Paul Bloom: The Pleasures of Suffering

thanks to Center for ideas for having me here and thanks all of you for being here several years ago the art critic James Elkins put ads in newspapers and magazines asking people to send him stories about paintings that made them cry you put together these stories in it's wonderful book pictures and tears now some of the stories were about the sorts of things that what made sense they were they were based on paintings that depicted a sort of thing that you saw them in a real world might make you cry the ravages of war the suffering of children the blinding of Samson some of the stories had a personal resonance an English professor wrote to Elkins describing a painting that his wife did of their bed unmade and soon after she finished the painting she left him for another man and one day he was alone in the house he looked at the painting started to cry other paintings were more mysterious in his responses that they gave these are giant purplish black canvasses by Mark Rothko they're on display in a canvas in Houston Texas and Elkins got the most letters about these people would sit on those benches they would look at the paintings and they would weep part of this probably had to do with the fact that they know they knew that Rothko killed himself soon after completing the paintings and that gave him a certain meaning so art can move us in sort of surprising and often like painful ways and it's not just visual arts sad songs we know it might make us cry but we also love them and then there's stories so the great philosopher David Hume took this great puzzle why why are we drawn to these things these artworks that make us suffer and he asked the question focusing on the case of stories so he wrote it seems an unaccountable pleasure which the spectators of a well-written tragedy received from sorrow terror anxiety and other passions that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy and everything in the things like Macbeth or to take it more contemporary as a TV show called this is us I've never seen it myself but my friends have seen it and I'm told you see it and you just cry and apparently there's an internet article reassuring you that's actually okay if you want C's to show and then you weep and this is what what you know Hume called a paradox of tragedy why do we enjoy things that give us this degree of pain next to that you have what sometimes called a paradox of horror why are we drawn to stories to movies to TV episodes of things that that that shocked us that horrify us the science gross this out like like psycho and he's a psycho well psycho has all sorts of other artistic merits but then there's like torture porn immensely popular movies that that exhibit that degradation and torture and horrors that could be done from one person either yet they're immensely popular too and what got what's going on with that I'm Jonathan godchild's literary scholar notes that this appetite for the horrible isn't just present in adults so he describes two children that's re the stories that children create and he lists a few of them told by preschoolers trains running over puppies and kittens a naughty girl being sent to jail a baby bunny playing with fire and burning down his house of little boy slaughtering his whole family with a bow and arrows and so on or consider our imaginations and where they go to so wonderful study by a Killingworth and gilbert used an iphone app and the app would go off randomly for the volunteers of the study and when it goes off you had to answer two questions the first question is are you focusing on what you should be focusing on what's happening are you daydreaming are you mind wandering and the second question is suppose your mind wandering is it positive or negative you think of good stuff fantasies happy memories or bad stuff memories of when you embarrass yourself dreads fears you found two things they found that first time a majority of the time when people are supposed to be doing something their minds are elsewhere I'll leave it as a question how many of you do what you know and a second their minds are often somewhere bad are when we have full reign under what to think about we often think about the negative so how do we make sense of this well when Hume phrased this puzzle the puzzle which were going to solve today I hope he phrased it in a particular focus you talked about tragedy this will happen for fictions for for stories and Samuel Johnson in the in his masterful biography of William Shakespeare zoom then said it only works for story so he wrote the delight of tragedy proceeds from our consciousness of fiction if we thought murders and trees is real they would please us no more I think this is pretty quiet plainly wrong I there are many now renditions of the OJ Simpson story documentaries reenactments and some of us here are old enough to have experienced the the murders in his murder trial by watching it on TV the fact that it was real takes away nothing from the pleasure we got from it in fact some would argue it enhances it some would say that when you see something on TV and it says ripped from the headlines based on a true story that makes us more interested not less and this is an old insight Plato tells the story of leon TS he saw some corpses lying at executioner's feet he had an appetite to look at them but at the same time he was disgusted and turned away finally overpowered by the appetite he pushed his eyes wide open and rushed towards the corpses saying look for yourselves you evil wretches take your fill of the beautiful sight and any one of us driving down a road and seeing an accident knows experience of slowing down a car to take a look here's my own story I'm driving to work on Whitney Boulevard driving to my office at Yale University and I catch a glimpse of that and I actually stopped the car today a closer look because it said gruesome details and don't we all want to know the gruesome details then there's cases where we seek out suffering and it's not the imagination at all it's real life the appetite many of us have for hot foods or spicy curries or wasabi the joy we take in roller coaster rides the the psychologist Paul rosin and his colleagues did a survey and he found out that there's always a sizeable minority people who like different versions of burning or disgust or fear or pain and and there's almost nobody nobody he finds actually who have had no masochistic pleasures we all like some kinds of pain in the right doses this shows up in a sexual realm again a sizable number of people at least when it comes to fiction novels and and movies find an immense satisfaction in in the experience of SNM our BDSM and and there's actually some data honest the major porn sites have done us the favor of releasing their data publicly telling us what people like to search for and who likes a search for what it turns out that I'm sure none of you have ever logged on to a porn site but if you were to Google Analytics keeps records basically they could figure out based on your prior searches who you are whether you're male or female gay or straight roughly how old you are and then there's a various surprises one surprises that women are far more likely to search for terms for porn terms depicting a violence or degradation words like humiliation extreme suffering pain and and this seems to reflect a more general attitude when it comes to actual masochistic behavior it's hard to get good data on this and you survey data and the survey data tends to be unreliable because you might ask the wrong group of people but I'll take this as suggestive this was from OkCupid a dating site and they asked the percentage of people who quote-unquote liked it rough and seventy five percent of men said yes and 62 percent of women said yes that's really the desktop is really interesting so what's going on here I think there's some low level explanations which are right so psychologists have often pointed out that pleasure isn't a thing in and of itself it's rather depends on contrast on what you've been feeling before and so one answer for why we made like a hot bath or spicy food is because when the sensation of pain is over it makes a subsequent sensation all the more pleasurable it's like the old joke about the guy banging his head against the wall he's asked why you're doing that he says it feels so good when I stop and this might capture some of it another mechanism is signaling you might you might engage in certain so-called masochistic pleasure to show everybody how tough they are and I mean this is more of a male than female thing it's more of a teenage thing but but you know if you find a group of people stuffing jalapeno peppers in their nose that's probably why you're doing a proble own or probably with friends then then there's the role of suffering in bringing groups together and and in and and this shows up maybe most strikingly in religion so in the Philippines people have themselves crucified in honor of the sacrifice of christ in mauritius worshipers will have skewers but through their face and hooks attached to their body and then they'll drag heavy objects of a distant Hill while experiencing great agony now I'm probably none of you do something like that but the major religions Islam Judaism Christianity have Hinduism have some ingredients like this some degrees of suffering and sacrifice that's part and parcel of a religion and one dominant theory this comes from Durkheim in the great sociologist who points out that when groups suffer together it brings them together it brings them closer and and enhances her loyalty and Dmitriy x-gal Lukas aglet cavitus and his colleagues have done work showing that that these people who suffer go through these extreme rituals in Mauritius in the course they're seven it makes them feel more fondly to the group they donate more money to the group in a later in a later psychological test hi or do purses participants those who suffer more give more than low or do participants and so do people who watch them the more pain the more donation and finally it shows up in secular ways as well so so some clubs for Brazilian Jujitsu for instance celebrate the promotion of somebody to a higher Bell by a belt whipping ceremony where they're whipped by fellow members and they know what they're doing this makes you feel more close more tight to the group it has in this case pain serves a social goal I don't doubt any of this and I'm going to assume a lot of it's true and what follows but what I want to say now and what a devote the rest of talk to is the claim that the proper understanding of masochistic pleasures in general of suffering of its sort have been talking about actually has a deeper explanation and it actually tells us some I think foundational facts about human nature three foundational facts in particular one is negative emotions aren't necessarily unpleasant so this goes back to Hume so Hume described it as talked about sorrow terror anxiety and other passions are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy but I don't quite think that that's true I think that that a theory closer to that of Lisa Feldman Barrett a constructivist theory where our emotions can be what we make them to be can be modified and Andry construed is closer to the truth even the most fundamental emotions the so-called basic emotions of anger fear disgust surprise happiness and sadness are not good and bad in and of themselves but rather can can be positive or negative depending on the circumstance so you take somebody who is being attacked by a tiger and are very afraid and this they would say is an awful experience but I want to suggest this it's not the fear itself that makes it an awful experience the fear is related to subject to danger but it's a danger that makes it awful it's the idea you could get killed or Maul that's what makes it awful but if you could have the fear and take away the actual danger suppose you're doing it through virtual reality or something then it'd be kind of pleasant and people like this kind of thing they do they go to haunted houses they like being afraid in the right measure they're like being angry anger is typically a response to injustice and injustice is a bad thing so anger is typically in response to a bad thing but if the injustice is fictional or imaginary or if your anger makes you feel like you're a better person then it could be quite a positive experience sadness is usually kind of bad but who among us doesn't enjoy a good sulk or you know paid the feeling take it broader take the feeling the end of a marathon where your heart is pounding out of your chest you're soaked with sweat you're you're you're lightheaded now if as you're sitting here these feelings came across you you would feel like gonna die and it'd be like the worst moment of your life but if you do it at the end of a marathon where it's wrapped up with accomplishment and hard work and and success then it could be political you could savor the memory of this suffering for rest of your life the moral here is that of Shakespeare there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so now negative emotions aren't necessarily unpleasant we can construe them in different ways but I don't want to overstate it we have limits to how much we can do this sometimes it's really really intrinsically aren't unpleasant so one example is disgust and nausea it's very hard to make nausea transcend nage and make it a good experience and in fact nausea is one thing that people never seek out or I'll take another example this is from Daniel burners wonderful series of collection of articles about perverse sexuality he describes a female masochist who would engage in the most brutal masochistic interactions with her boyfriend but she hated to go to the dentist she said it's too painful and and he said why don't we treat us as a great sexual adventure where you know you get his great masochistic and she says it's the dentist I can't you know I can't see it that way and and I think that in some way when you're when you're suffering is not chosen but involuntary it's very hard to transcend it you take the most hardened masochist the most powerful toughest person in the world and they wake up one morning and they stub their toe no one's gonna like that that's just pain without choice and it's hard to construe it the second fact about human nature I want to suggest is that we aren't hedonist the perception of human motivation where we seek out pleasure is itself fundamentally flawed we sometimes seek out the unpleasant in fact and and so I would disagree of Hume on this point to where he says it's unaccountable pleasure that we like tragedies which depicts sadness and in some way he's right as a puzzle but it's not special to tragedy and it's actually kind of how we work in general The Economist George Lowenstein talked about endurance mountain climbers people who climb snowy peaks around the world and he went over the diaries of all the hundreds of people describing these events and without exception they describe these events as terrible constant blinding headaches agonizing frostbite crippling boredom you might think that it that the social cohesion of being with other people helps you but in fact due to the oxygen loss or something you can't really talk to them and an N most of my people end up hating the people they're going with once he summarizes the experience is harshly uncomfortable miserable and exhausting yet people love it and devote their lives to it now some of you in this room may do endurance sports of that nature but but most don't but there's something else which I think more of you do which is have children now these these are my sons I haven't told him I use them in a slide for this purpose but but the experience of having kids as psychologists have long known it's complicated jennipher senior describes it as all joy and no fun and what she means by this is people who have kids will often say they're the greatest things in my life they give my life meaning but day to day it kind of sucks and we know this from the sort of Bieber studies so you give people a beeper that randomly goes off and then you ask them when it goes off you think what are you doing and how much you're liking it how much pleasure is it giving you and consistently the finding is that when people are with their kids particular young kids they say this is awful I'd rather be doing the damn dishes and and or take marital satisfaction this is a summary of four studies it kind of speaks for itself you start off you're very happy if your marriage you have kids it drops drop drop drop and then something glorious happens your kids leave the house you know and so so Dan Gilbert summarizes the data by saying the only known symptom of empty nest syndrome is increased smiling we're joining Isis why would somebody join an apocalyptic death cult and a little while ago the writer Joyce Carol Oates tweeted oh we hear about Isis is puritanic on punitive is there nothing celebratory and joyous or is query naive now this was Twitter and Twitter is not the most sympathetic audiences you got a lot of heat for this but some people defended her and said you know whatever you think of Isis and you think very little of them there's something about this which appeals and I think this idea was nicely summed up actually somebody who knew about this was Hitler and George Orwell summarizes Hitler's views and the insight that Hitler had Hitler knows that human beings don't only want contact safety short working hours hygiene they also want struggle and self-sacrifice oops whereas socialism and capitalism has said to people I offer you a good time Hitler has said to them I offer you struggle danger and death and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet you see this most modern Western pacifistic societies there's his appetite for more a rebellion against comfort and safety a desire to have deeper meaning deeper struggle desire for a clash between good and evil typically what we do in this in these societies is we satisfy them through our imagination we don't actually fight evil we watch over and over and over again movies would show other people fighting evil or even better we simulate it with battle simulations which are immensely popular particularly for young people and they're popular because they scratch an itch that for better or worse Modern Life doesn't sacrifice doesn't doesn't scratch we're not eating this what we pursue often requires pain and suffering what we want by its very nature demands some degree of struggle and pain and I'll give you some examples of the sorts of things we want one of the things that drives us is what I've been calling hard play and this is a human desire for play and in cases like play fighting and evolutionary biologists have wondered for a long time why would people play fight why would children and other another the young of other species play fight but the answer is pretty clear there's a lot of evidence for it answer is fighting is important for for adults to know and you know for human adults often fighting includes sort of verbal battles of different sorts cool well focus on the physical fighting it's useful to know and you get better at it the more you fight but you can't go up to people and fight them to get better at it because you could get killed you get them killed you get injured you get maimed so evolution is thought of this extraordinarily neat trick which is you take the people you or your friends your family you love most in the world and you fight with them but you hold back in such a way that you practice the fight and get better and better at it and just about every phenomenal play you could think of is best seen as this form of safe practice now this is a physical form of safe practice but we do it in our imaginations were drawn to seek out worst-case scenarios when we have a chance to imagine whatever we could imagine we could focus on tremendous victories satisfying our goals being loved being respected but instead we often think what would happen if my partner left me what would happen I've been around at the money what happen a lot we think about worst cases and I think there's a logic to this because we think about those cases because that's what we need to know in order that's what we need to practice on you know it's very well and good for me to imagine winning a big prize but the truth is if I rat won a big prize I wouldn't know what to do I say thank you that's great so instead what I need to think about is what am I gonna do if my university fires know what I want to do if my best friend betrays me because that's those are harder problems I think this could partially explain the pleasure we get from horror I think Stephen King was right when he said we make up imaginary horse to help us deal with real ones and and now horror movies tell fantastical stories we zombie films and zombie TV series are a popular venue and this is not because we need to prepare for the zombie apocalypse but it does in stead what Sambi movies are always about and this is nicely summed up here with fight to dead fear the living zombie movies and zombie TV shows are about what happens when the world goes to hell when the police are no longer there when society falls apart where will you be and that's the sort of thing we're interested in and we watch these movies because however unpleasant however terrible they are they capture our interest a second thing that pulls us is difficulty we like difficult things this is sometimes called the effort paradox is a paradox because typically when I was trying to do I go from one place to another I pick up some food or do something we try to do what's easiest but sometimes we seek out difficulty in and of itself and there's different flavors of it so one phenomena psychologists have found over and over again is if you create something with difficulty it's hard for you to do it you'll like it more than if it was easy so in one classic study they gave people instructions on how to build something a little thing out of at a wood and glue and then they asked them now do you build he could keep it how much money would have to pay you for you to give it up another group were just given the thing which was actually much better than they could make themselves it turns out people wanted a lot more money to to give up something they had built themselves we tend to imbue our own effortful creations with value something that the investigators call the IKEA effect we also like effort that doesn't give rise to a product so the joy of solving a crossword puzzle isn't necessarily getting it of doing property isn't interesting absolving and getting it done it's struggling with it we enjoy the struggle and the great psychologist Mike sent me hi he has pointed out that that a fortunate few in the world devote their lives to the pursuit of what he calls flow where you get totally immersed in a difficult project this is not pleasure in any simple sense its difficulty its struggle it comes of anxiety but it's immensely rewarding a third force that motivates us is morality we are moral creatures from Nagiko my day job is as a developmental psychologist and I've studied the emergence of moral understanding and moral motivations in babies and young children and one thing we know is that very early on there they they at least for those individuals they know they're very predisposed to make things better to help there are several studies for instance where an adult appears to be in fakes being in distress and then and then we see what the kid does and kids will inevitably help that'll soothe them a lovely set of studies by a Felix varnak and and Michael Tomasello show kids and adults in some sort of trouble and then they see will a kid without any prompting rescue the adults so I'll show you a clip from one of their studies Oh oops now this is the sort of positive side of morality you might think of when I said morality helping and being kind but there's another side of morality which is our punitive natures and to introduce this I want to tell you a story this guy in London had a cat and a cat every day would go out but every night it would come back home and everything was great for the guy and so one night the cat didn't come back man didn't come back so I sad but next morning he goes out and he's gonna throw his garbage and he opens up the garbage bin and there's the cat inside the bin she says how did the cat get inside the man now it turns out that there's cameras everywhere in London so he got access to the tape from the camera pointing at in front of his house and he saw this now he then put the video on Facebook and said does anybody know who this woman is and it went viral and sooner or later they caught up to her and and and now but that's not I don't want to talk about why she did what she did cuz I don't understand that but but but here's what's interesting it's pretty clear why this was upsetting to the guy it's pretty clear why this was upsetting to the cat but the response was outrage and she had to actually come under police protection due to death threats by people who wanted her dead it is a something else about morality which is we have an appetite to make bad people suffer we have an appetite for vengeance for retaliation when it happened to ourselves but also for what psychologists call third party punishment where we want to take somebody who did something wrong and make them pay you see this in all sorts of ways um two of my colleagues at Yale Arbor to see me and Karen win did a study with toddlers who couldn't speak too young to even speak to see whether what their attitude was towards wrongdoers and they used a simple method it turns out that if you offer a kid one cracker versus two crackers they'll choose two crackers because they like crackers that's not the interesting finding but it turns out but you can also show kids a good guy a puppet who does nice things and a bad guy a puppet who hits people it does bad things and then you can ask the question what do kids do when a nice guy offers one and the mean guy offers two and what they find is they overwhelmingly choose the one they give up the extra cracker as a way to shun the mean guy now I got to be realistic here they're there they're moral creatures but they aren't Saints and so here are the results chef's it's been argued by evolutionary theorist that our desires for punishment in spite fuel cooperation actually we couldn't be moral creatures if we didn't have some way of taking goodness and making it adaptive if if at any point you could have a bad person could get around doing whatever he or she wants a felt retaliation goodness could never evolve our desire to make bad people suffer is part and parcel of the evolution of morality in general but it reflects our appetites we have this appetite to see bad guys get what they deserve and this is not just located in movies two books that that claim to capture most of English language literature are called comeuppance and revenge tragedy because these things are so common in the literary world that's one aspect of why we like what we like another aspect is we're very drawn to the evil characters now maybe we're drawn to the evil characters because without the evil characters you can't get the more out moralistic tale going maybe we're drawn to them in part because of wish fulfillment where we want to be these evil characters to some extent and we don't want to be this way in real life but we will do this in fiction and any in any case it's it's long been observed that the most interesting character in Milton's Paradise Lost is Satan the Joker is far more interesting than Batman and the most interesting character from Silence of the Lambs is of course Hannibal Lecter if we like difficulty and we like morality you could add these together and you get to fascinating drive for difficult morality and this could explain a sort of puzzle some of you may remember - ice bucket challenge where people pour ice water over their heads to raise money to combat ALS you might ask why precisely did people do this why did they want to suffer as part of a tragedy and as the gain money at - why didn't want to suffer to gain money to do something immoral and but the answer is this more this is a general fact about how people work there's a lot of evidence for the martyrdom effect where if you suffer and you experience pain it infuses you with more moral energy you are much more likely to raise money to cure cancer by having a marathon than by having a massage session where everybody gets a back rub and now it is true canes money didn't even you make any sense you have to suffer the flip side of this is if you don't suffer your morality is devalued and this is called tainted altruism so the story of tainted altruism is you take two people one of them raises an enormous amount of money for charity the other one raises very little you might think the person raises the most money for charities a better person but it's not as simple as that it depends did they like it if they did like it you devalue their contribution the the researchers on the study gave the very real case of Daniel pelota Daniel pelota ran a business where he he would raise money for different charities including charities were robbing AIDS and leukemia and so on and and he raised millions of dollars for these charities until one day a newspaper reported you know this isn't his business itself wasn't charitable he's making some money off of this and then nobody want to work with him anymore even though he's making the world a better place if you make the world a better place cannot be having fun you cannot in other studies the study done here talked about people did an experiment where they told people people who worked in a homeless shelter if you work in a homeless shelter and you hate it and it's difficult you're a good guy if you work in a homeless shelter you make just as much difference but you're actually having the time of your life you're meeting people you're talking to me but then people say what are you doing that's awful so talked about hard play difficulty morality and difficult morality and I would argue that one of the ways understand why we pursue suffering is suffering emerges from the pursuit of these desires it reflects the choice to have a meaningful life but what about unchosen suffering what about cases where you suffer you experience pain but you didn't choose it it's not part of some sort of more general pursuit what about when you get assaulted your trial dies you lose your business something happens how do we make sense of that well there's some evidence that we reverse-engineer it that is once we take the suffering experience we try to tell a story where it makes sense would happen for a reason my favorite example of this was that of James Costello there was a terrorist attack at the Boston Marathon several years ago and he was caught up in it he was seriously burned and injured in other ways and a descent of several months in a hospital in Boston where he met a nurse they fell in love and they eventually got married and the day of their marriage Costello wrote on Facebook I now realize why I was involved in a tragedy it was to meet my best friend and the love of my life as the expression goes everything happens for a reason in collaboration of Kony Banerjee who was my student at Yale University we found at young children very strongly believed everything happens for a reason when you tell them a story was something bad happening they will favorite explanations where this bad makes sense it's punishment for something it's part of a larger plan to teach you a lesson but you might wonder what about adults I mean the problem is that everything happens for a reason is sort of a make sense in a world which is ruled by gods it's makes sense in a world which is pervaded by intentional design but what about science and what do you do when you also have a scientific conception and many people argue these cannot sit beside buy-side religion and science are fundamentally opposed my favorite depiction of the opposition between us is summed up in this onion headline which so-so Kony and I were interested in whether this depiction of the conflict is accurate so we did another study where we asked people to describe a deeply significant part of their life event in their life it could be something valuable and good like getting married or the birth of a child it could be something tragic and terrible like the sudden death of a loved one or debilitating illness and then we asked him a bunch of questions was it caused by fate was it meant to be did to happen for a reason did it happen to send a message and we tested both theists and atheists and what we found was this and there's two findings here one finding here which interests us that even hardcore atheist who explicitly denied the existence of God often said things happen for a reason even that something happened to send me a message which doesn't seem like a trick of language or a banal claim but a real substantive belief but the second fact as you can see it here is the people who are religious believe this much more and religion in general provides a framework for suffering every theologian every theological framework every religious culture has explained suffering as in some way the will of God part of a divine plan the most extreme example of this is from william h atkinson who was their first president at American Dental Association and a very devout Christian and and he was president at time when anesthesia like was becoming more popular and was becoming popular starting to be used and like many people at the time he thought this was terrible he wrote I wish there were no such thing as anesthesia I do not think men should be prevented from passing through what God intended them to endure and you might laugh at this but I have heard friends tell me honestly this is just nonsense but it's true for natural childbirth that there is a sense in which that that does make sense and your mileage may vary but the idea of suffering having an essential purpose does resonate this is a dangerous series of postcards popular in England that depict a sort of rosy world of rosy view of the world and for many people they see psychological motivation like this they see as this fundamentally hedonist seeking out a good time I hope I've convinced you today I can't explain a lot of what we did do it can't explain painful religious rituals it can't explain our appetite for occasional for violent or rough sex the love we have for horror movies for difficult and painful endurance pursuits and even for vile vile in 2pacalypse at groups or even something as simple as pouring ice over our heads for a good cause I've said we aren't heeding this but it's more complicated than that because we all I think have these other more substantive goals but people very we also want pleasure and and I think people vary between the balance of how much we want pleasure and how much we want suffering the title of this talk is the pleasure of suffering half a year here for the pleasure the other half for the suffering I made it this far into my talk I'm about to end as half of you probably think this have been a real pleasure another half that my suffering in and you can tell you can ask questions about making that choice who makes a choice on what the consequences are so I'll give you three examples of this one is I look at the jobs or jobs people do there was a study of two million people who and who and broken up into five hundred jobs that these people did most common jobs and they asked people and and here are the most common jobs they asked people what jobs they found most meaningful and I'll tell you these are the most common the apologies these are the most meaningful and here's the top of the list clergy military social workers and teachers now these jobs have interesting properties they don't pay well they aren't particularly strongly respected and they're tough they're tough they are not conducive to happiness and pleasure in their in a normal sense but they do provide extraordinary amounts of meaning there's only one job that is both very meaningful people to be able to meet a very meaningful and it pays extremely well and that surgeons you can also ask a question about what countries have people who claim to live meaningful lives versus happy lives and this is that the title of this paper gives away the answer so here are the top nine happiest countries when you ask people how happy are you these are the top nine countries they are are as you could tell they are affluent democracies with with strong social support and and some degree of a regulated free market there are nice places to live I will tell you because of where I am Number 10 Hey but now let's ask a different question the world value survey that did to happiness data also has people do you feel your life has an important purpose or meaning and here are the top 10 countries for that and they are for the most part poor countries very poor countries why would the countries which have poverty extreme poverty also have the citizens that say they have the most meaning well there's different answers one answer is these countries have are more religious and religion is correlated with seeking meaning what another answer I think is that if you're in a there's so much good about being in an affluent society but you're liberated from the need to do difficult and demanding work to survive life is less of a struggle and that's mostly good but if you're in a society where life is a struggle we're life where where there are demands upon you that that forced you to do difficult things that has the benefit of giving your life more meaning finally good ask about people this was a study by Rory Baumeister Kathleen Voss and colleagues and what they did was they asked people to big questions to what extent do you agree with the phrase sentence I consider myself happy you could do this that way and to what extent do you agree to sentence I consider my life to be meaningful then weeks later they asked a whole bunch of other questions and they want to see the relationship between being happy and other things and being meaningful and other things so here's their data here's what they found for both people who said their lives are happy and people who said their lives are meaningful they had rich social connections they weren't alone and they described themselves as being interested engaged they were on board this is what they had in common one thing they didn't have in common is this people who describe themselves are very happy are healthy and there tend to be rich money is correlated with happiness and so is health not so for meaning if once if I know you have a very meaningful life it tells me nothing about how healthy you are or how much money you make and then there's this happy people describe easy lives with little worry and little stress people who say their lives are meaningful describe your lives as difficult with more worry and more stress and I'll add a final thing they had a final survey question that is very simple I'll tell you exactly what it is he didn't elaborate are you a giver or are you a taker people who describes us is very happy describe themselves as takers very meaningful as givers there's a Connecticut artist who took a lot of these postcards and he different titles and for this one he took the postcard and he gave it a title from Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel brave new world so brave new world is about a world in the future where everybody is happy but they are happy due to behavioural control and pharmaceutical drugs they are basically sort of living happy but meaningless lives and brave new world tells the story of many people including story of John who's described as a savage and John rebels against this world goes off into hiding doesn't want to live this sort of artificially happy life and there's a wonderful scene in the book where a representative of the establishment finds John and approaches him and and says you have to come back and they're arguing back when it says he says we can offer you comfort and John's reply is this but I don't want comfort I want God I want poetry I want real danger I want freedom I want goodness I want sin I think there's no better summary of human nature and I'll stop with that [Applause] you

Channel: UNSW

Views: 10,015

Rating: 4.9721255 out of 5

Keywords: UNSW Sydney, UNSW Australia, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. University, unsw, university, facts, centreforeideas, moral goodness, research, developmental psychology, anthropology, behavioural economics, Paul Bloom

Id: _cbVUxiRY8A

Length: 46min 5sec (2765 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2019