Why Willpower Won't Change Your Habits | Jonathan Haidt

Hey, everybody, welcome to the 10% Happier podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. This whole show, and in fact, my whole post TV news anchorman career is based on the mix of ancient wisdom and modern science, which really are two great tastes that taste great together, as they used to say in the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups ads when I was a kid. And there's so much to be learned at the intersection of these two fields, which is why I was really excited when I heard from Jonathan Haidt, who wanted to come on to talk about his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, which really takes pillars of ancient wisdom and then pressure tests them against modern research. You might know Jonathan Haidt. He is a social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business. He has written many, many bestselling books, including The Anxious Generation. But today, we're really going to focus on The Happiness Hypothesis, which is actually 20 years old. It's celebrating its 20th anniversary, and he has just put out a revised edition of the book. Jonathan Haidt, welcome back to the show. Dan, thanks so much for having me on. Tell me about the idea for this book. I think I might have given away the headline, but the basic idea, as I said, is let's look at some pillars of ancient wisdom and see how they hold up in light of today's science. That's right. So the book grows out of my teaching Psych 101 at the University of Virginia. My first academic job beginning in 1995 was there. I was assigned to teach Psych 101. I have to teach a room of 319-year-olds everything from physiological psychology through love and dieting, everything. And I would often quote Shakespeare or Buddha. So it was clear that there are certain ideas. For example, there's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so, from Hamlet. And that is the foundation of stoicism, of Buddhism, of cognitive therapy, like that idea. And when I was coming up for tenure, I didn't have a lot of experimental publications, and I thought I might not get tenure. And if I don't get tenure, I don't want to just transfer to a lower-ranked university. You know what? I'll drop out, and I'll try to write up this trade book, collect all these ideas and write it up. So I did get tenure, although it was just barely. I happen to know my vote because they made a mistake and revealed it to me accidentally. But anyway, I got tenure at UVA, and I decided to write the book anyway. And it was so much fun. I basically just read every work from ancient China, India, everything that, you know, religious texts, anything that had sort of statements about humanity in it. And I had a big, long WordPerfect back then, a WordPerfect file with all these quotes. I organized them, and it turned out they really fell into clusters, and they were all true. Like none of the, you know, if an idea has survived for 2,000 or 3,000 years, it's not going to be, like, wrong. But in every case, there was nuance you could bring in from psychology. So that was the origin of the book. If it's cool with you, let's go through some of them. Okay. Let's do it. Let's start with the one you just mentioned. There's nothing good or bad except thinking makes it so. I think that's chapter 2, Changing Your Mind. That's right. So, okay, page 38. So it starts off with a quote from Marcus Aurelius, The whole universe is change, and life itself is but what you deem it. And this is Marcus Aurelius in the meditation, sitting alone in his tent at night, trying to improve his own mental health, trying to psych himself up and stop making mistakes. And he's telling himself, like, you know, don't be anxious about this. Don't be like, okay, this is under your control to frame this. This is not the reality. And then here's a very similar thought from Buddha. What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow. Our life is the creation of our mind. Exactly the same idea from, you know, many thousands of miles apart, both from 2,000 years ago. And both of those are the foundation of CBT and so much modern pop psychology. Two foundational truths of the book are the first one is about the divided self, and the second was this one about appraisal. Maybe we'll get to the divided self, but let's stay with this one, which is, as you say, appraisal. CBT is cognitive behavioral therapy. I am not an expert in this, but as I understand it, it's really about changing your relationship to your thoughts. What's the practical takeaway, if we agree with the Buddha and Marcus Aurelius and Shakespeare? Yeah. So the practical, okay, so let me give you an example. I teach a course at NYU called Flourishing. I taught it back in UVA when I was writing the book, and then I moved to the Stern School of Business, and I resurrected it as a course for business students. And over time, we've settled on a few texts that are just fantastic, and one of them is called The Stoic Challenge by William Irvine. And it really sort of makes super accessible stoic thinkings, and he tells you, whenever you face a setback, what happens is we have a setback, like, you know, you missed your train, and now you're going to be late for a job interview, and that really sucks. Okay, so that's bad. But then in addition, we get upset, and we suffer. Oh, why didn't I do, or God damn, that's two harms. And the stoic challenge is to say, okay, I missed the train. Stoic challenge, the stoic gods are giving me a chance to prove myself. Can I get through this without the second suffering? How am I going to do that? And so I've assigned this book for the last eight or 10 years. It's wonderful. So this morning, I taught the class. I have an MBA version, undergraduate. So this morning was the MBA version. And I asked for stories from the class, because they were starting the book. And one woman said, it was a really simple thing, but I come in from Queens every morning, and like half the time, the subway gets stuck under the river. We just sit there for a while, and it makes me really upset. And I said, okay, so what do you do? And she said, well, this morning when it happened, I just said, stoic challenge, stoic challenge. And then I took out a book, because I've started reading again. I haven't really read any novels in years, and I used to love reading novels. And so I took out a book, and I had 10 minutes to just sit there and read the book. What would have happened before is she would spend that time stewing the double loss. She now is late, and she's upset. But instead, she actually got 10 minutes of reading in. And so that's a super simple example, but it applies to almost everything where our mind reacts instantly. Our minds are very quick. Our minds react almost instantly to setbacks, problems, people. And now these students are learning how to have that little pause. You say, stoic challenge, and that gives you a moment to reflect. So the next time something shitty happens, just get in the habit of saying stoic challenge. Yeah, say stoic challenge. And really what you're sending a message to your mind and your nervous system, how can I make the best of this situation? Exactly. You're saying life itself is but what you deem it. What am I going to deem this situation? Right, right. It's that simple. Have you heard of the Buddhist concept of the second arrow? Exactly. That's it. The second arrow. You're going to get struck by one arrow, okay? You don't have to invite the second one in. Yeah, that's it. I feel like I deliver fifth and sixth arrows to myself on the regular. And just to have a little thing to say in, I mean, another thing you could say, I've heard, I can't remember his name, but there's some podcast host who has this little thing that anytime something quote unquote bad happens to him, he says, good. Oh, I've heard that too. I don't know who that is. I think it's the former military guy. Oh, yeah. Is it Jocko? Jocko. Well, I've never met Jocko. If you want to come on, you're welcome. I've always really liked that. I've never been able to do it. So here's why that works. Let me bring in the first truth now. So the foundational, most common, most important ancient wisdom truth that is essential for understanding modern psychology and all the stupid things that we do is truth number one, the divided self. Here are the quotes. So I always open the quote with two, the opening chapter with two quotes. So these two happen to be both from Western sources, but you find this everywhere. So one is St. Paul Galatians, for what the flesh desires is opposed to the spirit and what the spirit desires as opposed to the flesh, for these are opposed to each other to prevent you from doing what you want or other translations that you cannot do the things ye would is the more common translation. And here's Benjamin Franklin, if passion drives, let reason hold the reins. So every society has noticed that we want to do something, but then we don't do it. We do something else. And they generally contrast passion and reason or something like that, the spirit and the flesh. And so here's a case where modern psychology really helps us go further because really what's happening, it's not so much like passion and reason because the passions and the emotions are actually really rational. The passions, the emotions involve a lot of cognitive processing, a lot of meaning making. As I go through it in chapter one, I go through, you know, it's not exactly, you know, emotion reason, what it really is system one versus system two. Now this is the terms used by Dan Kahneman, who took it from an earlier cognitive psychologist. System one is pattern matching, automatic, the automatic mind. Our minds, our neural networks, they're 500 million years old. They work really well in all these animal species that don't have language. That's the way the mind works. Pattern comes in, pattern goes out, neural network in between syncs those up. Humans in the last million years, we don't know when, we got language, we got the ability, the second system where we can think through and we think, you know, I really shouldn't have that dessert. My cholesterol is high, I'm overweight, whatever. We think that, but then I don't know about you. Once there's a sweet dessert in front of me, I cannot stop eating. I will, you know, I'm good at not ordering dessert, but if it's on the table, I will eat it and then I will keep going. I cannot stop. Dan Kahneman I used to be that way with cocaine too. Chris I don't know whether you're kidding. Dan Kahneman I'm not kidding. Chris Okay. So yeah, I'm glad mine was just sugar. So the point is, most of our mind is an animal brain, which does pattern matching automatic, and that's what controls our behavior. But we have the second system. I make up the metaphor in the book that our mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict, like a small rider on top of a very large elephant. And the rider, and you see it here on the cover of the book, on the older edition, it was clearer. There's a small rider on top of the elephant. The elephant is super smart. A lot of previous metaphors, like Freud used a metaphor of like a carriage driver and the horse. A lot of people have used horses because humans are so familiar with horses. Horses are kind of dumb, but I wanted a metaphor. The elephant's really big. It's really smart. It has a great memory. So I thought I made that up myself. Although it turns out Buddha used that metaphor too. I might've gotten it from him in college. I don't know. But here's the point. Most of what we do is governed by automatic processes. We're not really in control, but we do think we have this consciousness. And so I tell my students, because the course is organized around, you have to improve yourself. You have to make a change in your habits, make a change that will make you happier over the course of the semester. But you cannot just use willpower. You cannot just say, I'm going to stop being and smelling the roses. I'm just going to remind myself to do it. That's not going to work. I'm going to be nicer to my girl. No, that's not going to work. I'm going to eat less and actually, no, that's not going to work. You have to have a system. And so the rider can make the resolution, but you have to have a plan. And so if you practice doing stoic challenge, what happens is the rider is saying like, you're riding along with this giant elephant and all of a sudden there's an obstacle and you know that the elephant's about to rear up and get all upset. But the rider can say, stoic challenge, here's a peanut. Okay. You know, pause. Okay. And then over time it becomes habitual to take a deep breath and look for other ways. So the rider and the elephant work together in people are mentally healthy and they are not well coordinated in people who are not mentally healthy. And is the elephant in this case are unconscious? Is it our passions? Is it both? Yeah. The way to think about it is it's everything the mind does other than conscious verbal reasoning. And so everything about motivations, desires, everything about emotions. So there's reasoning in emotions. There's cognition in emotion. So it's not emotion, cognition. It's automatic processing versus controlled processing is the way that modern psychology talks about it. And so we're not helpless in the face of the elephant, but we do have to recognize that the elephant is larger and more powerful than our CEO mind. Exactly. And if you've ever seen videos of how they train elephants or how they train dogs, it's behaviorism. It's, you just give a little, you know, you have, there's a behavior, you know, the, the elephant like begins to like sit back, you give him a peanut. He sits back a little further, you give him a peanut. He lifts one, one leg up, you give him another peanut. He lifts both legs up. You give, you know, so this is how BF Skinner, the behaviorist, this is how they train animals to do amazing things. Small rewards given quickly will change your behavior. That's the way the elephant works. That's the way neural networks work. Very practically. You've walked us through a little bit. I'm just going to put a fine point on this. If we want to change and grow, we really need to be treating ourselves like a toddler or a kitty cat or a dog that we are, or an elephant that we are training using these behaviorist, behaviorist or behaviorist concepts. That's right. Especially for a change that involves behavior. So habits, you know, like biting your fingernails or forgetting to brush your teeth or improving your diet or so things that are behavioral. Absolutely. For things that are purely mental, it's a little harder. It still works, but it's, it's, it's not quite as obvious how to do it. And with, so with CBT, with a lot of methods in pop psychology, what you do is you, so something happens and you begin to have these negative emotions and you get in the habit, take some practice, takes a few weeks, but you get in the habit of pausing and identifying the distortion. You see that you're reacting and you become aware of that. And then you pause for a moment and you'll say, you might say, okay, so what actually happened here? Or you might say, there I go again, doing catastrophizing. There I go again, doing emotional reasoning. And so my friend, Greg Lukianoff, who was, is the president of the foundation for individual rights and expression. He had the insight that led to the coddling the American mind. We wrote this book together. Greg is prone to severe depression. He had a suicidal depression in 2007, which led him to learn CBT. Greg says what he does is whatever thought is going through his head, these ruminations, these repetitive thoughts, these negative thoughts, what he does is he'll say it to himself in a Daffy Duck voice. He'll say the same thing, but in Daffy Duck's voice in his head. And that allows him to sort of laugh at it. And that gives him a little bit of distance to now do the work of CBT, which is say, oh, that's catastrophizing. Yeah, it might be bad, but it probably won't be. Let's look at what's really happening here. What are the options? Another hack that I've learned along those lines is to sing your worries out loud. That's right. That would be a similar approach. If you're a regular listener of the show, you know that we're always adding amazing new teachers and new guided meditations and hosting live sessions over on my app, which is called 10 percent with Dan Harris. What you might not know is that we also now have a full library of not just guided meditations, but also short courses and challenges. We've got a meditation masterclass with Joseph Goldstein. We've got. and Salzburg covering the Eightfold Path. We've got Diana Winston with her Reset Challenge. And next week, we are dropping a new course from Sharon Salzburg and Andy Gonzalez. It's called Taking Care of Yourself so You Can Take Care of the World. It's an eight-part course to help you develop skills for resilience and clear seeing. 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Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com slash happier. That's Q-U-O.com slash happier. I don't know if this is gonna make sense to you because this may be too deep end of the pool, Buddhist, but it just came to my mind. I struggle a lot with anxiety and depression and have since I was a little kid. One move that I make sometimes when I'm feeling despair, particularly despair, but anxiety too, is there's a quote from the Buddha, "'Not I, not mine, not myself.'" It is a refrain that runs through the Buddhist texts and is a way of reminding myself that emotions are like meteorological phenomena. They're coming together of impersonal conditions. They will pass at some point. So it kind of depersonalizes, but not in an unhealthy way. It makes it more tractable. Does that make any sense, what I'm saying? It does. That's an interesting case of where I think the Eastern and Western ideas differ. So as I was telling my students this morning, Stoicism, Buddhism, they're like almost the same thing. They have all these same ideas. That one I think is different. That's a more uniquely Eastern Hindu Buddhist notion like the Stoics didn't say that. The Stoics said, you don't have a self. No, they didn't say that. So at least, especially if you're raised in a Hindu Buddhist Eastern culture, that might be particularly resonant, especially if you have meditated, if the religion all around you told you that. That may not work as well for Westerners. I think the idea of this illusion of the self is really hard for a Westerner. It is, yeah. I have never been able to see myself as illusionary. Like, no, I don't get that personally, like as an intuitive idea. And it's hard, I'm not gonna argue you into it. It's really, it's hard. One of the reasons why I've seen these studies and you're the researcher, so you'll know if I'm recapitulating the research correctly, but these studies where they take people from Eastern civilizations, Eastern countries, and Western countries, or let's just say Asian and America or European countries, and they're asked to draw themselves in relationship to their community. And in the West, we draw ourselves huge and everybody else around us small. And in the East, it's everybody's drawn at the same size. And I think in a culture where we're so individualistic, consumerist, it's really hard to get the idea that the self isn't primary. That's right, there's a lot of research in a field called cultural psychology, which began with those sorts of studies, showing that if you ask, if you give people 20 lines, I am blank, blank, blank, you know, I am tall, I am, you know, a good guitar player. But in Eastern countries, it's I am a brother, I am a son, I am a, it's your roles in relationships. Westerners generally have a, what Hazel Marcus calls, a big, thick, padded self. And there are many advantages to that in terms of achievement and, you know, Western nations are generally pretty happy. But I think in, there's a, relevant here, there's a really good book, and I talk about it in The Happiness Hypothesis, by Mark Leary called The Curse of the Self. And it's about how self-consciousness ends up being the cause of so much of our misery. Our minds are incredibly social, a lot of our evolution is not for surviving lions and tigers and bears, it's for dealing really skillfully with other people. And we were always enmeshed in networks of other people. We never spent time alone, like until very recently, people were not alone. And now we spend a lot of time alone. And we do have, I'm not sure it's about alcohol, we do have problems and increasing problems with depression and anxiety. And they do seem to be related to our lack of embeddedness and healthy relationships and networks and networks of meaning. That's a huge problem. That's a huge problem. Getting worse. Getting worse, yes. I can't, on the getting worse tip, it just seems to me like AI, it's hard to imagine that helping things. I'm not anti-AI holistically, I have concerns. At least not yet. Maybe I will be. Yeah, when it tries to turn me into a paperclip. Yeah, maybe tomorrow. My one glimmer of optimism, I was at an event this morning with a bunch of young people who are social media creators. And they were, many of them were arguing to me that they're so sick of digital technology that they think it's going to lead to a resurgence of IRL in person. It's happening. Yeah, that is definitely happening. So here's the way that I look at it. In the 20th century, technology was always amazing. Setting aside the nuclear bomb, technology meant better everything. And I'm a little older than you, I was born in 1963. But technology was always exciting, promising, it made our lives better. And these were technologies that helped us do things that we wanted to do. And then we get the internet. And the internet was the most incredible thing ever. And you could get everything instantly. For a minute. My God. So the internet in the 90s was incredible. And then we get into the 2000s and now different business models come in. It gets, the word is inshittified. That's by Cory Doctorow. The business models allow the attention, create the attention economy companies like Meta, and they suck a trillion dollars of value out of people's attention. So now it starts getting more predatory. And then we get the smartphone in our pockets, which now allows us to be linked up all the time. And when you take most of people's time and attention, that is taken from everywhere. That means they get less sleep, they get less movement, they get less sunshine, they get less time with other people. I can't remember who was reading recently who pointed out, young people today haven't touched very much. Almost everything is glass. You know, when you and I were growing up, I remember taking apart a doorknob and a radio, and we were dealing with material things. We used our hands and there were smells. Things smelled like something. And if you grow up almost all on a screen, there's not much touch, not much smell, not much sensory, very little touch of other people. There's a lot less sex, a lot less love. And so I think what we're seeing is, just in the last few months, especially really until we're here in 2026, we're seeing almost an allergic reaction from humanity. Like, this is too much. This stuff which we thought was so wonderful, it's overwhelming. It's crushing our kids. It's making us all feel we can't focus. We can't read books. We don't have time with each other. So I'm actually really excited. I'm extremely negative about digital technology now, what it's doing as a social psychologist, what social media did to social relationships, and what AI is doing to education. Horrific, cognitive offloading, cognitive surrender. And what it's doing to relationships as AI takes relationships is so horrible. But I'm excited now that we are seeing this allergic reaction and the data center thing, it's unrelated to what we're talking about, but yet it's all part of a human shrug of saying like, stop, stop. It's not unrelated in that I think, I'm not sure data centers are more insulting to the environment than any other industrial innovation. It's just our anger to me, and I could be wrong, and people are probably gonna at me over this, but it seems to me that people are upset about data centers because they're really upset about AI. Yeah, I think so. I think that's right too. And what's striking to me is that this AI backlash, this tech lash, as some people are calling it, is truly bipartisan. Yes. The one thing we agree on. That's right, that's right. So one of the initiatives, so after the Anxious Generation came out, the first thing that really took off was phone-free schools because all of the teachers hate it. You know, they went into teaching to teach, and they don't get to, you know, the kids are watching TikTok and porn in class. Like it's insane what we let happen. And there's a headline in Politico about a year ago said the last bipartisan issue in America and one thing I learned when I was writing the book, I thought we're never gonna get any help from government. Our Congress is broken, things are corrupt, we're not gonna get any help from government. What I didn't realize is that there are 50 governors, almost all of them are parents, almost all of them see the problem. They jumped into action. The teachers, the school, everybody sees the problem. So at least with phone-free schools and kids, it's completely bipartisan. And you're right, the data center thing is unrelated to the phone-free schools issue, but yet I think it is a common bipartisan frustration. Standing athwart, history yelling, stop. That's kind of what's going on. Yes, yes. All right, so let's talk a little bit about, since we're talking about the importance of relationships for flourishing. You have a chapter about love and attachment in the happiness hypothesis. And I believe the ancient hypothesis you're playing, well, actually you're pulling out the book, you tell me, what is the ancient hypothesis that you're pressure testing in that chapter? So let's turn to that, page 149. The first is from Seneca. No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility. You must live for your neighbor if you would live for yourself. And so the idea that we, and then the second was John Donne. No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. So, and I don't have an Eastern quote here in the opening, but everybody talks about love and neighborliness and relatedness. But what I was surprised by is that there wasn't a lot in the ancient sources on romantic love or passionate love that actually Western philosophers really distrust it. And they often urge young men, of course they're always writing to young men at the time, to like avoid it, like this is gonna be a corruption. You know, you should really love philosophy or God or knowledge or something like that. What I do in the chapter is I bring in the attachment system, which is incredibly fascinating and so important for anybody raising kids. And I start off with the Harry Harlow experiments in which at the time in the behaviorist era in the 1930s, 40s, people thought, well, the child bonds to its mother because of the milk. The milk is reinforcing and that's why they bond. They didn't understand back then that there is an innate need for touch, love, contact, comfort, cuddling. We're mammals, we do this. And so once you understand the attachment system, how kids have sort of built into their minds, a system that says like, okay, who is responsive? Who is the adult who's my caretaker? And then they lock onto that. And that's a healthy attachment. So once you understand the attachment system in infants and children, now the really interesting discovery in the 70s and 80s by Phil Shaver and I forget who else, was that adult attachment, when you fall in love with someone and you have an adult romantic relationship, we're actually reusing the same cognitive models that we used as a child. And so if you were insecurely attached as a child, when your parent goes away, you're alone in a room, you get upset, and then when they come back, you don't settle quickly, you're still upset. Or maybe they go away, you don't even seem to notice because you're not attached. If you don't have healthy attachment as a child, your brain develops these models of the world and how people are responsive. We often use those for our adult romantic relationships. And so there's a lot of advice in the book on adult love, because that's certainly what my students care most about. And so especially, I think the advice that seems most to resonate, people tell me a lot about the book, is that the most important thing they got out of it was the difference between passionate and companionate love. So passionate love is the love that you fall into, it's falling in love, it's the pop songs, it's the movies, it's like a drug, you can fall in love with anyone in the world who's attractive, even if they're wildly inappropriate for you. That's what so much of pop culture is about. So that's not attachment, that's a mating system that is very ancient and it makes us want to have sex. And it makes us fall in love for a couple of months, that's the amount of time it takes to make a baby on average. We don't make a baby just from one act that often, it often takes multiple acts. So there's this one system that kind of makes us create babies, but doesn't keep us together. And then there's companionate love, which is where your life gets enmeshed with another person, and you come to depend on them and they on you, and it grows slowly over time. And a happy marriage is not predicted by a wild sex life in the first weeks, like that can happen with anyone. If you get a mix, if you get the companionate love, that's really a more important thing for a lasting or stable marriage. The companion, of course you want some passion in it, you want the passion to stay around to some extent. But anyway, that's the sort of stuff that I go into in chapter six. My wife and I have long seen this couple's therapist who we love and he talks about how in the West we have this idea that we're gonna go from one enchanted evening to happily ever after. But that is often not the case. We need some sort of bridge between the passionate love that gets us into the thing in the first place and the companionate love that will stop us from getting divorced. So what have you learned about what that bridge might consist of? Absolutely, right. So when I teach this to undergrads, I say, here's what we think is possible. Happily ever after, you fall madly in love, you stay in love forever. Maybe it'll get a little bit weaker, but we think it'll be like that. And that doesn't happen. Instead, what typically happens, and here I'll show this to the camera, although I know this is too small, is there's like a big spike and then it drops. And when it drops, people often think, oh, I guess it wasn't true love. But there's always gonna be a time when that passion cools. And that doesn't mean the person's not right for you. So sometimes we make a mistake by at the peak saying, oh my God, this is my soulmate, let's get married. And then sometimes it's hard to stop that train. Or we make a mistake of like, oh, the magic has worn off, therefore this is the wrong person. But while the passionate love goes up instantly and is wonderful and amazing, the companionate love grows more slowly as you intertwine your lives. The Little Prince, if anybody's read. the little, you know, le petit prince, the, is it the fox? Talks about taming. Like, no, no, you have to come every day and I will come to expect you. And then when you're late, I will feel like, oh, where is he? And so that's this gradual coming to expect things, gradual sharing your life. And that's more like, like, you know, plants growing together or like a cutting growing up. I mean, there are ways that we grow together. And then that's a totally different psychological system from the crazy hormonal falling in love, wanting to touch, kiss, have sex. This is the graph that Jonathan has been holding up. It shows the intensity level for passionate love spikes and then dwindles and quite quickly, whereas companionate love just kind of steadily grows from a low point to a sustainable point. We often start even long-term companionate love with a spouse or some sort of romantic partner starts with passion and then can move into companion. Yes. For Westerners, where we have love marriages, that's our ideal. Our ideal, you know, most of the world had agricultural societies had arranged marriages. You don't expect these young, how can we trust these young people to make this? They don't know anything. So, you know, marriage is arranged between families, the parents pick like, you know, and in many cases, in some like in India, I spent a little time in India. In India, when I was there in the nineties, it seemed like the norm was becoming the parents arranged the marriage, but the kids have a veto. If they really don't want it, we're not going to force them. But the parents arranged the marriage. And then sometimes in, you know, Hindi films are all about, you know, sometimes there'll be wild, crazy, passionate love. Other times it will grow slowly. That's very different from what we have. What we have is it's up to the kids. We expect it to start with love and with passionate love and sex. Obviously, there's subcultures. There are ones that don't think you should have sex before marriage. And so it's up to kids to figure it out. And I think we don't have a very good track record, you know, in terms of the divorce rate, in terms of the declining amount of dating and sex and love and marriage. So our system is not working very well. We teach a lot of things in school, but we don't teach this. And it seems like we maybe should. Yeah, I think so. And especially, I think we all need to really think about how technology is changing things. And so this is a point that we talk a lot about in my class when we do the section on the day on love. So most animals are not monogamous. Most mammals are not. Very few mammals are monogamous. Even humans aren't really that monogamous over time. We tend to do like serial. But we have courtship. And any species in which male investment isn't necessary, you tend to have courtship. Because if we're going to do this thing, the female wants to be sure that we're not just getting the sperm, we're getting some commitment here. Right, guys? You're going to help me out, right? So birds have to do that because you couldn't possibly be a bird and raise a child on your own. You have to have two parents for birds. Chimpanzees, no male involvement really at all. But humans, variable from a little to a lot, never 50%. It's always mostly female. Okay, but so what I'm getting at is we have courtship. And in courtship, that's flirting. And it's you show some interest, you show some excellence, you show some virtues, you somehow convey that I am a person that you will want to pair with. And it takes time. And when it goes in steps, it's exciting. And when it works, it's thrilling. And okay, what happens instead? Okay, swipe, swipe, swipe. Yeah, you look good enough. Okay, let's have lunch. Oh, but you're not as good as him. And all young people have stories of being out on a date. And they go to the bathroom. When they come back, the person's swiping and looking for someone else to go out with tonight. The technology cuts off courtship. The technology makes it difficult to display virtues. The technology makes it difficult to fall in love, frankly. I was texting my brother recently about something around AI. And he just wrote, I'm glad I'm not young. It's just that's what my millennial students say. They say, they say, thank those who got married in their 30s. They say, you know, like, I got the last chopper out of now. Like, they see what dating is like these days. It's horrible. But you started this section of the conversation talking about how the ancient idea was, hey, romantic love, there be dragons, like, let's watch out. But you don't actually agree with that per se. Oh, that's right. That's right. So what the book is really about is the conditions of human flourishing. And this is actually what all my books are about, in a sense. And the conditions of human flourishing are not absolute and unchangeable across eras and cultures and economic structures. There are a lot of similarities, a lot of commonalities, because we all have the same underlying psychology. In ancient civilizations, where economic survival was so vital and so uncertain, marriage was an arrangement between two families. You can't leave it up to the kids. Too many people would die. They would fail to have good unions. So flourishing had love played a very different role in those societies. But once we get a very high level of material prosperity, such that women can live independently, men can live independently, it's not an absolute 100 percent urgent necessity that you form a union of a man and a woman in order to raise a child. Like that, for much of Western history, that was essential. You had to have that. And you had to have a division of labor because someone had to do all the laborious cooking and cleaning and food. But once we get technology to say, you know what? Actually, everyone can live independently if they want. And this, of course, frees women to pursue careers, to live the way they want. So that's all great. Once we've changed the way things used to be, which is more consistent with how we, well, I don't want to get into how we evolved, because hunter-gatherers are actually very different from agricultural societies. So let's leave that aside. My point is just that. In a modern, Western, wealthy, free society, love, passionate love, opens up possibilities for joy and pleasure that were not really available in many societies and are not necessarily available widely in some societies today. Falling in love is like the greatest possible thing you can experience. And we want our kids to have that. And many of us want our kids to have that multiple times. Like, you know, don't fall in love at the age of 17 and then marry the person. Like, no, you know, live a full life, you know, get your heart broken, like have experiences. And that makes sense for us as a full, passionate, lived life. That doesn't make sense for traditional agricultural societies. Restoring nature in our cities begins with seeing waterways not as forgotten infrastructure, but as living ecosystems worth protecting. As co-founder and executive director of Billion Oyster Project, Pete Malinowski is helping restore oyster reefs to New York Harbor, supporting cleaner water, richer marine habitats and a new generation of environmental stewards. Hosted by climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold, Planet Visionaries meets the leaders, finding practical, lasting ways to create a healthier future for people and the planet. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is sponsored by ADT. It is that time of year again. The kids are back at school. We're all back at work after the summer. We're back to the routine. ADT wants to help you get back to home. 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It's actually essential if you want to show up for the world, if you want to deal with the various emergencies on the planet right now. There is, in fact, a geopolitical case for you to get your shit together. In other words, taking care of your own mind is good citizenship. I think about it like an upward spiral. You train your mind. That makes you happier and less reactive because you're steadier. That improves your relationships with everybody around you. Because relationships are crucial to human happiness, you get even happier, then your relationships get even better, and up you go. Our mission over at this new app is to guide you through this process with a growing library of meditations from world-class teachers like Sebene Selassie and Joseph Goldstein and on and on. Also, add free access to our full podcast archive, exclusive live stream events where we guide meditations and take your questions. We do those every week and much more. Head on over to danharris.com. You can try it for two weeks free. If you cannot afford a subscription, we'll give you one no questions asked. Chapter six is the one we've just been talking about, which is about love and attachment. The preceding chapter, chapter five, is about the ancient notion. You hear the Buddha talking about this all the time. If you look at the ancient Buddhist texts, that actually we shouldn't get overly attached to anyone. I really struggle with this aspect of the Dharma, aka Buddhism. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it. Let me hear yours first, because this is a real puzzle. Here's a question I've posed to some Buddhists, and I didn't really get clear answers. Is it okay for a Buddhist to feel pain when his spouse or child dies? It's a great story about a Buddhist master who loses his daughter. His students find him weeping, and they say to him, well, didn't you tell us it's all an illusion? He says that some illusions are more painful than others. Okay, that's a nice story. What does it mean? Does it mean that Buddhists actually say, it's okay to have your heart broken, it's okay to feel intense pain when your child dies? Do they say that? My understanding, and I would call myself a practicing Buddhist, but not a Buddhist scholar. My understanding, I'm actually right now in the middle of reading a biography of the Buddha, and in it, he is very, very clear that having children and romantic entanglements is a fetter. In fact, he named his child Fetter. Oh, my God. Rahula. Oh, Rahula, right. Yes, Rahula means fetter in the ancient language of Pali. From a strict standpoint, I get it. The basic Buddhist idea is everything that arises will pass away. Impermanence is ceaseless, relentless, unremitting. Given the ground truth of impermanence, clinging is a reliable source of suffering. What the Buddha is saying sounds really cold, but it actually can be construed as compassionate when you view it through the light of impermanence. Yet, in my lived experience, it's very hard to swallow. This is a great example of how the environment we're talking about is crucial for understanding advice for flourishing. I remember when I took a course on Tibetan Buddhism or Buddhism when I was in college and reading some of these ancient texts, I was really shocked at how austere and cold and sort of alien many of them felt. This was not attractive. Yet, you also find a lot of the Dalai Lama is full of love and light. As I understand it, the really ancient, the Theravada Buddhism is not something you'd necessarily might want to practice in today's modern world. It's those other Buddhisms that are more out in the world that are more like, yeah, you can have a job. You can have a family. I think there are obviously many different kinds of Buddhism. One of the few places where I disagree with ancient wisdom in the book, and it's in chapter five, I think, is where I say, when I started this, I used to think the Buddha was the wisest person who ever lived about how to flourish. I've come to believe that at least for people in Western societies, a better life is one in which you commit to things and you strive. When you succeed, you're exultant. When you fail, it's painful and miserable, that a life with these ups and downs is a better life, on average, for most people than one in which you cut off all attachments so that you don't feel the pain of loss. I had this amazing conversation in my class today with the MBA students. One of them asked the question, he said, we were talking about stoicism and the stoic challenge and how to cut off the negative emotions. He said, but how do we deal with the fact that we had all these expectations, and now they're being dashed? How do we deal with the fact that we came to grad school and we had ideas about what jobs we were going to get, and now it looks like all of that might be out the window because of AI? Are you saying we should just accept it? What I realized is, for all of history, people lived with the knowledge that they could die tomorrow. People lived with the knowledge that there could be an earthquake, a hurricane, an invading army, a plague. Nobody had a 401k plan. Nobody expected to be alive in 30 years. You couldn't expect to see your kids grow up. You had no idea it was going to happen. That was true for all of human history until sometime in the 20th or 19th or 20th century, I'd say. What came out in my discussion with the students today was, in a sense, it's back because none of us can be confident that we will be here in 30 years, even 10 years. We just don't know. With all the talk about what AI is going to do, nobody knows, but suddenly, it's back on the table that we can't necessarily plan for the future. What I'm coming to see is that reading the ancients, reading the best ideas, the best writing from people who lived this way, who could not count on life, who had to live with uncertainty, how do they deal with it? That's what Stoicism and Buddhism is all about. Many of us, you and I, we got to live in the period between the bomb and AI. The bomb was very scary for a while. Then by the late 80s, it was calming down. Then the 90s were amazing and wonderful. Technology and the end of history and all these wonderful things. Well, now history's back and existential threat is back. So we did have this period of a few decades that was fantastic, but it was kind of an illusion. Now we're back to the way that the ancients lived. So I think actually what I said to the student is reading the best ideas and writings from the people who lived this way is even more important now. Certainly, I wrote the book in 2006, the year before the iPhone came out. So the iPhone and the internet have changed our civilizations radically, mostly in negative ways, I believe. So I think looking to ancient wisdom is very helpful right now. I agree. As I said to my students, Buddhism and Stoicism, I found writing the book, Buddhism and Stoicism are the two richest veins to mine. If you wanna think about consciousness, relationships, how to be, like, those are incredible, incredible source. Obviously, Judaism, Christianity, Romanticism, there are all kinds of other sources of wisdom, but these two really stood out to me among the ancient sources. But the one place that I disagreed was I came to see, or I came to believe that if you grow up in a society that has prosperity and security and a range of things you can throw yourself into, that it would be a poor sort of life, it would be a failure to live to your best if you achieved non-attachment, that it's better. And it was very influenced by a philosopher named Robert Solomon, who I saw gave a talk. You know, philosophers are usually very analytic, but he was like a passionate Romantic philosopher about, like, go life, like throw yourself in, have experiences, have challenges. That's a rich human life. And I would say that is a rich human life for a modern Western person who can have that kind of life. So yeah, I did not resonate with the highest goal should be non-attachment. The best way I've heard this described from modern Buddhist teachers is, and this is gonna be hard for people listening, so I'll narrate it. The difference between holding a relationship with a closed fist, really clinging tightly, or holding it with an open palm. So I love you, I care about you, but I understand that I can't control the fact that you too are subject to the forces of impermanence. So, okay, so what I would say is, we have general tendencies and biases. We tend to dwell more on the negative, bad is stronger than good. We tend to judge too quickly. There's all sorts of ways that we tend to be. And if you take Buddhism as a constant pull towards a different direction, then I think it's fantastic. Yes, we need to hold things more lightly. That doesn't mean we should go all the way to complete non-attachment. The idea that you would not be, that you could reach a state where if your child is kidnapped and something horrible happens, that you would not feel horrific. I'm sorry, again, I apologize to Buddhists who have an explanation for that. But I'm just saying, it is directionally right. Like we Westerners need it as a directional pull. Yes, I think that what a Buddhist scholar would say is, there's a difference between non-attachment and detachment. So non-attachment just means you aren't overly attached, but you're not detached either. And so it's a, you know, the Buddha talked a lot about the middle way, the middle path. So the middle path between detachment and clinging would be non-attachment. Easier said than done. I wear a lot of t-shirts because I work from home and I'm a podcaster. And so I can be as casual as I want. And it's a nice little way to rebel against several decades in the news business when I had to wear a suit all the time. And anyway, the other day I was putting on a t-shirt and I thought, man, is this one of these, it looks really good. And I was wondering, is this one of these expensive t-shirts that I got for my birthday that my wife got for me? And then I realized, no, this is a t-shirt from Quince, which did not cost me much money at all. And by the way, is much nicer and more comfortable and better looking than all of the expensive t-shirts that I recently got for the aforementioned birthday. You know, those pieces in your closet that you find yourself wearing on repeat, the sweater that goes with everything, the perfect pair of pants or the tee you somehow always reach for. First, those are the pieces that make getting dressed easy and that's what Quince does best. Quince focuses on high quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton and Merino wool. The styles are timeless, versatile, and designed to become the dependable pieces you reach for day after day. Find your next fall favorites at Quince Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was 10% happier. 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Head on over to bombuz.com slash happier and use the code happier for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com slash happier. Use the code happier at checkout. Let me ask you about one last ancient idea that you talk about in the book, which is that we need adversity in order to have a meaningful life. Where do you come down on this? Oh, yeah. This is chapter seven, I think it is. Let's see, this is- It is chapter seven, The Uses of Adversity. Chapter seven, The Uses of Adversity 186. So of course, I'm sure I started off with the quote from Nietzsche. Yes, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger. And then there's one from Mencius or Mengzi. I'll read it if you don't mind. It's long, but it's so good. When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to poverty, place obstacles in the paths of his deeds so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent. So that's the exact same as what doesn't kill me makes you stronger. My third book, The Coddling the American Mind is based very much on this idea which Nassim Taleb, who wrote The Black Swan, he wrote a book called Antifragile. The idea of antifragility is the key thing. That's what's being expressed in these quotes. That if you think about the immune system, it's the ultimate antifragile system. If something is fragile, you need to protect it. Glass is fragile, we don't let kids play with it. If they drop a glass, it breaks, nothing good happens. We give them plastic, a plastic sippy cup. If they drop it, it doesn't break, but nothing good happens. And Taleb was asking, what's the name for things where if you drop them, they get better? And the immune system is like that. If we protect our kid's immune system, I don't want any dirt or germs to touch my child. You're crippling the development of the immune system because the immune system is expect, it's designed, it evolved to take in threats, react to them in a small way, and now it can react quickly later to larger threats. Our muscles are antifragile, our bones are antifragile. We take it easy on them, they weaken. You need to stretch them, strain them, stress them to make them grow. So adversity is absolutely essential for life, stress is essential for life, but this is where the psychology brings in some nice qualifications. So first we need to understand there's a field called post-traumatic growth. So of course there's post-traumatic stress disorder, there's trauma, there's damage. Most of the time when something bad happens, people end up growing from it. There are some exceptions to that. We need obstacles and adversity to grow, we need them to have a better life story. You know, one of my students was saying nothing bad has ever happened to her, she doesn't really have much in her life story. I don't wanna glorify or dramatize adversity, especially not severe or traumatic events. But, and I tell the story in the book, I had this discussion with my students at UVA, the undergrads at UVA back in 2006, and there was one young woman in the class who'd had brain cancer. And she had to take three years off from school, she had multiple brain operations. And we talked about the adversity hypothesis, which is that the highest levels of human flourishing are only open to people who have suffered. That, of course, you can have a happy life if you've never had any suffering, but that people have gone through hell, people have gone through war, through cancer, that there are levels of engagement with the world that are more open to them than to the rest of us. And she was a strong believer in that. She said, absolutely, that is true. I mean, what she'd been through, she was so full of love and just the joy of life. Yeah, I think that we need to be thinking about adversity differently. And this is why it's so important in the Kali American mind and in the Anxious Generation. We have to give our kids a lot of independence so that they can make mistakes, they can get hurt on the playground. Because if you can get hurt in a playground, that means every day you're learning how to not get hurt. But if we keep them in super safe playgrounds, they don't learn how to not get hurt, they don't learn independence. We have a new closing segment on the show called What's Good. Could be something that's good in your life or it could be a book or a TV show or anything like that. I know exactly what I wanna talk about. Okay, you do yours and then I'll give you one. Okay, so here's mine. I am falling more and more deeply in love with my dog. And so here's, so we got this wonderful dog, Wilma, three years ago. And I write about this in the Anxious Generation because it's like, there's all this great attachment system stuff happening with her. She's adorable and she's kinda dumb. And we did a terrible job training her. So she's not obedient and she's not even fully toilet trained. So I cannot say that this is the best dog in the world. She's not the best dog in the world, but she's my dog. And what happened this summer, I've been so busy with the Anxious Generation, I've been traveling around. But this summer, finally, I really took the summer off. And I spent almost the whole summer with Wilma. And my wife would come and go, my kids would come and go. But I was almost always with Wilma. And by the end of the summer, I looked at her and I just realized, wow, I just really love you. And the other thing, which is part of the pleasure, is I loved being a father to two to four-year-olds. I miss those days so much. Once they start running, that's when dads become the best. Because we play the chasing game. We pretend to be monsters. We pick them up and throw them up in the air. So I loved that. My wife says, I don't miss that at all, those years. They were overwhelming for her. But for me as a dad, that was so much fun. And so what I realized is the way that I am with Wilma is very much the way I was when my kids were two to four years old. What kind of dog is Wilma? Wilma is a Pouton, which means half toy poodle, half coton de touliere, which is a little white French fluffy breed you'll see around on the streets of New York City. She's just the cutest. She looks like a teddy bear come to life. That's what she looked like as a puppy. And she still looks that way. And so it's just a joy to have her in our lives. And again, it's like relatedness. This is the source of our pleasures, being embedded in relationships that grow slowly over time. All right, I'll give you one. This is, every time we have, this is a new segment. And generally speaking, people come on and give me something highbrow and beautiful, and then I give them something lowbrow and stupid. I watched a documentary with my son recently on Mr. T. Oh my God, Mr. T from the 80s? Mr. T from the 80s, who was a huge, so you're eight years older than me. For me, Mr. T just came at the perfect time. It was Rocky III and then the A-Team, right around the time that I was maybe 11, 12. So he just really lodged in my consciousness as this larger-than-life character. Cool masculinity, yeah. Yes, cool masculinity. But what I didn't realize is that he was kind of a radical figure. First of all, he was not a trained actor. He got cast in Rocky III by Rocky Balboa because Rocky Balboa noticed that Leon Spinks, the real boxer, had a really cool bodyguard, who was Mr. T. Oh my God, oh my God. Who was this guy who was raised in abject poverty in the projects of Chicago, I believe, who gets thrust into this global panoramic fame through being Clever Lang in Rocky III and then the star of this huge primetime TV show called The A-Team. And he used his fame to talk about race and the way he wore all these gold chains. Oh yeah, yeah. And he was asked about that, and he said, my ancestors were brought to this country in shackles. I'm turning that into gold. Into gold, wow. And he was unrepentant and unapologetic about who he was and the way he and black people were viewed by the culture, and his job was to change that. His hero is Muhammad Ali, who said, I'm not going to Vietnam. I have no quarrel with the Viet Cong. They never called me the N-word. And so it was fascinating to watch with my son, and Mr. T is now in his 70s and preaching the gospel in Chicago. That's a beautiful story, in part because it connects across generations. Yes. It connects your son to an important thread in American history. It's beautiful. Jonathan Haidt, the book is The Happiness Hypothesis, but he's written many other books, all of which I recommend. The Anxious Generation, The Coddling of the American Mind, and The Righteous Mind, which is the first one I read and had a real impact on me. We talk about it in our first interview, which I will put a link to in the show notes. It really impacted me in thinking about these polarized times. So thank you for your contributions. Thank you for coming on today. Always a pleasure to see you. Well, Dan, thanks for a great discussion. Thank you very much for listening to the show. If you care about supporting independent media and creators who are trying to make the world a little bit saner, you can hook us up by liking or rating and reviewing and following the show wherever you watch or listen. Subscribe me for my newsletter on Substack. following me on social media. All of these things really do help us grow. It's a big deal to us and would just take about 30 seconds if you have the time and inclination. Thank you again for watching. Thanks for supporting what we do. Now to the credits. Thank you so much to everybody who works so hard to make this show. 10% Happier is produced by Tara Anderson, Marissa Schneiderman, DJ Kashmir, David Hart and Hayden Broome. Post-production is handled by the great folks over at Greenhorn Creative and Nick Thorburn of the great indie rock band Islands wrote our theme. Thank you for listening. Deuces. Insurance is not one-size-fits-all. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years now. 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