
October 26, 2021
Happiness, Suffering, and The Sweet Spot | Paul Bloom on EconTalk with Russ Roberts
Check out the EconTalk episode page
Key Takeaways
- We have very paradoxical pleasures – eating spicy food, long runs, crossword puzzles, watching scary movies
- Pleasure is often realized and maximized as a result of suffering
- Having children is the ultimate paradoxical pleasure:
- “If you do [parenting] right, [your children] will eventually leave you. Actually, if you do it right, they will eventually think a lot less of you than you think of them. It’s such a perverse project, a very human one.” – Paul Bloom
- We are temporal creatures, we thrive in a bad-to-good time arc
- The Sweet Spot – embracing the cyclical nature of joy and suffering helps use worry and anxiety for positive reinforcement
- “It hurts as much as it’s worth” – Paul Bloom
- We are motivational pluralists, we don’t just want one thing – happiness is made up of reward, struggle, self-fulfillment, well-being (etc.), and not just pleasure
- Happiness and meaning are often difficult to maintain simultaneously, anxiety is the variable function in the equation
- Happiness occurs when you try to limit your anxiety
- Meaning often comes in high instances of anxiety considering external pressures
- When it comes to Walter White or Tony Soprano, people get skewed moral visions. We end up rooting for values that we don’t even hold.
- If you become the people you hang out with, are you hanging out with the characters in your favorite TV show?
Intro
- Paul Bloom (@paulbloomatyale) is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and formerly at Yale. Russ and Paul discuss the positive and dependent relationship between suffering and pleasure as it relates to well-being.
- The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning by Paul Bloom
- Host: Russ Roberts (@EconTalker)
Suffering
- We have very paradoxical pleasures – eating spicy food, long runs, crossword puzzles, watching scary movies
- All require effort and a little bit of pain, but they have satisfying trade-offs
- Suffering makes the pay-off more valuable
- Having children is the ultimate paradoxical pleasure
- Negatives: You lose sleep, increase marital stress, sacrifice time/money
- Positives: Gives your life meaning, purpose, value, and identity (Paul says the first thing he introduces himself as is a father, not a professor)
- “If you do [parenting] right, [your children] will eventually leave you. Actually, if you do it right, they will eventually think a lot less of you than you think of them. It’s such a perverse project, a very human one.” – Paul Bloom
- There’s importance in ‘chosen suffering’ – life is boring if you don’t apply hardness to your activities, even the simplest of tasks
The Sweet Spot
- ‘Worrying’ is a way of focusing on negative possibilities and forcing us to prepare for these
- ‘Worry’ is very motivating, the system forces us to consider the most unpleasant possibilities and be prepared to have the confidence to negate the problem if it does occur
- “It’s hard to enjoy the good times because you know they are going to end” – Russ Roberts
- The Sweet Spot – embracing the cyclical nature of joy and suffering helps utilize worry and anxiety for positive reinforcement
- It’s a curse to have too much anxiety but also a curse to have too little anxiety
- “It hurts as much as it’s worth” – Paul Bloom
- Embrace the contextual value of your suffering
- We are temporal creatures, we thrive in a bad-to-good time arc
Experience Machine
- Experience Machine – Putting your life in a simulated reality, pretending to achieve continuous pleasure for the sake of pleasure, not for the sake of experience. Pleasure is no longer dependent on suffering.
- Robert Nozick refutes the hedonist principles in Experience Machine – you don’t want to think you climbed Mt. Everest, you want to actually climb Mt. Everest
- Experiences only get value because they reflect realities
- Drugs can be a form of the experience machine
- There is room for moral pluralism – a moral agreement with yourself that you see value in both pleasure and suffering but there are instances where one presents more value
- We are not always ‘utility maximizers’ – there’s a ton of nuance that goes into these decisions over how to regulate our experience (simulated and real)
Happiness
- Many happiness strategies are not grounded in science but rather in becoming an NYT bestseller or getting a Ted Talk
- Most of them are in a narrow-minded hedonist approaches
- We are motivational pluralists, we don’t just want one thing – happiness is made up of reward, struggle, self-fulfillment, well-being (etc.), and not just pleasure
- Happiness and meaning are almost impossible to maintain at 100% simultaneously
- Happiness is most often found in people who focus on themselves
- These people focus on removing as much anxiety from their lives as possible
- Meaning is usually externally focused
- People with meaningful lives have a lot of anxiety because people rely on their efforts, reducing their capacity for happiness
- ‘Fun’ can exist in both places but is ironically found more often in difficult activities than on vacation
- Happiness is most often found in people who focus on themselves
Morality in Entertainment
- TV programs certainly shape our moral compass, good and bad
- Paul cites an example where as a kid he was watching a sitcom where a child talked back to his parents and the laugh-track played accordingly. This associates the illusion of talking back to your parents as a positive moral trait.
- Anti-Heroes have become a cultural norm
- We recognize that people can be “roughly good” but also have bad parts in them
- When it comes to Walter White or Tony Soprano, people get a skewed moral vision. We end up rooting for values that we don’t even hold. Whether that expands past the screen, we can only hypothesize.
- You become the people you hang out with, are you hanging out with the characters in your favorite TV show?