Eudaimonic Happiness and Social Good

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That's why you need supermobile from T Mobile. The best plan on the best network letting you run your business from your phone, like never before. In moments of hydr demand, Team Mobile's network adapts to put your business connection first . Discover more at supermobile dot com dot As best based on combination of advanced network performance covers and security features, network based on analysis of Google Space Tell Technique twenty five, remarks your license and rented with permission . Pushkin Oh my god, that guy has a shirt that says spilling the tea since seventeen seventy six. That's awesome. For this extra special episode in our new Happiness Hot Take season, I've decided to take a little field trip to Philadelphia , Pennsylvania. My gosh, there's so many school kids here. There's like five hundred little kids who are here, I guess, through the Declaration of Independence. Do not put that in your mouth . Okay, where do we get in line for the tours? I'm about to visit an important spot in my country's history, one that's particularly inspiring for a happiness expert like me. Hey happiness lab listeners. I'm coming to you live from right outside of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This is the building where it all happened exactly two hundred and fifty years ago this week. And I am super nerding out right now . To see why this building has me nerding out so much, let's do a quick American history lesson. It's the summer of seventeen seventy six, and the fledgling US colonies have grown more and more pissed off at King George III, and all the taxation and oppression coming out of Great Britain. That frustration came to a violent head, with the so called shot heard round the world at the Battle of Lexington . And so the colonists decided to send a group of delegates known as the Second Continental Congress to Philadelphia to figure out what to do next . After some feeble attempts at a peaceful resolution, the Congress concluded that the only viable solution was to break from imperial rule and form a new independentublic R.ep The delegates appointed a committee of five to write the historic announcement that the thirteen colonies were ready to formally sever ties with the British crown. Fabled wordsmith Thomas Jefferson was charged with penning the first draft, in addition to spelling out the colonists many' grievances and inspiring his countrymen to pick up their muskets and fight for freedom, Jefferson also had to write a document that spelled out the principles the new Republic would stand for, a doctrine that he hoped would encapsulate what he would later call the harmonizing sentiments of the day. After more than two weeks toiling away in a sweltering Pennsylvania boarding house, Jefferson was ready to share his draft with fellow committee members Ben Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, and Robert Living ston, who then spent two more days making extensive edits, changes that Jefferson would describe as mutilations . Ouch . But fresh with those mutilated track changes, Jefferson and the committee finally shared their famous announcement with the Continental Congress. In this very building, on july fourth, seventeen seventy six, the second Continental Congress voted to ratify what would later become known as the Declaration of Independence. What words did Jefferson choose to inspire the colonists and express those harmonizing sentiments of the day? I'm guessing you may remember from history class . We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and wait for it, the pursuit of happiness . What a mic drop moment. And happened right here. The pursuit of happiness has been a fundamental part of the so called American experiment since the beginning. And that's why I couldn't help but travel to this historic spot in Philadelphia on the eve of the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of American independence to announce this week's revolutionary happiness hot take. With all due respect to Jefferson and the founding fathers, I hold this happiness hot take to be self evident that the pursuit of happiness is in fact a very bad idea . You heard me right, pursu theit of happiness not a good idea, or at the very least, something that can go very wrong if we're not careful. Why is your intrepid podcast host denouncing two hundred fifty years of revolutionary wisdom? Why is she criticizing what at first glance may seem to be the entire point of this podcast? Well, get ready to join me on a historic journey to find out Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy, but what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. One of the things I always love to point out is that the word for happiness in every Indo European language without exception is cognate with luck . So the old Norse and Old English root of happiness is hap. It shows up in words like happens or perhaps or mishap. Shakespeare uses it happ y, he says. This is Darren McMahon, a professor at Dartmouth College and the author of an awesome book entitled Happiness A History. But the idea there is that happiness is a function of luck of fortune and that human beings don't really have control over luck or fortune, right? That's in the hands of the gods or the fates and we can't really control them. And I like to make the point that really in most developing societies, that is the norm, right? Happiness is not something that you can aspire to and control for yourself. If you get a little bit of it here and there, good for you, but you can't count on it. Darren's an expert on how the concept of happiness has changed over the last two thousand plus years. I've tagged him in to help me make sense of what Jefferson and the forefathers really meant with their famous phrase. But to find that out, we need to start at the beginning. And for most of human history, happiness wasn't something that even made sense to pursue , because it kinda came down to chance. Now, that older idea gets challenged by many of the wisdom traditions that come into being in the first millennium , BC the classical religious traditions as well as classical philosophical traditions in Greece and Rome and other places . And essentially, obviously you have massive differences between the Buddhist tradition and classical Judaism and so forth, but what they share is the idea that God is not random, that God is not inherently vengeful , and that our own actions, the way that we shape our personalities , the way that we live our lives, have some bearing or fate on our ultimate happiness. And so the crucial idea is expressed wonderfully by Aristotle to the effect that happiness is a life lived accordance with virtue and that we can control in some ways our ultimate fate. No one used a phrase like the pursuit of happiness back in Aristotle's day, but he and his contemporaries were the first to think that such a pursuit could even be possible, that at least with a lot of work, one could in theory try to become happier. The thing that's so different though about those traditions is that happiness remains a kind of special attainment. It's the highest attainment. Aristotle says that the happier are the happy few, right? And even though in a tradition like Buddhism, there's the belief that all human beings have the capacity for happiness. There's also the realization that most people don't get there, right? Happiness is attainable, but it's really the highest human achievement. It's something you have to devote your life to. It's a craft that we cultivate through an entire life, and that's just not something that most people are going to be up to. But all that changed during the Enlightenment period of the eighteenth century, just around the time that the American forefathers were coming up with their revolutionary ideals , people began thinking and talking about the concept of happiness in a very different way. Darren argues that the eighteenth century was marked by several important shifts that redefined how people thought about what it meant to live a good life. The first of these shifts involved a massive change to people's life expectancy. After centuries of disease and famine, people were living longer. Society was also undergoing lots of changes in terms of how people lived. From more hygienic practices, to better home heating, to less smoke inhalation from chimneys, to better lighting, to less itchy bedding, people's lives were starting to feel more comfortable and more controll . So I talk about the eighteenth century as the crucial period of a revolution in human expectations when really for the first time in human history, large numbers of people were presented with the possibility that they didn't have to suffer inherently in life, that they ought to be happy. And if they're not happy, then we need to address the things that stand in the way. But basically happiness is the human default . This idea of happiness as a default was also championed by the new scientific ideas of the Enlightenment period. The forefathers grew up around the time that Isaac Newton was coming up with his famous laws of motion and gravity , and when thinkers like Renee Descartes began conceiving of the universe as one big machine . These notions of order and natural law were soon applied to mankind, leading to the idea that human beings are creatures designed by God to feel good and live well. How do we know this well? Because we naturally are attracted to pleasure and we naturally flee pain. John Locke, the English philosopher sometimes called the Newton of the Mind, was a great admirer of Isaac Newton. And he imagines human beings like objects in space acted upon by gravity, but in this case by pleasure, pain. We are repulsed by pain and we are attracted to pleasure like an object in space acted upon by gravity . And that's just natural, he says. And so we need to get rid of these older kind of hang ups we have about pleasure, right? The Christian idea that pleasure's always the gateway to sin , that pleasure is kind of inherently a taboo . No, Locke says, pleasure is a good thing. We should work to cultivate it. New scientific advances also changed what people thought about the outward expression of pleasure. Consider, for example, the emerging field of dentistry, which began in France around this same time. Prior to that point, most people had bad teeth and bad breath and you don't open your mouth. Aristocrats don't smile in public in part because they don't want to betray their emotions, but in part because they have these kind of gaping mugs that they don't want to show. Well, that begins to change in the eighteenth century and the smile becomes an outward emblem a good inner life. So feeling well is an indication that you are being well, that you're living well . This importance of living well was also reflected in changes to religious thought during the Enlightenment period. You get a kind of de emphasis on an older fire and brimstone type approach, you know, that God is an angry vengeful god who sits up there on clouds and sends thunderbolts down, a greater emphasis on God's love, a greater emphasis on God's desire that we're happy not only in the next life but in this life. And so you actually see the phrase the pursuit of happiness all over the place in eighteenth century America in sermons . And most people, that's probably where they would have heard the phrase for the first time. Yes, that's right. Clever a wordsmith as Jefferson was, he was not the first to come up with that catchy tagline that he used in the Declaration of Independence. In fact, Jefferson's contemporaries would easily recognize this quote and stuff they were hearing all the time, both in churches and in eighteenth century novels. But did the pursuit of happiness mean the same thing back then as it does now? Did our forefathers understand that harmonizing sentiment in the same way we do today? Well, let's start with one part of the famous quote that you probably assume reads pretty much the same now as it did back in the seventeen hundreds. The word pursuit. Turns out that pursuit had a very different connotation in the eighteenth century. Samuel Johnson, right? Johnson, the great English man of letters in his dictionary of the English language defines pursuit as to follow in hostility . And then he uses the example of a pursuer which apparently in Scottish law in the eighteenth century is a criminal prosecutor. Somebody who hunts down criminals. The French have this phrase rather than say the pursuit of happiness, they say la chase bonur, the hunt for happiness. And I think that's wonderful because you hunt something. What happens when you come upon it? You know, you have to kill it . The eighteenth century notion of a pursuit was supposed to be adversarial, the sort of frustrated hunt that often ends in defeat, if it even ends at all. The great enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbs famously described the pursuit of happiness as a quote perpetual and restless desire of power after power that seeth in death . That's not exactly the way we tend to think about what it means to pursue happiness today . But did Jefferson really mean to imply that the quest for happiness was kinda doomed from the start? Darren says that another hint comes from a word that Jefferson and the forefathers chose not to use in their famous preamble. Although the Declaration talks about a right to pursue happiness, many of the state constitutions talk about a right to obtain happiness. So George Mason, Jefferson's close friend in Virginia , drafts the preamble to the Virginia Bill of Rights just a month before the Declaration of Independence in June of seventeen seventy six. And the Virginia Declaration of Right talks about men as equals with certain inherent rights , including the right to acquire and own property and to pursue and obtain happiness. Pursuing and obtaining happiness then becomes a right and that's reproduced in a whole number of state constitutions, including where I am now in New Hampshire and I love to tell my Dartmouth students that they have a right to obtain happiness. And that notion is really out there in the eighteenth century. So much so that in the nineteenth century you actually see a jurisprudence develop where people started suing state governments for not fulfilling their right to obtain happiness, which, you know, such a wonderfully American thing to do, but there you have it. By omitting that we had a right to obtain happiness, it seems that Jefferson and the drafters of the Declaration were trying to make an important distinction between the three different rights they mention in the preamble. Life and liberty are supposed to be straight up unalienable rights, well, at least unalienable for white, rich landed men. Important sidebar, you didn't exactly get those same rights if you were poor or a woman or a native person or a slave working on one of Jefferson's many huge plantations. But I digress . If you were one of the unfortunately limited number of people the preemble was aimed at, you were surprised to get life and liberty as rights, for sure, no questions asked. But the right to happiness didn't work the same way as those first two other rights. Our right to happiness was not guaranteed because the forefathers didn't give us an unalienable right to obtain happiness to pursue it. You know, they're reading Cicero and Plutarch and Epicurus and Aristotle , and they take from them this idea that we have to shape our personal hard work, right, through discipline, through moral craft and cultivation. We need to take on much of the advice that you and positive psychologists give us. Happiness doesn't just happen. We have to put the blocks in place. And so they profoundly believe that idea. And I think that Jefferson and others would have said that you can't guarantee the outcome because the outcome depends on a life well lived. And that takes work. It takes dedication, it takes craft both at the individual level and at the social level almost two are related for the founders and we can't predict that outcome until happens. So a right to get in the game, a right to pursue but not to obtain . And that gets to the final way that the eighteenth century notion of the pursuit of happiness differs from what we usually mean today , what Jefferson and his contemporaries implied by the word happiness. The eighteenth century is this wonderful period that's suspended between a very modern idea of thinking about happiness simply as just getting more and more pleasure for longer and longer periods and an older Judeo Christian and classical notion of happiness as virtue, happiness as a kind of sustained att ention to crafting a life well lived. Darren says that the Enlightenment notion of happiness was best summarized as it's complicated . Pleasure was definitely a big part of the pursuit of happiness for Jefferson and his contemporaries . The Forefathers were into living a life that felt good in the moment , but happiness for the Forefathers also meant something much broader than merely feeling good. To pursue happiness in the eighteenth century, a person also had to live virtuously. As Jefferson himself put it in later writings, happiness is the aim of life, but virtue is the foundation of happiness. The forefathers thought that personal happiness could be obtained by prioritizing the public good, by cultivating virtues like moderation, discipline, and self sacrifice so that you could strive for the betterment of all. I asked Darren what he thought Jefferson would say, if he could see how people think about happiness and its pursuit today . Yeah , I don't think he'd be too pleased let's put it that way . Hm , I guess all our expensive lifestyle brands and personal wellness routines and TikTok self care hacks would make poor old Jefferson think that modern Americans had veered a little off track. I think he would see a world in which people have turned inward and pursue their own pleasures at the expense of those of others as really profoundly disturbing. But Darren says that this concern about how Americans pursue happiness has actually been around for quite a while. When we get back from the break, we'll meet a nineteenth century writer who is seriously disturbed by how our country men were pursuing the good life. We'll hear what he thought Americans were getting wrong and what modern science shows we can start doing to get things right. The Happiness Lab, we'll be back in a moment I've been thinking about my spaces lately, and I've realized just how much thoughtful design can change the feel of my everyday routines. But I honestly never expected a toilet to be part of that convers ation until I experienced the Kohler smart toilet collection. Kohler has been elevating bathroom design since eighteen seventy three, and you can really feel that legacy in the way their products are designed. Take the Kohler Vale smart toilet. That design immediately stands out. It's modern, sleek, almost like a functional work of art. It just makes your entire bathroom experience feel more elevated. 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Accounts subject to credit approval restrictions and limitations apply. Cards are issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC It's eighteen thirty one, just fifty five years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence , and a young French aristocrat by the name of Alexis De Tocqueville has just landed on the bustling streets of New York City. Over the next few months, Tokwill would embark on a famous anthropological study of how things were going for our new young Republic in the half century since it gained independence. He's charged in the eighteen thirties by the French government to come to America to study prisons so that he can help carry out prison reform in France. And so he comes to America really for only a number of months, but it produces this magnum opius published in two volumes in eighteen thirty five and eighteen forty, which is his series of reflections on the Democratic experiment in America , really seen as a vision of what the world will become for Europe and he sees America and the American experiment as a kind of image of the future. What did Tockeville think when he observed this new American experiment? Well, let's just say Monsieur Alexis would probably have been very supportive of this week's Happiness Hot Take. You know, he has this wonderful line there where he says that Americans find themselves in the most fortunate conditions and he says no one could work harder to be happy. He has this line where he says American will build a house, you know, and before the roof is on, we'll move on to the next one because he's constantly pursuing happiness. He says that preachers there and he gets this exactly right give sermons and it's hard to tell whether their goal is happiness in this life or salvation because the two are so conflated . And yet in the midst of this ceaseless restless desire or pursuit of happiness, he finds what he calls a strange melancholy. Tokillve identified two distinct problems with nineteenth century America's pursuit of happiness . The first is one that historian Darren McMahon alluded to before the break. Americans in the eighteen hundreds seemed to be forgetting the forefathers' double sense of happiness , that the good life involved not just striving for personal pleasure, but also seeking out the public good through virtues like kindness and self restraint. But Tocquille also noticed a second problem with American's pursuit of happiness , it just didn't seem to be working. Democracy in the eighteen hundreds had bestowed Americans with more opportunities for prosperity and social mobility than was had by nearly any other country in the world at the time. But America's new found freedom to pursue a better life seemed to come at a cost. As Tokfill put it in his famed double volume Democracy in America , there is something astonishing in the spectacle of so many lucky men restless in the mist of abundance . He continued It seemed that a cloud habitually hung on their brow. They seemed serious and almost sad even in their pleasures. Americans, he said, were in such a rush to obtain happiness that they clutch everything but hold nothing fast, and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight. That continues for each American, Tokville explained, until death steps in the end and stops him before he has grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes him. In a world of frenetic, ceaseless energy where we're constantly working to be satisfied and never are, you know, that creates a kind of fatigue . Tokville was one of the first to notice a deep irony in American's pursuit of happiness . The more we seek happiness out, the less happy we seem to become. Unfortunately, it would take two hundred more years before scientists thought to test whether Tocqueville's hypothesis was actually right. Despite the fact and perhaps even because of the fact that we intensely strive to be happy , we fall short of it. So there's a self defeating nature within the pursuit of happiness . I'm chatting with Iris Mouse, a psychologyfess Porro at UC Berkeley. Iris is an expert on what we get wrong in our quest to feel happier. And in fact , it's even been shown that the more intensely people strive to be happy , the more likely they are to get away from happiness. Iris has christened this phenomenon the paradox of happiness . And I think a lot of the bad effects on the pursuit of happiness come from that sense of obligation that we put on ourselves and maybe also on other people . The moment you say that it's at least somewhat in people's own control , the idea arises that people maybe should or ought to strive for their own happiness . Iris has studied the paradox of happiness in a series of clever studies. In one experiment, she brought subjects into the lab and had them read different theories about the importance of feeling happy. In what we call the obsession with happiness condition , we had participants read an article that really extolded the importance of really happy and being really happy most of the time. So they read sort of a fake newspaper article that backed this up with a lot of real signs except for we very much emphasized the idea that you should be happy all the time . And in the control condition, participants read a similar article, but happiness wasn't mentioned. And then participants watched a couple of emotional film clips. One film clip was really sad and the sad film clip showed a husband losing his wife. Very sad film clip. In they Ha fppilm ip Cl, participants saw a figure skater win the Olympic gold medal. And it was actually Sarah Hughes who won the gold medal in two thousand two, but the scene was really similar to what we saw recently when Alyssa Lou won the gold medal . So it's like pure joy. She realizes she's just like knocked it out of the field and celebrates with her coaches and the audience goes wild . Both groups of participants, the experimental group who were told that they should feel happy all the time, and the control group who read the non happiness related article were asked to fill out a survey about how they felt after watching the videos. Now, in the Sadfilm clip , there was no difference between the two experimental conditions no matter how highly participants valued happiness in that moment, they all felt really sad. But in the happy film clip, we saw a really interesting difference between the two experimental condit ions such that the group that was led to highly value happiness actually felt less happy after watching Sarah Hughes win the gold medal . Participants who thought they were supposed to feel happy wound up feeling less positive after witnessing a good event. In this and other studies, Iris has observed that, paradoxically, the more we think we're supposed to be pursuing happiness, the less we seem to obtain it. People almost feel like an obligation to reach that state of happ iness . And so they're evaluating how they feel compared to where they think they should be. And we actually assessed that idea with a question in the study where we had asked our participants also how they felt about their own feelings . So a question like, how disappointed were you with how you felt when you watched the film clip ? And who were in the valuing happiness condition , they actually were more disappointed about how they had felt. So there's something about the idea that here happiness is within your reach. You're seeing this really lovely , beautiful, joyful film clip. It's within reach and yet you're falling short . And so people judge themselves for that. But why does seeking out happiness, expecting to obtain it paradoxically make us feel worse? Iris says that we can gain some insight by looking at what happens when we set our sights on any big objective, happiness is a goal . And from that perspective, you can see the pursuit of happiness as goal pursuit . And we have quite a bit of understanding of the sort of like steps that people walk along as they pursue goals. Psychologists argue that our minds go through four distinct steps when pursuing a new goal. The first step and the first spot where we could go wrong is in choosing a goal. Iris has found that there are better and worse ways to set a goal from the perspective of feeling happier. You can think of that goal either in terms of how intensely you want to be happy, but also in terms of how often you want to be happy. And most people set pretty high goals for being happy. They want to be intensely happy, but also pretty frequently happy. So is this the step where people go wrong in terms of pursuing happiness? So for a while , people, including myself thought that if we set the goal too intensely, too highly, we're like striving really hard to be happy that that in itself is harmful or self defeating . But when you take a really close look , it turns out that just being motivated to feel happy in and of itself, we sometimes call it aspiring to being happy , that alone is not necessarily inherently harmful . And so we've moved away from thinking that the goal itself is what's harmful to thinking that it's rather how people go about pursuing that goal that reveals the pitfalls of pursuing happiness . And step two in how people go about pursuing that goal is what psychologists have called affect regulation. And that's just the idea that people regulate their own affective emotional states to be more in line with their goal. If your goal is to feel happier , you'll probably be motivated to change your situation or what you're paying attention to in order to improve your mood. You may also try to regulate your affect by actively suppressing your feelings. And Iris says that this is a point in the goal pro pursuitcess where people tend to go wrong. One really common mistake that people make maybe because it's so easy is to simply not show how they feel on the inside . I might feel a little bit sad and I might decide ugh, it's easiest not to show that. But it turns out that that's actually really harmful to happiness in part because it disconnects us from other people . And so the idea is that emotion suppression might feel like a quick fix in the moment , but it's actually cuts us off from one of the main pathways to happiness , which is social connection. So step number two, this affect regulation step is a spot where we need to be careful. We're prone to suppressing our feelings more than we should . We also tend to go wrong in the next step of the happiness goal pursuit process. Step number three, which Iris calls monitoring. So basically we check in how am I doing? Am I getting further along on my path? Am I falling back? Am I frawling behind? But the mere act of posing these monitoring questions can also be a recipe for unhappiness. There's a saying, Ask yourself whether you 're happy and you cease to be so and that encapsulates that very idea that you destroy the very thing you're seeking when you're kind of checking in with yourself am I happy yet? How happy am I? Studies have shown that monitoring our happiness too frequently can make us less happy. One experiment used what's known as an experience sampling procedure in which, people are pinged at random times and asked to report what they're thinking about and how they're feeling. Participants reported feeling happier when they were not thinking about their own happiness . Results like these are common, but Iris says they don't necessarily mean that we should abandon monitoring altogether. No monitoring at all can't be the answer . Of course, you have all these, you know, like happiness tracking devices these days, right? And a lot of use them to great effect because asking yourself in a really systematic way how happy am I can give you really important clues as to what makes you happy and how can you do more of the things that make you happy . So there's a tension here when it comes to monitoring where monitoring is sometimes bad and sometimes good for happiness . One factor Iris says is when you do the active monitoring. Are you asking yourself how happy am I? How happy am I during a positive event? Or do you check in after a positive event has ended? Studies show that the former type of monitoring makes us less happy than the latter, in part because the act of monitoring takes us out of the present moment, but monitoring how an event feels s after it' over doesn't seem to hurt our happiness as much. So step number three, monitoring isn't all bad, but it's also a spot where we need to be careful about our technique. And that brings us to step number four of the gold pursuit process . One that Iris has found often goes awry when it comes to the pursuit of happiness , what psychologists call the response phase. We respond to and pass judgment on what it means to be off track from our goal. One very frequent reaction could be to ask ourselves, what does it mean that I'm less happy than I want to be? And a really common answer is I think there's something wrong with me because I'm less happy than I want to be. This is the step Irra says in which the paradoxical effects of pursuing happiness creep in the most, in part because it involves a lot of what she calls meta emotions. So meta emotions are just emotions, feelings that we have about our feelings. That's the meta part. I'm guessing that even if you haven't heard the term meta emotions, you're probably very familiar with them. Think judgment, shame, disappointment , frustration, all the negative reactions you have when you don't feel the way you want to feel. And Iris has found that meta emotions explain a lot of the paradox of happiness . In one study, she surveyed a group of participants about how much they valued happiness. She then asked each subject to keep a detailed diary of all the things that happened to them throughout the day. And they told us about the happiest event of their day for fourteen days , and then we also asked them about their meta emotions . How disappointed were you? How judging did you feel about your own feelings ? The subjects' happiest moments included lots of different positive events, get togethers with friends and yummy meals and birthday parties , but how much subjects enjoyed these good events depended on how much they valued happiness. Subjects who said they worried most about happiness were also the ones who showed the most negative meta emotions during their happy events . Those participants spent even the most positive moments feeling disappointed and judgy. These results suggest overthinking and judg ment can spoil the very moments when happiness is most in reach. The final part of gold pursuit isn't exactly a step per se, but it's something Iris thinks is super important for understanding where we go wrong when it comes to striving for happiness . And that is the cultural context in which we find ourselves whenever we're trying to pursue a goal. Just like people have ideas about happiness , so do societies and cultures . And that context is actually incredibly important. It can really facilitate and take pressure off individuals, but it can also work against them. As a German immigrant currently living in Berkeley, California, IRS has seen firsthand just how different two cultures can be when it comes to the pursuit of happiness. I mean, I've been here for a while, but I still remember sort of like when I first moved to the US and that was actually California, which might be a special relationship to the pursuit of happiness within a country that has a pretty special relationship to the pursuit of happiness. It's small things but I remember the first time somebody said to me enjoy . And I just noted that that struck me as almost a little bit funny . It's that notion that number one, it's important to enjoy, which is a little bit sus to a German , but also number two, that it's very much in your control. You're going to make it happen . And Iris' observations about these cultural differences have been borne out by research. There's actually a really lovely systematic study by a psychologist named Berggett Copenholm where she compared systematically American and German attitudes toward emotions. And she analyzed condolence cards that people send if somebody has lost a loved one. Both of them acknowledged grief and loss and mourning, of course . But the American condolence cards would also highlight an element of a silver lining. They would say something like I hope you find comfort and so forth. So some positivity coming back in, whereas the German condolence cards would like all the way lean into the morning with phrases like in deepest sadness in Tista wa. And there was no element of , you know, a silver lining. There is something more important to happiness in American culture and we're a little bit more tolerant or embracing of sadness and unhappiness in German culture. So let's recap. Iris argues that to understand where we go wrong in the pursuit of happiness , we need to understand the steps our minds take during any goal pursuit. And those four steps are setting a goal, regulating your affect to meet that goal, monitoring how you did, and then responding as needed if you got off track , and that entire process of goal pursuit is embedded within a particular cultural context which can make the process easier or harder. So where do we go wrong when it comes to these steps? Sometimes it's during AF C regulation. We preemptively shut off our negative emotions which prevent us from connecting with others. Sometimes it's in the monitoring step. We get so obsessed with asking ourselves if we're feeling happy that we pull ourselves out of the present moment. And sometimes it's in that final response phase when we get stuck judging whatever experience we're having with lots of nasty meta emotions. And if all these steps happen in a culture that heavily emphasizes how happy we should be, that demands we enjoy and find silver lin ings all the time, that can make it hard not to feel bad about ourselves whenever we fall short of expectations. So that's what we get wrong when it comes to our goal pursuit of happiness , but is there a way we can engage in that pursuit more effectively? Well, we'll find out when the happiness slab returns from this quick break. I've been thinking about my spaces lately and I',ve realized just how much thoughtful design can change the feel of my everyday routines, but I honestly never expected a toilet to be part of that conversation until I experienced the Kohler smart ile Tot Cectollion Kohler has been elevating bathroom design since eighteen seventy three, and you can really feel that legacy in the way their products are designed. Take the Kohler Vale smart toilet. That design immediately stands out. 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