Mo Gawdat: Why is Happiness So Hard to Find?

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mo Gaudat. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm so happy to be here with you today. That's an intimidating room. I hope by the end of my speech to you today, you will also be Alex and amazing innovation and AI and all of that wonderful stuff that I know you're so hungry for. But I actually will talk to you about another engineering problem, the problem of happiness. So the reason we are here is because of those two wonderful young. I call them young children. These are my children, Ali and Aya. Ali was born when I was 24, I think 25. He was a tiny little Zen monk. So every day of his life, he was such a wonderful human being, always peaceful, always happy. He was so wise that by a teenage, I started to stop going to my mentors and go to Ali as my mentor, as my coach. Ali taught me so much about life and about happiness. Aya, on the other hand, was the sunshine of our life. Aya was, you know, those kinds of people that will just pull you, take your hand, and just make sure that you enjoy the day, be present, have fun. You know, between them, I was extremely successful at a very, very young. Actually, that stuff didn't work for me at all. I was more interested in how does this machine work, how does this physical form of ours work, and why were we born happy and then grew out of happiness. I would go back to Ali and Ayah, and they would explain it to me from the heart, from the instinctive side, if you want. So eventually, Ali, unfortunately did. He didn't. He basically caused me to change my life. There's nothing to those at peace. This tattoo was the very last thing I saw from Ali when he sat up on the operating table going into a very simple surgical operation back in 2014. And it was almost as a reminder for me, because four hours later, five mistakes by the surgeon. We lost Ali. And as you can imagine, most parents would not be able to sustain such a tragedy. Ali was my son, but also my best friend, and he was my coach. He was my mentor. He was everything, if you want. So if I had closed my door and cried for the following 27 years, I don't think you would have blamed me. But that's not what happened. What happened 17 days after Ali left was this. I sat down and started to write. I wrote a book called Soul for Happy, which was basically an intention on my side to share Ali's model with the entire world. I was trying, in a very unusual way, you know, how they sometimes say, a life for a life. In my personal view, I felt Ali's life was worth 10 million lives. But instead of taking lives, I wanted to give life. I wanted to make people happy. I believe that a life without happiness is not a life. And so my, in my, you know, businessman's mind, I was thinking, if I could make 10 million people happy so that they remember Ali and they feel grateful for his contribution, then I've honored him. It doesn't bring him back, but it makes our world slightly better than the day he left. Of course, if you have read the Alchemist, you would know that when you know your life's purpose, the universe conspires to make it happen. And so that's exactly what happened for me. Literally six weeks after the book was released, my videos started to go viral on the web. One specific video was viewed 84 million times in the first, you know, few weeks. And so the 10 million happy target was overachieved by a very large margin. And so the team, the small team of volunteers we have working on the mission basically said, you're sandbagging. That's not good salesmanship. So set a higher target. So we went for what we call a Google scale target, which was 1 billion happy. And you may think I'm crazy. I'm not at all. In today's world, a billion is highly, highly achievable in the world of the Internet. It's also, believe it or not, I would think the most crucial mission we have on the face of planet Earth today. Our world is very unhappy. Suicide rates at an all time high, you know, depression is at an all time high. And the reality is we're raising a new generation of beings that are called artificially intelligent machines that are learning from our value system. And as they learn, they will grow to be like us. And unless we start to show them that happiness and compassion are the true values of the world, they will grow up to be mean, annoying, bullying, aggressive, narcissistic, selfish, competitive, and all of the features that we have internalized over the Industrial revolution until today. So 1 billion happy is my mission. I promise you, you will find some of the material I will talk about today useful to get you to that state of happiness. But before I go there, I want you to make me a promise. I definitely cannot reach a billion people. I can only reach a billion people if you help. And so I always ask people and say, if I give you two things today that will make you happier, please promise me that you're going to tell two People about them and then ask them to tell two people. Who will tell two people, who will tell two people. If you want, we want to build a Ponzi scheme, right? A positive Ponzi scheme, right? You tell two people, they tell two people, they tell two people. Promise? Yeah, I promise. Good. If I tell you more than two things, be generous and tell 20 people, okay? Good quota, right? So what is happiness? I was very happy until age 23. I didn't have much at all. And then by age 29, I had everything that everyone dreams of. And I became miserable. And I started to ask myself, why is happiness so hard to find? Why is it that I can buy anything I want, do anything I want, go anywhere I want, and I still am unhappy? And it occurred to me that it might be because none of the things I was investing in actually had any residual value of happiness at all in them. Maybe there is no happiness in vacations that last. Maybe there is no happiness in buying a fancy car. Maybe there is no happiness in. In buying a mobile phone, right? And, you know, all of those electronic gadgets and fashions and all of the things that we distract ourselves with, maybe they don't really make us happy. And I started to tell myself when I was happy, did I have any of those? You know, maybe I was happy at 23, I was happy at 20, I was happy at 16, I was happy at 2, by the way, every single one of you, it really. It shocked me to realize I was born happy. And if you don't believe me, just take a quick look at this. Every single infant you have ever seen in your life, if they were given their basic needs for survival, if they were fed, if they were safe, if they were given love, security, the room wasn't too cold. What was their state? Their state was happy. They lay on their backs and they looked at the ceiling and they giggled in joy. Remember that? You were in that state, too. You didn't ask for an Xbox to be happy. You didn't ask for anyone to tell you, hey, by the way, wonderful haircut. To feel happy. You didn't need any of that. You were just happy. You know what we call that in technology? We call it your default setting. You were born with a default setting of happiness. You know those mobile phones that we buy at the beginning? You buy it and it works perfectly well. You take it out of the box, and the first day, everything's beautiful. The menus will swipe perfectly. The English, you know, standard U.S. english is your language. The battery lasts a full day. At least that first day, right? And then. And then the next day, something starts to mess up with the phone. Is that because there is anything wrong with the phone that you bought? Nothing at all. Your phone is great. You just started to install weird apps on it. You know that. You know. You know the app with the blue logo that is responsible for telling you everything that everyone around the world has ever eaten, and you have to passionately say that you like it, right? The other app that is responsible to make you believe that every but in the world is just prettier than yours. And we, you know, the app does what we tell it to do. There is nothing wrong with the app. There is nothing wrong with the phone. But you put them together and you're abusing your battery life, you're abusing the network, and the phone doesn't perform anymore. Now, I tend to believe that this is also the reality about us. We're born happy, and then they install weird apps on our heads, right? The shape of your body matters. Your sexual tendencies matter. Unless you're rich, you're gonna starve to death. And by the way, your only value in life is in the things that you acquire. And we start to chase those concepts and beliefs, and as we do, we run out of happiness. It's literally like your phone coming out of the box, doing really well, and then suddenly becoming unhappy. Now, I found one song. Any Supertramp fans in the audience, I know that will give away your age, but yes. All right, so if you're not a Supertramp fan, I strongly recommend that you actually listen to the logical song. Make it your homework for this weekend. Listen to it as many times as you can so that it continues in your head and you're unable to get rid of it because this is the way it goes.

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful. Oh, it was beautiful, magical. And all the birds in the trees Will they be singing so happily? Oh, joyfully oh, they believe watching me but then they send me away Teach me how to be sensible, logical or responsible, practical. And then they show me a world where I could be so dependable or clinical. Oh, intellectual.

And that, my friends, is the story of your life, right? Truly. I mean, don't deny it. Remember when you were six and they sent you to school and they said, that's it. No more joyful, no more fun. You know that laughing thing? We don't do that here in school. And then, you know, they gave you homework and you had to be serious. Like, what's serious? I Was six. Like, seriously, where does serious come from? But we believed and we followed and we prioritized what they asked us to prioritize. All of those illusions, all of those false expectations, all of those societal pressures and put all of those on top of you. The happy you, believe it or not, is still inside. It's still waiting for all of those pressures to be taken off. And it hit me back in my research in 2004 that that little happy child, remember when a diaper was wet, the child cried. There was a reason to be unhappy. You change the diaper, the child goes back to happiness. Which actually is really interesting, because you know what it means? It means that happiness simply is the absence of unhappiness. I know this sounds really simple, so please read it again. Happiness is the absence of unhappiness. You know what that means. All of the consumer product promises that you get, you know that you buy this and you'll be happy, and you drink that and you'll be happy, and you dress this way and you'll be happy. They're all lies. There is nothing you can do to be happy. The only thing you can do to be happy is to stop being unhappy. Yeah, it's really that simple. If you stop being unhappy, what's left behind is your default state, and your default state is happy. So with that, I started to change my research. I started to search for the reasons that make me unhappy. And I thought if I could remove them one by one, what's left behind is going to be happy. So what is happiness? What if happiness is right here next to me and I don't know what it is? I started to research for an answer on that topic. I read every single book I could find, attended every lecture, couldn't find a common definition of happiness. So I started to do it the weirdest way, the way a scientist would do it. I started to take as many data points as I could of moments in my life where I felt happy. I plotted them on charts and I tried to find a trend line, some kind of an approximation of all of those data points. Because if I could find that trend line, that would be happiness. Any point on that line is reproducible as happiness, and any point outside that line is unhappiness. So I started to do something I call the Happy list. The happy list is as many answers as you could or as many completions as you could to the statement I feel happy when. And yeah, it actually was really interesting. I had 92 points at the time, and most of them were Very, very simple things. I feel happy when I have a good cup of coffee. I feel happy when my daughter smiles. I feel happy when I'm people I love. I'm with people I love. Right? And when you really start to think about it, most of the happy lists I've ever helped people produce since then were exactly there. No one has ever written on their happy list. I feel happy when I buy a Ferrari. Ever. Nobody ever said, I'll feel happy when I get a Nobel Prize. Mostly they're very simple things that you can invite in your life on daily basis at least once a week. But we don't. We don't invite them in our life enough. And by the way, you know, we should be. If we say that we want to be happy, maybe we should be actively focusing on inviting them in our lives more often. So I encourage you to do your own happy list, by the way, and do that. But that wasn't the purpose of my exercise. The purpose of my exercise was to find what is it that is common across all of the moments in my life where I felt happy? And you know what it was? I feel happy when life seems to be going my way. It really is very, very simple. Every single event that comes your way, your brain analyzes if that event is what.