PNTV: The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt (#111)

Hey guys, what's up? This is Brian with another Philosopher's Notes TV episode. This one's on the happiness hypothesis. Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by a guy named Jonathan Haidt, who's one of the world's leading positive psychologists. He's a professor at the University of Virginia. Very cool guy. Great book. And I'm excited to share some of my favorite big ideas. The essence here is integrating modern truth into in ancient wisdom. So integrating these two, ancient wisdom, modern truth, really cool stuff. Here are some of the big ideas we'll cover. We'll range from the rider and the elephant. A big idea on integrating the relationship between the ego, the ID and the superego. We'll look at epiphanies and lasting change. Meditation. It's the closest to a magic pill we're ever going to get. Cognitive therapy. It works. Science. Skip over a couple and then vertical coherence. We want to make sure that we have coherence between our long term goals and our near term goals. We'll talk about that. We want to talk about getting your virtue on from the Greeks to Benjamin Franklin. Arete again. And then we'll talk about avoiding elephant poop. We'll see how much of that we can get through in around 10 minutes. So again, this book integrates everything from Buddha and Stoic philosophers to modern day positive psychology. And ultimately Haidt tells us 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. So let's look at some ideas on how to do that. The first one here in a theme throughout the book is the rider and the elephant. So Haidt tells us about Freud who divided the mind into three parts, the ego, the ID and the superego. Now I'm going to create a video where we talk about this all on its own because we can talk about that for a weekend and how important the ego actually is. A lot of people want to kill the ego, get rid of the ego. Well, you know, you actually need a really healthy ego that balances your impulse, your desires for pleasure and all these things with your conscience and the rules of society that can often be overbearing. Oftentimes we toggle back and forth between the superego, what you should do, and the id, what you really want to do. What we need is a really healthy, strong ego. Before we can let go and transcend the ego, we've got to have a really strong one. Part of a longer conversation, height gives us a metaphor that Freud uses of a rider Managing a horse while trying to deal with his father in the back seat, the superego. And then he uses the metaphor of the rider and the elephant. Your ID is the elephant and you are the rider. And how do you get control of the subconscious impulses that you have? It's a big theme throughout the book. Again, we can talk about that for a weekend. For now, we're going to move on and know that you need to be a strong rider. You've got to have a strong ego to be able to manage these different impulses and conditioning, etc. So for now, we're moving on to epiphanies and lasting change. Now, Haidt talks about the fact that you often achieve dramatic insights into your own life and you resolve to change your ways, and then the next day or the week after, you're back to how you used to be. And he tells us that's because lasting change can only come by retraining the elephant, and that's hard to do. The elephant, again, is our impulses, what we've been kind of trained to do, and what we've been doing for so long that it takes a lot of work to start doing something different now. Now, Ken Wilber talks about this and he describes it as states and stages. I'll do a video on this at some point as well. But it's one thing to have this really amazing elevated state experience, but if your stage of development is here, you're going to drop from this high that you experienced in the weekend workshop to who you are normally at your stage of development. Now, what we want to do is we want to diligently, patiently and persistently practice the fundamentals state such that our stage of development goes up, goes up and goes up so that that state experience that we were so blessed to have becomes our way of being. You only get there and you only create lasting change through diligent, patient, persistent practice. Obviously, this is a big theme in my work and everything we talk about here. Moving on to one of the fundamentals here we want to practice if you want to move our stage of development up and experience lasting change. Meditation did a whole video on this where I quoted Height, who tells us the closest thing we have to a magic pill essentially is meditation. It's, you know, side effects include increased self esteem, empathy and trust. It even improves your memory and has no side effects that are negative. It costs nothing. That's a pretty sweet pill. It's called meditation. Again, check out that video. I'll link to that. It's a good idea that's an Eastern approach to optimizing our lives and our minds. The Western approach is cognitive therapy. So he tells us. Meditation is characterfully Eastern. Cognitive therapy is more the let's bring out, bust out the tool set that, that will help us reshape our minds, get really, really active about it. And cognitive therapy started by a guy named Aaron Beck, is huge. And the basic idea there, as we talk about throughout these notes, is training clients to catch their thoughts, write them down, name the distortions, and then find alternative and more accurate ways of thinking. So east meditation, west cognitive behavioral therapy. We want to intercept and look at the, the negative thoughts we have, see if we can look at them and create more positive interpretations that are more in sync with reality. Really powerful stuff we come back to again and again and again. Skip that one love. As we talk about throughout all these notes, relationships are huge. Height tells us if you want to predict how happy someone is or how long she will live. And if you are not allowed to ask her genes about her genes or personality, you should find out about her social relationships. Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life even more than does quitting smoking. It speeds recovery from surgery and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorder. Relationships are huge. We talked about it in Seligman's book Flourish. One of the key aspects, we just talked about it yesterday as well with the book Happiness, where giving support versus receiving support. Giving support extends your lifespan significantly. So find ways to give yourself to your families, your friends, your communities and your world more today and tomorrow and beyond. And invest time in your relationships healing. Huge, huge, huge, huge practice for us as we master the happiness hypothesis. So here's another cool idea. Vertical coherence. It's pretty straightforward, but it's something we want to pay attention to. And again, we can spend a weekend on this idea alone. I've done a video on this in the past. I'll do some more on it. But the basic idea here is we want vertical coherence. We want our long term goals and our near term goals, our intention, our little compass here, but both long term and near term to be matched up. We want what we're striving for over the long run and what we're striving for over the near term to be in harmony, to be in sync, to cohere vertically. We do that and research tells us we are going to feel a lot better. Pretty straightforward, but pay attention. In the note, I go through some exercises that help us actually create this coherence. We don't have time to go through that right now. The next idea is another one of my favorites. Haidt talks about classic virtue. And it's not about being uptight and pleasure hating. It's about living with what the Greeks called arete, which meant excellence or virtue or goodness. And they said that if we want well being or happiness, which is eudaimonia, which we did a video on, that's basically an activity of soul in conformity with excellence or virtue. And as Haidt tells us, Aristotle was basically saying that a good life is one where you develop your strengths, realize your potential and become what it is in your nature to become. That's the essence of arete, that's the essence of virtue. How beautiful is that? To become what is in your nature to become, actualize your potential. Very, very inspiring. Now final idea here is this idea that Aristotle also said that if you want to live with arete, we also need telos, purpose and goals. We need to know what we're aiming for. And he says just like, well, people are like archers who need a clear target at which to aim. And without that target, we're just left to our animal default, which as elephants do, kind of roam around in herds together. And when you roam around in herds together, you tend to step in elephant poop. Final big idea. So you need a clear purpose, a clear goal to connect to the highest within yourself and to fully actualize your latent potentials. That's what it's all about as you want to go out and live with virtue and master this aspect of the happiness hypothesis. So there you go, the writer and the elephant. The healthy ego vis a vis the ID and the superego epiphanies becoming lasting change. Meditation is a magic pill. Cognitive therapy is great. Make relationships important. Get vertical coherence in your long term and near term goals. Get your virtue on and avoid the elephant poop by setting a clear set of goals and having a purpose in your life. There you go. Quick look at the happiness hypothesis. Finding modern truth and ancient wisdom. Jonathan Haidt is awesome. Google him for some more. Hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. See ya.