0:00:00.000,0:00:03.000
When I was president of the American Psychological Association,

0:00:03.000,0:00:05.000
they tried to media-train me,

0:00:05.000,0:00:09.000
and an encounter I had with CNN

0:00:09.000,0:00:12.000
summarizes what I'm going to be talking about today,

0:00:12.000,0:00:16.000
which is the eleventh reason to be optimistic.

0:00:16.000,0:00:21.000
The editor of Discover told us 10 of them,

0:00:22.000,0:00:24.000
I'm going to give you the eleventh.

0:00:24.000,0:00:28.000
So they came to me -- CNN -- and they said, "Professor Seligman,

0:00:28.000,0:00:33.000
would you tell us about the state of psychology today?

0:00:33.000,0:00:36.000
We'd like to interview you about that." And I said, "Great."

0:00:36.000,0:00:41.000
And she said, "But this is CNN, so you only get a sound bite."

0:00:41.000,0:00:44.000
So I said, "Well, how many words do I get?"

0:00:44.000,0:00:46.000
And she said, "Well, one."

0:00:46.000,0:00:47.000
(Laughter)

0:00:47.000,0:00:51.000
And cameras rolled, and she said, "Professor Seligman,

0:00:51.000,0:00:55.000
what is the state of psychology today?"

0:00:55.000,0:00:57.000
"Good."

0:00:57.000,0:00:59.000
(Laughter)

0:00:59.000,0:01:02.000
"Cut. Cut. That won't do.

0:01:02.000,0:01:06.000
We'd really better give you a longer sound bite."

0:01:06.000,0:01:10.000
"Well, how many words do I get this time?" "I think, well, you get two.

0:01:10.000,0:01:16.000
Doctor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?"

0:01:16.000,0:01:18.000
"Not good."

0:01:18.000,0:01:27.000
(Laughter)

0:01:27.000,0:01:29.000
"Look, Doctor Seligman,

0:01:29.000,0:01:32.000
we can see you're really not comfortable in this medium.

0:01:32.000,0:01:35.000
We'd better give you a real sound bite.

0:01:35.000,0:01:38.000
This time you can have three words.

0:01:38.000,0:01:43.000
Professor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?"

0:01:43.000,0:01:48.000
"Not good enough." And that's what I'm going to be talking about.

0:01:48.000,0:01:52.000
I want to say why psychology was good, why it was not good

0:01:52.000,0:01:56.000
and how it may become, in the next 10 years, good enough.

0:01:56.000,0:02:01.000
And by parallel summary, I want to say the same thing about technology,

0:02:01.000,0:02:05.000
about entertainment and design, because I think the issues are very similar.

0:02:05.000,0:02:08.000
So, why was psychology good?

0:02:08.000,0:02:13.000
Well, for more than 60 years, psychology worked within the disease model.

0:02:13.000,0:02:15.000
Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane

0:02:15.000,0:02:19.000
and I introduced myself to my seatmate, and told them what I did,

0:02:19.000,0:02:21.000
they'd move away from me.

0:02:21.000,0:02:24.000
And because, quite rightly, they were saying

0:02:24.000,0:02:28.000
psychology is about finding what's wrong with you. Spot the loony.

0:02:28.000,0:02:33.000
And now, when I tell people what I do, they move toward me.

0:02:33.000,0:02:36.000
And what was good about psychology,

0:02:36.000,0:02:40.000
about the 30 billion dollar investment NIMH made,

0:02:40.000,0:02:42.000
about working in the disease model,

0:02:42.000,0:02:44.000
about what you mean by psychology,

0:02:44.000,0:02:49.000
is that, 60 years ago, none of the disorders were treatable --

0:02:49.000,0:02:51.000
it was entirely smoke and mirrors.

0:02:51.000,0:02:53.000
And now, 14 of the disorders are treatable,

0:02:53.000,0:02:55.000
two of them actually curable.

0:02:55.000,0:03:00.000
And the other thing that happened is that a science developed,

0:03:00.000,0:03:02.000
a science of mental illness.

0:03:02.000,0:03:10.000
That we found out that we could take fuzzy concepts -- like depression, alcoholism --

0:03:10.000,0:03:12.000
and measure them with rigor.

0:03:12.000,0:03:16.000
That we could create a classification of the mental illnesses.

0:03:16.000,0:03:21.000
That we could understand the causality of the mental illnesses.

0:03:21.000,0:03:25.000
We could look across time at the same people --

0:03:25.000,0:03:29.000
people, for example, who were genetically vulnerable to schizophrenia --

0:03:29.000,0:03:33.000
and ask what the contribution of mothering, of genetics are,

0:03:33.000,0:03:36.000
and we could isolate third variables

0:03:36.000,0:03:39.000
by doing experiments on the mental illnesses.

0:03:39.000,0:03:43.000
And best of all, we were able, in the last 50 years,

0:03:43.000,0:03:47.000
to invent drug treatments and psychological treatments.

0:03:47.000,0:03:51.000
And then we were able to test them rigorously,

0:03:51.000,0:03:54.000
in random assignment, placebo controlled designs,

0:03:54.000,0:03:58.000
throw out the things that didn't work, keep the things that actively did.

0:03:58.000,0:04:05.000
And the conclusion of that is that psychology and psychiatry, over the last 60 years,

0:04:05.000,0:04:11.000
can actually claim that we can make miserable people less miserable.

0:04:11.000,0:04:16.000
And I think that's terrific. I'm proud of it.

0:04:18.000,0:04:23.000
But what was not good, the consequences of that were three things.

0:04:23.000,0:04:25.000
The first was moral,

0:04:25.000,0:04:29.000
that psychologists and psychiatrists became victimologists, pathologizers,

0:04:29.000,0:04:34.000
that our view of human nature was that if you were in trouble, bricks fell on you.

0:04:34.000,0:04:37.000
And we forgot that people made choices and decisions.

0:04:37.000,0:04:41.000
We forgot responsibility. That was the first cost.

0:04:41.000,0:04:45.000
The second cost was that we forgot about you people.

0:04:45.000,0:04:49.000
We forgot about improving normal lives.

0:04:49.000,0:04:55.000
We forgot about a mission to make relatively untroubled people happier,

0:04:55.000,0:05:01.000
more fulfilled, more productive. And "genius," "high-talent," became a dirty word.

0:05:01.000,0:05:03.000
No one works on that.

0:05:03.000,0:05:07.000
And the third problem about the disease model is,

0:05:07.000,0:05:10.000
in our rush to do something about people in trouble,

0:05:10.000,0:05:15.000
in our rush to do something about repairing damage,

0:05:15.000,0:05:18.000
it never occurred to us to develop interventions

0:05:18.000,0:05:22.000
to make people happier, positive interventions.

0:05:22.000,0:05:24.000
So that was not good.

0:05:24.000,0:05:29.000
And so, that's what led people like Nancy Etcoff, Dan Gilbert,

0:05:29.000,0:05:33.000
Mike Csikszentmihalyi and myself to work in something I call positive psychology,

0:05:33.000,0:05:35.000
which has three aims.

0:05:35.000,0:05:40.000
The first is that psychology should be just as concerned

0:05:40.000,0:05:44.000
with human strength as it is with weakness.

0:05:44.000,0:05:51.000
It should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage.

0:05:51.000,0:05:53.000
It should be interested in the best things in life.

0:05:53.000,0:05:59.000
And it should be just as concerned with making the lives of normal people fulfilling,

0:05:59.000,0:06:04.000
and with genius, with nurturing high talent.

0:06:04.000,0:06:08.000
So in the last 10 years and the hope for the future,

0:06:08.000,0:06:12.000
we've seen the beginnings of a science of positive psychology,

0:06:12.000,0:06:15.000
a science of what makes life worth living.

0:06:15.000,0:06:19.000
It turns out that we can measure different forms of happiness.

0:06:19.000,0:06:23.000
And any of you, for free, can go to that website

0:06:23.000,0:06:26.000
and take the entire panoply of tests of happiness.

0:06:26.000,0:06:31.000
You can ask, how do you stack up for positive emotion, for meaning,

0:06:31.000,0:06:35.000
for flow, against literally tens of thousands of other people?

0:06:35.000,0:06:41.000
We created the opposite of the diagnostic manual of the insanities:

0:06:41.000,0:06:46.000
a classification of the strengths and virtues that looks at the sex ratio,

0:06:46.000,0:06:48.000
how they're defined, how to diagnose them,

0:06:48.000,0:06:52.000
what builds them and what gets in their way.

0:06:53.000,0:06:57.000
We found that we could discover the causation of the positive states,

0:06:57.000,0:07:01.000
the relationship between left hemispheric activity

0:07:01.000,0:07:07.000
and right hemispheric activity as a cause of happiness.

0:07:08.000,0:07:11.000
I've spent my life working on extremely miserable people,

0:07:11.000,0:07:13.000
and I've asked the question,

0:07:13.000,0:07:16.000
how do extremely miserable people differ from the rest of you?

0:07:16.000,0:07:21.000
And starting about six years ago, we asked about extremely happy people.

0:07:21.000,0:07:23.000
And how do they differ from the rest of us?

0:07:23.000,0:07:26.000
And it turns out there's one way.

0:07:27.000,0:07:29.000
They're not more religious, they're not in better shape,

0:07:29.000,0:07:32.000
they don't have more money, they're not better looking,

0:07:32.000,0:07:35.000
they don't have more good events and fewer bad events.

0:07:35.000,0:07:40.000
The one way in which they differ: they're extremely social.

0:07:40.000,0:07:43.000
They don't sit in seminars on Saturday morning.

0:07:43.000,0:07:47.000
(Laughter)

0:07:47.000,0:07:49.000
They don't spend time alone.

0:07:49.000,0:07:51.000
Each of them is in a romantic relationship

0:07:51.000,0:07:54.000
and each has a rich repertoire of friends.

0:07:54.000,0:07:59.000
But watch out here. This is merely correlational data, not causal,

0:07:59.000,0:08:04.000
and it's about happiness in the first Hollywood sense I'm going to talk about:

0:08:04.000,0:08:08.000
happiness of ebullience and giggling and good cheer.

0:08:08.000,0:08:12.000
And I'm going to suggest to you that's not nearly enough, in just a moment.

0:08:12.000,0:08:17.000
We found we could begin to look at interventions over the centuries,

0:08:17.000,0:08:19.000
from the Buddha to Tony Robbins.

0:08:19.000,0:08:22.000
About 120 interventions have been proposed

0:08:22.000,0:08:25.000
that allegedly make people happy.

0:08:25.000,0:08:30.000
And we find that we've been able to manualize many of them,

0:08:30.000,0:08:33.000
and we actually carry out random assignment

0:08:33.000,0:08:35.000
efficacy and effectiveness studies.

0:08:35.000,0:08:39.000
That is, which ones actually make people lastingly happier?

0:08:39.000,0:08:42.000
In a couple of minutes, I'll tell you about some of those results.

0:08:42.000,0:08:49.000
But the upshot of this is that the mission I want psychology to have,

0:08:49.000,0:08:53.000
in addition to its mission of curing the mentally ill,

0:08:53.000,0:08:57.000
and in addition to its mission of making miserable people less miserable,

0:08:57.000,0:09:01.000
is can psychology actually make people happier?

0:09:01.000,0:09:05.000
And to ask that question -- happy is not a word I use very much --

0:09:05.000,0:09:09.000
we've had to break it down into what I think is askable about happy.

0:09:09.000,0:09:12.000
And I believe there are three different --

0:09:12.000,0:09:16.000
and I call them different because different interventions build them,

0:09:16.000,0:09:19.000
it's possible to have one rather than the other --

0:09:19.000,0:09:21.000
three different happy lives.

0:09:21.000,0:09:24.000
The first happy life is the pleasant life.

0:09:24.000,0:09:29.000
This is a life in which you have as much positive emotion as you possibly can,

0:09:29.000,0:09:31.000
and the skills to amplify it.

0:09:31.000,0:09:33.000
The second is a life of engagement --

0:09:33.000,0:09:40.000
a life in your work, your parenting, your love, your leisure, time stops for you.

0:09:41.000,0:09:43.000
That's what Aristotle was talking about.

0:09:43.000,0:09:45.000
And third, the meaningful life.

0:09:45.000,0:09:48.000
So I want to say a little bit about each of those lives

0:09:48.000,0:09:50.000
and what we know about them.

0:09:50.000,0:09:55.000
The first life is the pleasant life and it's simply, as best we can find it,

0:09:55.000,0:09:57.000
it's having as many of the pleasures as you can,

0:09:57.000,0:10:00.000
as much positive emotion as you can,

0:10:00.000,0:10:06.000
and learning the skills -- savoring, mindfulness -- that amplify them,

0:10:06.000,0:10:09.000
that stretch them over time and space.

0:10:09.000,0:10:13.000
But the pleasant life has three drawbacks,

0:10:13.000,0:10:19.000
and it's why positive psychology is not happy-ology and why it doesn't end here.

0:10:19.000,0:10:22.000
The first drawback is that it turns out the pleasant life,

0:10:22.000,0:10:27.000
your experience of positive emotion, is heritable,

0:10:27.000,0:10:33.000
about 50 percent heritable, and, in fact, not very modifiable.

0:10:33.000,0:10:37.000
So the different tricks that Matthieu [Ricard] and I and others know

0:10:37.000,0:10:41.000
about increasing the amount of positive emotion in your life

0:10:41.000,0:10:45.000
are 15 to 20 percent tricks, getting more of it.

0:10:45.000,0:10:53.000
Second is that positive emotion habituates. It habituates rapidly, indeed.

0:10:53.000,0:10:58.000
It's all like French vanilla ice cream, the first taste is a 100 percent;

0:10:58.000,0:11:02.000
by the time you're down to the sixth taste, it's gone.

0:11:03.000,0:11:07.000
And, as I said, it's not particularly malleable.

0:11:07.000,0:11:10.000
And this leads to the second life.

0:11:10.000,0:11:12.000
And I have to tell you about my friend, Len,

0:11:12.000,0:11:18.000
to talk about why positive psychology is more than positive emotion,

0:11:18.000,0:11:20.000
more than building pleasure.

0:11:20.000,0:11:24.000
In two of the three great arenas of life, by the time Len was 30,

0:11:24.000,0:11:30.000
Len was enormously successful. The first arena was work.

0:11:30.000,0:11:32.000
By the time he was 20, he was an options trader.

0:11:32.000,0:11:35.000
By the time he was 25, he was a multimillionaire

0:11:35.000,0:11:38.000
and the head of an options trading company.

0:11:38.000,0:11:43.000
Second, in play -- he's a national champion bridge player.

0:11:44.000,0:11:50.000
But in the third great arena of life, love, Len is an abysmal failure.

0:11:50.000,0:11:56.000
And the reason he was, was that Len is a cold fish.

0:11:56.000,0:11:57.000
(Laughter)

0:11:58.000,0:12:01.000
Len is an introvert.

0:12:02.000,0:12:06.000
American women said to Len, when he dated them,

0:12:06.000,0:12:10.000
"You're no fun. You don't have positive emotion. Get lost."

0:12:10.000,0:12:16.000
And Len was wealthy enough to be able to afford a Park Avenue psychoanalyst,

0:12:16.000,0:12:20.000
who for five years tried to find the sexual trauma

0:12:20.000,0:12:23.000
that had somehow locked positive emotion inside of him.

0:12:23.000,0:12:27.000
But it turned out there wasn't any sexual trauma.

0:12:27.000,0:12:31.000
It turned out that -- Len grew up in Long Island

0:12:31.000,0:12:37.000
and he played football and watched football, and played bridge --

0:12:37.000,0:12:42.000
Len is in the bottom five percent of what we call positive affectivities.

0:12:42.000,0:12:46.000
The question is, is Len unhappy? And I want to say not.

0:12:46.000,0:12:50.000
Contrary to what psychology told us about the bottom 50 percent

0:12:50.000,0:12:53.000
of the human race in positive affectivity,

0:12:53.000,0:12:56.000
I think Len is one of the happiest people I know.

0:12:56.000,0:12:59.000
He's not consigned to the hell of unhappiness

0:12:59.000,0:13:05.000
and that's because Len, like most of you, is enormously capable of flow.

0:13:05.000,0:13:10.000
When he walks onto the floor of the American Exchange at 9:30 in the morning,

0:13:10.000,0:13:13.000
time stops for him. And it stops till the closing bell.

0:13:13.000,0:13:15.000
When the first card is played,

0:13:15.000,0:13:19.000
until 10 days later, the tournament is over, time stops for Len.

0:13:19.000,0:13:23.000
And this is indeed what Mike Csikszentmihalyi has been talking about,

0:13:23.000,0:13:28.000
about flow. And it's distinct from pleasure in a very important way.

0:13:28.000,0:13:33.000
Pleasure has raw feels: you know it's happening. It's thought and feeling.

0:13:33.000,0:13:41.000
But what Mike told you yesterday -- during flow, you can't feel anything.

0:13:42.000,0:13:46.000
You're one with the music. Time stops.

0:13:46.000,0:13:48.000
You have intense concentration.

0:13:48.000,0:13:53.000
And this is indeed the characteristic of what we think of as the good life.

0:13:53.000,0:13:56.000
And we think there's a recipe for it,

0:13:56.000,0:13:58.000
and it's knowing what your highest strengths are.

0:13:58.000,0:14:00.000
And again, there's a valid test

0:14:00.000,0:14:03.000
of what your five highest strengths are.

0:14:03.000,0:14:09.000
And then re-crafting your life to use them as much as you possibly can.

0:14:09.000,0:14:12.000
Re-crafting your work, your love,

0:14:12.000,0:14:15.000
your play, your friendship, your parenting.

0:14:15.000,0:14:20.000
Just one example. One person I worked with was a bagger at Genuardi's.

0:14:20.000,0:14:22.000
Hated the job.

0:14:22.000,0:14:24.000
She's working her way through college.

0:14:25.000,0:14:28.000
Her highest strength was social intelligence,

0:14:28.000,0:14:33.000
so she re-crafted bagging to make the encounter with her

0:14:33.000,0:14:35.000
the social highlight of every customer's day.

0:14:35.000,0:14:38.000
Now obviously she failed.

0:14:38.000,0:14:41.000
But what she did was to take her highest strengths,

0:14:41.000,0:14:45.000
and re-craft work to use them as much as possible.

0:14:45.000,0:14:47.000
What you get out of that is not smiley-ness.

0:14:47.000,0:14:49.000
You don't look like Debbie Reynolds.

0:14:49.000,0:14:54.000
You don't giggle a lot. What you get is more absorption.

0:14:54.000,0:14:58.000
So, that's the second path. The first path, positive emotion.

0:14:58.000,0:15:02.000
The second path is eudaimonian flow.

0:15:02.000,0:15:04.000
And the third path is meaning.

0:15:04.000,0:15:08.000
This is the most venerable of the happinesses, traditionally.

0:15:08.000,0:15:14.000
And meaning, in this view, consists of -- very parallel to eudaimonia --

0:15:14.000,0:15:20.000
it consists of knowing what your highest strengths are, and using them

0:15:20.000,0:15:26.000
to belong to and in the service of something larger than you are.

0:15:27.000,0:15:32.000
I mentioned that for all three kinds of lives, the pleasant life,

0:15:32.000,0:15:37.000
the good life, the meaningful life, people are now hard at work on the question,

0:15:37.000,0:15:41.000
are there things that lastingly change those lives?

0:15:41.000,0:15:47.000
And the answer seems to be yes. And I'll just give you some samples of it.

0:15:47.000,0:15:49.000
It's being done in a rigorous manner.

0:15:49.000,0:15:54.000
It's being done in the same way that we test drugs to see what really works.

0:15:54.000,0:15:59.000
So we do random assignment, placebo controlled,

0:15:59.000,0:16:02.000
long-term studies of different interventions.

0:16:02.000,0:16:06.000
And just to sample the kind of interventions that we find have an effect,

0:16:06.000,0:16:10.000
when we teach people about the pleasant life,

0:16:10.000,0:16:12.000
how to have more pleasure in your life,

0:16:12.000,0:16:18.000
one of your assignments is to take the mindfulness skills, the savoring skills,

0:16:18.000,0:16:22.000
and you're assigned to design a beautiful day.

0:16:22.000,0:16:27.000
Next Saturday, set a day aside, design yourself a beautiful day,

0:16:27.000,0:16:31.000
and use savoring and mindfulness to enhance those pleasures.

0:16:31.000,0:16:37.000
And we can show in that way that the pleasant life is enhanced.

0:16:38.000,0:16:44.000
Gratitude visit. I want you all to do this with me now, if you would.

0:16:44.000,0:16:46.000
Close your eyes.

0:16:46.000,0:16:54.000
I'd like you to remember someone who did something enormously important

0:16:54.000,0:16:58.000
that changed your life in a good direction,

0:16:58.000,0:17:01.000
and who you never properly thanked.

0:17:01.000,0:17:04.000
The person has to be alive. OK.

0:17:04.000,0:17:06.000
Now, OK, you can open your eyes.

0:17:06.000,0:17:08.000
I hope all of you have such a person.

0:17:08.000,0:17:12.000
Your assignment, when you're learning the gratitude visit,

0:17:12.000,0:17:16.000
is to write a 300-word testimonial to that person,

0:17:16.000,0:17:19.000
call them on the phone in Phoenix,

0:17:19.000,0:17:24.000
ask if you can visit, don't tell them why, show up at their door,

0:17:24.000,0:17:30.000
you read the testimonial -- everyone weeps when this happens.

0:17:30.000,0:17:34.000
And what happens is when we test people one week later, a month later,

0:17:34.000,0:17:39.000
three months later, they're both happier and less depressed.

0:17:40.000,0:17:44.000
Another example is a strength date, in which we get couples

0:17:44.000,0:17:47.000
to identify their highest strengths on the strengths test,

0:17:47.000,0:17:53.000
and then to design an evening in which they both use their strengths,

0:17:53.000,0:17:56.000
and we find this is a strengthener of relationships.

0:17:56.000,0:17:58.000
And fun versus philanthropy.

0:17:58.000,0:18:01.000
But it's so heartening to be in a group like this,

0:18:01.000,0:18:05.000
in which so many of you have turned your lives to philanthropy.

0:18:05.000,0:18:08.000
Well, my undergraduates and the people I work with haven't discovered this,

0:18:08.000,0:18:12.000
so we actually have people do something altruistic

0:18:12.000,0:18:15.000
and do something fun, and to contrast it.

0:18:15.000,0:18:18.000
And what you find is when you do something fun,

0:18:18.000,0:18:20.000
it has a square wave walk set.

0:18:20.000,0:18:26.000
When you do something philanthropic to help another person, it lasts and it lasts.

0:18:26.000,0:18:30.000
So those are examples of positive interventions.

0:18:30.000,0:18:35.000
So, the next to last thing I want to say is

0:18:35.000,0:18:38.000
we're interested in how much life satisfaction people have.

0:18:38.000,0:18:42.000
And this is really what you're about. And that's our target variable.

0:18:42.000,0:18:46.000
And we ask the question as a function of the three different lives,

0:18:46.000,0:18:48.000
how much life satisfaction do you get?

0:18:48.000,0:18:54.000
So we ask -- and we've done this in 15 replications involving thousands of people --

0:18:54.000,0:18:56.000
to what extent does the pursuit of pleasure,

0:18:56.000,0:19:00.000
the pursuit of positive emotion, the pleasant life,

0:19:00.000,0:19:03.000
the pursuit of engagement, time stopping for you,

0:19:03.000,0:19:07.000
and the pursuit of meaning contribute to life satisfaction?

0:19:07.000,0:19:11.000
And our results surprised us, but they were backward of what we thought.

0:19:11.000,0:19:16.000
It turns out the pursuit of pleasure has almost no contribution to life satisfaction.

0:19:16.000,0:19:19.000
The pursuit of meaning is the strongest.

0:19:19.000,0:19:23.000
The pursuit of engagement is also very strong.

0:19:23.000,0:19:27.000
Where pleasure matters is if you have both engagement

0:19:27.000,0:19:31.000
and you have meaning, then pleasure's the whipped cream and the cherry.

0:19:31.000,0:19:39.000
Which is to say, the full life -- the sum is greater than the parts, if you've got all three.

0:19:39.000,0:19:42.000
Conversely, if you have none of the three,

0:19:42.000,0:19:44.000
the empty life, the sum is less than the parts.

0:19:44.000,0:19:46.000
And what we're asking now is

0:19:46.000,0:19:50.000
does the very same relationship, physical health, morbidity,

0:19:50.000,0:19:55.000
how long you live and productivity, follow the same relationship?

0:19:55.000,0:19:57.000
That is, in a corporation,

0:19:57.000,0:20:03.000
is productivity a function of positive emotion, engagement and meaning?

0:20:04.000,0:20:07.000
Is health a function of positive engagement,

0:20:07.000,0:20:09.000
of pleasure, and of meaning in life?

0:20:09.000,0:20:14.000
And there is reason to think the answer to both of those may well be yes.

0:20:16.000,0:20:23.000
So, Chris said that the last speaker had a chance to try to integrate what he heard,

0:20:23.000,0:20:28.000
and so this was amazing for me. I've never been in a gathering like this.

0:20:29.000,0:20:32.000
I've never seen speakers stretch beyond themselves so much,

0:20:32.000,0:20:35.000
which was one of the remarkable things.

0:20:35.000,0:20:39.000
But I found that the problems of psychology seemed to be parallel

0:20:39.000,0:20:44.000
to the problems of technology, entertainment and design in the following way.

0:20:44.000,0:20:48.000
We all know that technology, entertainment and design

0:20:48.000,0:20:54.000
have been and can be used for destructive purposes.

0:20:54.000,0:20:58.000
We also know that technology, entertainment and design

0:20:58.000,0:21:01.000
can be used to relieve misery.

0:21:01.000,0:21:05.000
And by the way, the distinction between relieving misery

0:21:05.000,0:21:08.000
and building happiness is extremely important.

0:21:08.000,0:21:11.000
I thought, when I first became a therapist 30 years ago,

0:21:11.000,0:21:17.000
that if I was good enough to make someone not depressed,

0:21:17.000,0:21:23.000
not anxious, not angry, that I'd make them happy.

0:21:23.000,0:21:28.000
And I never found that. I found the best you could ever do was to get to zero.

0:21:28.000,0:21:30.000
But they were empty.

0:21:30.000,0:21:35.000
And it turns out the skills of happiness, the skills of the pleasant life,

0:21:35.000,0:21:38.000
the skills of engagement, the skills of meaning,

0:21:38.000,0:21:42.000
are different from the skills of relieving misery.

0:21:42.000,0:21:45.000
And so, the parallel thing holds

0:21:45.000,0:21:49.000
with technology, entertainment and design, I believe.

0:21:49.000,0:21:56.000
That is, it is possible for these three drivers of our world

0:21:56.000,0:22:02.000
to increase happiness, to increase positive emotion,

0:22:02.000,0:22:04.000
and that's typically how they've been used.

0:22:04.000,0:22:07.000
But once you fractionate happiness the way I do --

0:22:07.000,0:22:10.000
not just positive emotion, that's not nearly enough --

0:22:10.000,0:22:13.000
there's flow in life, and there's meaning in life.

0:22:13.000,0:22:15.000
As Laura Lee told us,

0:22:15.000,0:22:19.000
design, and, I believe, entertainment and technology,

0:22:19.000,0:22:23.000
can be used to increase meaning engagement in life as well.

0:22:23.000,0:22:27.000
So in conclusion, the eleventh reason for optimism,

0:22:27.000,0:22:31.000
in addition to the space elevator,

0:22:31.000,0:22:36.000
is that I think with technology, entertainment and design,

0:22:36.000,0:22:40.000
we can actually increase the amount of tonnage

0:22:40.000,0:22:42.000
of human happiness on the planet.

0:22:42.000,0:22:48.000
And if technology can, in the next decade or two, increase the pleasant life,

0:22:48.000,0:22:52.000
the good life and the meaningful life, it will be good enough.

0:22:52.000,0:22:58.000
If entertainment can be diverted to also increase positive emotion,

0:22:58.000,0:23:02.000
meaning, eudaimonia, it will be good enough.

0:23:02.000,0:23:08.000
And if design can increase positive emotion,

0:23:08.000,0:23:11.000
eudaimonia, and flow and meaning,

0:23:11.000,0:23:16.000
what we're all doing together will become good enough. Thank you.

0:23:16.000,0:23:24.000
(Applause)