The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos Are You Taking Fun Seriously Enough?

Pushkin.

00:13

Speaker 2

When was the last time you did something just for fun? You know, not because you had to or you were supposed to, but just for the sheer enjoyment of it. If your mind is drawing an embarrassing blank right now, don't worry, you're not alone. Between work and family and our never-ending to-do lists, fun often gets pushed to the bottom of our priority list, if it even makes that list at all. But are we getting our to-do lists all wrong? What if having fun isn't just a nice bonus in life, but something that's essential to our health, our happiness, and even the well-being of the world around us? Today, for this latest installment in our series of live conversations, I'll be taking you to the Aspen Ideas Festival, where I had the chance to speak to two experts who take fun very seriously. Katherine Price is an award-winning journalist and the best-selling author of How to Break Up with Your Phone and The Power of Fun. Katherine is also my personal guru when it comes to all things delightful. OG listeners of the Happiness Lab will probably remember that Katherine staged a funtervention for me a few years ago, at a time when I really needed it badly. Joining Katherine and me on stage is another one of my academic idols, Liz Dunn. Liz is a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and the author of both Happy Money, The Science of Happier Spending, and a new co-authored book, Leave the Lights On, How Joyful Decisions Can Save Our Species. Liz studies how the choices we make about our time, money, and technology affect our happiness. She also violates the usual stereotype I have of happiness experts. You see, when you work in the happiness space, you meet a lot of so-called happiness gurus who ironically are not themselves all that happy. But Liz is different. She genuinely practices what she preaches. She's actually one of the happiest happiness experts that I know. So get ready for Liz and Catherine and I to share a very serious take on fun, live from the Aspen Ideas Festival. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy. But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. This time coming to you live from the Aspen Ideas Festival.

02:38

Speaker 1

Okay, Catherine, since you've written most directly on fun, I wanted to start with your origin story when it came to thinking about the importance of fun. And as I understand it, your interest in this topic happened during a surprisingly unfun existential moment of screen-free downtime. Tell me about this pivotal moment and what happened next.

02:55

Speaker 3

It's always good to start fun talks with existential malaise. So I'm glad you started there. Yeah, I had written a book called How to Break Up with Your Phone, which is what it sounds like. It's a book that gives a guide to how to create a better relationship with your phone. It was to solve my own problem because I realized I was spending more time on my phone than I wanted to. But I didn't realize it was opening up a whole new problem for myself, which is that once I had more free time, I didn't really know what to do with it. And I had a moment that Laurie's referring to where I was alone on my couch, the site of many existential crises. And my daughter who was then a baby was napping and my husband was out of the house. I had this whole hour in front of me. It should have been this amazing opportunity. Should have been so excited. But we were deliberately taking a break from screens that day. We were doing a digital Sabbath and I realized I didn't know what I wanted to do. Like, honestly, the last thing I wanted to do was read a book because that's my job. And I just thought, oh my God, I like to think of myself as a self-aware person who lives fully and I can't think of anything to do. And so I asked myself a question. I asked when I was writing How to Break Up With Your Phone that I post to you all today now, which is what's something you say you want to do, but you supposedly don't have time for? Hmm. Because what I realized is I did have time. In fact, I had this reclaimed time, but I didn't know what I wanted to do with it. So I said, well, I want to learn how to play the guitar because I play piano. I had a guitar that my grandmother had given me money for in college. So I started going to this guitar class and I started being filled with this feeling, this unfamiliar at that stage in my life, feeling this energetic, joyful feeling. And I was like, what's the word for this? And I'm going to blame this on early parenthood that I couldn't think of the word, but the word was fun. And so I got fascinated by what is fun and how can I have more of it? And when I looked into the research on fun, at that moment, if you looked it up in PubMed, the number one hit that came up was putting the fun in fungi. And it was an article about toenail fungus. And the science journalist in me was like, oh, that's intriguing. I want to do something with this. And then I also realized that the definition of fun in the dictionary didn't match up to the feeling I was experiencing. So that led me to write this book, The Power of Fun, which led me and Lori to connect for a funtervention. And here we are today.

04:59

Speaker 1

And so one of the things I adored about your book was that you tried to take on the hard task of defining fun, which maybe isn't so fun, but you got to do this as a nerdy scientist looking at stuff. You did this deep dive and got hundreds and hundreds of examples of fun from people all over the world. And you tried to distill what they were experiencing in these great moments down to three factors, three parts of fun. What are these different parts?

05:19

Speaker 3

Yeah, so... Fun is a feeling, first of all. It's not an activity. And different people get that feeling from different things. Like some people might find it actually quite fun to do a dorky explanation as to what is fun. When I read through the stories, I noticed that there was this profound sense of joy running through them. The details of the stories were all different, but they were so joyful. They also made me cry when I was reading them. There was something very powerful and deeply human about them. And the definition I ended up coming up with is that there are these three factors in play. One is playfulness. That's the hardest for adults, especially adults like us, to grasp. It doesn't mean you have to play games. It's about having a lighthearted attitude, letting your guard down, having your inner critic be silenced and not taking yourself too seriously. That was present in play. A sense of release and letting go. Also, connection. So playfulness and connection, connection being the feeling of having a special shared experience, normally with another person, occasionally with a dog. This was actually interestingly true even for introverts. People told me, I'm a self-proclaimed introvert, but everything I told you, all the stories involve another person. And the third factor is flow. So the state you get into when you're totally actively engaged in something to the point that you lose track of time, whether it's a great conversation or you're playing a piece of music, or you can think of an athlete playing a game, that's total flow. The man who coined the term was actually studying rock climbers. So playfulness and connection and flow. And I just want to point out that flow in particular, you can't be in flow if you're distracted, which we'll get to more in a minute. And also you can lose track of time if you're just binge watching Netflix, but that's not the same thing. That's really junk flow. True flow is when you're actively engaged and present.

06:51

Speaker 1

OK, so this is our definition of fun that we're working with, a playful, connected flow. Liz, ideally, all episodes of fun have these three ingredients. But in one of my favorite of your recent papers, you took kind of a different approach that I loved to looking at the behavioral gradients, not of fun per se, but of having a good day. I was reminded of the Ice Cube song from back in the day, like, today was a good day. You did the paper analyzing ice cubes, today was a good day. And so explain what the study tried to do and what you found were the ingredients in.

07:17

Speaker 3

A good day.

07:18

Speaker 4

Yeah, so we took advantage of this really amazing data set in which thousands of Americans told the researchers whether they had a particularly good day. Basically, was today better than an average Friday? And fortunately, they also reported the way they spent every minute.

07:35

Speaker 3

Of their day.

07:36

Speaker 4

So we could actually chart how they spent the minutes of their day and how that related to whether today actually turned out to be an especially good day. And one of the things that we found was that socializing emerged as one of the most important pieces of having a good day. And so it really fits with what you're saying in terms of that power of connection. Interestingly, it turned out just having about one to two hours of socializing in a day was enough to really kind of max out that probability of having a good day.

08:04

Speaker 1

You got to cut it off.

08:05

Speaker 5

Yeah, you don't have to go more.

08:07

Speaker 3

You can.

08:07

Speaker 5

It doesn't hurt, but it kind of plateaus.

08:09

Speaker 4

Although the interesting exception there was time with friends. Time with friends was almost like chocolate chips in a cookie. You can just add more and it keeps being better. So that was pretty interesting. And We also found one of the surprising findings in that data was that spending time on relaxing and leisure was actually associated with a lower probability of having an especially good day. And we were like, I thought my grad student analyzed the data wrong. I made him go back and look at it again. But it turned out it was about 70% of the time that people were engaged in leisure and relaxation. They were actually like watching Netflix, watching TV. And again, going to what you're saying about that sort of false flow or whatever. It wasn't actually enhancing people's likelihood of having a good day. In contrast, engaging in sports and exercise did raise the likelihood of having a good day.

09:02

Speaker 1

I'm curious about, just because I know we're in a group of workaholics, myself included, what about work? Did that factor in at all? Yeah.

09:09

Speaker 4

So with work, you know, work gets a bad reputation in happiness research. So as a happiness researcher, I've been involved in a lot of studies where we see work is not really where people feel the.

09:18

Speaker 5

Happiest on average.

09:20

Speaker 4

But interestingly, people could work for up to six hours a day with no detrimental effect on their likelihood of having an especially good day. However, once people were working more than six hours a day, the probability of having a really good day plummeted. So what this tells us then is that maybe work isn't so bad.

09:39

Speaker 5

I mean, I'm a happiness researcher. I love my job.

09:41

Speaker 4

But when we're doing too much work, we may end up kind of blocking out some of that time that we could otherwise use for fun. So I think for some of us, it's sort of a call to think about rebalancing the way we spend our time.

09:54

Speaker 1

And so we need to rebalance these ingredients to have a little bit more fun. Before we get into how to do that, though, I want to make the case that fun matters. Right now we're at this festival that's focused on big geopolitical threats. I think there's another conversation going on about the singularity. By the time this session's over, the AI is going to take over, so it might be moot anyway. But there's sessions this morning about universities and rebuilding social trust. We're talking about big issues here. And so you might wonder why Aspen would focus on a seemingly frivolous topic like fun. And so I want, Katherine, you to make the case that fun is a serious topic. It's still important to be talking about something like fun at a place that cares about these big issues. Why is fun such an important and such a serious topic? I'm glad you asked that question, Lori, because it's really true. People tend to think it's frivolous. When we think of fun, we tend to think of it as being childish.

10:45

Speaker 3

And it should be at the bottom of the priority list. But I encourage everyone in the room to actually think to yourself of a memory that stands out in your own mind as having been really fun. Don't be horrified if it takes a minute to get one of those. It often does for adults. And also to share that story with someone at this festival, maybe even after this session is over. And just notice what it does to your mood and your energy level to just think about and share this past fun memory. Because I think that that is one of the many things that fun does for us and one of the many reasons that it is not frivolous. So... If you back up for a second, it's very difficult to concretely identify how fun is good for us because as I said, there's no research on fun. There's lots of research on playfulness and connection and flow though. So if you buy my definition of that, you can see that there's actually a lot of evidence there. So one thing that it does for us is this energy boost. The world is really exhausting. Adult life is really exhausting. Our to-do lists are never ending. So if you can do something that's actually going to boost your mood and give you energy, that's going to help you go through your own life feeling better, and also give you the energy to be a better person to whoever you're living with, to whoever you're working with, and also give you energy to try to solve some of the problems, which I know you're going to talk about, Liz, is how you can actually harness this power of fun to work on serious things. I would also say that it really has the power to unite us, and I think that's extremely important when we're living in such a polarized world where it just seems like everything is us versus them. If you think about some of your past fun experiences, even momentary small things that were fun, like dancing at a wedding with someone you didn't know or someone's strange relative that you never would have interacted with otherwise. You can see that it really erases differences. You actually don't see people as political parties when you're having fun and laughing together. You don't see them as different races or nationalities or religions. So if you can have more moments of playful, connected flow with someone, you're going to see them and connect with them on a much more human level. And that, again, makes it easier to solve serious problems. And I'll just say another thing. I might even go on about the benefits of fun. But one that really stood out to me that's very much tied into the theme of loneliness and what to do about it is that we now know that being lonely and isolated really is bad for us physically. probably in part because it raises our level of cortisol, a major stress hormone that over time is not good for us. But if you think about the moments in which you have fun, they're moments in which you're relaxed and open and also socially connected. And that's the antidote to loneliness. So I personally really did come away from writing the book, which again, it was a professional attempt to solve a personal problem. I came away really thinking that the way to be happy in the long run and the way to have the energy to be a better partner and be a better parent and just do good in the world is to make sure that... I and we are having enough fun.

13:27

Speaker 2

So fun, this vibrant state of playfulness, connection, and flow is super important for our health and our well-being. But in our modern society that prioritizes overwork, where it's hard to make room for basic things like sleep and exercise, how do we find a little time for joy? After the break, Liz and Catherine will help us tackle some of the biggest obstacles standing between us and a little more delight. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

14:00

Speaker 1

When we think about how to get more fun, for me, as I think about this, I have to think very personally about what are some of my barriers to fun? What prevents me from getting more social time, more playful, connected flow? And one of my biggest barriers is something that I know you've both written about a lot, which is that I'm too busy. I have a grind. I respect efficiency. I'm trying to fit so much work into my day that just feels like I simply don't have time for this playful connected flow. And Liz, I know you and your former students have talked a lot about the importance of valuing time and specifically this concept that gets so much traction on my podcast, this idea of time affluence. What is time affluence and why does it matter so much and particularly if you're having more fun?

14:39

Speaker 4

So in a nutshell, time affluence refers to having enough time to do the things that are important to you. And interestingly, as people become wealthier, more material affluent, they actually seem to become less time affluent. So there seems to be a kind of dynamic trade-off between material affluence on the one hand and time affluence on the other. And material affluence does matter for happiness, but so too does time affluence. And one thing we've discovered is that there are really substantial individual differences in the ways that people think about time versus money and make these trade-offs. And of course, this is a complex issue, but we've found we can actually get a little bit of a crystal ball into people's futures by asking them one very simple question about how they sort of navigate trade-offs between time and money. And in one recent study, we asked students who were about to graduate from the University of British Columbia whether they basically prioritized time or prioritized money.

15:33

Speaker 5

And then we followed them. So we followed them after they graduated.

15:36

Speaker 4

And what we discovered was that students who prioritized time over money during their last year at university actually ended up happier a couple years after graduating. And when we dug into the data, what we discovered was that students who had really prioritized time were more likely to pursue grad school or a career or a job that they found inherently enjoyable and fun. And so they ended up happier. And so there's this kind of pathway that we see between creating time for yourself and to be able to pursue the things you actually find fun that really do have these consequential effects on.

16:16

Speaker 5

Our overall happiness.

16:18

Speaker 1

And then Catherine, you also have talked a lot about time and the misconceptions we have about time and fun.

16:23

Speaker 3

Yeah, I think what I would add to that is that it It's very important for us as busy adults to prioritize fun. And I know I was mentioning this before, but it's too easy for fun to just end up at the bottom of the list. I mean, I am notorious for my to-do list. It's so satisfying to check something off the to-do list. So one suggestion I would have is to actually make a point of identifying what I call your fun magnets. And those are the people, the activities, and the settings that attract this feeling of fun to you personally. And we all have different collections of them, and yours may not be the same as the person you live with. They might not like singing along with me and Lori, and I don't understand them. Anyway, but if you come up with this list of your fun magnets, you now have a set of activities and people and settings that you can prioritize in your busy life, and that if you do have some time affluence, you can choose to spend on. So that's kind of a way to make space for fun and engineer it to a certain degree, because it's not the case that you're going to always have maximum fun doing this activity that you love. Even the most fun activities for you personally, there's a varying degree of fun that can come out of that. If you have a dinner with a uproariously, and the next time it's like, meh, you know what I mean. But at least you'll have a better chance than if you're just continuing to try to do your to-do list for eight to 10 to 12 hours a day. And the other thing I would say is that you also need to make room for spontaneous fun and finding moments in your pre-existing life to incorporate a little bit more playfulness, a little bit more connection, a little bit more flow. And that's something you can do no matter what you're doing. You can do it in the middle of a work meeting. you know, by making a joke with a friend or a colleague. You can do it by putting it on your phone and connecting with the person who's serving you coffee or saying hello to someone, you know, whoever's delivering your mail. Little moments. And those really do add up. So I think you can carve out time for more fun and put your fun magnets in those. You can also look up from your phone and just notice more opportunities for playfulness, connection, or flow.

18:08

Speaker 1

And that is a nice transition to one of my second barriers to fun, which is my phone. In theory, my phone should help me with fun. I should be able to, I don't know, play video games with friends or do something. But instead, it winds up just being a horrible distraction. Catherine, you had this lovely quote in your book that distraction is kryptonite to fun. Explain why that is.

18:29

Speaker 3

Well, again, if you believe my definition of playful connected flow... flow is a state of being totally engaged and present. Anything that kicks you out of that state of flow, anything that distracts you, rather, is going to kick you out of flow. And if you're not in flow, you're not going to be able to truly have fun. And we've all had that experience where you're, for example, out to dinner and you are laughing, but then someone gets a text and they reach for their phone and suddenly that moment is broken. So I really say that that is the main reason why our phones are kryptonite to fun is that they're constantly distracting us and they're constantly taking us out of our present experience and taking us away from the people we're with, whether they're It's our friends or our children or our colleagues and taking us somewhere else. And you just can't have fun if you're trying to be in two places at once.

19:08

Speaker 1

And I think this is something we know from our lived experience, but I think understanding the science of how it works can make it even more compelling. And Liz, you've done this really excellent work just showing the subtle ways that our phones steal our attention and particularly steal our attention for one of these components of fun, which is kind of this connected part. Tell me about some of these studies. I find them very depressing, but very... important and interesting to press.

19:28

Speaker 4

Us yeah well first let me just say i don't think smartphones are the root of all evil and that they're responsible for all our problems and if we got rid of them everything would be fine i think that's a simplified view but and i say that as someone whose research is cited in defense of that view but our research does clearly suggest that smartphones can take away from the pleasure of being with other people and so for example in one study we basically took over a table at a local restaurant for about six months. And every night, we would bring in a different group of friends and family to have dinner together on our tab.

19:59

Speaker 5

And we just had one simple manipulation that we did.

20:02

Speaker 4

Basically, by the flip of a coin, we either assigned everybody at the table to have their phones out and available or to put their phones away. Now, importantly, we just sort of mentioned this casually embedded among some other housekeeping details of the study. And this is really important because people have very powerful theories about how phones affect each other, affect themselves.

20:20

Speaker 5

So we didn't want those theories on the table. We wanted just to see what happened when we actually changed this.

20:25

Speaker 4

And what we discovered was, first of all, as Catherine mentioned, people felt significantly more distracted when they had their phones out and available during dinner. And what was interesting about this is they weren't on their phones that much. It wasn't like that stereotypical image of four teenagers just sitting on their... It wasn't that often that they were on their phones. But still, it was enough to create this form of distraction. And we saw that at the end of the meal, again, people didn't know this study had anything to do with phone use, but at the end of the meal, groups who had had their phones out and available rated the whole experience of dining with their friends and family as less enjoyable compared to those who simply had been told to put their phones away. And perhaps most interestingly, and again, kind of surprisingly, but tying in with what Lori suggested, is that People reported being more bored when they had access to their phones. And again, our theory about this is that people are sort of slipping out of that moment and losing the flow, as Catherine has highlighted, of being in that conversation so that it just doesn't feel right.

21:24

Speaker 5

As interesting.

21:25

Speaker 4

Now, we also videotape people, so if you ever get invited to have dinner on my tab, be aware, you're probably being videotaped, and I'm probably manipulating something you're not aware of, but when we went back and coded these videotapes, what we could see was that phone use was contagious, so when one person used their phone, Other people use their phone. And so actually you don't even have to be like scoldy with people. Just putting away your own phone at dinner and not touching it will have ripple effects and will make the whole experience more fun for everybody.

21:54

Speaker 5

So that would be a good practical challenge.

21:56

Speaker 4

Like let's put our phones away and see what we can do to create fun at these meals.

22:02

Speaker 1

Yeah. Snap, snap for that one. Catherine, you have this whole book on how to break up with your phone, which I think is mistaken. I think people assume that you're going to like compel people to break up with their phones, but I really take your book as sort of couples counseling for the phone. You don't have to break up with it yet, but like give it a little help there. Any other ideas beyond what Liz suggested for how to do this better? Yeah.

22:19

Speaker 3

I mean, I would say it's, I do think you should break up with your phone in the sense of it's not a good relationship right now. I mean, if you think it's not a good relationship, you do you. But then find a better relationship that can involve your phone. And as Liz was just alluding to, I don't think any of us are anti-tech as a bottom line. You could plan that dinner by calling or texting your friends. Just use it as a tool. So there are lots of tips and tricks out there you probably have heard that are effective, like Grayscale or reducing your notifications or please redesign your home screen so that it only contains apps that are tools and not temptations for you. But I personally think it's important to start from a higher level or a level back that's more philosophical, which is that we only have so many hours in the day. We only have so many days in a year and so many years in our lives. And we need to decide how we want to spend them. Many of the most time-sucking apps on our phones are time-sucking because they've been designed to steal our attention from us. But that's really our most valuable resource. If you spend time with someone, as Liz was just saying, but you're on your phone, you're not really fully together. You're together when you're paying attention to each other. So the thing that really stuck with me after writing How to Break Up With Your Phone was a question I also encourage you to ask yourselves repeatedly, which is what do you want to pay attention to? What is important for you to pay attention to? Because if you don't make that decision, there's a company out there that's going to make it for you. And that's not to say that you won't necessarily decide that you want to pay attention to your phone at a particular minute. But the point is to make it a choice, not the default and not because you've been manipulated. And I do have a technique that I can offer you that I've shared with Lori before called WWW, which is short for What For? Why Now? what else that you can use if you notice yourself picking up your phone. The first W is what for? What did you pick up your phone for? Did you have a purpose in this moment? Because you might have. You might have been calling those friends or texting them to get together for dinner or buying a specific thing, sending a specific email. But you also might find that you didn't really have a specific purpose. Then the next step is why now? What about this moment led you to reach for your phone? There might, again, be an actual specific time-sensitive reason, but in many cases it's going to be emotional. You're going to recognize there was a moment of boredom, or you're with a friend and they pulled out their phone, or you're working and you want a distraction, or you're a little lonely and you're seeking connection. So this is something Charles Duhigg talks a lot about in The Power of Habit, but if you can identify the reward that your brain is after, you can figure out a different way to give your brain that reward. And that leads to the third step. So you've got what for, why now, and then what else? What else could you do in that moment to give yourself that reward? Could you actually call a friend instead of turning to social media for connection? Because we all know that doesn't really work. Can you take a break from work by going for a little walk instead of just scrolling through the news, which also is not going to make you feel better. And then I'd also say that you might decide that you don't want to do anything. And speaking to the idea of boredom and the value of boredom and empty space in our minds, you might decide that just staring at a wall or, as I often do in Ubers, like staring out the window at a cloud is actually what you want to be doing. Just don't be alarmed if the driver asks you if you're okay, which is something that's happened to me multiple times. I'm like, oh, I'm just looking at a cloud. And the last thing I would say is you could answer the what else, as I was alluding to before, by saying, I actually want to be looking at my phone right now, even if it's for something as mindless as scrolling through social media. But again, if you can just get better control over your attention, it's going to make a big difference in how you experience your life. Because what we pay attention to in the moment is really a decision about how we're going to live our lives more broadly.

25:32

Speaker 2

But with so many serious problems in the world, is having fun really something we should be prioritizing? When we get back from the break, Liz and Catherine will explain why fun might be even more important when times are tough, and how a little more joy might be essential for tackling some of the world's biggest challenges. Plus, I'll share how embracing the old-school game Guitar Hero helped me rock my way through some pretty tedious Zoom-filled workdays. More from our live conversation at the Aspen Ideas Festival after these messages.

26:08

Speaker 1

We had our barriers to fun. We had, I don't have any time. I'm super distracted. I'm on my phone all the time. Final barrier to fun. And this one gets back to what my students talk about a lot is this idea that like right now with the world as it is, we are not supposed to have fun. How can I be playful when the world is on fire? How can I like be having fun like in this connected way when politics is falling apart all around me, when there's like wars everywhere and And I think this is something that comes up a lot. And I think there's lots of reasons to recognize that this is a misconception, that during the tough times in the world and for yourself, this might be exactly the time where you really, really want to have fun. Interestingly, because making sure you're feeling good, feeling happier might be connected to solving some of these interesting problems. And Liz, your whole new book is actually arguing that we can use focusing on our joy to fix the climate crisis, which is definitely not something I was expecting. I know you're going to figure out how we can harness our time and our money to feel happier, but not how we can harness like carbon to feel happier. So given that it's such an unusual notion, explain what you mean and give me some example of how we can fight climate change through fun. Yeah.

27:20

Speaker 4

So as Catherine said, fun is energizing and any social movement needs energy. Any social movement I think needs fun, it needs joy. And I think the climate movement has been starved of it. So, you know, when we're in a good mood, we tend to be better at thinking of creative novel solutions, which is of course what we need at this moment. And if we can make changes in our own lives that we actually enjoy, it is so much easier to stick with them than if we are just pursuing self-sacrifice. So in our book, we kind of chart this through every domain of life from work and commuting to major.

27:57

Speaker 5

Life decisions like whether to have kids and where to live.

28:00

Speaker 4

But since this is a session on fun, I'm going to focus on vacation and then I'll just touch on voting as well.

28:05

Speaker 5

So let's talk about vacation.

28:06

Speaker 1

So vacation.

28:07

Speaker 4

As a happiness researcher, I want people to have a great time. Vacations are wonderful. But like the first thing you learn about climate change is that flights are terrible, right? Like flying is incredibly carbon intensive activity.

28:20

Speaker 5

So how can we.

28:21

Speaker 4

Enjoy vacation and keep our carbon footprint low? Well, interestingly, I got some insight on this from a really cool study by a Dutch researcher who went around to all kinds of different tourist attractions and surveyed tourists. And he wanted to figure out, what's the tourist activity that brings people the greatest joy? And basically the first sort of look at the data said, it doesn't really matter like whether people are eating or shopping or visiting a historical monument or museum, they're having a great time. Like all these different things seem to put people in good mood. The one exception was if most of their day had been spent on travel. That sucked out the joy of tourism. So what that tells us is that there's potentially an opportunity to think about taking at least some of our vacations closer to home. maybe even being a hometown tourist. And interestingly, there's data showing that people rarely visit the tourist attractions that bring other people to their own region. In fact, the most likely times for people to visit their hometown tourist attractions, maybe you can guess in your head, are one, when people have visitors from out of town, and two, when they themselves are about to move away. So because these attractions are always there, we don't take advantage of them. And so this just being a hometown tourist is a great way to sort of capitalize on the pleasures of tourism while having an incredibly low carbon footprint. Now, that doesn't mean never go to Aspen.

29:43

Speaker 5

Which is amazing.

29:45

Speaker 4

But when you do it, really think about making it a treat and thinking carefully about what I call the return on emissions. Like, are you getting enough joy and connection out of this experience? So I used to fly in and out quickly for talks. And, you know, just I was there and then I was gone. Now I'm like, how long can I possibly stay and enjoy this experience and meet everybody and do the, I did the yoga this morning. You know, it's like do all the things, suck the most joy out of every.

30:10

Speaker 5

Pound of carbon you burn is sort of the key idea here. So that's vacation. And that's a small thing.

30:18

Speaker 4

It's an individual choice, but the same lens we can apply to more systemic problems too. So if we think about voting, it turns out happier people are more likely to vote. Education is one of the best predictors of voting, but life satisfaction is actually just as strong as education. And I'm someone I've done like phone banking for elections. It's not that fun. You're talking to a lot of people who don't want to talk to you. And field experiments actually show it is less effective to do phone banking than to host a party near a polling place. So bringing the joy, bringing the fun actually might be more effective than some of these traditional strategies that we look to to change the world.

30:59

Speaker 3

Can I add one example to that? You just made me think of like an actual example of that. I live in Philadelphia and they had a get out the vote party put on by Daybreaker, which is this organization that does early morning sober dance parties right by city hall. They had this DJ with incredibly loud music, pole dancers, like with thongs. I And he talked about the Constitution, and everybody danced, and I saw the pole dancers taking pictures of Bill Nye the Science Guy, and then they marched everybody over to City Hall to register to vote.

31:28

Speaker 5

Yes, beautiful.

31:33

Speaker 1

I mean, the power here is that when we think about all these problems, we think that the only way to solve them is by making ourselves miserable. But I think what we're really hearing here with climate with so many other things is like, if we figure out ways that we can get in the ingredients of fun and ingredients of happiness in solving these things. maybe we'd be better off.

31:52

Speaker 3

Okay.

31:52

Speaker 1

So now in the few moments we have left, we also want to talk about how we can use our money to get more fun. And Liz, you wrote a whole book called Happy Money about this. What are some quick tips we could do to get better about spending our money in ways that are actually going to deliver on fun?

32:07

Speaker 4

Well, I think one thing is, you know, I talked before about the importance of time affluence. And our research has shown that people who use money to buy time by buying their way out of their dreaded tasks are happier.

32:19

Speaker 5

Than those who do not.

32:21

Speaker 3

But.

32:23

Speaker 4

When I share this research with people, one thing they say is, yeah, okay, you buy time, but then you kind of get used to that extra time and it just gets folded into, it's just, you know, you get to item 11 instead of item 10.

32:31

Speaker 5

Of your to-do list.

32:33

Speaker 4

And so what I would say is like a cool, I haven't demonstrated this scientifically, but I do do it in my own life, is to buy that time and And then really link it to like something fun that you want to be able to do. So, you know, the annoying thing you have to do once a month on Saturdays, if you could buy your way out of it and then think of like, what's the really fun thing you could do during that Saturday instead and commit to making that direct linkage.

32:55

Speaker 1

Can I give my example that I've done since knowing Liz's work about this? Now, every time I get takeout, especially the takeout that comes on a day when you're like just really exhausted and you just like can't even in the kitchen and you buy that takeout. I put a timestamp on that take. I just bought Pad Thai. If I tried to cook Pad Thai myself, that'd be like an hour to at least two hours. What am I going to do with that two hours? Right. I was going to buy the Pad Thai anyway, but just that little shift can let me use that time a Katherine, I know you've talked about a misconception that we have when it comes to time and fun, that like fun really requires lots and lots of hours of time. What's wrong with that idea when it comes to how people really engage with fun?

33:31

Speaker 3

Yeah, you don't need that much time or money. Although I will say what you both said ties in perfectly to the idea. If you figure out how much your pad tie is worth in time and you figure out those fun magnets we were talking about, that's when you put this all together and you say, okay, on Saturday, I'm going to carve out my pad tie two hours or whatever to do that thing I identified. I like that idea. I might try to do that myself because that also plays mental games with yourself where you're like, ah, yes, I've justified it to myself more. Sorry, I'm working through my own issues.

33:58

Speaker 1

Anyway, all research is me search. We're just working things out.

34:03

Speaker 3

You don't need lots of time or money. And I would say for the money part, one of my favorite stories that someone shared with me when I was doing research for my book is how he had a ton of fun. sitting on a park bench with his nephew, just catching leaves, trying to catch leaves as they fell off a tree. And I thought that was so beautiful. It's obviously free. And I was like, you're actually making, because I like to say, you know, there's opportunities for fun floating around us in the air all the time. We just have to reach out and grab them. And I'm like, you just made that literal. Thank you so much, Joe, that guy who told me that story. But you also don't need that much time. I mean, you should carve out the time on your calendar for those things. But as we were talking about before, you also can just find these little moments, these little interstitial moments where you can do something that's a little bit playful. An example in my own house, we have something called a 30 second dance party timer that my husband got me as a gag gift. It has a German accent and it says 30 second dance party. And then it gives you 30. Anyway, something like that, literally 30 seconds that elevates the mood. And if we're in kind of like a let's say a fight with our 11-year-old daughter, it also breaks the tension. So you can just do little things throughout the day to add a bit of levity and add a bit of connection that really can make a difference, even if it's not a whole two-hour pad thai block.

35:09

Speaker 1

My 30-second dance party, stolen from Catherine again, because these are, of course, my gurus for happiness and fun, was that when she told me about this, I was like, I don't really have this German 30-second dance party thing. But at the time, I had an old PlayStation that was still hooked up, and we had Guitar Hero. And I realized that the songs I like to play most on Guitar Hero are at most like... two minutes for like that Molly crew song or whatever. And so in between zoom meetings, I would like, when I'm working from home, leave five minutes at the end to run to my room, put on the Molly crew, play the Molly crew, and then just go to the next zoom meeting. And what's crazy is like, what else would I have done with those five minutes? I would have checked off some stupid email. I would have scrolled through something stupid on Facebook or Instagram. Like now I come back energized.

35:48

Speaker 3

I come to that meeting.

35:49

Speaker 1

I'm like, kickstart my heart people. Let's talk about the spreadsheet, you know? Anyway, in our last two minutes, in our last two minutes before we turn away, another thing that everybody's talking about is loneliness and connection. And both of your ingredients to happiness included connection, which we're getting less and less of these days. Quick, fast tip on your best advice for how can we increase connection?

36:14

Speaker 5

Catherine, want to start?

36:15

Speaker 3

Put down your phones and talk to someone. And then I'd also say one of my favorite techniques is to notice and share delights, which is a practice I got from the poet Ross Gay, who wrote a whole book called The Book of Delights. The basic idea is just make a point of noticing things in your environment or your interactions that delight you. And when you notice those things, you put a finger up in the air and you say out loud, delight. And so I'd like to invite you to do that with me on three. You'll feel silly the first time, but there's actually scientific evidence showing that noticing and naming positive things saying it out loud, accompanying it with a physical gesture, and then sharing it with other people is a way to boost your mood. So count of three.

36:48

Speaker 1

Ready?

36:49

Speaker 3

One, two, three.

36:50

Speaker 5

Delight.

36:51

Speaker 3

Thank you. And you can do that for yourself alone. You can share it with other people. We have a jar of delights on our kitchen table we drop delights into. And if you're like, I don't know about this delight thing, another quick tip I would have is create delight for other people. Like, for example, I went through a phase, speaking of little things you can give people, to just create delight for others by, in my case, buying a number of $ 9. 99 portable disco balls off of Amazon and sending them to friends with no explanation.

37:14

Speaker 1

It's good to get on her mailing list. Liz, 30 second, how can we increase connection? All right.

37:22

Speaker 5

So I've needed two. One is like planned fun.

37:24

Speaker 4

So I calendar my fun, which, you know, maybe doesn't reflect well on me, but actually it works so well because for example, I have a friend who is like the busiest person I know.

37:35

Speaker 5

And so I wasn't seeing her.

37:37

Speaker 4

And so we committed to doing this fitness class together every week. And I literally just booked a flight around not missing that class. And so we make sure we see each other. And she's one of my favorite people in the world. And we get that hour together every week. The other bit is more serendipitous, and that is similar to what Catherine was saying, but talking to strangers. So my research has shown that when people have even a brief chat with someone they don't know, it actually lifts both people's moods. And so I would invite all of you as we're leaving here today to maybe just talk to somebody else that you haven't met before.

38:08

Speaker 1

Say hello.

38:09

Speaker 4

And what's really interesting about this is we actually underestimate other people's interest in talking to us. So practice it here and then take it home with you to your own community.

38:23

Speaker 2

Thank you so much to the Aspen Ideas Festival for making this conversation possible. It was, at least for me, super fun. For more practical tips on how to bring fun into your busy life, check out Catherine's book, Power of Fun, and her amazing substack called How to Feel Alive. And if you're curious about how pursuing joy might actually help us tackle some of the world's biggest challenges, I recommend Liz's new book, Leave the Lights On, How Joyful Decisions Can Save Our Species. Next week, we'll be continuing our series of live conversations from the past year. This time, I'll be speaking to Duke professor Kate Bowler about how meaning, humor, and connection can help us deal with life's most difficult moments.

39:04

Speaker 1

What's lovely about and very annoying about happiness is that it is a surprise. It will sneak up on you.

39:11

Speaker 3

And it is because you are built.

39:13

Speaker 5

With this unbelievable capacity for it.

39:16

Speaker 3

Like we are actually made for joy.

39:18

Speaker 2

That's all next week on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr.

39:22

Speaker 1

Laurie Santos.