Happiness isn’t the goal

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Society & Culture, News, Politics, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.6 • 10.8K Ratings

🗓️ 30 September 2024

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Children live with a beginner’s mind. Every day is full of new discoveries, powerful emotions, and often unrealistically positive assumptions about the future. As adults, beginner’s mind gives way to the mundane drudgeries of existence — and our brains seem to make it much harder for us to be happy. Should we be cool with that? We wrap up our three-part series on optimism with Paul Bloom, author of Psych: The Story of the Human Mind and Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. He offers his thoughts on optimism and pessimism and walks Sean Illing through the differences between what we think makes us happy versus what actually does. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling) Guest: Paul Bloom (@paulbloom), psychologist, author and writer of the Substack Small Potatoes Support The Gray Area by becoming a Vox Member: https://www.vox.com/support-now Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for this show comes from Grammarly.
0:03.0	88% of the work week is spent communicating,
0:05.5	so it's important to make sure your team does it well.
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0:14.4	It shows you how to make words resonate with your audience,
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0:19.1	and lets you instantly create and revise drafts in just one click.
0:24.0	Join the 70,000 teams and 30 million people who use Grammarly to move work forward.
0:29.4	Go to Grammarly.com slash Enterprise to learn more. Grammarly.com slash Enterprise to learn more. Grammarly, Enterprise Ready AI.
0:37.0	If you could decide whether to be optimistic or pessimistic all the time, which would you choose?
0:46.0	I think most of us would choose to be optimistic.
0:52.0	I mean, why not? Who doesn't want to feel good about
0:55.9	the future? But we all know it's not that easy. We can't always control how we feel. If we could, everyone would feel great all the time.
1:07.0	Still, it's worth asking why being optimistic can be so difficult sometimes, especially when there are plenty of reasons to be.
1:17.0	If you're like me, it often seems as though your own mind is at war with itself. Does it have to be that way though? Or is it possible
1:27.9	that we're just wired to worry? I'm Sean Elling and this is the Blo. He's a professor at the University of Toronto and the author of several great books including Psych, the Story of the Human Mind, and the Sweet Spot, the pleasures of suffering and the search for meaning.
2:02.0	I'm not dropping any official rankings here, but Paul is one of my favorite
2:07.6	psychologists to read and talk to. His books are fun, enlightening, and full of practical wisdom.
2:17.0	So when we decided to do this series on optimism, he was one of the first people I thought of.
2:24.7	I had a great conversation a few weeks ago with another psychologist,
2:28.5	Jamil Zaki, about the temptations of cynicism and how to overcome them.
	...

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