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Are you like me in that you blame yourself whenever your kid is going through a hard stage, but then it gets better, you double blame yourself for, quote, waiting so long to get help? Well, I have news for you. I think the reason you might not have taken that next step of getting help is because actually you know that you're so busy and you might not utilize whatever the thing is that you would invest in.
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Two things that don't always go hand in hand. But for anyone listening who might not be enjoying parenting right now, that's okay. And there is hope. I'm Dr. Becky, and this is Good Inside.
My guest today is Arthur Brooks. He's a social scientist, author, and Harvard professor who blends behavioral science and neuroscience research with philosophy and wisdom traditions to teach people how to live better, happier lives. And his ideas around happiness are probably going to be surprising. Today, we're going to talk about how all parents can figure out their happiness equation and bring more happiness into their lives.
Let's start with you. Are you a happy person? How do you think about that for yourself? Yeah, I mean, the answer is no. Not naturally. And that's why I study happiness. You don't do research in social science. You do me-search.
If you have the tools to understand human behavior, you look for the answers of the questions that you have. I realize that's egotistical, but it's human nature nonetheless. You know, I grew up in a family that had some issues. You know, I mean, I had a great childhood and wonderful parents, but they were pretty gloomy. And we know from studies of identical twins that about 50% of your baseline mood or affect level is
is genetic so you know i don't have great genes for happiness and i grew up as kind of you know with i was a little blue maybe a little melancholic and and when i became a social scientist i said you know i wonder if it's possible not just to observe behaviors but to but to change life with this science and i've dedicated myself to doing just that and and i can tell you becky it works
It works, meaning you can be someone who says, maybe even I know I'm predisposed to some depression or to not the happiest of genes. And through learning, through practice, through certain behaviors, I can get closer to happiness or I can even get there. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
the science is very important for us to understand because we don't, we don't naturally, our state of nature is not necessarily to be happy. We think, you know, often if I just do what I want to do, then I'm going to get happier, but that's wrong. Mother nature doesn't really care if you're happy. We don't select on happiness. Mother nature wants us to meet our caloric needs and have mates. I mean, it's just pretty basic stuff in the Pleistocene.
But today, you know, we can do a lot better than that. We understand how human happiness works, not perfectly, but a lot better than we did. And on the basis of the science, we can change our habits, which I've done for myself. And that's what I teach at my university. That's what I write about. And that's what I travel around speaking on because I want through knowledge and science and ideas. I want more love and happiness in the world. I've gotten more of it in my life.
And I want to bring more of it to others. So yes, yes to this. And I love that you said, you know, it's so true. We study, we talk about in sophisticated ways, usually all the things that are hard for us. And whenever people say that to me, they're like sitting with emotions and tolerating emotions instead of trying to fix them. Like, you're so good at that. I'm like, why do you think I'm good at that? Like, why do you think I talk about it all the time? It's because I need to work on it.
So I went on a trip with some of my girlfriends a couple months ago, and we are all busy parents. It is so hard to coordinate schedules, and honestly, it's even challenging to allow myself to really prioritize that trip for myself. And two things are true. I know it's so important to do.
So we booked an Airbnb, and it was just the best decision for us because we rarely get uninterrupted time together. And the hotel we had been considering, hotels just don't give us the kind of space we actually needed because we just realized the best part of those trips isn't meeting over a meal or an activity. It's kind of like those in-between moments, those conversations, those memories that we have when we're together.
When we're just having coffee in our pajamas or getting ready for dinner and together in the bathroom. And that's really only possible because we were all staying together. Airbnb gave us the best of both worlds. I mean, we each had our own bedrooms, which felt important in adulthood. And we had shared space for all of that in-between best time. So if you're looking to plan a trip with your friends or family to take some dedicated time to really bond and come together, this is it.
Go to Airbnb and find your weekend getaway. You deserve it. Okay, so I think we always have to understand things before we intervene about them. So my guess is...
People might not understand happiness in the most helpful or accurate way. So let's start with an understanding. Like, what is happiness? And maybe, what do some people think happiness is that you might, you know, I don't know, paint a different way? Yeah, for sure. People misunderstand happiness all over the place in radical and completely sometimes counterintuitive ways. The first thing that people think that is not true is that happiness is a feeling that
So happiness is the feeling I have when I'm with the people that I love or the feeling that I get when I'm doing what I enjoy. That's wrong. Feelings are evidence of happiness. Happiness is not feelings in the same way that your Thanksgiving dinner is not the smell of the turkey.
The smell of the turkey is evidence of Thanksgiving dinner. And if you mistake the two, you're going to have a very frustrating Thanksgiving and pretty unsatisfying at that. And the same thing is true if we're looking for feelings. We'll be kind of chasing vapors all throughout our lives. So that's number one. The second thing that's important for us to understand is that happiness is actually not a destination. We have unhappiness in our lives for a very, very good set of reasons. We actually need unhappiness or we would be dead.
Negative emotions keep us literally alive. Fear and anger and sadness and disgust, they're incredibly important and they don't bring happiness. They bring a sense of unhappiness and we need that. If we didn't have that, we would be in just a world of trouble. In point of fact, there are no bad feelings.
There are negative feelings, but there are no bad feelings because feelings are nothing more, or emotions are nothing more than information. I know we'll talk about that a little bit later. So the result of that is that we need to get past the two big mistakes. Number one, that happiness is a feeling. And number two, that happiness is a state that you can arrive at. Happiness is a direction, not a destination. So I just think about how often people say, I just want to be happy, or I just want my kids to be happy. That makes me think that's destination mindset.
Yeah, it's also incredibly dangerous to want your kids to be happy for a bunch of reasons. Number one, they can't. You really don't want that because your kids would be in danger if they were happy too much. They wouldn't learn, they wouldn't grow, and they would be literally unsafe from the outside world if they didn't have negative emotions.
The second thing is that you'll be a really horrible parent if that's your goal. Look, I'm on your territory now, but there is a lot of research out there that says that the extent to which we've helicoptered our kids into oblivion, that we've tried to save them from all the vicissitudes of the outside world, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, that we protected them so much. And that's one of the reasons that the explosion of anxiety and depression is
It comes when they go away and they're on a college campus or they start to experience bullying for the first time. They just have no defenses. We have kind of a social peanut allergy that actually comes from the over-parenting where we say, I want my kids to be happy all the time. It's a dangerous ambition for your kids. It doesn't actually help them. Do you agree with that? Yeah.
I mean, this is like one of my favorite chapters of my book where I talk about resilience over happiness and how, yeah, childhood focused on optimizing happiness leads to an adulthood of anxiety because every time you feel distress, it feels like an alarm that's wrong instead of information to use and that you've learned to cope with. So I think, yes, we're in complete alignment there. So I'm thinking about the parents listening. And I think we both get the intention, right? We want our kids to...
Maybe that's worth breaking down. Like, what is it that we want? Do we want them to lead fulfilled life when we say happy or right? What are the components when you think parents are saying, I want my kids to be happy when they're older that are worth preserving, but maybe like shifting our perspective on a little bit? What should the goal be? Yeah. Well, that really comes back to a question that you asked before, but I didn't really answer and I showed up before, which is, okay, if happiness is not a feeling and it's not a destination, what the heck is it?
And happiness is really a combination of three macronutrients, kind of like Thanksgiving dinner is protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three things that we need to have kind of a balanced diet that can lead us to getting happier without trying to be perfectly happy. And by the way, all three of those things have unhappiness and discomfort embedded in them.
Which is one of the great ironies of happiness is you can't get happier without also being unhappy a good deal of the time. So to begin with, and all three of these objectives are the objectives that we have for our children. I'm the father of three adult kids and I'm a grandfather, as a matter of fact. And I really, really want in my heart my kids to be happy, but I actually don't because I know that that's a curse.
So I want them to be happier, and I break that into wanting to help them understand the three macronutrients and the strategies for getting greater enjoyment, greater satisfaction, and having a greater sense of meaning in their lives. So the first of these is enjoyment, and this is a big misunderstanding. So people often think it's pleasure. You know, back in the 60s,
You and I weren't kicking around in the 1960s. But if you go back, you see like at the Woodstock Music Festival, the motto was, if it feels good, do it. That is an incredibly good way to ruin your life.
Because that's the pursuit of pleasure. And the pursuit of pleasure is an awful, awful goal. It's basically tapping a part of your limbic system called the ventral striatum. But that's a part of the brain that's your reward center. And you can do it with drugs. You can do it with alcohol. You can do it with gambling or highly glycemic carbohydrates. You can do it with pornography. And what all those things have in common is if you're searching for pleasure by touching the ventral striatum again and again and again, you're not going to get happier, but you're going to get addicted.
And that's really, really bad for you. So that's not enjoyment. That is not enjoyment. Enjoyment is the sources of pleasure plus people and memory. Why? Because you want to move the experience of pleasure, which is nothing more than a brain phenomenon, a signal to you saying that this is a good way to get mates or calories or something.
And then you turn it into something that the executive center of your brain actually is experiencing. And that can be the source of happiness. And you do that by doing it socially and making a memory, which in turn brings it to the prefrontal cortex of your brain, which is the C-suite of your brain. That's the human, that's the conscious part of your brain. So here's the rule of thumb for young adults and for our teenage kids and everybody else in between, and for all of us, by the way.
You don't have to shy away from pleasure. That's not the problem. But if something can be addictive and you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong.
Now, there's a lot of stuff you do alone that's great, like walking in nature and saying your prayers. But if I find you at 4 o'clock in the morning in Las Vegas in the casino all alone by yourself pulling the lever on a slot machine, yeah, not the secret to happiness. And that's one of the most important things that we can actually learn. If it's addictive and it brings pleasure, don't do it alone. And then you're going to be on a much healthier track to beginning enjoyment, which is one of the macronutrients of happiness. Yeah.
I'm thinking about the parents listening who are thinking about their kids and their phones and video games. There you go. Right? Or...
Right. So that would be social media, right? Highly addictive. And you always do it alone. Now you'd say, okay, no, no, no. I'm with my friends on social media. No, you're not because in real life is actually social. You need oxytocin, which is a neuropeptide in the brain functions as a hormone and it gives you bonding in response to eye contact and touch.
So virtual relationships are inadequate, and especially virtual relationships where the other person isn't really present at this moment. They give you no oxytocin. So therefore, that doesn't count. And these things are highly addictive. They're designed to be addictive. The social media, the screen applications, and especially social media on the devices is made to affect your brain much the same way that a slot machine does. It addicts you. It gives you tiny little spritz.
And what that does is it makes you go, that's great. And it addicts you and it makes you lonely. And it's sort of this junk food. It's the big Macs and fries of social life. You know, it's interesting. It fills you up for a minute, but then it leaves you hungry later. You know, it makes me think I play a lot of board games with my kids or kind of like, maybe not board games, but like physical games, right? Yeah. Like we're really into Sushi Go right now. And we play it as a whole family. And I'm thinking like my kids would never say that to me.
sparks, you know, whatever happens inside their body or their brain the way like a video game does. But the best I would say, it's very enjoyable. But hearing what you're saying, that's actually like that's the best it should get is a component of happiness. Like that's good. It's enjoyable, but maybe not that same like addicting. Oh, yeah, totally. No, no, it doesn't give you nearly as much of these big taps on the ventral strain. But it gives you a little bit of that plus the people, plus the memory equals the enjoyment, which is the first part of happiness. Exactly.
Okay, so talk to me about satisfaction. Okay, satisfaction. Now, satisfaction is not just contentment or fulfillment. It's the joy that you get after struggle. You worked for something, you wanted it, you suffered, right?
You deferred your gratification and you got it. It's so sweet. If we don't suffer, we don't enjoy. That's just the way it is. Humans are so funny this way. You know, my students, if they cheat to get an A on my exam, there's no satisfaction. If they stay up all night studying for my exam and they get an A, it's phenomenal. They just really, they really, really enjoy it. And that enjoyment, that joy that comes at the end is satisfaction when it's at the end of this process of struggling for something.
Now, that's important for us to understand because that's why we always tell our kids that they shouldn't eat in the afternoon until they'll enjoy their dinner. We want them to actually get some satisfaction from eating. My father-in-law lived through the Spanish Civil War.
And he was a little kid. He was in a refugee camp during the Spanish Civil War. And he was on the wrong side. His family was on the wrong side. They really suffered a lot. He went hungry night after night after night. It was a really rough business. He told me one time he's kind of a sensible, grumpy guy. And he said, you know, you know, the problem with people today, they don't enjoy their dinner. That's why they're not happy because they don't enjoy their dinner.
And I said, okay, why not? You know, I'm playing along. He says, because they're never hungry. And you get the point, right? I'm not saying that people should go hungry. That's not my point at all. My point is don't snack in the afternoon so you enjoy your dinner. And in so doing that, that will give you a little bit of satisfaction because there was a little bit of waiting for it. The problem then becomes that the satisfaction doesn't last, right?
Right. And this actually leads people into another another kind of doom loop of actually that it's like I've met a lot of very wealthy people as have you, I'm sure. And the one thing that a billionaire who's not very self-reflective thinks is, I guess I needed another billion to.
Because they get to that and they struggle for it and they got a lot of satisfaction from getting there, but they didn't keep the new car smell, the new billion smell for very long. And so they kept running and running and running and running and running. And that's a different problem. That's called the...
hedonic treadmill. It's a brain process called homeostasis where you get used to stuff really, really fast. And so when I'm working with people about that, especially young people, but people my age as well, I say you have to remember that lasting satisfaction doesn't come from having more. It actually comes from wanting less.
Your satisfaction is really all the things you have divided by your wants, halves divided by wants. And you got to work on the denominator of that fraction. Wanting less and managing your wants is the secret to lasting satisfaction.
The other day, I was thinking about how many of us parents don't eat our own breakfast. Do you know how often I've scraped the bottom of my kid's half-eaten yogurt container or snagged two bites of their soggy cereal while running out the door? Well, I'm calling BS. Parents deserve to eat and to enjoy our own food in the mornings. And I know that fueling my mind and body helps me show up as a sturdier leader for my kids.
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I have too many things pinging in my brain right now, but I have something about that. But I actually want to go back to satisfaction because I want to give also listeners this concrete strategy. And I think, Arthur, I think you're going to like it. If not, be like, Becky, I don't like that. But test you out, okay? Because one of the things I talk to parents about a lot is just is not taking away your kid's struggle.
is not. Like, down to, like, your kid is small and they can't open Play-Doh yet, but they're, like, working at it or they're working on a puzzle or, you know, your older kids are working on things too. And something I used to always say to my kids, and it reminds me of maybe this thing with satisfaction, okay, was, like, do my, I can't do this puzzle. I can't do this piece for me. Do this. And this is what I'd say, because I noticed them on the precipice. I'd say, sweetie, I see you working hard on this, okay? I see you working hard. And here's the thing. The best feeling in the world
is when you think you can't do something and then you work and work and work and watch yourself do it. And I don't want to take that feeling away from you. So I'll sit with you and take a deep breath.
We can take a break. You can come back when you want. I'm not finishing it for you because I don't want to take away that feeling. And I can't even tell you, my kids will still, and maybe the feeling is satisfaction, just a note to name it, but they still will say, like, I got, they just call it that feeling, right? And you only get it through the struggle. That's exactly right. That is satisfaction. The problem is going to be as they grow up,
that they always think it's going to hang around and it doesn't. And, you know, this is one of the ways that mother nature lies to us. She lies to us constantly. Right. And the reason is because she wants us to be in the hunt.
Mother Nature wants us to be literally in the hunt, you know, back in the old days. But now she wants us to be, you know, trying to get our calories and, you know, and meet our goals. And so she keeps lying to us by telling us that if we get that thing, that we will enjoy it forever. And the truth is it wears off very quickly because we have to get ready for the next set of circumstances. These feelings actually never last unless we're in the serious business of modifying not our haves, but modifying our wants.
And that's a much harder thing. But that's, you know, I struggle with that. I feel like modifying your wants isn't a thing we can do, but maybe we can take issue with that. But I don't think...
I don't think—it's interesting to hear you say that when you kind of get these material objects that doesn't last, that feels more like the addiction, like it's something you get on your own, that the satisfaction is a feeling. But if you're equating the feeling with money or with an object, of course those things don't last. But it seems like then it was more about those objects than about money.
the feeling itself yeah the experiences actually do last longer but the objects you know when you save your money and buy the car the car gives you a huge amount of satisfaction it's actually the car represents what you were able to do and the problem is you equate the satisfaction with the object and you know then it becomes really problematic for all sorts of reasons that we would think about then we think i needed a better car i need two cars or whatever it happens to be but the other thing is even with even with experiences
you know, I was, you know, one of the funniest things that in the world of psychology that we see, not funny, but you know, it's a, but it's an irregularity in people's lives is that a lot of people are trying to lose weight all the time. It's very common in our society to want to lose weight and losing weight is not that hard. Almost any diet will make you lose weight. The
The problem, of course, is keeping weight off. 95% of diets fail within a year, meaning people gain the weight back and then some. The reason for that has everything to do with the satisfaction dilemma that we're talking about. Every day that you sacrifice eating what you want, the reward of the scale going down is greater than the cost. The benefit is higher than the cost. But when you get to your goal, you assume that it's going to be Shangri-La. That's called the arrival fallacy. You think it's going to be great, and it's really frustrating because when you hit your weight goal,
congratulations. Your reward is never getting to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life. That's a terrible reward. And so the result is that people like, I hate this. And so 30% of people who go on really serious diets wind up with an eating disorder.
Because they can't get off the treadmill. They want the satisfaction. They want the daily hit of actually the reward of what they're getting. And they're not getting it anymore when they get to a healthy weight level. And so they get to an unhealthy weight level on the other side of the goal. So people go back up and they go into yo-yo diets and all these sorts of things. But that's a metaphor for a lot of other ways that we get into this cycle in our lives unless we start thinking about really what our priorities are. So when I say want less, what I mean is basically
Well, I'll give you a concrete example. I have what I, in my own life, what I call the reverse bucket list. You know, when I was a younger man, I had my bucket list, which is on your birthday, you list all your desires and cravings and ambitions. And you imagine yourself enjoying all these things, how it's going to be so wonderful. You know, when I get tenure, you know, when I get married, you know, it's going to be wonderful forever. And now I realize, you know, I'm 59 years old. I got some years behind me and I have a reverse bucket list.
Or I make a list of my worldly cravings and desires, all the dumb stuff, money, power, pleasure, fame. Those are the idols of life. And it's not like I'm not going to get these things, but I'm going to detach myself from these things consciously. And if I say, basically, I'm going to cross this out.
As the big be-all and end-all, I'm way less attached and I become much happier. I've done this every year on my birthday for years now since I figured this one out. It's very easy come, easy go. And in so doing, you know, the haves are fine, but the wants are weaker. And I'm managing the denominator in my satisfaction fraction. Okay. Yeah.
And tell me about purpose. That's the last one we got to get to. So meaning is the hardest. You know, I can go for a long time without enjoyment. I can go for a long time without satisfaction because I'm pretty good at deferring my gratification. But I can't go for an hour without meaning. If I don't have a sense of life's meaning, I have trouble. Now, meaning really has three parts to it. So if you say, what's the meaning of life? That's too big a question.
It's really three questions, according to philosophers and psychologists. There is the question of coherence. Why do things happen the way they do? You got to have a theory of the case. What is the direction and goals of my life? That's the purpose question. So purpose is kind of a subcategory of meaning. And last but not least is significance. Does it matter that I'm alive? Those are the three big questions, significance, purpose, and coherence. I can kind of boil it down in a two-question survey that I give my students.
So I asked my students to answer in their heads, and sometimes I'll make one of them, you know, put one of them on the hot seat and answer these questions if they're willing. Obviously, this has to be voluntary to answer these questions, which kind of summarize this into two things. And if you have answers, it's really good for meaning. And if you don't, it's really good news because now you know what to go looking for.
to find meaning in life. Question number one is why are you alive? Why are you alive? Now, there's no right answer to this, but that can either mean where did I come from? And even better, where did I come from and what am I supposed to do? Right? That's why I'm alive. And the second question is trickier for some people. For what would I be willing to die? Now, that question gets a lot clearer when you have your children.
Right. But for a lot of young adults who don't have children yet, they don't know. It's like I die for my parents. Really? Would you? I don't know. And so a lot of my students, for example, they struggle with this with the questions of meaning.
And they can't really answer why am I alive? They don't have a theory of why the answers to that question. And they don't know what they'd be willing to die for. And looking for those answers turns out to be the search for life's meaning. You got to find your answers is the bottom line. That's why meaning is so critical. Hmm.
I feel like that gives us all a lot to think about. Those questions are hard to answer on the spot. They are hard. Yes, it's okay. The real answers, not the PC answers that you'd give your mom, right? Exactly. The real ones that are written on your heart. Exactly. So in your book, you talk about building an imperfect family. So most of our listeners here have kids.
I think this probably isn't a phrase they think about with my imperfect family. I try to like build this perfect family. But you talk about happiness in an imperfect family and a couple kind of principles around it. Can you speak to a few? Yeah. So one of the, I mean, I, you know, you're a professional in dealing with families and I wind up talking about this an awful lot, you know. So for my class, I teach MBAs.
and happiness. And one of the big things that they want to talk about in the business of happiness is not money and happiness, it's love. So they want to talk about romantic love, friendships,
In relationships with their parents is a lot of what they want to talk about. And the average age of my students is 28. So they've got a lot going on. This is super important for a lot of people. And the reason they want to talk about these things is because they're quite distressed. They don't know how to fall in love and stay in love. They feel like they're losing their closest friendships as they move away and go to work and go to school. And they can't quite figure out how to have a proper relationship with their parents. They don't actually know how to do that.
The number one thing to remember in these family relationships, which is to say siblings and parents and children and even extended families, is lower your standards. The problem that we have is we have this kind of, I mean, it's bad enough in romantic love when you watch Disney movies, happily ever after. Yeah, right. That's not how marriages work. That just isn't. That's not even the right goal. It's permanent passion for the rest of your life. You'd go out of your mind and you'd want to die after a few years.
But with your parents, it's the same thing. It's like all these happy families and everybody's just getting along great. No, lower your standards and treat people like people and start treating them the way that you would if you didn't have these unbelievably...
you know, unreasonable expectations for perfection in these relationships. And only then can you actually start working with people as people and have the relationship that you want. That's what I mean by an imported family. Then you can communicate better with them. You can actually start moving into an adult relationship with your aging parents in all sorts of ways. You can actually deal with it when there's conflict and not be freaked out and think that there's something wrong with you or something wrong with them. And my guess is that this is a lot of what you're doing in your practice.
is helping people to lower their standards and have a human relationship with these
people that were put on earth that they didn't choose. Absolutely. I think the number one relationship strategy, definitely parenting strategy, I share a lot about is repair, right? That like if you're going to get really good at something, get good at repair because what that means also is mistakes and struggles and yelling. It's inevitable. We all do it. You talk about forgiveness. So can you speak about that related to happiness? I think people often think, oh, if I just didn't have this happen or if someone didn't do this thing, I'd be happy. But forgiveness is
to happiness, then that also makes me think you believe that like messing up this imperfection, you know, isn't is inherent in happiness, too. Yeah. So forgiveness is like being able to let go of a hot coal in your hand. Right. I mean, when you're holding on to a hot coal that you want to throw at somebody else, you're the one who's getting burned the worst. I mean, I didn't come up with that metaphor. That was the Buddha.
So, I mean, yeah, I say that with appropriate humility, but it's really important and it's really true. And there's a whole lot of research on this, that forgiveness is hard to do. And there's evolutionary biology behind why forgiveness is hard. You know, you keep grudges because you have to remember things about slight so that you can take care of yourself, et cetera. But it's so counterproductive.
and the way that we use it in our modern lives and the way that we've configured our families. And so the number one skill that you actually find in family life for families that do have a relatively high level of harmony is forgiveness. And you're going to need to forgive and forgive and forgive and forgive. And this is one of the things that they actually should teach you in family
Everybody should go through a course in marriage counseling before they actually get married. And this is the number one thing, the technique that you should have forgiveness techniques, but really comes down to forgive and forgive and keep forgiving. Now I get it that there, that this can get to a logical limit. Somebody's gonna be listening to us and say, what about abuse? That's not what I'm talking about. That's not what I'm talking about. You may need to forgive in the case of abuse, but that doesn't mean you need to forget it and stay in the situation.
I mean, you do need to take care of yourself as well. So that's not the situation that I'm talking about right now. Yeah. When I think about my own kids getting married one day or partnered up, it's so unromantic. But I think...
what I'll say to them about their potential future partner is just like, is this the set of problems you want to deal with the rest of your life? You know, because when you're getting partnered with someone, it's just about like everybody has some set of problems. And I think you're right, especially so many people now they're looking for this perfect person or the perfect family. And if you go in knowing, okay, so everyone has a set of problems. You're just kind of choosing, is this the one I want to deal with? And I'm going to have to
forgive over and over. And to me, that like really sets the baseline at a much more realistic place because I think we all get very surprised and very almost like taking personally the fact that like we all do just kind of carry around a set of struggles. Yeah. And it's very disappointing early on in a marriage. It's usually the first five years of a marriage are very tricky because you're moving from what we call passionate love to ideally what we call companionate love. You know, companionate love has plenty of passion in it, but really it's best friendship.
And that's where you want to get. And so one of the things that you find in, you know, you'll talk to people,
I mean, anybody who has a successful love life, almost anybody has had some ugly breakups beforehand. You kind of need ugly breakups because you need experience and pain gives you a lot of experience. It's kind of like being an entrepreneur with a startup where the average successful entrepreneur has four failed enterprises in her or his past. Very important. So it's basically the same thing with a startup of romantic life is what it comes down to.
And the relationships that really last are the ones that have ignition in passion, but then they actually become friendships, really, really close, intimate friendships. And that's what you really want to get to after the first two to five years. Otherwise, what happens is when the passion wears off and there's not friendship, you find out that you're not even friends and never liked each other and you can't imagine what you saw in that person. That's what all of those things really are, is it never got to companion it.
love. So you have to have the right goals as well. And really close friends, they have realistic and a realistic understanding of the other person. I mean, with your really close friends, you don't think that person isn't perfect, so I can't be friends. No, of course your friends are horribly imperfect. You laugh about their imperfections. That's kind of the same thing. You just have way more margin of forgiveness for your friends. And that's the kind of margin of forgiveness you actually need for your spouse too, because companionate love is the best kind of love. Yeah.
I want to kind of end by asking you for, on behalf of all the parents listening, like, I think especially when you're parenting young kids, it's a stage where you reflect, like, this is not the happiest time in my life. It's exhausting. It's hard. It's stressful on a marriage or partnership, right? For people who are hearing you, I think, like, it's like, yes, that makes sense. And that makes sense. And still, I'm left at the end of this podcast, like, I don't know. Do I feel that happy? I want to be happier. And I don't know.
Anything you leave people with or something they can make with them that, again, doesn't put them on the destination of happiness. That's not a thing, but puts them on that pathway. Yeah. So one of the ways that we measure happiness is by asking people how high their well-being is.
And, and you have to ask it under the right circumstances. It has to be anonymous. You can't ask somebody that in front of their spouse because the lie and, you know, there's all kinds of things that you need to do. And one of the best way to ask that is think of the happiest person you've ever met. And that's a 10 and the unhappiest, unfortunate person you've ever met is a one on average at this point in your life, not this moment.
what's your number? And that turns out to be a very good way of doing it. Now, what you find when you ask people that question is that generally speaking, most people, they slightly decline year after year from their early 20s until their early 50s. And then it turns around and they get a lot happier from the early 50s until about 70. And then the population breaks up into two groups.
One that keeps getting happier and happier and the other that starts going back down again. That's a lot of what I write about, about what to do earlier in life to get on that upper branch after 70. That's really important. But one of the big questions that people have is I thought, because everybody thinks, my students at 28, they think they're going to be happier at 38.
because they're optimistic. They think they're going to get what they want. And by the way, they're right. And what do they want? They want to start their families. They want to get a good job. They want to make good money. And they want that. The problem is that homeostasis, hedonic treadmill, the stuff we were talking about earlier, that doesn't actually bring the happiness. And the result is that they're quite surprised when they find at 38, when everything is going right, and they're a little less happy than they were. That's normal. And here's what's happening.
They're trading off very short-term happiness for very long-term happiness, and it's a good trade. Remember, happiness is enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning. All the things that you're doing when your kids are crying at 3 a.m. and all the things that you're doing, it lowers your enjoyment and it raises your meaning.
that's what's going on. You're making a big old trade off and you're going to get the, I promise everybody watching us here who didn't have a good sleep last night because of their little kids, you are going to be much richer as a result of that. And it's not even close. There is nobody who says when they're 55 or I'm 59, I'm going to be much richer.
Grandfather, 59. Look, I'm a Catholic, and we always say that being a grandparent is God's reward for not killing your children. It's a hardcore joke, but you get the point, right? Because when they're teenagers or when they're little, it's so totally worth it. But there is a short-term versus long-term trade-off. That's the enjoyment versus the meaning.
And you do it because you know it's the right thing to do, but you also do it because you have a sense that it's going to work out in your favor. And the abundance that comes from that is not even remotely close. To me, that is such like an offering of hope of like, oh, right. Like I always say like this stage feels hard because it is hard. It is hard. That's why it feels hard. Right. Okay. And like there is like maybe you're on that pathway to happiness of like all this work you're doing right now. So I love that so much. Yeah.
Thank you. Thank you for your book. Thank you for your work. And thank you for your time. Thank you, Becky. Thank you for what you're doing to bring families together and lift them up in bonds of love and happiness. There's nobody listening or watching or pretty much anybody in the world who would deny that a happier world requires happiness.
happier families and happier families require people who actually understand how to love each other and keep loving each other through thick and thin. And your dedication to doing that means that I get to live in a happier world. So I'm really grateful to you. That means so much. Thank you. Thanks, Arthur. Thank you. Today's episode is in partnership with Airbnb and Happy Egg.
Thank you for listening. To share a story or ask me a question, go to goodinside.com slash podcast. Or you could write me at podcast at goodinside.com. Parenting is the hardest and most important job in the world. And you deserve resources and support so you feel empowered, confident for this very important job you hold.
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Our production staff includes Sabrina Farhi, Julia Knapp, and Kristen Muller. I would also like to thank Erica Belsky, Mary Panico, Brooke Zant, and the rest of the Good Inside team. And one last thing before I let you go. Let's end by placing our hands on our hearts and reminding ourselves, even as I struggle and even as I have a hard time on the outside, I remain good inside.