Want to ‘Optimize’ Your Happiness? This Happiness Expert Says: Don’t.

Are you happy? It’s a deceptively simple question, but for me, at least, a difficult one to answer.

Another tough question: Why is it so hard to be happy for so many? Despite a culture full of wellness influencers with their happiness hacks and mind-set tricks, all of the indicators show that we Americans are less happy than ever. It’s as if the more energy we focus on trying to feel happy, the harder it is to achieve.

So what is going on and what can we do about it? I put these questions to Laurie Santos. Santos is a cognitive scientist and professor whose class on happiness quickly became the most popular in Yale’s history. And through her podcast “The Happiness Lab” and her free online course called “The Science of Well-Being,” Santos’s reach has extended far beyond the classroom.

I wanted to understand what history and science say happiness really is, how that connects to loneliness and American ideas about productivity and why, with so many happiness tips flooding our feeds, it has still been so hard for me, and many others, to do the things that will actually make us truly, deeply happy.

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Lots of philosophers have tackled the question of happiness going back to ancient Greece, and there are two main types of happiness according to ancient Greek philosophers as far as I can tell: hedonic and eudaimonic. Can you explain the difference? Hedonic happiness is what a lot of laypeople mean when they say happiness — just a sense of good feeling. Often when we’re thinking of hedonic pleasure, we’re thinking of the really basic stuff: good food, good sex, a feeling of accomplishment. Eudaimonic happiness is bigger. It’s about living a good life. Happiness that comes not just from your own success, your own pleasure, but from other people and from building character. If you look back at the ancient folks like Aristotle, they knew about both, but when push came to shove they were like, Go for the eudaimonic.

In ancient Greece, the big philosophical debate was also if happiness was nature or nurture. What does science say? Are certain people more predisposed to be happy? The way scientists study this is they do these classic studies with twins, and what they generally find is that happiness is heritable. The important thing to know, though, is that the heritability factor is pretty low. It’s about the same rate as what you’d see for religiosity or risk-taking. If your parents were super religious, maybe you’re more likely to be super religious, but it’s not set in stone. That’s the message of happiness: There’s probably some component that’s a little built in, but so much more of it is under our conscious control.

So we can learn to be happy? That’s the premise of my work, honestly. And interestingly, this was something that the ancient Greeks didn’t totally realize. If you look at Aristotle, he’s like, You can do it, but it’s going to be hard. Aristotle talked about “the happy few.” Scientifically, we think it’s a little bit more malleable today, but we still share with Aristotle this idea that if you want to be happy, you can do it, but like all good things in life, you’ve got to put some time in.

Can I ask you what exactly you mean when you say “happy,” though? Because I was thinking about moments when I felt happy. I lived for two years in Rio de Janeiro, and I would wake up every morning and look out the window, and you couldn’t be unhappy there, because it was so beautiful. I had my young daughter, and she would go to the beach every day, and I had good friends. It’s not even like looking back I was happy — I knew at the time that I was experiencing happiness. Is that different from just general well-being? You were experiencing lots of positive emotions. It’s awesome to live in Rio de Janeiro. It’s awesome to stick your feet in the sand. That just feels good. That’s half of what social scientists mean when they talk about happiness. They’re talking about the feeling, the ratio of your positive to negative emotions. But happiness isn’t about getting rid of your negative emotions. That’s toxic positivity. Happiness, according to social scientists, has a second component, which is this idea of being happy with your life. You have a sense of meaning. You have a sense of purpose. It feels good to be you because of how you think it’s going. This is the cognitive part of happiness.

You used the term “toxic positivity.” You’re referring to this idea that we always need to feel great and exude optimism? It’s really summed up by the phrase that you see on social media all the time: “good vibes only.” If there are bad vibes, something’s really off. And that just doesn’t make sense from the perspective of evolution. When I talk to my students, the way I often talk about negative emotions is as a signal, just like other negative sensations. You put your hand on a really hot stove, it’s going to hurt. And the reason you have that feeling is it’s a good signal: Get your hand off that stove. Many of our negative emotions are doing that for us. If I’m feeling lonely, that’s a signal that I need to seek out social connection. A big one for me is that if I’m feeling overwhelmed, that means I have way too much on my plate. If you had good vibes only, you couldn’t live a positive life, because you’d be missing out on these cues about where you’re going off track and what you should change.

Do you worry that this idea of pursuing happiness, always striving, actually creates unhappiness? Definitely. There’s really lovely research on this from Iris Mauss at the University of California at Berkeley. She has a paper about the paradox of the pursuit of happiness, that the simple act of pursuing happiness often makes us feel unhappy. But that gets back to this fact that we just don’t get happiness right. When we think about the pursuit of happiness, we think of hedonic stuff. We think “good vibes only.” Whenever we’re off track with that, we think something’s gone wrong. And when things go wrong, we tend to have a different set of emotions — what nerdy psychologists like me call meta-emotions. Those are emotions about emotions.

So you go on some really cool trip to Rio de Janeiro and you’re like, I’m annoyed with the sand, it’s a little too sunny, I’m not feeling happy. That’s Emotion No. 1. Then the meta-emotions come in. You’re ashamed: How can I be in Rio de Janeiro and not feeling happy? You’re disappointed: I spent all this money. You’re judging yourself: What’s wrong with me that I don’t feel good? Those emotions come up whenever we feel like we’re off the path of the pursuit of happiness. And the problem is, if we are really into pursuing it — this is what Iris’s data show — the more you value happiness, the more you think you’re supposed to get there, the more these negative emotions come up whenever you feel like you’re off track. So, yeah, it really does seem empirically that it’s a paradox. Key, though, is that the paradox doesn’t come up as much if you’re pursuing the healthier kind of happiness.

The pandemic showed us that if you don’t have social connection, you’re really going to suffer. I have been trying to figure out what happened to me during that period, honestly. I became a lot more insular, and I had to relearn how to make those social connections. Am I typical? Pretty much every survey that asks people, “Was it smooth sailing when you jumped back in?” people are like, No. We got out of practice. And that makes sense, because even though we’re built to be social, connection is hard. As a professor, whenever I go into the dining hall, I’m shocked at how few of my students are talking to one another. When I walk into a seminar, where all my students are sitting around a table, they’re not chatting with one another. They’re all on a screen. And I think the problem for them is there’s a little bit of friction. It’s hard to get that going. And when you didn’t do it for a year, it got harder. You were out of practice.

The modern world is also taking away all these subtle ways that we talk to one another. One of my favorite articles that looked at this was by the Talking Heads frontman, David Byrne. He wrote this article, presciently, back in the 2010s called “Eliminating the Human.” His idea was that technology has taken away the human. We go to the A.T.M. now — we don’t have to talk to a teller. We don’t go to a record store and talk with people about records to get our music — we just have an algorithm deliver it to us. In all these subtle ways, our technologies are making it so that we don’t need to talk to people.

What do you think A.I. is going to do? It’s going to get way worse. The L.L.M. is there whenever you want to talk. The L.L.M. is not judgy. They can create cognitive delusions in people. Yet that is what our young people are turning to. I just had the technology specialist Jean Twenge on our podcast. She has talked a lot about phones, and she’s really shifting to the dangers of A.I. One of her data points is just how many young people, and we’re talking like 12-, 13-year-olds, are having their first relationship with an L.L.M. Their first boyfriend and girlfriend is an L.L.M. So what’s the friction going to look like when they have to ask a real human out on a date, navigate a sexual-consent conversation with a real human with preferences? I think A.I. is going to change this in ways that are likely to make it worse. It creates this cycle where it becomes harder and harder to overcome that little friction to talk to someone.

My daughter asked me recently, How do you go up to someone that you don’t know and talk to them? Today, you’re not only interrupting a social dynamic, you’re also interrupting people’s interaction with their devices. I notice it in my own family, because she comes up to me and I’m on my phone and I feel annoyed sometimes, like, I’m in the middle of reading, can’t you see? All these cues that it’s appropriate to talk to someone — they’re making eye contact with you, they’re smiling at you — that doesn’t happen when your eyes are glued to your phone. Liz Dunn, who’s a professor at the University of British Columbia, has a study I love where she puts strangers in a waiting room, and either has them have access to their phones or not. And she measures how often they spontaneously smile at each other. [She found] a 30 percent decrease in smiling! And I’m not harshing on people for their phones. They’re built to be interesting. But the consequence of our eyeballs being glued to them is really dangerous for the social connections we care about most.

There was a recent report by the American Enterprise Institute that shows that across all age groups, people are socializing with their neighbors less. Do you think we’ve just become a nation of indoor cats? This is something that scholars have been worried about for a while. Rewind to the late ’90s, early 2000s, and you have Robert Putnam’s seminal book, “Bowling Alone,” where he argued that back in the day, we’d go out to bowling alleys and bowl together and bowl in leagues. But nowadays — early 2000s — people just bowl alone. I talked with Putnam for my podcast, and he had this interesting idea of, when he wrote that, we didn’t know that viral TikTok videos were coming. There was television, which he was worried about, but we didn’t know there were going to be streaming services that picked algorithms to get you exactly the best documentary that only you, Lulu, would love. We’re fighting against technology that makes stuff interesting and attractive. There are whole companies built to keep our eyeballs on that stuff. Of course regular social connection with my friend at the bowling alley might suffer in the face of that kind of competition.

I also spoke to Robert Putnam, and his prescription was, to put it succinctly, “Join a club.” But I think a lot of people feel that they don’t have time for that, in between work and caretaking. This is something that social scientists are also really clued into. One of the coolest bits of work coming out of modern-day social science is on this concept of what’s called “time affluence.” This is lovely work by Ashley Whillans at Harvard Business School. Time affluence is feeling wealthy in time. It’s not how much objective time you have, but it’s the subjective sense that you have free time for yourself. It’s the opposite of what so many people are experiencing, which is what’s called time famine, where you’re literally starving for time. This term “famine” works physiologically, because when we feel like we don’t have enough time, it’s almost like famine. It increases inflammation. It does all these bad things to our body. But there’s lots of work showing that it does bad things to our social connection. And this time crisis is worse for marginalized people and people who don’t have enough income and are worried about putting food on the table. That crisis is linked to the loneliness crisis.

But is the time crisis real? Because I sometimes think about where I choose to spend my time. It’s watching a Netflix show, sitting on my sofa, or bed rotting, as it’s called on social media, as a way to “relax,” when it’s really not that relaxing at all. So is our time crisis manufactured by our bad choices? I’m going to say yes and no on that one. Yes in the sense that if you look to other countries that allow people to have a little bit more time affluence — the Netherlands, a lot of these countries that come up very high on the happiness list in Scandinavia — they have a 35-hour work week. So people have time to do stuff with their friends. And what you find is that in those countries, Denmark in particular, club membership is huge. They’re joiners, in part because they have time. I think that does matter. If we set things up structurally to have more time in the United States, maybe with a four-day workweek, it’s happiness-inducing, good for companies and so on. I think we could get there. So there’s something about the time crisis that is real. But if you look at the data, what you find is that people today actually have more free time than they did 15, 20 years ago. It doesn’t feel like it.

It really does not. And there’s a reason it doesn’t feel like it, which is that the blocks of time have shifted. They’ve turned into what the journalist Brigid Schulte has called time confetti. These five minutes when, if our conversation ends a little early, or when your kid falls asleep unexpectedly quickly, or some work meeting ends. It’s not a big chunk — it’s little chunks. We have more time because we have more of those little chunks. But those little chunks don’t feel like a lot of time. And so what do we do with the little chunks? I know what I did before I knew about this research: I checked my email. I scrolled something quick on Instagram. I looked at something dumb on my phone. And that gets to your point: In practice, we do actually have free time. We’re just not using it well.

The other thing I hear people say about why they don’t interact more socially is that they enjoy being alone. They interact with people all day for work and just prefer their downtime to be more calm, more peaceful. I do sometimes wonder if people are just kidding themselves, though. [Laughs] Well, there’s actually some lovely new work on this topic by Micaela Rodriguez. Her work focuses on this flip side of the loneliness crisis. She’s a little younger than I am, and she’s like, My whole generation has spent all this time hearing about how bad loneliness is. It’s so terrible. It’s as bad as 15 cigarettes a day. And she’s like, Two things: One, let’s jump back to Aristotle, Buddhist texts and so on. Those folks were into contemplation. They were into solitude. They were into the benefits of having the time and the bandwidth to notice what’s going on with yourself, to think, to be bored. They knew that there were some benefits to alone time.

Second thing is that we know from so much literature and psychology that how you frame something affects how you experience it. If I’m a student who’s alone in the dining hall, and I sit down and think, My gosh, this is my me time, I can contemplate, I can gather my thoughts before class, that’s great. But if you’re seeped in everything that social scientists like me have been saying, it’s like: This is the loneliness crisis! Look at you! You’re sitting in the dining hall by yourself? You’re going to feel crappy, right? You’re going to judge yourself. You’re going to have all those nasty meta-emotions that we talked about before. Micaela said there’s something damaging about this narrative. I don’t think we necessarily want to justify it fully — pretty much every available study of happy people suggests that happy people have some strong relationships — but that doesn’t mean we have to be in social connection all the time.

Is there anything about our happiness that you think is uniquely American? Oh, for sure. We’re such weirdos when it comes to happiness. We are really into happiness, first of all. We care a lot about it, and that means that we tend to have more of that paradox of pursuing happiness that we talked about before, this idea that the more you go for happiness, the more unlikely you are to get it. This is one of the things I find most fascinating about Iris Mauss’s research. She works at U.C. Berkeley, but she’s German. One of things that drew her to this work is that Germans have a different relationship with the pursuit of happiness than Americans do. There’s some data on this. There are studies that have analyzed, for example, condolence cards in Germany and other parts of Europe and the U.S. And what they find is that all of them mention grief, but the German cards stop there. Whereas the American greeting cards are like, but silver lining, they’re in a better place, the German cards stop at, somebody died and you’re sad.

So I think Americans are kind of weirdos when it comes to happiness. We’re also focused on optimizing. This feels very TikTok, but it’s something Americans have been thinking about for a long time. Rewind to the early 19th century, and you have scholars like Alexis de Tocqueville, who came over to the U.S. as this anthropological experiment, like, What’s going on with the new country? And what he remarked upon was that Americans weren’t just constantly pursuing happiness — they were never satisfied. My guess is if de Tocqueville showed up today, he’d be like, Oh, man.

It’s funny you mention this, because I’ve noticed a lot of interest in your work from what I’d call productivity dudes — people who are obsessed with practical tips and clear-cut answers for how to always be improving. And I’ve heard you tell them things like the science backs up that your employees will be more productive if they’re happier. Do you have misgivings about productivity and this idea of optimization? Yes, I definitely have misgivings. One of the things that we have to pay attention to is how we’re optimizing. But another thing I worry about with the productivity culture is that we’re just never going to get there. I recently interviewed Oliver Burkeman, who is this productivity expert. He would review time-performance apps, and he had this realization: It’s never going to be enough. And one of the ways you can productivity-hack is to have radical acceptance about that. It’s not the usual move for the productivity-hack bros: self-compassion, realizing your limits, recognizing your common humanity. But it’s what the data suggests leads you to happiness, and might actually lead you to more productivity too.

We’ve been talking about people who go to Yale, people who are in demanding office jobs. But of course there’s the structural inequality that comes from American society where people have to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet, plus raising families. One of the reasons that countries like Denmark are happy is because they have social safety nets. It’s one of the reasons people can pick careers that they like. You’re taxed so heavily that it doesn’t pay to be a finance bro, so you’re like, Well, I might as well be an artist if I want to be an artist. The lack of income inequality means people have an excuse to follow their purpose, which can allow people to feel like their life is better. Those structural things matter a lot.

I get in trouble sometimes for talking about so many of these individual solutions — engage in social connection or write in a gratitude journal or meditate. And people think, Don’t we also have to have a social safety net? Yeah, of course. All these individual things that I’m suggesting are supposed to complement, not substitute for the stuff that we should really be doing.

But another thing we know about individual action is that it just makes us more productive. It gives us emotional bandwidth. I think people mistakenly think that these individual strategies sometimes build up the resilience you need to put up with being in a bad society. But I think the real goal is to give you the resilience to fight the bad society. There’s data on this. Kostadin Kushlev, who’s at Georgetown, talks about the Pollyanna Hypothesis, which is this idea that if we just make people happy, they’re going to be delulu, walking around like, Everything’s great, all these structures of inequality, I’m cool with that. And his point is, that’s a hypothesis about how human nature works. The hypothesis is you make people happy and they are going to ignore the structural stuff. And what he finds is the opposite. If you look at people who are taking action to fix structural problems, it’s the people who have the highest positive emotion.

It goes back to where we started, around the eudaimonic sense of how you become happy and find meaning. And getting back to the American experiment. This was what the forefathers meant, right? They had problems. Those unalienable rights are for landed white dudes, not for everybody. But in the idealistic sense, what they were trying to go for is that eudaimonic sense of happiness. It was about civic virtue. It was about making everybody happy. That was the happiness they thought we should all be pursuing.

This interview has been edited and condensed. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio or Amazon Music. Follow us on Instagram and TikTok.