Plain English with Derek Thompson: What’s So Great About Marriage?

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Today's episode is about happiness in America

and evidence that Americans today are significantly less happy than they used to be.

So since the 1970s, the General Social Survey has asked thousands of Americans

the same question, and that question is, quote,

take in all together, how would you say things are these days?

Would you say you are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy?

End quote. And in the last decades of the 20th century,

America's overall well-being seemed to barely budge.

We were just sort of bouncing along.

But since 2000, happiness in America took a clear and dramatic dive.

There's a new paper by the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman

that dug into this GSS data to pull out a couple

tantalizing threads, each of which I think could be their own podcast episode

in and of themselves. So for example, Peltzman's found that in the 1970s,

women were significantly happier than men.

But female happiness has declined every decade since the 1970s,

such that now both genders have for the first time on record the same level of

happiness. I mean, that alone could be its own extremely interesting episode.

What happened to female happiness in America?

Here's another example from his paper.

He found that income plays a huge role in well-being.

Every year, the rich are happier than the middle class,

the middle class are happier than the poor.

He also found that race matters, but not as much as it used to.

White Americans have consistently reported more happiness in black Americans.

But since 1970 and especially since 2000,

happiness has dramatically increased among black Americans,

even as it's moderately declined among whites.

So that again would be its own interesting episode for this show.

What explains the shrinking happiness gap between black and white Americans?

Well, before my parent leave, I called Peltzman to talk about this paper

and I asked him, you know, now that you've marinated in half a century of

happiness statistics, what do you think is the most important thing that people

might not be paying enough attention to?

And Peltzman did not hesitate.

He said the most surprising thing he found was also the most important

thing he discovered.

That is that nothing seems to matter more for happiness in America than

marriage, marriage.

Yes, despite all those Borschfeld jokes about wives being the antidote to

joy, you know, all those take my wife, please jokes.

The bottom line of happiness research is something more like my colleague Olga

Kazan wrote in her analysis of this data in the Atlantic.

And that is, you know, not take my wife, please, but take a wife, please.

Happiness seems to be the clearest distinction between those pointing

toward happiness and the pointing in the other direction.

Quote from the paper.

Marriage is the single most important differentiator when it comes to

happiness, end quote.

Married Americans are more than 30 points happier than the unmarried.

That gap is twice as large as the average happiness gap between college

graduates and people who never finished high school.

So that's an enormous difference.

And the difference is roughly the same, whether you're comparing married

people to those who never got married or were married and got divorced or

are now separated or even suffer the death of a spouse.

So what I wanted to know is, of course, why?

Why marriage?

What are we looking at here?

What are we talking about here?

Is marriage an intervention that turns unhappy people into happy people?

Maybe.

Or wait, no, maybe it's the opposite.

Maybe it's that happier people are just more likely to get married.

So what, you know, some people might call a marriage effect is really

more like what researchers would call endogeneity.

Or maybe this is really a story about money.

Maybe low income Americans are significantly less likely to be married.

Low income Americans, I should say, are significantly less likely to get married

and less likely to stay married.

And as a result, you could say, what we're really looking at here isn't that

marriage is so special, but rather marriage is becoming a luxury product,

a product of the already rich and happy.

It's a ceremony that richer, more educated people do.

It's a partnership that richer and more educated people are more likely to maintain.

Three theses, no firm conclusions.

Peltzmann is not an economist.

He's not a psychologist.

He's not a psychiatrist.

He's not a happiness researcher.

So to understand more about the relationship between marriage and well-being,

I wanted to bring back two of my favorite guests, two of your favorite guests.

Their last appearance on this show is still one of our most popular ever,

Bob Waldinger and Mark Schultz, the director and associate director of the Harvard

study of adult development.

That is the longest running study of adult happiness ever conducted.

And also the authors of the book, The Good Life, on the lessons that they

gleaned from that decades long study.

We talk about this study.

We talk about what role marriage is playing.

What's so special about marriage, whether it's marriage at all that is making

this apparent difference in people's lives.

And we go back to their core theory of why social fitness is at the heart of

well-being and at the heart of the decline of happiness in America over

the last few decades.

I'm Derek Thompson.

This is Plain English.

Bob and Mark, welcome back to the show.

Thank you.

Good to be back with you, Derek.

So the headline that we're discussing here today is that the general social

survey, which is a gold standard survey for evaluating changes in American

attitudes and behaviors over time, has found that American happiness has

generally declined in the last 50 years with the bulk of that shift happening

in the last 20 years since the turn of the century.

I know that the worst thing that anybody can do to kick off a podcast is to

talk about methodology.

But Mark, in our discussions before the show, you said you wanted to say a

few things about the methodology of this paper that we're discussing.

And it is an analysis of GSS data by the University of Chicago economist

Sam Peltzman.

And in particular, Mark, you said you want to point out that our definitions

of happiness, what it means to be happy, have shifted in significant ways in

the last 50 years.

What do you mean?

Yeah, I think there are really two challenges, Derek.

And they're really kind of interesting to think about.

One is when we talk about people reporting about their sense of happiness, we

always worry about bias.

And it's a particularly challenging way of scale, which the GSS survey uses.

That only has three choices.

So the choices are you can be very happy, pretty happy or not happy.

And pretty happy to me sounds like what I would say, actually, I feel like

I'm happy a good part of the time, but not all of the time.

And I'm certainly not generally sad.

Pretty happy in this survey for the paper that we're talking about was chosen

to be a kind of neutral point, neither happy nor sad.

So I think when we talk about it, we need to take that into consideration.

And then the bigger point is the one you raise, which is that across time over

the last 50 years, our discourse or discussion of what we mean by happy,

how important it is to us has changed.

So talking to people 50 years ago is like talking to a slightly different

culture, maybe from abroad, not from the United States.

And we need to be careful.

We're talking about the same thing.

So that's the challenge of happiness research.

It's a challenge for us and our own research as we follow people across

eight decades. This is pretty common in this research.

Bob, as someone who's helped to oversee the largest

longitudinal study on happiness in American history,

what do we need to know about the ways that American attitudes toward

happiness or attitudes toward ideas like mental health and well-being

have changed in the last few decades?

Like, how do we need to sort of like foreground that before we dig

into the nitty gritty details of this paper?

Well, it's hard to characterize because one size never fits all.

So, yes, there may be some big trends about what people mean by happiness.

Certainly in our study, these people of the World War Two

generation were thinking about how they could have meaningful lives,

how they could be good people, right?

We don't hear as much about that.

Does that mean people don't want that as much?

I don't know. And I don't know that there's good research that really can

say that there has been a real historical shift.

But certainly the idea of wanting a life of meaning and purpose

was something that many of the people coming out of World War Two

were concerned about.

But let me just say that, you know, to Mark's point,

even what people mean now when you ask, are you happy, that varies a lot.

And so at some point, I hope we'll get into the different flavors

of happiness that we know exist from research.

Yeah, I think the most important takeaway from this paper and from the data

that Peltzmann analyzed is marriage.

And Peltzmann writes in his analysis, quote,

marriage is the single most important differentiator when it comes to happiness.

Continuing with Peltzmann,

arithmetically, most of the overall downturn in happiness

is attributable to a decline in marriage after 2000.

I should say, you know, the difference that he's

analyzing here is roughly the same, whether you're comparing married people

to those who never got married or got divorced or are now separated

or suffered the death of a spouse.

It's a comparison between married married and not married.

Bob, I want to go back to you on marriage because

this, again, is one of those interesting places where there might be

some really obvious things to say about what's so special about marriage.

But maybe there's some not so obvious things that are important about

marriage in terms of being this significant to overall happiness.

What are the active ingredients to marriage as it seems to promote well-being?

That's really important because if we just say, well, married people are happier,

does that mean the marriage license is what makes you happy?

No, absolutely not.

So to your question, what are the active ingredients?

Close relationships give us a bunch of different things.

Probably one of the most important and most obvious is they give us a sense of intimacy.

We asked people in our original sample,

who could you call in the middle of the night if you were sick or scared?

Now, having a spouse usually guarantees that there's somebody you could call in the

middle of the night, somebody who has your back, right?

Now, a few of our people didn't even list their spouses.

But most people find that marriage provides that secure base of attachment,

that sense of, I've got somebody here when I'm in trouble.

So there's that.

But then what we discovered was that marriage provides all these benefits

that are quite mundane, like somebody who gets you to remember to eat,

somebody who gets you to remember to go to the doctor to take your medication.

It sounds trivial, except it turns out to really matter for whether you're happy

and whether you stay healthy.

So there are emotional intimacy aspects that are active ingredients

and remembering to take care of yourself aspects.

Those can be provided without a marriage license.

Those can be provided even if you don't live together with someone.

And so we want to name that rather than allowing people to have the impression

that, well, you've got to be married in order to be happy.

Mark, as our resident sort of statistical complexifier here,

I wonder how you think about the, about whether what we're looking at

is correlation versus causation.

So to be specific, does marriage create happiness?

Or conversely, we could say, is getting married something

that people predispose to happiness just do.

You know, as I was thinking about this, one of my more sort of, you know,

glum thoughts or maybe not glum, just sort of like soberly realistic is that,

you know, if being sometimes dissatisfied with life is just the natural

state of adult life, then maybe it's the case that like married people

and especially higher income married people will talk a little bit about money later,

but higher income married people are more capable of pooling their financial

and to Bob's point, emotional resources to bear the whips and scorns of time.

And so there, you know, it's not just that marriage is creating happiness.

It's actually that stability, which today might lead to marriage is ironically

or fittingly likely to lead to more stability.

So how do you tease apart correlation and causation here when we're looking

at the significance of marriage in terms of predicting happiness?

So that's just a huge and important question, really, really important.

So this is not an experiment.

So we always have to raise the question of, is it just an association

that might be due to some third factor that we're not looking at?

Like maybe happier people tend to get married more often, stay married.

So it's a selection bias in the sample.

And my guess is that that may explain part of it.

This study that we're being inspired by today doesn't really tell us the answer

to that, but the selection may be a part of it.

That folks who are doing better, maybe at work, maybe they're happy in life,

maybe more likely to get married.

So that's one possibility.

The other possibility is there are other things that tend to happen

along with marriage that may be confounds.

And again, that might be job success or general competence or things like that.

So my guess is the best answer, getting rid of all the method

of complications is that the relationship is probably bi-directional in some way.

There's probably some selection that there's not a random group

of people that are getting married and staying married.

And there also are some possibilities.

And I think it's quite likely that marriage may confer some benefits,

both emotional and financial.

I want to highlight one thing Bob said and really sort of doubled down on it,

that we can get these benefits from close friends, from close relatives that we have.

There may be some unique things about marriage,

but this particular article studied marriage as the relationship entity.

They didn't study how many close friends you had.

Other studies have looked at support networks and people see similar

abuse and their satisfaction with life and their overall happiness.

So it's not constrained just to whether people are legally married.

These may be things that you can get from a really close friendship

or a sibling that is really tight and who you would call

if you were needing help in the middle of the night.

Right. Yeah. Two pieces that I really want to put into the conversation.

One is that we've seen inequality in marriage, marriage rates open up by education level.

So now it's the case that the most educated and by association,

higher income Americans who are much more likely to be married

and non married cohabitation or just being single or single parenthood

is becoming disproportionately more common among low income people.

And it's important to point that out because, you know, we're talking about,

you know, what is driving what it might be the case

that if marriage is becoming a little bit of a luxury product,

something that is more participated in by the high income,

then it might simply be the case that, you know, high income people

who are pooling their financial resources together are going to be

are going to feel more stable in life than someone who is low income,

doesn't have a partner and feels more unstable.

I want to I want to drill down on this point of social fitness

because as I was reading the paper, I had like a funny thought

or maybe you'll consider it an obvious thought.

But I was thinking like, all right, the last time that we spoke,

we talked a lot about this idea that social fitness,

the degree to which we are folded into local communities and networks of friends,

is just so important for not only physical health, but also for happiness.

And I was thinking, you know, people need people and friendships are great.

But platonic friendships can often ebb and flow over time as people change,

as they switch jobs, as they move around.

There's really no such thing as a legally binding social institution

that encourages platonic friends to remain friends.

But we do have a legal and social institution

that strongly encourages people who are in love to maintain intimacy.

It's called marriage.

It's our only legal institution that does this.

There's no such thing as married friends.

And so I don't want to write off love.

I like and I haven't like, you know, talked about love itself.

But I want to suggest that like one of the great benefits of marriage

is to put it as unromantically as possible,

the possibility of legally binding yourself to a close friend.

So that the law is inscribing your intimacy

and the habit reminding function that Bob was talking about.

Bob, how do you feel about my utterly

and pathetically unromantic conception of marriage?

Actually, you're talking about something that's been the case for marriage for centuries, right?

Marriage was a legally binding contract.

And often it was an arrangement between families, right?

So that it was a whole universe of people that were connected

and would support that union, right?

And to your point about marriage being less common now among people

in lower socioeconomic groups,

what you're talking about is that there are social structures

that support relationship stability.

And there are social structures that don't.

And the danger is that we are leaving people without support.

You know, many people say, I can't get married because I can't afford to.

I don't have the job security.

I don't have the income security to responsibly get married.

And that's something that is a systemic issue, right?

And so I think your point is really well taken

that to have not just a legally binding institution,

but an institution that financially, socially,

even politically supports sustained ongoing connection

and working through the hard bits of connection,

that all of that matters.

And that it's probably worth taking a more systemic view

of how we do or do not support people getting together

and staying together in this kind of union.

I was also going to say there are words not really about marriage,

but we use in friendship.

We talk about being brothers to men,

might talk about being connected in that way.

And it's not legally bound in the same way that marriage is,

but we search for those ways of making our connections more permanent.

And I was trying to use a verb of permanentizing those connections

in a way that does bond us, not necessarily legally,

but in a way that goes beyond a platonic relationship

that may ebb and flow.

So I think people come up with creative ways

to make those connections across time,

but I like the way you're thinking about it.

There aren't the same social supports and sanctions,

legal sanctions that provide that boost,

that keep people in a relationship across time when they're married.

So that's an important distinction.

And I'm just operating off of the first principle of your book,

which is that social fitness might be the most important ingredient

for long-term well-being.

Like true happiness might be a kind of efflorescence of feeling,

like it might be sort of inherently short-lasting,

but we're talking about well-being the good life.

And if social fitness is the most important thing,

well, it makes me think about how fluid so much of adult life is

that if you can move cities and you move away then

from the people that were your friends, you switch jobs.

And so maybe if you were friends with people at your old company,

you don't see them for happy hours.

You move from neighborhood to neighborhood.

You lose those friends that you see when you're walking your kid

or you're walking the dog.

I'm looking for institutions in modern life that are sticky.

Marriage is sticky.

Marriage is sticky enough that if you want to dissolve it officially,

you have to go through a legal process.

That's incredibly sticky.

It's not as hard as it used to be maybe 70 years ago,

but it's still a tough process.

Religion, church is sticky.

It's hard to leave a community when you're used to seeing them every Sunday

and they're going to call you on Monday

if you weren't at church the last day.

But as Putnam has talked about and a lot of people have talked about,

you've talked about, there aren't as many sticky institutions in modern life.

It's much easier to just sort of switch up.

No longer respond to that group text.

No longer respond to that Slack channel and just sort of move on,

redefine your life in some other contour and some other network.

And I do wonder whether that freedom of fluidity has this downside

of you never envelop yourself in a sticky network

that provides the kind of social fitness that leads to long-term well-being.

Bob, it looks like you're chopping at the bit.

Jump right in.

Yeah, because I love this way of thinking about it.

So because work could be sticky, but for most people, it's not.

So you probably know the Gallup Organization did a survey of 15 million workers.

And one of their questions was, do you have a best friend at work?

Meaning, is there someone you can talk to about personal matters?

Only 30% of workers said that they had a friend at work,

who they could talk to about their personal life.

But it turned out that not only were those workers happier,

not only were they better performers,

they were much less likely to leave their jobs

for the next seemingly good opportunity, right?

So work gets sticky too if you feel connected.

If there are people you want to get up in the morning and go see at work.

So I love this idea that they're, how do we make organizations that are sticky and hold us together?

Stickier.

We're shooting for things that are stickier.

I think Derek, you kind of posed it really nicely that in modern life,

we're kind of weighing this balance between freedom and choice

and some allegiance and connection.

And many people are choosing that freedom option, right?

We're moving away from where we grew up.

We're deciding to change jobs more quickly than we have in the past.

So freedom is being valued above all things, including connection.

And there are some consequences of that, I think, for people.

One thing that's interesting I want to add to the discussion

is just thinking about the role of marriage.

So Eli Finkel, who's a psychologist, wrote a really interesting book

called The All or Nothing Marriage.

And the idea there is that we've grown to become more dependent

on that person we're in an intimate relationship with

than we have at any time in our past.

We depend on that person for friendship, camaraderie, recreational opportunities,

advice, and life that we've narrowed down our social networks

to really rely on that person even more.

And I think we can turn that around a little bit

and say that in modern life, when we're moving a lot,

we don't have as many sticky connections to other people.

That person becomes so important to us, even for finding new friends, right?

I asked my wife, we need to enlarge our social circle.

Are there folks that you've met recently that are important,

that we might have fun with?

Those are things about marriage that are very useful

about having an intimate partner.

And I think they become more important in the last 20, 30 years

as we become more atomized and disconnected

from our normal networks and our communities.

I wasn't expecting to go here when I brought you on,

but what you just said raised a question that I've always wondered about,

which is how to make friends in adulthood.

I do think that there is an interesting challenge

of building intimacy from scratch

when the participants are in their 40s, in their 50s,

with the understanding that they've already missed

the majority of the other person's life

and now they have to build a relationship of intimacy.

Like that's a really interesting challenge.

Having studied people's lives over decades and decades,

what advice do you have about building intimacy late in life?

Well, Derek, there's research about this.

So the research asks what are ways

that people actually form new connections of any significance?

And they find that there is kind of a formula.

So if you think about the iconic water cooler at work

or the coffee machine, it's where you go

and you run into people who you might not otherwise see.

And if you run into the same people again and again,

you might strike up conversations that eventually deepen.

So what they find in our personal lives,

that is if we volunteer or if we join something

to do something we enjoy or we find meaningful

alongside other people, alongside the same people again and again,

first of all, we have something in common

because we're doing something we care about.

And so there's a natural place to start conversations.

And we're seeing the same people again and again.

So some of those people, maybe people we start to talk to

and eventually deepen our conversations with and make friends.

So there are ways to do this.

So in research terms, it would be proxivity plus proclivity

equals intimacy, right?

I like that.

I like that.

It reminds me of the fact that,

and I know listeners are going to get very tired

of me talking about this, but I just became a father

about a month ago.

My first daughter was born.

Congratulations.

Wonderful, thank you.

And it's really interesting just how immediately

we intuitively feel like we belong to networks

of parents of young kids.

I mean, in part because young kids are,

in addition to being the most beautiful thing in the world,

a pain in the ass.

Like, I mean, my God, newborns are a lot of work.

And you need to ask for help all the time.

And I love my single friends who don't have kids,

but while I can ask them for time help,

I can't ask them for advice.

I can't ask them how do you deal with a two-month-old

who's dealing with acid reflux or something like that.

So right there, that's proclivity.

That's our punching our ticket into a social network

of parents that we previously had no ticket to punch.

And I do think that it's remarkable the degree to which,

yeah, what you said, proximity and proclivity

seem to just drive friendship over time.

But I think in a life of great fluidity,

it can be hard to come back to the same thing

over and over again.

It really does take a kind of commitment

if it's not something as inevitable as pregnancy

followed by newborn.

I think it also takes intention.

One of the things we talk about when we talk about

social fitness is really doing this proactively

and intentionally.

So this time of life that maybe your readers

are sick of hearing about, but we know those of us

who are parents know it very intimately

can also be very isolating.

So people complain about this time of life

as one in which they felt disconnected from people.

Despite the fact that there are people out there

that are having similar challenges and experiences,

Bob and I bonded 30 years ago on part by me

asking him about what it's like to be a new parent

and Bob and his wife offering advice about that.

So it's a great way to make a new connection.

But we also know it's a nodal point in people's lives

where they often feel quite alone.

So intention is really critical.

It's not just opportunity, but it's the intention

to build those relationships.

Some courage to reach out, to bury your soul,

and to say that it's challenging.

Well, I was staying up at night trying to figure out

what to do, really challenging.

So people have to be open and courageous

and also intentional about those efforts

to make connections as well.

Yeah, the last button I want to put on this

is that one idea you reminded me of,

and I forget if we spoke about it during our last interview,

but my favorite philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard,

had this observation about modernity

when he was writing in 1830s, 1840s Denmark,

where he said that for the vast majority of human life,

we have been lost in the finite.

You were the son of a Catholic potato farmer

who was the son of a Catholic potato farmer,

who was the son of a Catholic potato farmer,

and there was no opportunity at self-actualization.

You couldn't discover anything outside

of the well-worn treads of Catholic potato farming.

But the problem of modernity

is not being lost in the finite.

It is being lost in the infinite that you are born,

and you are told you can be whatever you want to be,

that you should find a spouse who is the all or nothing

answer to the marriage question,

who is the romantic partner and the intellectual partner

and the friendship partner,

and your work should provide income and to be meaning

and all sorts of purpose and friendship and community

that everything should be everything.

And he said that people get lost in that kind of freedom,

and the famous line that's associated with him

is he said that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

And his solution to the problem of being lost in the infinite

was a leap of faith toward Christ,

which as a reformed Jew atheist secular person

is unlikely to be my leap of faith.

But interpreted more broadly,

a leap of faith is anything that puts you essentially

into a very sticky relationship with an ideology

getting married is a kind of leap of faith.

Having a child is a kind of leap of faith.

And so I'm connecting these ideas and thinking about the ways

in which sticky networks and that those kind of hard

solidified commitments are an answer to the problem

of being lost in the infinite.

Bob.

Well, Barry Schwartz did this work on the paradox of choice,

that too much choice can really make us unhappy,

make us more anxious.

And what you're talking about is deliberately putting

constraints in our lives within which we grow and develop, right?

So you decided to have a child.

That's a big deal.

That changes your life forever.

And it puts constraints on your life forever.

And I think about, so for example,

my Zen practice involves going to these highly

ritualized retreats where we sit still

and then we walk in formation.

And what happens is you realize that the richness of life

starts to unfold precisely in those constraining circumstances.

And I just want to lay that out there as a kind of riff

on what you're saying, that there's something perhaps

about committing to a marriage, committing to a child,

committing to a best friend who you agree to stay with,

no matter what, that makes us live within ups and downs

and constraints that are a source of growth.

Yeah, I don't want to be too bumper-stickery here,

but I do feel like if you combine what Kierkegaard said,

that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom with your observation,

it's almost as if real freedom is found within constraints.

I think that's right.

I really love this discussion.

So there are a few ideas that are floating around in my head

that I want to share.

One is this idea that the choices have provided us

with more anxiety as the world has gotten more infinite

to use Kierkegaard's ideas.

There is more anxiety about someone not pursuing the right path.

And that's been multiplied by social media that shows us

many more paths than the incredible paths

that other people are following.

So we're human beings who tend to like to compare ourselves

to others.

And in the old days, we could look down the street,

maybe at our neighbors to see what their house looked like

or their car looked like.

But these days, we look at the internet,

and that infinite world is gigantic.

It's just gigantic.

There's a bumper sticker I liked when I lived in California.

Now that I've given up hope, I feel much better.

That was someone who knew Kierkegaard well.

This idea that if I've given up on a dream that I may not reach,

I won't be disappointed.

I won't feel sad in life.

So it is true that if we constrain ourselves in our own volition,

we make a choice to constrain ourselves,

we guard against disappointment.

But life is about living, right?

So what Bob is talking about are making big commitments in life,

taking on responsibilities in life.

And it turns out that those responsibilities often come

with stress and anxiety,

but they also come with incredible joy and meaning making as well.

And we see that in our participants over and over again

throughout their life.

And can I just riff for a minute on this?

Because this gets us back around to that question of what do we mean

when we say we're happy, which we started with, right?

So we could say, well, I'm happy right now

because we're having an interesting conversation.

So this moment to moment experience of happiness

is what I'm having right now.

But in an hour, something really annoying might happen

and I won't be happy at all.

That's different from what we're talking about,

which is the, if you will, harder one sense of my life

is basically meaningful.

My life has some purpose.

My life is basically rewarding,

even though it's got ups and downs.

And so the question of are you happy

might be answered in all these different ways, right?

Like this is a great conversation or yeah,

I'm happy because basically my life has a purpose that I care about.

And that sounds to me to geek out on what we first started talking about.

That sounds to me like being pretty happy.

My life is basically meaningful.

And in the study that inspired this conversation,

those pretty happy people were kind of taken out of the mix.

So I worry about that.

Maybe pretty happy is pretty good.

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I love this conversation and it's too bad that we have to shift to something

as materialist as mere money.

But I do want to talk about mere money,

because in the happiness literature,

one of the strongest relationships is the relationship between

average happiness, self-reported well-being, and income.

At pretty much every level of income,

especially up to about $80,000, $100,000,

you find that happiness rises with income.

Bob, we can start with you.

What's a sophisticated way to think about how money makes us happy?

Is it that the ability to buy ourselves out of deprivation

is the thing that's making us happy?

Is it that stuff makes us happy?

Big houses make us happy in the long term?

Or is there some way in which money is really better thought of

as like a medicine or a vaccine that protects us

against the whips and scorns of time?

Do you have a way of thinking about this?

Well, to try to get to these many, many facets you just named,

money does buy us out of deprivation.

That's pretty clear.

So that as your income goes up,

while you're meeting your need for food security and housing

and being able to educate your children,

all of that, until you get your basic needs met,

money does make us happier.

That's clearly demonstrated.

Then there's debate in the field.

Some people look at the data and say,

oh, your happiness really doesn't go up much

once you get your basic needs met.

Other people say, no, it does increase.

But the place where I think we've landed,

there's a kind of collaboration between Daniel Kahneman

and Matt Killingsworth, who did an adversarial collaboration

because they disagreed about whether you get happier

as you make a lot of money.

And the bottom line takeaway that I think is most useful

for our listeners is that once you get your basic

material needs met, to try to make yourself happy

or by making more money is not going to work out.

That seeking happiness by making more money doesn't go well,

doesn't predict that you're going to get there.

Does that make sense?

It does make sense, but I also just wonder, Mark, to you,

I also wonder why if people who want to make a lot of money

succeed in making a lot of money, and yet that meeting

of their goal fails to make them any happier,

whether some catastrophic error is being made

in the modern mind here.

Yeah, so catastrophic is a pretty strong word,

but I think there are a lot of people who have made money,

who have met their goals, that aren't so happy.

We know that from our own research.

And the literature that shows that connection

after a middle-class income between income and happiness

suggests that the link is pretty small.

So it's reliable, it's there across lots of research,

but the contribution of more and more income

to our happiness is probably quite small.

So it's other things that are really important,

and of course, our research emphasizes

the importance of connection and meaning in your life.

So I think people are putting their eggs in the wrong basket

after a certain amount of money,

but you started by asking a question about

how much money buys us certainty,

how much it might inoculate us

against some of the challenges in life.

And I think that is one of the benefits of money

to a certain point.

It provides more predictability, a little bit more control,

but control is a bit of a two-edged sword.

When we begin to have more control,

we have more choice and more choices,

as Bob was suggesting, don't always lead us to be happier.

But money does protect us.

So if we have a catastrophic event

and we have money, we have more options

at our disposal for dealing with that event.

If we have a health problem,

we have more options for pursuing a remedy

for that health problem.

So they're advantages to money,

but they may not necessarily be in the service

of that positive lift of happiness.

They may be in the service of perhaps reducing

some of the stress and challenges

that people who are less privileged

are more used to facing in their life

because they have fewer choices.

It's interesting that a lot of people seem to use money

to buy things, whether it's private jets

or big houses that tend to be in the suburbs.

A lot of times, and I think we talked about this

the last time you were on the show,

they buy a kind of loneliness,

or at least they buy a kind of aloneness.

They buy the privilege of being alone

when they want to be alone,

which is ironic if the most predictable ingredient

for long-term well-being

is being sewn into a social network.

Do you have any thoughts about the connection

between income and social fitness?

How would someone use money to buy more social fitness, Bob?

Well, they've done research on this.

They asked the question,

how do you use your discretionary income

to make yourself happier?

Is it by buying material things,

buying that second home or that yacht or whatever,

or is it by paying for experiences?

And it won't surprise you that the research shows

that when we pay for experiences,

it makes us happier and it makes us happier for longer

than when we pay for material objects.

So then the researchers ask, well, how does that work?

Well, it turns out it works in two big ways.

One is when we pay for objects,

they just beg for comparison.

And the more we compare ourselves to other people,

the less happy we are.

We know that.

And someone always has a shinier object on us.

And when we pay for experiences,

usually they're experiences either with people we already know,

I go with my wife to a concert,

or they're having experiences with people we haven't yet met,

but we come to know.

And so experiences are more likely to strengthen

existing relationships and or make new relationships.

So that has something to do with what makes us happy

in the way we use our finances.

I do think we compare experiences too.

I think Instagram is nothing,

if not one giant experience comparison machine.

That said, I do think the irony of this established fact,

as you said, that experiences seem to be more predictive

of happiness than the purchase of things.

Ironically, because experiences end and things don't.

So how do experiences make us happier in the long run?

Seems to me that maybe the cash value of experience,

so to speak, is our ability to talk about them,

to share them, to say, oh, you went to, I don't know,

whatever, Los Angeles, Rome, Greece.

I did too.

And then you bond over that.

And that's the proclivity that we mentioned,

which is next to the proximity.

And so you can discharge these experiences later on in your life

as a means of connecting with people.

Whereas I think it's just harder to say,

oh, you have a chair from Pottery Barn.

You won't believe this,

but I also have a chair from Pottery Barn.

Like, what else are you going to talk about?

That's not a very interesting conversation.

I think that is part of it.

The ability to talk about that experience,

there's research that suggests

it's the planning of a vacation,

the anticipation of a vacation

that's more powerful than the actual vacation.

I'm not sure that's really true,

but there is something very powerful

about planning, anticipation, sharing with others.

But it's also out of experiences,

the kinds that Bob was talking about.

We often develop connections that are long-lasting.

So we do a trip with someone that we meet

and we spend a few days with,

and that may be a connection that carries

beyond the experience itself.

I also want to say it's not a world I live in,

but I'm always fascinated to talk to people

that live in this world,

people who are into motorcycles, for example,

some sort of collecting of something.

And it's often done in groups with other people.

They often go to rallies

and spend time talking to other people.

So we can accumulate things

that lead to experiences as well,

and they can be quite powerful.

You have an identity that's tied up

in being a motorcycle guy

and being part of the rally.

But more importantly, you have people

that you're going to spend your Saturdays with,

that you're going to go out on a ride with.

So it provides a connection.

So that's a kind of weird accumulation mix

that meets experience.

But I think Bob and I would emphasize this idea

that things that we can spend our discretionary money on

that may have a big payoff

are things that allow us to deepen existing connections

or to develop new ones

that will continue beyond that experience itself.

And can we just contrast that

with the subliminal messages we get all day long,

which are just the opposite, right?

We're told in every billboard

or every ad we see on our phones,

if you buy this car,

you're going to be more appealing to people.

You're going to be sexier.

If you serve this brand of pasta,

your family dinners are going to be blissful.

So we're constantly told,

if you buy this material object,

it's going to make you happier.

And that's what we're all up against all day long.

I do think in defense of Madison Avenue,

which was not a defense I was prepared

at the top of the show to mount,

there's a lot of ads that are ads of people together.

And sometimes it'll be almost hilarious,

like how they'll try to smuggle in sociality

as a advertisement for something

that has nothing to do with sociality.

It'll be an ad for life insurance or car insurance,

but it'll basically just show a bunch of people happy together.

So maybe even there,

this liminal message in the part of the advertisers is,

we actually do understand

that happiness is not something that is discharged alone.

It's some of the people experienced communally.

It requires, in many ways, for most people,

the presence of other people.

And so we have to show other people being happy together

in order to at least suggest to people

that the product's going to make them happier.

Right, but you should buy our life insurance.

But also buy our life insurance, of course.

Yeah.

And there's something else, Derek,

that we take away from these experiences too.

So I'm thinking we're on food topics,

and I can savor a meal.

You know, I go out to a restaurant.

I have a pasta dinner.

I'm really excited about what it is.

It was such an interesting flavor.

I could, you know, on the tip of my tongue,

I'm still tasting it days after, so I can savor it.

But oftentimes, what we savor about experiences

are those connections with others

and the sense that we're not alone.

So if I've had a good experience, I play racket sports.

If I've had a good, you know, competition tennis tournament

of some kind, part of what I'm savering

is not just whether I did well or not,

but I had fun hanging out with those people,

talking between the games.

I remember a specially good conversation I had.

I might savor that in the same way

that I can savor good meal.

So we carry that with us in our head,

just like we carry around the good feelings we had as kids,

if we were lucky enough to be raised by parents

that were warm and present.

There are things that we carry away with us

outside of that experience that are also warming

and humanizing for us in an important way.

That's great.

Last question, and I will not make this a theme of all episodes,

but because this episode, you know,

touched on sociality and friends and fatherhood,

any parenting tips for a one month and two day old father?

Take care of your relationship with your wife.

When you can, when you've recovered

from the whole newborn experience,

set up a date night and said, you know,

what we did was we had a babysitter come every Thursday

evening at six o'clock, and even if we were exhausted,

we went out no matter what.

It made a huge difference, just having

some alone time together in the swirl

of all this parenting you're now immersed in.

That's my advice.

Great, great advice.

And again, I want to note that Bob was the first person

that babysat our first kid to get my wife and I out for a date,

I think three weeks in.

So I'm ever grateful for that.

Get sleep when you can and be kind to each other.

Yeah, that relationship tends to go on the back burner.

So what Bob is saying is keep it on the front burner,

really important over the long term.

That's great, I love that advice.

A friend before, just before our kid was born,

our friend said, a lot of people think

about when you have a newborn, the order of operation

should go take care of your newborn,

then take care of your relationship,

then take care of yourself.

And he said, I want you to consider flipping that on its head

that you won't be a very good father if you don't sleep,

take care of yourself, you won't be very good co-parents

if you're not good at each other,

take care of your relationship,

and then having checkboxes one and two,

take care of the newborn.

So that's a philosophy of life

that I'm trying to carry forward.

But sometimes it is simply not possible

to take care of sleep when the baby is screeching

and diapers must be changed, but such is life.

Bob and Mark, thank you so much for coming back again.

I really appreciate it.

This was fun.

Really enjoyed being with you again, Derek.

Pleasure.

Plain English was hosted and reported by me,

Derek Thompson, and produced by Devon Manzi.

We'll see you back here every Tuesday

for a brand new episode.

Have a great day.

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