just get you a better price, it gets you a happier partner (or victim)…”
• “Including a five-dollar “gift check” along with a survey sent in the mail increases people’s willingness to complete the survey, even more than does promising to send them fifty dollars for completing the survey.”

4 – The Faults of Others

Tit for Tat

• “In these games, which are intended to be simple models of the game of life, no strategy ever beats tit for tat.”
• “The Machiavellian version of tit for tat, for example, is to do all you can to cultivate the reputation of a trustworthy yet vigilant partner, whatever the reality may be.”
• See Nicky Case on The Evolution of Trust. It’s an awesome way to learn about game theory. I’d also recommend Primer’s playlist on simulations of evolution.

Moral Saints

Human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse.

Robert Wright – The Moral Animal

• “In other words, people who think they are particularly moral are in fact more likely to “do the right thing” and flip the coin, but when the coin flip comes out against them, they find a way to ignore it and follow their own self-interest. Batson called this tendency to value the appearance of morality over the reality “moral hypocrisy.””
• “From the person who cuts you off on the highway all the way to the Nazis who ran the concentration camps, most people think they are good people and that their actions are motivated by good reasons.”
• “We are fairly accurate in our perceptions of others. It’s our self-perceptions that are distorted because we look at ourselves in a rose-colored mirror.”
• “In other words, subjects used base rate information properly to revise their predictions of others, but they refused to apply it to their rosy self-assessments. We judge others by their behavior, but we think we have special information about ourselves—we know what we are “really like” inside, so we can easily find ways to explain away our selfish acts and cling to the illusion that we are better than others.”
• “In a study of 1 million American high school students, 70 percent thought they were above average on leadership ability, but only 2 percent thought they were below average.”
  • “In fact, evidence shows that people who hold pervasive positive illusions about themselves, their abilities, and their future prospects are mentally healthier, happier, and better liked than people who lack such illusions.20 But such biases can make people feel that they deserve more than they do, thereby setting the stage for endless disputes with other people who feel equally over-entitled.”

Victimhood & Evil

• “When taking the perpetrator’s perspective, he found that people who do things we see as evil, from spousal abuse all the way to genocide, rarely think they are doing anything wrong. They almost always see themselves as responding to attacks and provocations in ways that are justified. They often think that they themselves are victims.”
• “Almost everywhere Baumeister looked in the research literature, he found that victims often shared some of the blame. Most murders result from an escalating cycle of provocation and retaliation; often, the corpse could just as easily have been the murderer. In half of all domestic disputes, both sides used violence.”
  • “This does not mean that both sides are equally to blame: Perpetrators often grossly overreact and misinterpret (using self-serving biases). But Baumeister’s point is that we have a deep need to understand violence and cruelty through what he calls “the myth of pure evil.” Of this myth’s many parts, the most important are that evildoers are pure in their evil motives (they have no motives for their actions beyond sadism and greed); victims are pure in their victimhood (they did nothing to bring about their victimization); and evil comes from outside and is associated with a group or force that attacks our group.”
• “But greed/ambition explains only a small portion of violence, and sadism explains almost none. Outside of children’s cartoons and horror films, people almost never hurt others for the sheer joy of hurting someone. The two biggest causes of evil are two that we think are good, and that we try to encourage in our children: high self-esteem and moral idealism.”
  • “Baumeister questions the usefulness of programs that try raise children’s self-esteem directly instead of by teaching them skills they can be proud of. Such direct enhancement can potentially foster unstable narcissism.”

Conflict Resolution & Apologies

• “When you find a fault in yourself it will hurt, briefly, but if you keep going and acknowledge the fault, you are likely to be rewarded with a flash of pleasure that is mixed, oddly, with a hint of pride. It is the pleasure of taking responsibility for your own behavior. It is the feeling of honor.”
• “If you can move to believing that you are mostly right, and your opponent is mostly wrong, you have the basis for an effective and nonhumiliating apology. You can take a small piece of the disagreement and say, “I should not have done X, and I can see why you felt Y.” Then, by the power of reciprocity, the other person will likely feel a strong urge to say, “Yes, I was really upset by X. But I guess I shouldn’t have done P, so I can see why you felt Q.””

5 – The Pursuit of Happiness

The Progress Principle

• “We can call this “the progress principle”: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them.”
• “The final moment of success is often no more thrilling than the relief of taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike. If you went on the hike only to feel that pleasure, you are a fool.”

The Value of Environmental Conditions

• “…there are two fundamentally different kinds of externals: the conditions of your life and the voluntary activities that you undertake.33 Conditions include facts about your life that you can’t change (race, sex, age, disability) as well as things that you can (wealth, marital status, where you live). Conditions are constant over time, at least during a period in your life, and so they are the sorts of things that you are likely to adapt to. Voluntary activities, on the other hand, are the things that you choose to do, such as meditation, exercise, learning a new skill, or taking a vacation.”
• “Buddha, Epictetus, and many other sages saw the futility of the rat race and urged people to quit. They proposed a particular happiness hypothesis: Happiness comes from within, and it cannot be found by making the world conform to your desires.”
• “But recent research in psychology suggests that Buddha and Epictetus may have taken things too far. Some things are worth striving for, and happiness comes in part from outside of yourself, if you know where to look.”
• “People win at the game of life by achieving high status and a good reputation, cultivating friendships, finding the best mate(s), accumulating resources, and rearing their children to be successful at the same game.”
• “Of course, it’s better to win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you’d think. … Within a year, lottery winners and paraplegics have both (on average) returned most of the way to their baseline levels of happiness.”
  • “Lottery winners are so often harassed that many have to move, hide, end relationships, and finally turn to each other, forming lottery winner support groups to deal with their new difficulties.7 (It should be noted, however, that nearly all lottery winners are still glad that they won.)”
• “A good marriage is one of the life-factors most strongly and consistently associated with happiness.14 Part of this apparent benefit comes from “reverse correlation”: Happiness causes marriage. Happy people marry sooner and stay married longer than people with a lower happiness setpoint, both because they are more appealing as dating partners and because they are easier to live with as spouses.15 But much of the apparent benefit is a real and lasting benefit of dependable companionship, which is a basic need; we never fully adapt either to it or to its absence.”
• “…religious people are happier, on average, than nonreligious people.17 This effect arises from the social ties that come with participation in a religious community, as well as from feeling connected to something beyond the self.”
• “Overall, attractive people are not happier than unattractive ones. Yet, surprisingly, some improvements in a person’s appearance do lead to lasting increases in happiness.42.”
• “The condition that is usually said43 to trump all others in importance is the strength and number of a person’s relationships. Good relationships make people happy, and happy people enjoy more and better relationships than unhappy people.”
• “At meal times, people report the highest levels of happiness, on average. People really enjoy eating, especially in the company of others…”
• “Wherever he goes, from Greenland to Kenya to California, he finds that most people (with the exception of homeless people) are more satisfied than dissatisfied with their lives.67 He even interviewed sex workers in the slums of Calcutta, forced by poverty to sell their bodies and sacrifice their futures to disease. Although these women were substantially less satisfied with their lives than was a comparison group of college students in Calcutta, they still (on average) rated their satisfaction with each of twelve specific aspects of their lives as more satisfied than dissatisfied, or else as neutral (neither satisfied nor dissatisfied).”
• “Yes, attachments bring pain, but they also bring our greatest joys, and there is value in the very variation that the philosophers are trying to avoid.”
  • Helps us circumvent the adaptation principle.

The Adaptation Principle

Adapt	Don’t Adapt
Health	Marriage
Status	Variable Noise
Weather	Commute
Looks	Lack of Control
Wealth	Shame
Bigger House	Relationships

• “What Bob has going for him is a string of objective advantages in power, status, freedom, health, and sunshine—all of which are subject to the adaptation principle.”
• What are the things we don’t adapt to? Pets. Kids. Partner. Services. Social relationship.
• “People are often surprised to hear that the old are happier than the young because the old have so many more health problems, yet people adapt to most chronic health problems such as Mary’s21 (although ailments that grow progressively worse do reduce well-being, and a recent study finds that adaptation to disability is not, on average, complete).”
• “People who live in cold climates expect people who live in California to be happier, but they are wrong.”
• “People believe that attractive people are happier than unattractive people,24 but they, too, are wrong.25…”
• “…within any given country, at the lowest end of the income scale money does buy happiness: People who worry every day about paying for food and shelter report significantly less well-being than those who don’t. But once you are freed from basic needs and have entered the middle class, the relationship between wealth and happiness becomes smaller. The rich are happier on average than the middle class, but only by a little, and part of this relationship is reverse correlation: Happy people grow rich faster because, as in the marriage market, they are more appealing to others (such as bosses), and also because their frequent positive emotions help them to commit to projects, to work hard, and to invest in their futures.27 Wealth itself has only a small direct effect on happiness because it so effectively speeds up the hedonic treadmill.”
• “Research shows that people who must adapt to new and chronic sources of noise (such as when a new highway is built) never fully adapt, and even studies that find some adaptation still find evidence of impairment on cognitive tasks. Noise, especially noise that is variable or intermittent, interferes with concentration…”
• “But although people quickly adapt to having more space,36 they don’t fully adapt to the longer commute”
• Lack of control and shame are conditions we don’t adapt to.
• “You never adapt to interpersonal conflict;45 it damages every day, even days when you don’t see the other person but ruminate about the conflict nonetheless.”

Variety is the spice of life because it is the natural enemy of adaptation.

Jonathan Haidt – The Happiness Hypothesis

Happiness Set Point

• “The two big findings of happiness research (strong relation to genes, weak relation to environment)”
• “The human mind is extraordinarily sensitive to changes in conditions, but not so sensitive to absolute levels.”
• “When we combine the adaptation principle with the discovery that people’s average level of happiness is highly heritable,11 we come to a startling possibility: In the long run, it doesn’t much matter what happens to you. Good fortune or bad, you will always return to your happiness setpoint—your brain’s default level of happiness—which was determined largely by your genes.”
• “The second biggest finding in happiness research, after the strong influence of genes upon a person’s average level of happiness, is that most environmental and demographic factors influence happiness very little.”
• “Maybe there really is a set point fixed into every brain, like a thermostat set forever to 58 degrees Fahrenheit (for depressives) or 75 degrees (for happy people)? Maybe the only way to find happiness therefore is to change one’s own internal setting (for example, through meditation, Prozac, or cognitive therapy) instead of changing one’s environment?”
• “Yes, genes explain far more about us than anyone had realized, but the genes themselves often turn out to be sensitive to environmental conditions.32 And yes, each person has a characteristic level of happiness, but it now looks as though it’s not so much a set point as a potential range or probability distribution. Whether you operate on the high or the low side of your potential range is determined by many factors that Buddha and Epictetus would have considered externals.”

The Happiness Formula

H = S + C + V

Jonathan Haidt – The Happiness Hypothesis

• “One of the most important ideas in positive psychology is what Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, Schkade, and Seligman call the “happiness formula:” H=S+C+V The level of happiness that you actually experience (H) is determined by your biological set point (S) plus the conditions of your life (C) plus the voluntary activities (V) you do.”
• “The extreme biological version of the happiness hypothesis says that H = S, and that C and V don’t matter. But we have to give Buddha and Epictetus credit for V because Buddha prescribed the “eightfold noble path” (including meditation and mindfulness), and Epictetus urged methods of thought to cultivate indifference (apatheia) to externals. So to test the wisdom of the sages properly we must examine this hypothesis: H = S + V, where V = voluntary or intentional activities that cultivate acceptance and weaken emotional attachments. If there are many conditions (C) that matter, and if there are a variety of voluntary activities beyond those aimed at nonattachment, then the happiness hypothesis of Buddha and Epictetus is wrong and people would be poorly advised simply to look within.”
• “When life is unpredictable and dangerous (as it was for the Stoic philosophers, living under capricious Roman emperors), it might be foolish to seek happiness by controlling one’s external world. But now it is not. People living in wealthy democracies can set long-term goals and expect to meet them. We are immunized against disease, sheltered from storms, and insured against fire, theft, and collision. … Although all of us will get unwanted surprises along the way, we’ll adapt and cope with nearly all of them, and many of us will believe we are better off for having suffered.”
• “Happiness comes from within, and happiness comes from without.”
• “Happiness comes not just from within, as Buddha and Epictetus supposed, or even from a combination of internal and external factors (as I suggested as a temporary fix at the end of chapter 5). The correct version of the happiness hypothesis, as I’ll illustrate below, is that happiness comes from between.”

Flow

• “Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “cheeks sent me high”), the Hungarian-born cofounder of positive psychology.”
• “The keys to flow: There’s a clear challenge that fully engages your attention; you have the skills to meet the challenge; and you get immediate feedback about how you are doing at each step (the progress principle).”
• “In the flow experience, elephant and rider are in perfect harmony. The elephant (automatic processes) is doing most of the work, running smoothly through the forest, while the rider (conscious thought) is completely absorbed in looking out for problems and opportunities, helping wherever he can.”
• “Drawing on Csikszentmihalyi’s work, Seligman proposes a fundamental distinction between pleasures and gratifications. Pleasures are “delights that have clear sensory and strong emotional components,”50 such as may be derived from food, sex, backrubs, and cool breezes. Gratifications are activities that engage you fully, draw on your strengths, and allow you to lose self-consciousness. Gratifications can lead to flow. Seligman proposes that V (voluntary activities) is largely a matter of arranging your day and your environment to increase both pleasures and gratifications. Pleasures must be spaced to maintain their potency.”
• “Gratifications often come from accomplishing something, learning something, or improving something.”
• “Seligman suggests that the key to finding your own gratifications is to know your own strengths.53 One of the big accomplishments of positive psychology has been the development of a catalog of strengths. You can find out your strengths by taking an online test at https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/.”
• “So V (voluntary activity) is real, and it’s not just about detachment. You can increase your happiness if you use your strengths, particularly in the service of strengthening connections—helping friends, expressing gratitude to benefactors.”

Too Much of a Good Thing

• “Pleasures should be both savored and varied.”
• “”But you can’t enjoy physical pleasure all day long. By their very nature, food and sex satiate. To continue eating or having sex beyond a certain level of satisfaction can lead to disgust.49…”
• “The French know how to do this: They eat many fatty foods, yet they end up thinner and healthier than Americans, and they derive a great deal more pleasure from their food by eating slowly and paying more attention to the food as they eat it.51 Because they savor, they ultimately eat less. … The French also vary their pleasure by serving many small courses; Americans are seduced by restaurants that serve large portions.”

People Would Be Happier If:

• “…people would be happier and healthier if they took more time off and “spent” it with their family and friends…”
• “People would be happier if they reduced their commuting time, even if it meant living in smaller houses…”
• “People would be happier and healthier if they took longer vacations, even if that meant earning less…”
• “People would be happier, and in the long run wealthier, if they bought basic, functional appliances, automobiles, and wristwatches, and invested the money they saved for future consumption…”

If Money Doesn’t Make You Happy Then You Probably Aren’t Spending It
Right

• https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/danielgilbert/files/if-money-doesnt-make-you-happy.nov-12-20101.pdf
• “Conspicuous consumption is a zero-sum game: Each person’s move up devalues the possessions of others. Furthermore, it’s difficult to persuade an entire group or subculture to ratchet down, even though everyone would be better off, on average, if they all went back to simple watches.”
  • Molock Liv Boere podcast Lose Lose competition.
• “…experiences give more happiness in part because they have greater social value: Most activities that cost more than a hundred dollars are things we do with other people, but expensive material possessions are often purchased in part to impress other people. Activities connect us to others; objects often separate us.
• “As a first step, work less, earn less, accumulate less, and “consume” more family time, vacations, and other enjoyable activities.”

Over Optimizing

• “…[optimizers] are less likely to make a choice; and if they do, they are less satisfied with it.60 The more choices there are, the more you expect to find a perfect fit; yet, at the same time, the larger the array, the less likely it becomes that you picked the best item.”
  • Applies to dating apps.
• “Other people—“satisficers”—are more laid back about choice. They evaluate an array of options until they find one that is good enough, and then they stop looking. Satisficers are not hurt by a surfeit of options. Maximizers end up making slightly better decisions than satisficers, on average (all that worry and information-gathering does help), but they are less happy with their decisions, and they are more inclined to depression and anxiety.”
  • Connects with Ramit Sethi’s 85% solution.

6 – Love and Attachments

No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility; you must live for your neighbour, if you would live for yourself.

SENECA

Attachment Theory

• “Attachment theory begins with the idea that two basic goals guide children’s behavior: safety and exploration. A child who stays safe survives; a child who explores and plays develops the skills and intelligence needed for adult life.”
• “If you want your children to grow up to be healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, cuddle them, and love them. Give them a secure base and they will explore and then conquer the world on their own.”
• “If the model says that mom is always there for you, you’ll be bolder in your play and explorations. Round after round, predictable and reciprocal interactions build trust and strengthen the relationship.”
• “Each of eight baby rhesus monkeys was raised alone in a cage with two surrogate mothers, one of each kind. For four of the monkeys, milk was delivered only from a tube coming through the chest of the wire mother. For the other four, the tube came through the chest of the cloth mother. If Freud and Watson were right that milk was the cause of attachment, the monkeys should attach to their milk givers. But that’s not what happened. All the monkeys spent nearly all their time clinging to, climbing on, and pushing themselves into the soft folds of the cloth mother.”
• “The mother was much more effective as a secure base than were other women.”
• “She observed mothers at home and found that those who were warm and highly responsive to their children were most likely to have children who showed secure attachment in the strange situation. … Mothers who were aloof and unresponsive were more likely to have avoidant children, who had learned not to expect much help and comfort from mom. Mothers whose responses were erratic and unpredictable were more likely to have resistant children, who had learned that their efforts to elicit comfort sometimes paid off, but sometimes not.”
• “On the other hand, twin studies have found that genes play only a small role in determining attachment style.19 So now we have a real puzzle, a trait that correlates weakly with mothering and weakly with genes. Where does it come from?”
• “…this simple test to see whether Ainsworth’s three styles were still at work when adults try to form relationships. They are. Some people change style as they grow up, but the great majority of adults choose the descriptor that matched the way they were as a child.21…”
• “But it’s only at the end of adolescence, around the ages fifteen to seventeen, that all four components of attachment can be satisfied by a peer, specifically a romantic partner.”

Love

• “Sex is for reproduction; lasting love is for mothers and children. So why are people so different? How did human females come to hide all signs of ovulation and get men to fall in love with them and their children?”
• “Studies of hunter-gatherer societies show that mothers of young children cannot collect enough calories to keep themselves and their children alive.33 They rely on the large quantity of food as well as the protection provided by males in their peak years of productivity.”
• “A man who felt some desire to stay with a woman, guard her fidelity, and contribute to the rearing of their children could produce smarter children than could his less paternal competitors.”
• Common misconception:
  • “True love is passionate love that never fades; if you are in true love, you should marry that person; if love ends, you should leave that person because it was not true love; and if you can find the right person, you will have true love forever.”
• “…passionate love is a “wildly emotional state in which tender and sexual feelings, elation and pain, anxiety and relief, altruism and jealousy coexist in a confusion of feelings.””
• “Berscheid and Walster define companionate love, in contrast, as “the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply intertwined.”38 Companionate love grows slowly over the years as lovers apply their attachment and caregiving systems to each other, and as they begin to rely upon, care for, and trust each other.”
• “If the metaphor for passionate love is fire, the metaphor for companionate love is vines growing, intertwining, and gradually binding two people together.”
  • Heather Heying and Brett Weinstein talk about love as the merging of another person into your self concept.
• “People are not allowed to sign contracts when they are drunk, and I sometimes wish we could prevent people from proposing marriage when they are high on passionate love…”
• “True love, the love that undergirds strong marriages, is simply strong companionate love, with some added passion, between two people who are firmly committed to each other.42…”
• “Some modern leaders, such as the Dalai Lama, accept romantic love and its attendant sexuality as an important part of life.”
• “Rather, Christian love has focused on two key words: caritas and agape. Caritas (the origin of our word “charity”) is a kind of intense benevolence and good will; agape is a Greek word that refers to a kind of selfless, spiritual love with no sexuality, no clinging to a particular other person.”
• “Caritas and agape are beautiful, but they are not related to or derived from the kinds of love that people need. Although I would like to live in a world in which everyone radiates benevolence toward everyone else, I would rather live in a world in which there was at least one person who loved me specifically, and whom I loved in return.”
• “First, there may be a kind of hypocritical self-interest in which the older generation says, “Do as we say, not as we did.” Buddha and St. Augustine, for example, drank their fill of passionate love as young men and came out only much later as opponents of sexual attachments.”

Constraints Are Good

• “In the late nineteenth century, one of the founders of sociology, Emile Durkheim, performed a scholarly miracle. He gathered data from across Europe to study the factors that affect the suicide rate. His findings can be summarized in one word: constraints. No matter how he parsed the data, people who had fewer social constraints, bonds, and obligations were more likely to kill themselves.”
• “People living alone were most likely to kill themselves; married people, less; married people with children, still less. Durkheim concluded that people need obligations and constraints to provide structure and meaning to their lives…”
  • Connect Stephen R. Covey‘s interdepence. Independence is only a stepping stone.
• “Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life (more than does quitting smoking), speeds recovery from surgery, and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders.”
• “…recent work on giving support shows that caring for others is often more beneficial than is receiving help.”
• “We need to interact and intertwine with others; we need the give and the take; we need to belong.”
• “An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities, and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfillment.”
• “Durkheim, the sociologist who found that freedom from social ties is correlated with suicide32 also gave us the word “anomie” (normlessness). Anomie is the condition of a society in which there are no clear rules, norms, or standards of value. … Anomie breeds feelings of rootlessness and anxiety and leads to an increase in amoral and antisocial behavior.”

7 – The Uses of Adversity

The Adversity Hypothesis

• “…the “adversity hypothesis,” which says that people need adversity, setbacks, and perhaps even trauma to reach the highest levels of strength, fulfillment, and personal development.”
• “People who suffer from PTSD are changed, sometimes permanently: They panic or crumble more easily when faced with later adversity. Even if we take Nietzsche figuratively (which he would have much preferred anyway), fifty years of research on stress shows that stressors are generally bad for people,3 contributing to depression, anxiety disorders, and heart disease.”
• “So adversity, especially if overcome fully, is probably most beneficial in the late teens and early twenties.”
  • “Even young men who had not been doing well before serving in World War II often turned their lives around afterward, but people who faced their first real life test after the age of thirty (for example, combat in that war, or financial ruin in the Great Depression) were less resilient and less likely to grow from their experiences. So adversity may be most beneficial for people in their late teens and into their twenties.”
  • Probably because we are more plastic then.
• “For adversity to be maximally beneficial, it should happen at the right time (young adulthood), to the right people (those with the social and psychological resources to rise to challenges and find benefits), and to the right degree (not so severe as to cause PTSD).”

The 3 Levels of Personality

• “Dan McAdams has suggested that personality really has three levels,17 and too much attention has been paid to the lowest level, the basic traits. A second level of personality, “characteristic adaptations,” includes personal goals, defense and coping mechanisms, values, beliefs, and life-stage concerns (such as those of parenthood or retirement) that people develop to succeed in their particular roles and niches. These adaptations are influenced by basic traits: … The third level of personality is that of the “life story.””
• “We can’t stop ourselves from creating what McAdams describes as an “evolving story that integrates a reconstructed past, perceived present, and anticipated future into a coherent and vitalizing life myth.”18 Although the lowest level of personality is mostly about the elephant, the life story is written primarily by the rider.”
• “In the thousands of life stories McAdams has gathered, several genres are associated with well-being. For example, in the “commitment story,” the protagonist has a supportive family background, is sensitized early in life to the sufferings of others, is guided by a clear and compelling personal ideology, and, at some point, transforms or redeems failures, mistakes, or crises into a positive outcome, a process that often involves setting new goals that commit the self to helping others. The life of the Buddha is a classic example.”
• “Whenever a system can be analyzed at multiple levels, a special kind of coherence occurs when the levels mesh and mutually interlock. We saw this cross-level coherence in the analysis of personality: If your lower-level traits match up with your coping mechanisms, which in turn are consistent with your life story, your personality is well integrated and you can get on with the business of living.”

Posttraumatic Growth Through Coping

• “In general, the ability to make sense of tragedy and then find benefit in it is the key that unlocks posttraumatic growth.27”
• “London and Chicago seized the opportunities provided by their great fires to remake themselves into grander and more coherent cities. People sometimes seize such opportunities, too, rebuilding beautifully those parts of their lives and life stories that they could never have torn down voluntarily.”
• “Psychologists have devoted a great deal of effort to figuring out who benefits from trauma and who is crushed. The answer compounds the already great unfairness of life: Optimists are more likely to benefit than pessimists.28 Optimists are, for the most part, people who won the cortical lottery: They have a high happiness setpoint, they habitually look on the bright side, and they easily find silver linings. Life has a way of making the rich get richer and the happy get happier.”
• “The key to growth is not optimism per se; it is the sense making that optimists find easy. If you can find a way to make sense of adversity and draw constructive lessons from it, you can benefit, too. And you can learn to become a sense maker by reading Jamie Pennebaker’s Opening Up.30…”
• “Pennebaker discovered that it’s not about steam; it’s about sense making. The people in his studies who used their writing time to vent got no benefit. The people who showed deep insight into the causes and consequences of the event on their first day of writing got no benefit, either: They had already made sense of things. It was the people who made progress across the four days, who showed increasing insight; they were the ones whose health improved over the next year.”
• “You have to use words, and the words have to help you create a meaningful story. If you can write such a story you can reap the benefits of reappraisal (one of the two healthy coping styles) even years after an event. You can close a chapter of your life that was still open, still affecting your thoughts and preventing you from moving on with the larger narrative.”
• “When a crisis strikes, people cope in three primary ways:29
  • active coping (taking direct action to fix the problem),
  • reappraisal (doing the work within—getting one’s own thoughts right and looking for silver linings), and
  • avoidance coping (working to blunt one’s emotional reactions by denying or avoiding the events, or by drinking, drugs, and other distractions).”
• “What mattered was what people did afterward: Those who talked with their friends or with a support group were largely spared the health-damaging effects of trauma.”
• “Having once reviewed the literature on the catharsis hypothesis, I knew that there was no evidence for it.31 Letting off steam makes people angrier, not calmer.”
• “Trusted friends who are good listeners can be a great aid to making sense and finding meaning.”
• “Third, religious faith and practice can aid growth, both by directly fostering sense making (religions provide stories and interpretive schemes for losses and crises) and by increasing social support (religious people have relationships through their religious communities, and many have a relationship with God). A portion of the benefits of religiosity33 could also be a result of the confession and disclosure of inner turmoil, either to God or to a religious authority that many religions encourage.”
• “Write about what happened, how you feel about it, and why you feel that way. If you hate to write, you can talk into a tape recorder.”
  • Connects with Peterson’s Self Authoring
• “Younger children know some stories about themselves, but the active and chronic striving to integrate one’s past, present, and future into a coherent narrative begins only in the mid to late teens.”
• “Posttraumatic growth usually involves, therefore, the growth of wisdom.”

Wisdom

• “But wisdom is based—according to Robert Sternberg,46 a leading wisdom researcher—on “tacit knowledge.” Tacit knowledge is procedural (it’s “knowing how” rather than “knowing that”), it is acquired without direct help from others, and it is related to goals that a person values. Tacit knowledge resides in the elephant.”
• “The wise are able to see things from others’ points of view, appreciate shades of gray, and then choose or advise a course of action that works out best for everyone in the long run. Second, wise people are able to balance three responses to situations: adaptation (changing the self to fit the environment), shaping (changing the environment), and selection (choosing to move to a new environment).”
• “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” – Serenity Prayer

8 – The Felicity of Virtue

The Virtue Hypothesis

• “This claim, which I will call the “virtue hypothesis,” is the same claim made by Epicurus and the Buddha in the epigraphs that open this chapter: Cultivating virtue will make you happy.”
• “They all knew that virtue resides in a well-trained elephant. They all knew that training takes daily practice and a great deal of repetition.”
• “Maxims are carefully phrased to produce a flash of insight and approval. Role models are presented to elicit admiration and awe. When moral instruction triggers emotions, it speaks to the elephant as well as the rider.”
• “Moral education must also impart tacit knowledge—skills of social perception and social emotion so finely tuned that one automatically feels the right thing in each situation, knows the right thing to do, and then wants to do it. Morality, for the ancients, was a kind of practical wisdom.”
• “Trying to make children behave ethically by teaching them to reason well is like trying to make a dog happy by wagging its tail. It gets causality backwards.”
• “Scientific research supports the virtue hypothesis, even when it is reduced to the claim that altruism is good for you.”
• “You can grow vegetables hydroponically, but even then you have to add nutrients to the water. Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language—a pointless and isolating task if there is no community with whom to speak.”

Character Strengths

• “Although no specific virtue made every list, six broad virtues, or families of related virtues, appeared on nearly all lists: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence (the ability to forge connections to something larger than the self).”
• “Peterson and Seligman suggest that there are twenty-four principle character strengths, each leading to one of the six higher-level virtues.19 You can diagnose yourself by looking at the list below or by taking the strengths test (at www.authentichappiness.org). 1. Wisdom: • Curiosity • Love of learning • Judgment • Ingenuity • Emotional intelligence • Perspective 2. Courage: • Valor • Perseverance • Integrity 3. Humanity: • Kindness • Loving 4. Justice: • Citizenship • Fairness • Leadership 5. Temperance: • Self-control • Prudence • Humility 6. Transcendence: • Appreciation of beauty and excellence • Gratitude • Hope • Spirituality • Forgiveness • Humor • Zest…”
• “Here’s my favorite idea: Work on your strengths, not your weaknesses. How many of your New Year’s resolutions have been about fixing a flaw? And how many of those resolutions have you made several years in a row?”

Altruism & Volunteering

• “But it would be naive to think that doing the right thing always feels good.”
• “These two processes—kin altruism and reciprocal altruism—do indeed explain nearly all altruism among nonhuman animals, and much of human altruism, too.”
• “People who do volunteer work are happier and healthier than those who don’t; but, as always, we have to contend with the problem of reverse correlation: Congenitally happy people are just plain nicer to begin with,24 so their volunteer work may be a consequence of their happiness, not a cause.”
• “The psychologist Jane Piliavin has studied blood donors in detail and found that, yes, giving blood does indeed make people feel good, and good about themselves. Piliavin26 has reviewed the broader literature on all kinds of volunteer work and reached the conclusion that helping others does help the self, but in complex ways that depend on one’s life stage.”
• “A longitudinal study27 that tracked volunteering and well-being over many years in thousands of people was able to show a causal effect: When a person increased volunteer work, all measures of happiness and well-being increased (on average) afterwards, for as long as the volunteer work was a part of the person’s life. The elderly benefit even more than do other adults, particularly when their volunteer work either involves direct person-to-person helping or is done through a religious organization. The benefits of volunteer work for the elderly are so large that they even show up in improved health and longer life.”
• “In old age, when social networks are thinned by the deaths of friends and family, the social benefits of volunteering are strongest (and indeed, it is the most socially isolated elderly who benefit the most from volunteering).30 Furthermore, in old age, generativity, relationship, and spiritual strivings come to matter more, but achievement strivings seem out of place,31 more appropriate for the middle chapters of a life story; therefore, an activity that lets one “give something back” fits right into the story and helps to craft a satisfying conclusion.”
• “Altruism could be explained away as a special kind of selfishness, and anyone who followed Darwin in thinking that evolution worked for the “good of the group” instead of the good of the individual (or better yet, the good of the gene),42 was dismissed as a mushy-headed romantic.”
• “For ants and bees, the queen is not the brain; she is the ovary, and the entire hive or colony can be seen as a body shaped by natural selection to protect the ovary and help it create more hives or colonies. Because all members really are in the same boat, group selection is not just permissible as an explanation; it is mandatory.”
• “But as long as each human being has the opportunity to reproduce, the evolutionary payoffs for investing in one’s own welfare and one’s own offspring will almost always exceed the payoffs for contributing to the group; in the long run, selfish traits will therefore spread at the expense of altruistic traits. … Evolutionary theorists have therefore stood united, since the early 1970s, in their belief that group selection simply did not play a role in shaping human nature.”
• “If you make the models more realistic, more like real human beings, group selection jumps right out at you. Wilson points out that human beings evolve at two levels simultaneously: genetic and cultural.”
• “A caste system then restricts marriage to within-caste pairings, which in turn alters the course of genetic evolution. After a thousand years of inbreeding within caste, castes will diverge slightly on a few genetic traits—for example, shades of skin color—which might in turn lead to a growing cultural association of caste with color rather than just with occupation. (It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences of appearance and behavior in other mammals.)50 In this way, genes and cultures co-evolve;51 they mutually affect each other, and neither process can be studied in isolation for human beings.”
• “By making people long ago feel and act as though they were part of one body, religion reduced the influence of individual selection (which shapes individuals to be selfish) and brought into play the force of group selection (which shapes individuals to work for the good of their group). But we didn’t make it all the way through the loophole: Human nature is a complex mix of preparations for extreme selfishness and extreme altruism.”
• “From Wilson’s higher perspective, there is no contradiction. Group selection creates interlocking genetic and cultural adaptations that enhance peace, harmony, and cooperation within the group for the express purpose of increasing the group’s ability to compete with other groups. Group selection does not end conflict; it just pushes it up to the next level of social organization.”
• “From Wilson’s perspective, mystical experience is an “off” button for the self. When the self is turned off, people become just a cell in the larger body, a bee in the larger hive.”
• “McNeill’s conclusion suggests that synchronized movement and chanting might be evolved mechanisms for activating the altruistic motivations created in the process of group selection.”

Diversity

• “Given how easy it is to divide people into hostile groups based on trivial differences,36 I wondered whether celebrating diversity might also encourage division, whereas celebrating commonality would help people form cohesive groups and communities.”
• “Moral diversity, on the other hand, is essentially what Durkheim described as anomie: a lack of consensus on moral norms and values. Once you make this distinction, you see that nobody can coherently even want moral diversity.”
• “Our conclusion from this study is that diversity is like cholesterol: There’s a good kind and a bad kind, and perhaps we should not be trying to maximize both. Liberals are right to work for a society that is open to people of every demographic group, but conservatives might be right in believing that at the same time we should work much harder to create a common, shared identity.”

9 – Divinity With or Without God

Flatlan & the Third Dimension

• “With the wrong metaphor we are deluded; with no metaphor we are blind.”
• “The metaphor that has most helped me to understand morality, religion, and the human quest for meaning is Flatland, a charming little book written in 1884 by the English novelist and mathematician Edwin Abbot.3 Flatland is a two-dimensional world whose inhabitants are geometric figures. The protagonist is a square.”
• “Now imagine yourself happily moving around your two-dimensional social world, a flat land where the X axis is closeness and the Y axis is hierarchy (see figure 9.1). Then one day, you see a person do something extraordinary, or you have an overwhelming experience of natural beauty, and you feel lifted “up.” But it’s not the “up” of hierarchy, it’s some other kind of elevation. This chapter is about that vertical movement. My claim is that the human mind perceives a third dimension, a specifically moral dimension that I will call “divinity.””
• (I myself am a Jewish atheist.) Rather, my research on the moral emotions has led me to conclude that the human mind simply does perceive divinity and sacredness, whether or not God exists.”
• “But at the other extreme, the effort to create a three-dimensional society and impose it on all residents is the hallmark of religious fundamentalism.”
• “My students and I have used a variety of means to induce elevation and have found that video clips from documentaries about heroes and altruists, and selections from the Oprah Winfrey show, work well.”
• “Subjects in the admiration condition were more likely to report feeling chills or tingles on their skin, and to report feeling energized or “psyched up.” Witnessing extraordinarily skillful actions gives people the drive and energy to try to copy those actions.27 Elevation, in contrast, is a calmer feeling, not associated with signs of physiological arousal.”
• “Oxytocin causes bonding, not action. Elevation may fill people with feelings of love, trust,30 and openness, making them more receptive to new relationships; yet, given their feelings of relaxation and passivity, they might be less likely to engage in active altruism toward strangers.”
• “He noticed that he shed two kinds of tears in church. The first he called “tears of compassion,” such as the time he cried during a sermon on Mothers’ Day on the subject of children who were abandoned or neglected. These cases felt to him like “being pricked in the soul,” after which “love pours out” for those who are suffering. But he called the second kind “tears of celebration”; he could just as well have called them tears of elevation: There’s another kind of tear. This one’s less about giving love and more about the joy of receiving love, or maybe just detecting love (whether it’s directed at me or at someone else). It’s the kind of tear that flows in response to expressions of courage, or compassion, or kindness by others.”
• “When this happens, people find themselves overflowing with love, but it is not exactly the love that grows out of attachment relationships.32 That love has a specific object, and it turns to pain when the object is gone. This love has no specific object; it is agape. It feels like a love of all humankind, and because humans find it hard to believe that something comes from nothing, it seems natural to attribute the love to Christ, or to the Holy Spirit moving within one’s own heart. Such experiences give direct and subjectively compelling evidence that God resides within each person. And once a person knows this “truth,” the ethic of divinity becomes self-evident.”
• “Virtue is not the only cause of movement on the third dimension. The vastness and beauty of nature similarly stirs the soul. Immanuel Kant explicitly linked morality and nature when he declared that the two causes of genuine awe are “the starry sky above and the moral law within.”33…”
• “People often refer to viewing great art, hearing a symphony, or listening to an inspiring speaker as (crypto) religious experiences.”
• “An unfortunate tendency of three-dimensional societies is that they often include one or more groups that get pushed down on the third dimension and then treated badly, or worse.”
• “If the third dimension and perceptions of sacredness are an important part of human nature, then the scientific community should accept religiosity as a normal and healthy aspect of human nature—an aspect that is as deep, important, and interesting as sexuality or language (which we study intensely).”

Disgust

• “…most cultures are very concerned about food, sex, menstruation, and the handling of corpses.”
• “Animals that routinely eat or crawl on corpses, excrement, or garbage piles (rats, maggots, vultures, cockroaches) trigger disgust in us: We won’t eat them, and anything they have touched becomes contaminated. We’re also disgusted by most of the body products of other people, particularly excrement, mucus, and blood, which may transmit diseases among people.”
• “Imagine visiting a town where people wear no clothes, never bathe, have sex “doggie-style” in public, and eat raw meat by biting off pieces directly from the carcass.”

The Sacreness Instinct

• “Shweder’s research on morality 14 in Bhubaneswar and elsewhere shows that when people think about morality, their moral concepts cluster into three groups, which he calls the ethic of autonomy, the ethic of community, and the ethic of divinity. When people think and act using the ethic of autonomy, their goal is to protect individuals from harm and grant them the maximum degree of autonomy, which they can use to pursue their own goals. When people use the ethic of community, their goal is to protect the integrity of groups, families, companies, or nations, and they value virtues such as obedience, loyalty, and wise leadership. When people use the ethic of divinity, their goal is to protect from degradation the divinity that exists in each person, and they value living in a pure and holy way, free from moral pollutants such as lust, greed, and hatred.”
• “Eliade’s most compelling point, for me, is that sacredness is so irrepressible that it intrudes repeatedly into the modern profane world in the form of “crypto-religious” behavior. Eliade noted that even a person committed to a profane existence has privileged places, qualitatively different from all others—a man’s birth-place, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the “holy places” of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.”
• “Even atheists have intimations of sacredness, particularly when in love or in nature. We just don’t infer that God caused those feelings.”

Awe & Peak Experiences

• “As we traced the word “awe” back in history, we discovered that it has always had a link to fear and submission in the presence of something much greater than the self.”
• “Maslow’s goal was to demonstrate that spiritual life has a naturalistic meaning, that peak experiences are a basic fact about the human mind.”
• “Peak experiences make people nobler, just as James had said, and religions were created as methods of promoting peak experiences and then maximizing their ennobling powers.”

10 – Happiness Comes from Between

The Meaning of Life

• “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a gigantic computer built to answer the Holy Question spits out its solution after 7.5 million years of computation: “forty-two.””
• “There appear to be two specific sub-questions to which people want answers, and for which they find answers enlightening. The first can be called the question of the purpose of life: “What is the purpose for which human beings were placed on Earth? Why are we here?” … The second sub-question is the question of purpose within life: “How ought I to live? What should I do to have a good, happy, fulfilling, and meaningful life?””
• “Aristotle asked about aretē (excellence/virtue) and telos (purpose/goal), and he used the metaphor that people are like archers, who need a clear target at which to aim.13 Without a target or goal, one is left with the animal default: Just let the elephant graze or roam where he pleases. And because elephants live in herds, one ends up doing what everyone else is doing.”
• “The two questions can, however, be separated. The first asks about life from the outside; it looks at people, the Earth, and the stars as objects—“Why do they all exist?”—and is properly addressed by theologians, physicists, and biologists. The second question is about life from the inside, as a subject—“How can I find a sense of meaning and purpose?”—and is properly addressed by theologians, philosophers, and psychologists. The second question is really empirical—a question of fact that can be examined by scientific means.”

Necessary Conditions for Flourishing

• “If people are like plants, what are the conditions we need to flourish? In the happiness formula from chapter 5, H(appiness) = S(etpoint) + C(onditions) + V(oluntary activities), what exactly is C? The biggest part of C, as I said in chapter 6, is love. No man, woman, or child is an island. We are ultrasocial creatures, and we can’t be happy without having friends and secure attachments to other people. The second most important part of C is having and pursuing the right goals, in order to create states of flow and engagement.”

Work

One can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the person one loves and to love one’s work.

Leo Tolstoy

• “(I define work broadly to include anyone’s answer to the question “So, what do you do?””
• “When workers had occupational self-direction, their work was often satisfying.”
  • Connects with job crafting in Designing Your Life.
• “More recent research finds that most people approach their work in one of three ways: as a job, a career, or a calling.”
• “If you see your work as a calling, however, you find your work intrinsically fulfilling—you are not doing it to achieve something else. You see your work as contributing to the greater good or as playing a role in some larger enterprise the worth of which seems obvious to you. You have frequent experiences of flow during the work day, and you neither look forward to “quitting time” nor feel the desire to shout, “Thank God it’s Friday!” You would continue to work, perhaps even without pay, if you suddenly became very wealthy.”
• “Take the strengths test27 and then choose work that allows you to use your strengths every day, thereby giving yourself at least scattered moments of flow.”
• “Work at its best, then, is about connection, engagement, and commitment. As the poet Kahlil Gibran said, “Work is love made visible.””

Vital Engagement

• “His interviews showed that every path is unique, yet most of them led in the same direction: from initial interest and enjoyment, with moments of flow, through a relationship to people, practices, and values that deepened over many years, thereby enabling even longer periods of flow.”
• “Vital engagement does not reside in the person or in the environment; it exists in the relationship between the two.”

Coherence

• “Whenever a system can be analyzed at multiple levels, a special kind of coherence occurs when the levels mesh and mutually interlock. We saw this cross-level coherence in the analysis of personality: If your lower-level traits match up with your coping mechanisms, which in turn are consistent with your life story, your personality is well integrated and you can get on with the business of living.”
• “People are multilevel systems in another way: We are physical objects (bodies and brains) from which minds somehow emerge; and from our minds, somehow societies and cultures form.36 To understand ourselves fully we must study all three levels—physical, psychological, and sociocultural.”
• “You can’t just invent a good ritual through reasoning about symbolism. You need a tradition within which the symbols are embedded, and you need to invoke bodily feelings that have some appropriate associations. Then you need a community to endorse and practice it over time. To the extent that a community has many rituals that cohere across the three levels, people in the community are likely to feel themselves connected to the community and its traditions.”
• “But conflict, paralysis, and anomie are likely when a community fails to provide coherence, or, worse, when its practices contradict people’s gut feelings or their shared mythology and ideology.”
• “Religions do such a good job of creating coherence, in fact, that some scholars38 believe they were designed for that purpose.”

Happiness Comes From Between

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

Victor Frankl

• “We were shaped by individual selection to be selfish creatures who struggle for resources, pleasure, and prestige, and we were shaped by group selection to be hive creatures who long to lose ourselves in something larger. We are social creatures who need love and attachments, and we are industrious creatures with needs for effectance, able to enter a state of vital engagement with our work. We are the rider and we are the elephant, and our mental health depends on the two working together, each drawing on the others’ strengths.”
• “The final version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness comes from between. Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality.”
• “It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.”

11 – Conclusion: On Balance

• “A society without liberals would be harsh and oppressive to many individuals. A society without conservatives would lose many of the social structures and constraints that Durkheim showed are so valuable.”
• “A good place to look for wisdom, therefore, is where you least expect to find it: in the minds of your opponents.”

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Affiliate Links

• The Happiness Hypothesis – Jonathan Haidt
• Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman
• Me, Myself And Us – Brian R. Little
• The Molecule of More – Daniel Z. Lieberman & Michael E. Long – Summary
• Think Again – Adam Grant
• Rationality – Steven Pinker
• Designing Your Life
• Stillness is the Key – Ryan Holiday
• Solve for Happy – Mo Gawdat
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