Why Your Brain Sabotages Your Own Happiness

Lots of us go through life wanting different things. The right city, the right job, the right romantic partner. And then sometimes we get it all. We're ecstatic, but soon enough, we get the nagging suspicion that what we thought we wanted was not really what we actually wanted. After all, if it was, wouldn't we be happy? A Stanford professor has a name for this malaise. He calls it the all will be well fallacy. This is the belief that if you get the right job, the right relationship, the right number in your bank account, you'll be happy. But when you look back at your own life, have you noticed how achieving your goals can fail to produce lasting happiness? Why is this? Today, I'm going to tell you about 4 mental traps that can leave you feeling adrift and unhappy, even if you look like you're on the right track. And I'll share how you can build a life that's more satisfying. Let me explain. The year is 1973. A young engineering student named Dave Evans is waiting in line at a store. A television is playing in the corner. The news is on, and the anchor is talking about the skyrocketing price of gasoline. Dave sees the story, and he decides right there he's going to solve the energy crisis. He gets a master's degree in thermoscience, a branch of engineering focused on engines and power systems. He graduates in 1976, Ready to change the world. And then he runs into a problem. He cannot find a job doing what he wants to do. Dave spends 4 years looking for work. He starts a small solar energy company. It fails. He's broke, he's frustrated, and he's holding a welding torch one afternoon when the phone rings.

And the guy said, my name is so-and-so and I'm from Apple Computer. We'd like to talk to you. And I said, no, you want to talk to the Dave Evans at Hewlett-Packard. That's the one who likes computers. I don't. And I hung up.

14 interviews and a lunch with Steve Jobs later, Dave takes the job at Apple. He helps to design the very first mouse. He works on something called desktop publishing before anyone knew what that was. Looking back on that time with the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to see the importance of the work that Dave and his colleagues were doing. It was the beginning of a revolution in how people use technology. By any measure, it was important, Meaningful work. But at the same time, something nagged at him.

What I was doing was making stuff. And if I don't do it, somebody else will. So is that all there is?

Is that all there is? Dave had set out to save the world from oil. Instead, he was building plastic things with wires in them, as he puts it. He was successful, but the success didn't feel the way he'd been told it would feel. Years later, Dave left Apple and became a professor at Stanford University. He started teaching the art of design thinking. It was a method of problem solving that he had used to build products. Now he was applying it to something much harder, helping people to design a life that felt meaningful to them. While speaking to a room full of accountants in Kansas City, he met a woman whose question would stay with him for years. Her name was Allison. She ran a small business doing accounting and taxes for about 50 other small businesses. She was happily married, 2 children, 3-bedroom house.

She had exactly everything that she had ever tried to get in her life. She really thought she did it all right. She was really stuck.

This is that all-will-be-well mindset I mentioned earlier. Once I build a stable business, all will be well. Once I own the house, all will be well. Once the kids are settled, All will be well. It's a mindset that can keep you motivated and moving forward. But Dave says this is a trap, one of the first we fall into when we're trying to build a meaningful life. We think there's an ideal version of ourselves waiting to be unlocked, if only we can find the right key. The truth is, all of us contain more possibilities than any single lifetime can hold. There are more versions of you than you will ever have time to experience. Which means there is no one apex of the pyramid, no one ideal version of your life. The goal is impossible. Yet we carry this idea around like a moral obligation. We believe that we owe it to ourselves to become everything we're capable of. The second trap that many of us fall into is the idea that a meaningful life requires making an impact, changing the world, leaving a mark that outlasts us. Now, you might ask, why is this a trap? Isn't it a good thing to want to do something that endures, something that's remembered? The answer is, of course, that's a good thing. It's just a very, very hard goal to accomplish. And even when you manage to pull it off, the feeling of satisfaction that you get from that impact tends to fade. Picture it. You invent a groundbreaking gadget. You win an Oscar. You write a bestselling book. And it isn't long before the world asks you, what have you done for me lately? Resting your entire self-worth on your ability to make an impact can be risky. Trying to have an impact can also lead to a 3rd mental trap, the belief that radical change will inevitably make your life better. Dave says this trap prompts people to quit their jobs and uproot their lives, seeking a version of themselves that feels fundamentally different. But a few weeks or months or years after they make this big change, many people find that the novelty fades. They wake up in a new place, still themselves, still asking the same questions. The 4th and perhaps most dangerous trap is one that many of us fall into. It's the conviction that when something isn't working, you just need to do more, work harder, sleep less, push through. Dave fell into this trap early in his career. He had 3 children and a 75-hour workweek. He had trained himself to survive on just 3 or 4 hours of sleep every night. He thought he had it all figured out. But one Saturday morning, he had a realization.

I'm sitting in the family room drinking a cup of coffee, and I heard my then 3-year-old son Robbie say to his mother, Mom, could we play with Dad today, or is he just going to fall asleep in the chair again? When I was Robbie's age, my dad was gone because he died. When Robbie's Robbie's age, his dad's gone because he's asleep.

Dave knew in that moment that pushing harder was not working. Something had to give, and he didn't want it to be his health or his relationship with his family. So to recap, trap number 1 is believing that there is a single ideal version of yourself just waiting to be uncovered. Trap number 2, you have to make an impact on the world to be on the right path. Trap number 3, radical change will make everything better. And finally, trap number 4, if something is not working, push harder. 4 beliefs that feel productive. Each one is a trap. Now, maybe you're saying, okay, so if these beliefs are a trap, how do I avoid them? What's the alternative? Dave says that before you can figure out how to get where you want to go, You have to figure out if you're asking the right question. He calls this wayfinding.

When you can't know what you're doing, you can't navigate like a GPS would because you don't have a map and you don't have all the information. You have to wayfind. And wayfinding means taking one step at a time, knowing something about the direction you're going, trying a few things, you know, tuning it up and then doing it again and doing it again. And life is like that.

So instead of, what's the meaning of life? Ask yourself, how might I live a more meaningful life right now? That's a question you can actually do something with. You can try small experiments, see how they go, adjust your path accordingly. Another simple tool that Dave teaches begins with just 2 words: got to. Most of us approach our lives through a language of obligation. I've got to finish this project. I've got to attend this meeting. I've got to answer these emails. I've got to get the kids ready. Dave calls this the got-to mindset, where everything becomes a box to check before you get to the thing that actually matters. He suggests a shift in framing from got-to to get-to. I get to do this work. I get to be in this meeting. I get to pick up my kids. Same day, same obligations, But a completely different experience of being alive. Dave tells a story about his book editor who was working from home one day while her child was making noise in the other room. She caught herself thinking, I've got to get this kid to quiet down. But then she stopped and she told herself a different story. I get to work from home, which means I get to be in the presence of this very alive child. That shift took just 2 seconds, and it changed how the rest of her day felt. Dave calls this practice moment-making. It's the discipline of inhabiting the life you're already living instead of racing toward a future destination where meaning is supposed to begin. We just need to slow down long enough to notice that the life we're rushing through is already full of moments worth being present for. Because there's a term for what happens when you spend your whole life racing: destination sickness. Dave heard this term many years ago when talking with a nurse in an intensive care unit.

We have all these highly accomplished people, and it was always, when I finish the degree, get the grad degree, get the good job, make partner, make my first million. And it's always that next thing will make me happy. And some of the people here, the ones in their mid-50s who've burned their heart out and now they're actually gonna die, they suddenly realize there is no next thing. And then they look Back at all the things they ran through and they realized they missed the whole thing. Most of them die in despair.

The meaning of life is rarely found at a single destination. It's in the moments we race through trying to get there. So instead of asking, what's the meaning of my life? Come up with 3 different versions of yourself and prototype each path. You might find a new version that you love, or you might discover Or you might discover that the path you were on was not so bad after all. Whatever you choose doesn't have to be the one perfect path for you. As Dave says, there's more than one of you in there. The question is, which version do you want to be right now? If this video helped you see your life in new ways, you can find many more conversations about meaning and purpose on the Hidden Brain audio podcast. Spotify, or hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.