13avoiding comparison with others and
being satisfi ed with what we already
have, can also lead to complacency?
Don’t you need some of the emotional-
ly detrimental stuff in order to achieve?
People have looked at this in the context
of things that we worry about when it
comes to complacency: huge problems
from anti- Black violence to the climate
falling apart. We need people to rec-
ognize these issues, get angry and take
action. There’s a worry that maybe if you
follow these practices, you’ll be so com-
placent that you’ll let California burn and
let horrible social- justice violations con-
tinue. There’s been some lovely work on
this by Kostadin Kushlev, who’s a positive
psychologist who has been interested in,
Do these practices make you complacent
when it comes to the big issues? What he
fi nds is that the people who self- report
the highest positive emotions, they’re the
ones who are taking action. There’s also
evidence that people who are more grate-
ful are more likely to do things for other
people. So I worry about complacency,
but the evidence suggests it doesn’t work
in the way we might expect. When you
do have some positive emotion, you have
the bandwidth to deal with other things.
Social media, Instagram in particular,
off ers almost infi nite capacity for nega-
tive comparison.^3 Would quitting social
media be the most important thing your
students could easily do to increase their
happiness? We go through a lot of the
work on social media. One of the things
is: Delete all your apps right now. You can
see their faces. They’re like, Uhh. I teach
students — this comes from the journalist
Catherine Price^4 — the acronym W.W.W.:
what for, why now and what else? When
you pick up your phone, what was that
for? Was there a purpose? Then: Why
now? Did you have something to do,
or were you bored or anxious or fi ght-
ing some craving? And then, what else?:
actively noticing the opportunity cost.
It could be studying. It could be talking
to your roommate. Based on seeing stu-
dents in the trenches, the biggest hit of
social media on their well- being is that
they spend a lot of time on it thinking that
they’re being social rather than talking to
other people. We’re not always making
good use of the humans around us.
Is there anything surprising to you
that people are just not getting about
happiness? For my students, it’s oftenJulie Lythcott- Haims.^5 Her argument is
that when the spoils of war get big, there
becomes a nuclear- arms race for who
gets in, and that parenting has changed
to push children to be thinking about this
stuff. They develop this implicit belief that
there is a path that’s correct, and if you
can fi gure out the Easter eggs, you can
be on it. It’s something I feel on campus
so much. I assign students this book by
the social scientist Alfi e Kohn, who does
work on how much grades and extrinsic
motivations mess kids up.^6 He tells the
story of giving this speech to high school
students: A student raises their hand and
is like, If everything you said is true, and
I’m not just working for grades and trying
to get into college, then what’s the pur-
pose of life? When I assigned that chapter,
I also got that question. They’re not sure
what they’re supposed to get out of col-
lege other than accolade building.
So what’s the answer? What’s the pur-
pose of life? It’s smelling your coff ee in the
morning. [Laughs.] Loving your kids. Hav-
ing sex and daisies and springtime. It’s all
the good things in life. That’s what it is.Th is interview has been edited and condensed
from two conversations.Above: Laurie
Santos giving a
lecture at Yale
in 2018. Opposite
page: Santos
recording an episode
of ‘‘The Happiness
Lab’’ podcast.David Marchese
is the magazine’s Talk
columnist.money. My fast read of the evidence is
that money only makes you happier if
you live below the poverty line and you
can’t put food on your table and then you
can aff ord to. Whether getting superrich
actually aff ects diff erent aspects of your
well- being? There’s a lot of evidence it
doesn’t aff ect your positive emotion too
much. Yeah, the money thing is one that
students fi ght me on. It hits at a lot of the
worldview they’ve grown up with.
This probably speaks more to my defi -
ciencies as a student than anything
else, but when I was in college, which
is 20 years ago now, I don’t remember
such a pervasive, overwhelming sense
of being there solely as the next step
on some ladder of achievement. What
has changed? It’s surprising how diff er-
ent it feels. I’ll have conversations with
fi rst-year students on campus who will
ask what fourth class they should take to
make sure they get that job at Google by
the time they’re 24. They come in plan-
ning this set of next steps, in part because
that’s how they got here in the fi rst place.
They think that’s how you get the carrots.
How that change happened is an incred-
ibly interesting cultural puzzle. Some of
Opening page: Source photograph by Michael Marsland/Yale News. This page: Karin Shedd/Yale University. Opposite page: Ryan Dilley. my favorite guesses about it come from