Welcome to the World Happiness Summit. I hope you're having a wonderful first morning. It's delightful to see all of you in this beautiful place. I know you're dedicated. You may or may not realize that we're in Miami, Florida. It's nice outside and you're here learning about something that's really timeless, and that's the kind of dedication towards something in your own lives and the lives of other people that I admire very much and to which I've dedicated my own life and career. That's what I want to talk about.
But I don't want to talk just about how the work that I do, the research that I do at the Harvard Business School, how it just helps people get happier. I want to deal with what I believe is the biggest barrier to happiness that we're facing in our society today. And it might surprise you a little bit. It's not the most conventional thing that you've ever heard, but my data show me that if we can crack the nut on this in our own lives and the lives of other people, happiness is going to rise. And you may or may not have noticed that we need a lot more of it in our country and in our world.
I want to talk to you today about the meaning of your life and how to get more of it, how to find it, and just as importantly, why the modern world is making people feel empty about their lives today. Now, sometimes in your life, in your ordinary life, or for me as a researcher, somebody says something and it kind of sticks with you. It's a point that you don't quite know how you're going to use it, but you file it away thinking, 'Boy, that's going to be useful to me at some point.'
Let me tell you about how that happened to me a pretty long time ago and how fairly recently that idea came back to me and illuminated something in my own work that's really changing how I see the world and it's actually changing my life as well. Now, there was a big mystery in the world of military affairs going back to 1990 in the first Gulf War. As you probably remember, Iraq invaded Kuwait and the United States with a coalition of other nations pushed Iraq out of Kuwait. That was the first Gulf War.
But here's the mystery that sort of caught my attention at the time. The president, George H. W. Bush, asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff, his military advisers, the top military advisers in the United States, to give him an estimate of if the United States and its coalition partners pushed Iraq out, the resulting war, how many casualties, how many deaths would the American military sustain? They had to make an estimate.
So the Joint Chiefs of Staff went to all the best think tanks and many of the best analysts in the world and asked them to make an estimate on the basis of their mathematical models, their simulations of what that war would bring. They came back after a couple of weeks with the estimate between 20 and 40,000 American dead. Obviously their suggestion to the president of the United States was don't do this. The American public is not going to put up with it. We cannot sustain that level of casualties, particularly for this kind of engagement.
And President George H. W. Bush said, 'I don't trust it. I don't think that's right.' And he went in. And how many casualties did the US military sustain? How many deaths? 216. The models were completely wrong. That was a big mystery to a lot of people.
Five years later, I actually went to one of those think tanks to work as a military operations research analyst to run those kinds of models. Now, that wasn't my vocation. It wasn't what I was going to do for a living for the rest of my life. I needed a job. And so I was doing that while I was working on my PhD as a behavioral scientist studying happiness. But it was a really interesting job nonetheless.
The first day that I got there, I went to the most experienced military operations research analyst who had worked on those models in 1990. I said, 'What gives? How'd you get that wrong? You guys are geniuses. How'd you get it wrong?' He said, 'Oh, oh, oh, yeah. No, no. It's super simple.' 'What happened?' 'When you're calibrating a mathematical model of a military engagement, you have to figure out what the assumptions are. And those assumptions come from data. And those data come from the military engagement that was previous.'
'And the last military engagement the United States has been involved in was Vietnam. Here's the assumption. And here's the most critical assumption in these models to figure out how many casualties you're going to sustain. At what point when you're engaging an adversary do they give up and run away? At what point in the attrition of their own forces do they give up and run away? And the answer in Vietnam was 90%. You had to attrit the adversary 90% because they were so dedicated.'
And so they plugged that into the model, and if the Iraqis fought to 10% of their fighting force, we would have sustained between 20 and 40,000 American dead. But it turns out that they gave up after 5%. They were literally in the desert surrendering to unarmed drones because it was so crummy what they were living. They wanted to be taken captive because it was probably a better life than going back to Baghdad. They didn't know that, and that's why they got it wrong.
Okay, now here's the interesting point about that. He said, 'This is a big problem with why we can't actually model military engagement very well.' I said, 'Well, tell me more.' He said, 'Well, military models are just complicated models, but war is a complex problem.' Is that complicated? Complicated, complex, logic chopping. What's the difference? Splitting hairs, right? No, no. Here's the point.
He said, complicated problems are super hard to solve, but once you solve them, you can do it over and over and over again. Like making a jet engine, like making a toaster. Complicated problem. Complex problems are easy to understand, but you can never solve them. You have to live them. And then he said, all the things we really care about in life are complex problems. And all of our engineering solutions in life are complicated solutions, and that leads to a lot of problems. I thought, huh, I'm going to be able to use that at some point. And I filed it away.
Well, let me tell you, when I used that difference between the complicated technological solutions of life and the complex issues and problems of the heart, it's right now. I left academia in 2009. I was teaching at Syracuse for a long time. I was a longtime professor and I left so I could go run a think tank in Washington, D.C. I left for 11 years until 2019.
When I left academia, it was a happy place. The thing I loved most about being an academic, teaching my graduate students who are on average 28 years old at Syracuse University, is that they were optimistic, hopeful, and happy. That was characteristic of people in their 20s. When I was in my 20s, for sure, it's like the world's ahead of you. And when I was a professor, it was the same thing when I left in 2009.
And when I left, something changed. I didn't know it until I came back in 2019. What changed? Now, that red line right here, that's the year I left academia. The lines below it are depression and anxiety symptoms for women and men who are young adults. Now, I'm not going to tell you that the reason depression exploded is because I left academia. I'm not going to say it's not that reason either, but it would be a little self-aggrandizing.
But you can imagine how strange it was when I came back to academia after 10 years and my big sample of young adults to whom I was not related, who were not my family or not my family friends. They were depressed and anxious at unbelievably high rates, much higher rates than people my age. Something happened in that 10-year period. And I thought to myself, well, you know, I'm a behavioral scientist, so I might as well set to the task of trying to figure out actually what happened.
Now, as a happiness scientist, when I see something like this — by the way, this only goes through 2017. If you took it to 2019, it's higher. If you took it through COVID, it explodes. I mean, I just don't have enough room on the graph to give you an idea of how bad this has gotten. As a happiness scientist, this is now like a Sherlock Holmes deal that I'm working on. That's what I really want to figure out. What actually caused this? And more importantly, what can we do to solve it?
When I see something like this, I know there's a barrier to some part of happiness. Now, definition time. On my first day of class, I asked my students, 'You must know what happiness is. You're in my happiness class.' I mean, it's a hard class to get into. I have 180 enrolled but 400 on the waiting list, and there's even an illegal Zoom link they think I'm not aware of. Yeah. So they must know what it is.
I ask them to define it and they always say the same thing: 'Yeah, I know it when I feel it, but I can't quite put it into words.' And they talk about feelings, and I say, wrong. Happiness isn't a feeling. Happiness and feelings are related like the smell of your turkey is related to your Thanksgiving dinner. Feelings are evidence of happiness. Happiness is something tangible that you can understand, that you can get better at. And it has three parts.
The three parts of happiness are these: enjoyment with your life, satisfaction with your accomplishments, and the meaning of your existence. You can't be the happiest person that you could be if you're not working on these three things. You know, the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence — they wanted to get more precise about that than Thomas Jefferson. He should have talked about the unalienable right endowed by our Creator to the pursuit of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, because that's the project, my friends.
Okay, now back to the case at hand. When I see a major explosion in misery, I know that one of these is blocked, or more. That's when I know what's going on. This is diagnostic. So I'm going in search of the problem over the past 10 years that's been systematically blocking one of these channels and looking at the data.
Now, I can't do experiments to figure this out. I can't do random controlled trials where I have placebo groups where people don't get any enjoyment in their life for three years and see how it affects them. I can't — that would be like a diabolical Harvard experiment that I couldn't even get past my internal review board. But when I look at data that look like that last graph in one of these buckets, then I know I'm on the case.
Consider the following set of data. These are data that go back to 1990 and all the way to the present for the answer to the following question among young adults: 'Would you say that life often seems meaningless?' And it just bops along and stays where it was, just like depression and anxiety did for this very group for a long time, until well, until I left academia, and then it pops up. It's the same graph, my friends. It's the same graph.
Now, there's lots of explanations for this. The only way to establish causality is to do random controlled experiments. I can't do that. But when I find that correlation, boy oh boy, then I go looking for explanations that might tell me why this is happening and how the causality runs, because my hypothesis is very clear: if there's something that's blocking our ability to find meaning and our lives feel less meaningful, we're going to see more depression, more anxiety, less happiness. And we now know why.
That's what I want to talk about. I want to tell you why scientifically the search for meaning is getting harder. It's especially afflicting people under 30, and what we can do about it individually and in the lives of the people that we love. That's what I'm going to spend the next 17 minutes and 40 seconds talking to you about here today.
So let's start with a definition of meaning itself. And you know my colleague Mike Steger, who's a Wascana alum — I think he's here. Is Mike Steger here? Mike Steger's here. Mike Steger has created, in his work, the most important work on the science of meaning because it's the best, most systematic definition of what meaning is. He's also, by the way, writing a new book on meaning that I can't wait to get, and I'm hoping he's going to ask me to blurb it. And I'm writing a book on meaning too, but I'm more looking forward to his.
So let me show you Mike Steger's definition of meaning. It is a combination of coherence, purpose, and significance. Now, let me talk about these things in a minute. But what I really want you to be thinking about is the fact that this is complexity encapsulated.
Now, remember, complexity is the set of problems that you can't solve. You can only live, right? You understand perfectly what it means. All the things that you really care about, the things that you enjoy, the things that you love, they're all complex. You know, your toaster is not complex. It's complicated. Your cat is complex. That's why you love your cat, but not your toaster. You don't know what your cat is going to do. It's very easy to understand, but it's impossible to predict.
You know, why do I like watching the football games? Football games are awesome. Because I never know if the Seattle Seahawks are going to beat the Miami Dolphins. I hope so. I'm a Seattle fan. But here's the point: I watch it because it can't be predicted with any degree of accuracy using any complicated means in the world. You have to live it.
Love is complex. My marriage is highly complex. I'm married to a Spaniard. It's so complex. I never know what's going to happen. But that's the magic of my marriage. And the ultimate complex question — easy to understand, impossible to solve, impossible to simulate — is life's meaning.
Meaning has three parts. Coherence: why do things happen the way they do? I need an answer to that. Purpose: people often confuse purpose and meaning, thinking they're synonyms. They're not. Purpose is a subcomponent of meaning. Purpose is goals and direction, which you need so you can make progress. Happiness is making progress in your life. And you can't make progress unless you've got a rum line, a destination, an intention, goals, and direction. That's purpose.
And last but not least is significance: that your life matters to someone, ideally someone other than you. And figuring these things out — this has to be lived. There's no computer that can simulate the meaning of your life. There's nothing on the screen. There's nothing to solve it. There is no algorithm. This is the life in life, the ultimate complexity.
So when I see a meaning crisis, which is evident in the data, and I see it as the ultimate complex problem, I want to know what's going on that's making it too hard to get into the complexity of the most important thing in life. Here's my explanation. And to do this, I want to introduce you to some amazing new neuroscientific research that pulls back the curtain on a lot of what we're talking about here today.
Complexity in the brain is largely the product of using two parts of your brain involuntarily. The first — this actually comes from the work of Iain McGilchrist. I like this graphic. You know, Arthur knows how to use AI. So, Iain McGilchrist is one of the great neuroscientists of our time. He's a Scottish psychiatrist and neuroscientist who does work on hemispheric lateralization.
That's a fancy way of saying the right side of the brain, the left side of the brain do different things. When we were kids, we all learned that you're a left-brain or a right-brain person. All that stuff didn't stand up to the research. You're not just an analytic or a creative person. But the brain does do different things according to what his work suggests.
Notably, the right side of the brain deals with complex questions of meaning, the things you can't quite define, the things you can only live and understand. The left side of the brain, well, that deals with specifics and technological issues and distractions. What you're doing on your computer is the left side. What you're doing in love is the right side. You need both. And the right side needs to be in charge to ask the big questions of meaning and send you in a quest to understand what the answers might be, whether you have specific answers or not.
So if I find a complexity problem around us, if I find a meaning crisis around us, I'm pretty much going to find something that's systematically making it harder to access the right side of my brain.
Now, the second part of the brain I want to tell you about is called the default mode network. That's the part of the brain, the set of four structures in your brain that turn on involuntarily when your mind wanders, especially when you're bored. That is actually what gives you access to the right side of your brain. You get bored, your mind wanders, the default mode network turns on, you go to the right side of your brain, you think about questions of meaning, you go in search, you get that source of happiness. That's pretty much how the algorithm goes.
Here's the problem. Here's the problem, friends. What do you do all day in work? You sit on the left side of your brain. You sit on the left side of your brain. You're looking at your computer screen. You're doing things with ideas, but ideas mediated by technology all day long. You're in left-brain world. Okay. Okay. You're making a living. I'm not suggesting we should all go back to pushing a plow.
I'm not suggesting that we should go do something that actually doesn't use technology, because it doesn't matter if I suggest that or not. You're not going to do it. The world's not going to change. What I'm suggesting is you better have the rest of your life not in that world. And that's where the problem really comes in. What do you do after work? Well, after work, you try to avoid being bored.
I have a colleague at Harvard, Dan Gilbert, in the psychology department. He's one of the great psychologists of our time. One of the most creative psychologists I've ever met, as a matter of fact, and he's an expert in boredom. Now remember, the default mode network turns on when you get bored and let your mind wander, right? That's what you need as the ignition switch to start using the right side of your brain to interrogate questions of meaning.
Dan Gilbert has noticed that humans hate boredom, right? Hate it. And here's how he's demonstrated that. He's taken people and put them in an empty room for 15 minutes. Nothing to do. Sit in a chair in an empty room for 15 minutes. No big deal, right? He gave them one thing to do actually, which is he gave them a little box with a button on it. Just one box, one button. If you press the button, you self-administer a painful electric shock.
So, you got two choices, friends. Sit there in the chair or get a painful shock. 80% of the sample shocked themselves. That's how much we hate boredom. One guy gave himself 190 shocks in 15 minutes. I mean, that guy is just sick and twisted, you know. Yeah. But the point is, pain, physical pain, is better than boredom. We hate it.
So what is it about evolution and Mother Nature that the thing that we need to be bored — the default mode network, the right side of the brain — we don't want? Here's the thing. Just because you don't want it doesn't mean you don't need it. Mother Nature, she doesn't care what you want. Mother Nature is going to give it to you good and hard anyway. Unless through human ingenuity we find some way to get rid of it, which is exactly what we've done, especially in the last 10, 15 years.
We created anti-boredom devices that keep us out of the default mode network 24 hours a day, and you have it in your pocket right now. This is your anti-boredom device. Think about yourself at a stoplight waiting in the car like, 'Man, this light is long,' right? Or, you know, you're actually standing on a crosswalk waiting to cross the crosswalk in New York City. Okay. All right. You're doing this all day long.
You know, there's nothing to look at. There's nothing good on social media. It's tedious. There's nothing new in your email. Nobody has sent you a meaningful text. You're not looking for meaningful entertainment. You're trying to avoid boredom because you don't want that default mode network.
But when you don't want that default mode network and you use technology to get rid of it, what have you done? You've kept it off, and the right side of your brain is dormant, and the meaning questions go unaddressed. And that's true for you. But now think about people under 30 today who've never actually had the experiences of looking good and hard into the right side of their brain and dealt with the complex questions, and have no experience whatsoever with the meaning questions of their lives, who've never asked those questions because they grew up with this.
This, my friends, is called the meaning doom loop. I like this expression. I think this might sell books, which is not my purpose. It's actually my purpose anyway. Here's how it works. You have technical work, fine. But then you have technological distraction. This leaves life's complex questions unaddressed. This leads to a meaning crisis that leads inevitably to anxiety, depression, an inability to focus, an addiction to devices, which leads to self-soothing and numbing with more device activity, which makes the problem worse, and around and around it goes. And all the data support this hypothesis.
So the real question that I have for us — me, you — what are you going to do about it? I think we've diagnosed the problem pretty adequately at this point. The really interesting thing is what do we do? What do you do in your life? What do you recommend to the people that you love? And maybe, just maybe, what should we do in public policy? Let me give you my suggestions.
Start. Well, by the way, this is Dostoevsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky. He talked about in Notes from Underground in 1890. He said, 'Beware the Palace of Crystal.' The Palace of Crystal is the solutions that we get from the technologists themselves, that we will finally solve these problems with just a little more technology. You know what we need to finally find meaning? Artificial intelligence. Oh yeah, your AI girlfriend, she'll keep you warm. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. When you're in a hole, stop digging, man.
That's what he said. And this is 1890. Imagine if he were alive today. 'It's the world already made and worked out with mathematical exactitude.' That's what's being sold as we are being productized and as our sense of meaning recedes.
Second question, by the way, how come your grandparents never complained about not knowing the meaning of their lives? I have a picture of your grandfather. Okay, here he is. Your grandfather never complained about not knowing the meaning of his life because he spent all day looking at a mule's butt or something like that. He was super bored a lot. He didn't have to deal with something like this. He's like, 'Yeah, whatever, man.' It's like, 'I don't know. I don't like the mule's butt, but I certainly know the meaning of my life.' They're connected. You need the mule's butt. That's the bottom line.
How do you get it? I'm going to give you four assignments, four pieces of homework in the time that I have left. Number one, you want more meaning in your life, you got to start by cutting the doom loop. The way that you cut the doom loop is doing exactly what your brain doesn't want you to do. You need detox. You need to digitally detox. There's a bunch of different ways to do that.
Now, I could just say, you know, throw away your phone. Yeah, you're not a freak. You're not going to do that. I mean, look, three-quarters of you are taking pictures of my slides right now with your phones. But you can be free, my friends. And the way that you do that is by establishing protocols of discipline in your own day. Tech-free times every day.
The first hour after waking is the most critical hour of the day for the way that your brain is going to work. Try it. I mean, I know it's next to your bed. I know. But I have this new technology. It's incredible. It's called an alarm clock. You don't need your phone in your room.
Second is meal times. Why? Because you actually need the neuropeptides, the hormones in your brain that connect you to other people, the oxytocin in your brain. It doesn't flow when you have your phone. Because you're cutting off these connections with other people. As such, you're leaving the complex issue of love and relationships unaddressed. No phones at meal times. Even if your phone, by the way, is on the table in front of you, you don't get oxytocin flows adequately. Not even in the room.
And last but not least, after 7 p.m. at night, or a few hours before you actually go to sleep. This is hard, by the way.
Second is tech-free zones. There is not a school in America that should have a private phone in it during school hours. These are easy executive orders from governors. And by the way, when you introduce these policies in schools, you know who freaks out? The parents do. You know why the parents freak out? Because the kids are coming home and complaining.
But here's what the data say. After two weeks, the kids like it better. Wait it out. They just got to get de-addicted. You got to detox them a little bit, right? Wait it out. Wait it out. It's going to be okay. It's going to be okay.
Second is the bedroom. You shouldn't have your phone in the bedroom. You actually need times of your own. And a good time for your mind to wander, by the way, is when you're lying in bed. Really good time. Don't waste it by looking at Instagram reels for 40 minutes before you go to sleep. You're wasting your brain and your default mode network.
And last but not least, think about a tech fast, one to two weeks in August. You know, I gave an early version of these ideas in Barcelona a few weeks ago. And you know, in Barcelona, like, nothing works in the whole month of August. And so they're like, 'Yeah, it's easy because, you know, nobody — it's illegal to send an email in August anyway in Spain,' right? I realize that's not the case for all of your lives, but you can do this if you decide to do this.
For me, it's a four-day peek fast in December when I take my Catholic silent retreat. I don't take the phone. It's crazy. The first day there was like screaming children in my head. By the end, I wish it were 40 days.
This is part one. Clip the doom loop. Second is invite boredom. And this is a hard thing to do. In today's world, you don't just follow the mule. You have to do this on purpose. You have to manually invite boredom into your life because life is just not boring enough. It's weird because the things that we do to avoid boredom are actually extremely boring, but they don't have the same neurophysiological effects. And so we get all the bad side of boredom with none of the benefits of boredom. So go get the real thing.
Have you ever worked out without headphones? What's he crazy saying these things to me? You will find a weird thing. So let me remind you of something. Every single one of you has noticed that you have your best ideas in the shower, right? How come? Because you don't have your phone in there. It's like your default mode network kind of flickers on for a second, and then you're like, 'I think I'm going to take a longer shower.' That's because you've actually leaned into the default mode network and good things are happening in your brain.
Let it happen to you while you're working out, because, by the way, there are all kinds of properties of hard physical exercise that lend themselves to that. And if you actually go the hour, no music, no headphones, you're going to have your best ideas. It'll be like an hour-long shower for you. I know it's hard. I can't always do it because I'm working on something. But when I do, it's rewarding.
Second is driving in silence. People actually, I've worked on this with, they say, 'For the first time in my life, I love my commute because something happens to my brain when I'm on my commute. I get home and I'm in a better mood and I'm thinking about deeper things and I'm contemplating the love of my life.'
Walking without devices. I recommend an hour and a half before dawn. Don't walk out an hour and a half before dawn in the dark, no devices. And do that every day for a month and look at how your life changes. Why is your life changing? Because your default mode network turned back on. The right side of your brain is illuminated and you're leaning into the questions of meaning in your life.
Third, ask more big questions. This, by the way, is Koko the gorilla with Francine — what's her name? Her last name. Her trainer for all those years. Koko the gorilla was 46 when she died. A nice, ripe old age for lowland Ugandan gorillas. She learned a thousand words through sign language. That's what she was. She had an obituary in the New York Times. I'm not going to have an obituary in the New York Times. A gorilla had an obituary in the New York Times because she learned a thousand words, which is a lot, by the way. I mean, I don't think all my kids know a thousand words.
But she didn't speak them. She had sign language because she was physiologically incapable of speaking words. But here's the one thing — people say, 'Oh, it's blurring the boundary between humans and animals.' No, it wasn't. There's one thing that Koko never did that no non-Homo sapiens animal has ever done in the history, as far as we know, of the world. You know what it is? Koko never asked a single question.
You want to know the difference between humans and everything else? We ask questions, they don't. The issue of consciousness is about questions, not answers. You need to ask bigger questions that actually don't have conscious answers. All the interesting complex questions in your life don't have clear answers. They just have understanding. Why do you love your spouse? You're like, 'I don't...' Anyway, why do you love your spouse? Any answer you give me will trivialize it, but you understand it in your heart.
Huh? What are your questions? Here are mine. Why am I alive today? What would I give my life for today? It's hard to articulate, but I have an understanding.
And last, but not least, it's time to get smaller, friends. Part of what's wrong in the new technological world is that it puts an intense mirror up against ourselves to make ourselves the object of our own worship. And that's terrible. That's called the psychodrama, where you're the star and you can't ever get away from it.
You want to be happier? Do you want to have a greater sense of meaning? You need to get small and make the universe large. And the only way to do that is transcendence. Maybe it's through the philosophy of the Stoics, or a walk in nature, or a serious intellectual pursuit of the most beautiful things that have ever occurred, or a meditation practice. Or in my own case, I started this day going to the gym and then going to mass, because that's how I start every day in worship.
Getting small in the grandeur of the universe and in the presence of my Creator, who can help me understand the meaning of my life and then give me the confidence that I can come to you and talk about it with you. And that leads me to my last point.
If you don't know what to do in your worst moment when your life feels most meaningless, the answer is to lean into the ultimate complex question of your life — the most complex thing that will give you that sense of meaning, that will illuminate the right side of your brain more reliably than anything else that you can do. And that's for you to go in love.
No matter how you feel, to make the decision to will somebody else's good as the other person, which is the definition of love — to will the good of the other as other, or to love the divine. Your friends, your family, to love the whole world through what you do with your ordinary work. That's what will stimulate this process in your own life, because this is the point I'm trying to make and the ultimate solution to the problem that we face today in today's world.
The meaning of your life, the meaning of my life, the meaning of all of our lives is love. Thank you. [Applause]
