# The Happiness Hypothesis - Jonathan Haidt Synced: [[2023_11_30]] 6:03 AM Last Highlighted: [[2020_03_05]]  ## Highlights [[2020_01_24]] (Location 654) > Clinical psychologists sometimes say that two kinds of people seek therapy: those who need tightening, and those who need loosening. [[2020_01_24]] (Location 755) > John Milton’s paraphrase of Aurelius: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”32 [[2020_01_25]] (Location 828) > Depressed people are caught in a feedback loop in which distorted thoughts cause negative feelings, which then distort thinking further. Beck’s discovery is that you can break the cycle by changing the thoughts. A big part of cognitive therapy is training clients to catch their thoughts, write them down, name the distortions, and then find alternative and more accurate ways of thinking. Over many weeks, the client’s thoughts become more realistic, the feedback loop is broken, and the client’s anxiety or depression abates. Cognitive therapy works because it teaches the rider how to train the elephant rather than how to defeat it directly in an argument. On the first day of therapy, the rider doesn’t realize that the elephant is controlling him, that the elephant’s fears are driving his conscious thoughts. Over time, the client learns to use a set of tools; these include challenging automatic thoughts and engaging in simple tasks, such as going out to buy a newspaper rather than staying in bed all day ruminating. These tasks are often assigned as homework, to be done daily. (The elephant learns best from daily practice; a weekly meeting with a therapist is not enough.) With each reframing, and with each simple task accomplished, the client receives a little reward, a little flash of relief or pleasure. And each flash of pleasure is like a peanut given to an elephant as reinforcement for a new behavior. You can’t win a tug of war with an angry or fearful elephant, but you can—by gradual shaping of the sort the behaviorists talked about—change your automatic thoughts and, in the process, your affective style. In fact, many therapists combine cognitive therapy with techniques borrowed directly from behaviorism to create what is now called “cognitive behavioral therapy.” [[2020_01_26]] (Location 1423) > The problem of evil has bedeviled many religions since their birth. If God is all good and all powerful, either he allows evil to flourish (which means he is not all good), or else he struggles against evil (which means he is not all powerful). Religions have generally chosen one of three resolutions of this paradox.25 One solution is straight dualism: There exists a good force and an evil force, they are equal and opposite, and they fight eternally. Human beings are part of the battleground. We were created part good, part evil, and we must choose which side we will be on. This view is clearest in religions emanating from Persia and Babylonia, such as Zoroastrianism, and the view influenced Christianity as a long-lived doctrine called Manichaeism. A second resolution is straight monism: There is one God; he created the world as it needs to be, and evil is an illusion, a view that dominated religions that developed in India. These religions hold that the entire world—or, at least, its emotional grip upon us—is an illusion, and that enlightenment consists of breaking out of the illusion. The third approach, taken by Christianity, blends monism and dualism in a way that ultimately reconciles the goodness and power of God with the existence of Satan. This argument is so complicated that I cannot understand it. Nor, apparently, can many Christians who, judging by what I hear on gospel radio stations in Virginia, seem to hold a straight Manichaean world view, according to which God and Satan are fighting an eternal war. In fact, despite the diversity of theological arguments made in different religions, concrete representations of Satan, demons, and other evil entities are surprisingly similar across continents and eras.26 [[2020_01_26]] (Location 1607) > We can call this “the progress principle”: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them. Shakespeare captured it perfectly: “Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.”4 [[2020_01_26]] (Location 1650) > If this idea is correct, then we are all stuck on what has been called the “hedonic treadmill.”13 On an exercise treadmill you can increase the speed all you want, but you stay in the same place. In life, you can work as hard as you want, and accumulate all the riches, fruit trees, and concubines you want, but you can’t get ahead. Because you can’t change your “natural and usual state of tranquility,” the riches you accumulate will just raise your expectations and leave you no better off than you were before. Yet, not realizing the futility of our efforts, we continue to strive, all the while doing things that help us win at the game of life. Always wanting more than we have, we run and run and run, like hamsters on a wheel. [[2020_01_26]] (Location 1757) > Research shows that people who must adapt to new and chronic sources of noise (such as when a new highway is built) never fully adapt, and even studies that find some adaptation still find evidence of impairment on cognitive tasks. Noise, especially noise that is variable or intermittent, interferes with concentration and increases stress.35 It’s worth striving to remove sources of noise in your life. [[2020_01_26]] (Location 1761) > Commuting. Many people choose to move farther away from their jobs in search of a larger house. But although people quickly adapt to having more space,36 they don’t fully adapt to the longer commute, particularly if it involves driving in heavy traffic.37 Even after years of commuting, those whose commutes are traffic-filled still arrive at work with higher levels of stress hormones. (Driving under ideal conditions is, however, often enjoyable and relaxing.)38 It’s worth striving to improve your commute. [[2020_01_26]] (Location 1766) > Lack of control. One of the active ingredients of noise and traffic, the aspect that helps them get under your skin, is that you can’t control them. [[2020_01_26]] (Location 1790) > Relationships. The condition that is usually said43 to trump all others in importance is the strength and number of a person’s relationships. Good relationships make people happy, and happy people enjoy more and better relationships than unhappy people. [[2020_01_28]] (Location 1880) [[favorite]] > For example, people would be happier and healthier if they took more time off and “spent” it with their family and friends, yet America has long been heading in the opposite direction. People would be happier if they reduced their commuting time, even if it meant living in smaller houses, yet American trends are toward ever larger houses and ever longer commutes. People would be happier and healthier if they took longer vacations, even if that meant earning less, yet vacation times are shrinking in the United States, and in Europe as well. People would be happier, and in the long run wealthier, if they bought basic, functional appliances, automobiles, and wristwatches, and invested the money they saved for future consumption; yet, Americans in particular spend almost everything they have—and sometimes more—on goods for present consumption, often paying a large premium for designer names and superfluous features. [[2020_02_29]] (Location 2148) > If you want your children to grow up to be healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, cuddle them, and love them. Give them a secure base and they will explore and then conquer the world on their own. The power of love over fear was well expressed in the New Testament: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (I JOHN 4:18). [[2020_03_04]] (Location 2480) > Seneca was right: “No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility.” John Donne was right: No man, woman, or child is an island. Aristophanes was right: We need others to complete us. We are an ultrasocial species, full of emotions finely tuned for loving, befriending, helping, sharing, and otherwise intertwining our lives with others. Attachments and relationships can bring us pain: As a character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit said, “Hell is other people.”57 But so is heaven. [[2020_03_05]] (Location 2599) > The adversity hypothesis has a weak and a strong version. In the weak version, adversity can lead to growth, strength, joy, and self-improvement, by the three mechanisms of posttraumatic growth described above. The weak version is well-supported by research, but it has few clear implications for how we should live our lives. The strong version of the hypothesis is more unsettling: It states that people must endure adversity to grow, and that the highest levels of growth and development are only open to those who have faced and overcome great adversity. If the strong version of the hypothesis is valid, it has profound implications for how we should live our lives and structure our societies. It means that we should take more chances and suffer more defeats. It means that we might be dangerously overprotecting our children, offering them lives of bland safety and too much counseling while depriving them of the “critical incidents”12 that would help them to grow strong and to develop the most intense friendships. It means that heroic societies, which fear dishonor more than death, or societies that struggle together through war, might produce better human beings than can a world of peace and prosperity in which people’s expectations rise so high that they sue each other for “emotional damages.”