[0:03]Hi, my name is Mike Frisch. I'm a psychology professor at Baylor University. With me today is Dr. Ed Diener, the World Authority on Human Happiness.
[0:14]And Dr. Diener, I want to talk to you about some of the elements that seem important to cultivating and preserving a life of happiness, meaning and joy.
[0:24]Good. Sounds good Mike.
[0:27]What can you what can you tell me? What are some of those elements that you think may be very crucial based on your research of happiness around the world?
[0:34]Well, we know that social relationships are important. Giving to others, having people that you can count on. And that's really one of the keys to happiness. We find that the happiest people always have that.
[0:48]There is not an exception of a super happy person that has nobody in their life who they care about or who cares about them.
[0:54]How about a primary relationship, committed relationship or marriage? Is that a What can you tell us about that?
[0:59]Well, marriage is important to many people because that is a relationship in our society that is defined as a good relationship. But marriage isn't absolutely essential. People can have close family and friends and not be married and be very happy.
[1:14]So, it's a mistake to think that marriage is absolutely essential. On the other hand, for many people, marriage is the most important social relationship in their lives.
[1:23]How about children? Now, children don't seem in our research to contribute to happiness or unhappiness. And why is that? Because on average, it doesn't matter because some people love children and it makes their lives happier, and for some people it's a burden.
[1:40]It's children are expensive, they take a lot of time. So, really the key to understanding your own happiness is to say, am I a person who's really going to love children?
[1:50]Or am I a person who's going to have children just because it's the thing you're supposed to do, and that's a mistake. So, we our recommendation is, not that children are good or bad, but to understand yourself enough to know, am I a person who's really loves kids and therefore should have them?
[2:10]Or kids are fine, but maybe I'll let other people have the kids. Now, another thing that we find is really important to long-term happiness is having work that you love.
[2:20]Now, some people are homemakers, some people are retired. So, it's not paid work necessarily. But having activities that you love in life. And at work, do you love what you're doing?
[2:33]If if you're a salesperson, you'd love talking to other people and convincing them that your product is a good one. But if you're a homemaker, you like cooking, you like child rearing, you like cleaning and so forth.
[2:46]And surprisingly, some people love cleaning, but other people hate it. So, you have to decide, if I'm going to be a full-time homemaker and stay at home, uh, parent, then you're the kind of person that would like that. And then there're certain challenges involved in that.
[3:01]One of them is you can become isolated. So you have to make sure that you have some contact with adults, not just with kids and be able to get out of the home and so forth.
[3:12]Now, for retired people, the challenge is to find something new that you love, if you're no longer doing paid work.
[3:18]And for some people, it's volunteer work, for other people, it's an avocation or hobby, but stay involved, stay active as long as you can. Because we what we know is active leisure is one key to happiness.
[3:32]People who watch TV 12 hours a day are not going to be as happy. People who go hiking and continue to get exercise, uh, go out with other people, see people, uh, maybe they, uh, exercise in a group.
[3:47]Uh, they have a lot of social relationships, they have some hobbies that are active. Those people are the happy people. So, whether you're retired, working, or a homemaker, there's a way to be happy in each of those.
[4:03]Well, I have this concept of meaning optimism. What I mean by that is that, uh, like the character John Amos in the Polter Prize-winning book Gilead, who says there's a thousand, thousand ways to find joys in this life.
[4:17]Is it true that there are many past to happiness and that people should never really give up in the sense that there are always new avenues that even people who've undergone terrible accidents have found and discovered?
[4:29]Yes, and of course, one of the things to understand about happiness is, it's not a life without problems. Everybody has problems.
[4:38]If you take the richest person, the luckiest person who ever lived, they will have had some bad things in their life. I've had some bad things in my life.
[4:49]We all do. Some people that are close to us are going to die. We're going to have some disagreements with people and so forth.
[4:56]So the trick to being happy is to know that those disappointments and problems don't define you and that you move forward and you still have a positive attitude and you know that life can still be full of joys and fun things despite those problems.
[5:13]And it's not that we ignore the problems, if they're important we deal with them, but then we move on. So that's so important.
[5:19]Now, in terms of sources of happiness, besides people, doing activities that you love.
[5:27]And we all have skills and we're built to like learning new things. Why do we like play? Why do we enjoy sports or games and so forth?
[5:35]Because it's challenging, it's fun, it uses our mental abilities, it uses our physical skills. So we all enjoy learning and using skills, and if that's part of our work or part of our hobbies, then we're going to love them.
[5:51]Well, there's a positive psychology or well-being aphorism of the concept of take risks with grit, which means put yourself in new situations and be persistent and exploring that potential avenue of joy.
[6:04]Is that something we need to do in order to find these uh highly rewarding activities? Do we need to be exploring that?
[6:10]Well, I think that when we look at the world and in the Gallup World Pole, we've looked at the entire world now.
[6:16]How many countries is that? We find 155 countries we've looked at. And so we've looked at all the major countries in the world.
[6:23]What percent is that? It's like 99% of the world's population we've studied. And what we find in every country and in every region of the world, people who like learning new things are happier.
[6:35]They enjoy life more. Now, it doesn't have to be learning new things like in school where you're learning calculus or something boring. Learning new things about other people, learning new things about what's important to you or going around in the world.
[6:47]Or learning new things about politics. So people who are constantly learning and see the world as an interesting place are going to be happier.
[6:57]What about having uh life goals? Is that important to us?
[7:00]Well, we think that having life goals and furthermore having life goals that are bigger than yourself, so having things you care about outside yourself. So having some long-term goals, gee, I'm going to uh, try to become a doctor, or I'm going to really try to find a good spouse and get married someday before I'm 40 years old, and so forth.
[7:22]So people have all sorts of goals. Having long-term goals is probably a part of what it means to be human. But having goals that are bigger than yourself. If your only goal is I want to be happy, so I'm going to take drugs and be happy. I'm going to drink a lot of alcohol and be happy.
[7:39]That's self-defeating. You have to have goals that are bigger than yourself that matter outside yourself. So those values that you have. And and using your strengths, things you personally are good at and are interested in is the second part of that.
[7:55]So you want to have values to work for, but values to work for that use your particular skills.
[8:00]I see. And you're almost saying too that if the activity has maybe uh some kind of a service element where you're helping other people, even if it be your your spouse or the the field of medicine or your patience.
[8:13]Is that part of it? That's right. And and and no matter what you do, you can see the element in that that helps other people, not just help yourself.
[8:23]So sure, you want to make money and support yourself and your family and so forth. But at the same time, what you're contributing to the world is so important.
[8:31]So avocations and vocations and occupations that serve others may be a particularly powerful kind of thing.
[8:38]What about involvement in, uh, you talked about learning, what about involvement in creative pursuits? Is that important?
[8:44]That's right. And so we also find that people who try new things are more creative. We actually find that happy people on average are more creative.
[8:53]They're willing to take chances. People who are depressed are not typically as creative because they're withdrawing from life.
[9:00]So the people that sort of look at what uh new ways to do things or try to think of new things, uh, those creative people typically are happy people.
[9:12]Now another thing that we haven't talked about yet, Mike, is your surroundings, does that matter? And what we know is that the environment of the society and even your local environment with your house matter.
[9:23]So people who have more green space around them, green plants, they have parks around them, they're happier.
[9:30]People who live in a concrete jungle are not quite as happy. We know another thing is long dense commuting.
[9:36]So if you have to go an hour to work every day and an hour home every day, well, there's two reasons that that's not very happy. One is commuting itself can be stressful.
[9:46]It usually is. And the other is that's two hours a day, you don't spend with your family and friends or doing fun things. So we find that people who get a raise and move way out to the suburbs where they buy a big house and now they commute back to work farther, their life satisfaction doesn't go up or even goes down, even though they got to raise at work, because now the commuting detracts from the things in life that are really rewarding.
[10:14]So happiness isn't all in your head. That's right. And and so and also we know that having a clean environment, uh, air pollution lowers, uh, life satisfaction, uh, and and and so being in a negative environment can actually lower happiness.
[10:31]Can you tell me about uh, the role of uh, spiritual life and religion, which seems to vary so much from country to country? That's right. And we know that that's right. Some some countries are very religious. And uh, for example, the Muslim countries, we find in some of them 98% of the people, uh, go to religious services.
[10:50]And we find in other countries like in Northern Europe where maybe 20% go to religious services. So the importance of religiosity really varies. And if you live in a religious country, it's easier to be happy if you're religious, and if you live in a non-religious country, it really doesn't matter.
[11:07]You can be non-religious, but what's universal we believe is spirituality. And what does that mean? That means having positive emotions that connect you to things larger than yourself. Awe, gratitude, Thanksgiving, wonder at the universe, seeing beauty outside yourself.
[11:25]So seeing things that are bigger than yourself, caring about things, love is a spiritual emotion. Why? Because you care about something or somebody besides yourself.
[11:37]So the spiritual emotions are universal, whether you're religious or not in terms of creating happiness.
[11:43]And they really involve a commitment to goals and values beyond yourself.
[11:47]That's right. Goals and values beyond yourself.
[11:50]Well, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Michael.
