WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.000 When I was president of the American Psychological Association, 00:00:03.000 --> 00:00:05.000 they tried to media-train me, 00:00:05.000 --> 00:00:09.000 and an encounter I had with CNN 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:12.000 summarizes what I'm going to be talking about today, 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:16.000 which is the eleventh reason to be optimistic. 00:00:16.000 --> 00:00:21.000 The editor of Discover told us 10 of them, 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:24.000 I'm going to give you the eleventh. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:28.000 So they came to me -- CNN -- and they said, "Professor Seligman, 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:33.000 would you tell us about the state of psychology today? 00:00:33.000 --> 00:00:36.000 We'd like to interview you about that." And I said, "Great." 00:00:36.000 --> 00:00:41.000 And she said, "But this is CNN, so you only get a sound bite." 00:00:41.000 --> 00:00:44.000 So I said, "Well, how many words do I get?" 00:00:44.000 --> 00:00:46.000 And she said, "Well, one." NOTE Paragraph 00:00:46.000 --> 00:00:47.000 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:00:47.000 --> 00:00:51.000 And cameras rolled, and she said, "Professor Seligman, 00:00:51.000 --> 00:00:55.000 what is the state of psychology today?" 00:00:55.000 --> 00:00:57.000 "Good." NOTE Paragraph 00:00:57.000 --> 00:00:59.000 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:02.000 "Cut. Cut. That won't do. 00:01:02.000 --> 00:01:06.000 We'd really better give you a longer sound bite." 00:01:06.000 --> 00:01:10.000 "Well, how many words do I get this time?" "I think, well, you get two. 00:01:10.000 --> 00:01:16.000 Doctor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?" 00:01:16.000 --> 00:01:18.000 "Not good." NOTE Paragraph 00:01:18.000 --> 00:01:27.000 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:01:27.000 --> 00:01:29.000 "Look, Doctor Seligman, 00:01:29.000 --> 00:01:32.000 we can see you're really not comfortable in this medium. 00:01:32.000 --> 00:01:35.000 We'd better give you a real sound bite. 00:01:35.000 --> 00:01:38.000 This time you can have three words. 00:01:38.000 --> 00:01:43.000 Professor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?" 00:01:43.000 --> 00:01:48.000 "Not good enough." And that's what I'm going to be talking about. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:48.000 --> 00:01:52.000 I want to say why psychology was good, why it was not good 00:01:52.000 --> 00:01:56.000 and how it may become, in the next 10 years, good enough. 00:01:56.000 --> 00:02:01.000 And by parallel summary, I want to say the same thing about technology, 00:02:01.000 --> 00:02:05.000 about entertainment and design, because I think the issues are very similar. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:05.000 --> 00:02:08.000 So, why was psychology good? 00:02:08.000 --> 00:02:13.000 Well, for more than 60 years, psychology worked within the disease model. 00:02:13.000 --> 00:02:15.000 Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane 00:02:15.000 --> 00:02:19.000 and I introduced myself to my seatmate, and told them what I did, 00:02:19.000 --> 00:02:21.000 they'd move away from me. 00:02:21.000 --> 00:02:24.000 And because, quite rightly, they were saying 00:02:24.000 --> 00:02:28.000 psychology is about finding what's wrong with you. Spot the loony. 00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:33.000 And now, when I tell people what I do, they move toward me. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:33.000 --> 00:02:36.000 And what was good about psychology, 00:02:36.000 --> 00:02:40.000 about the 30 billion dollar investment NIMH made, 00:02:40.000 --> 00:02:42.000 about working in the disease model, 00:02:42.000 --> 00:02:44.000 about what you mean by psychology, 00:02:44.000 --> 00:02:49.000 is that, 60 years ago, none of the disorders were treatable -- 00:02:49.000 --> 00:02:51.000 it was entirely smoke and mirrors. 00:02:51.000 --> 00:02:53.000 And now, 14 of the disorders are treatable, 00:02:53.000 --> 00:02:55.000 two of them actually curable. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:55.000 --> 00:03:00.000 And the other thing that happened is that a science developed, 00:03:00.000 --> 00:03:02.000 a science of mental illness. 00:03:02.000 --> 00:03:10.000 That we found out that we could take fuzzy concepts -- like depression, alcoholism -- 00:03:10.000 --> 00:03:12.000 and measure them with rigor. 00:03:12.000 --> 00:03:16.000 That we could create a classification of the mental illnesses. 00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:21.000 That we could understand the causality of the mental illnesses. 00:03:21.000 --> 00:03:25.000 We could look across time at the same people -- 00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:29.000 people, for example, who were genetically vulnerable to schizophrenia -- 00:03:29.000 --> 00:03:33.000 and ask what the contribution of mothering, of genetics are, 00:03:33.000 --> 00:03:36.000 and we could isolate third variables 00:03:36.000 --> 00:03:39.000 by doing experiments on the mental illnesses. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:39.000 --> 00:03:43.000 And best of all, we were able, in the last 50 years, 00:03:43.000 --> 00:03:47.000 to invent drug treatments and psychological treatments. 00:03:47.000 --> 00:03:51.000 And then we were able to test them rigorously, 00:03:51.000 --> 00:03:54.000 in random assignment, placebo controlled designs, 00:03:54.000 --> 00:03:58.000 throw out the things that didn't work, keep the things that actively did. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:58.000 --> 00:04:05.000 And the conclusion of that is that psychology and psychiatry, over the last 60 years, 00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:11.000 can actually claim that we can make miserable people less miserable. 00:04:11.000 --> 00:04:16.000 And I think that's terrific. I'm proud of it. 00:04:18.000 --> 00:04:23.000 But what was not good, the consequences of that were three things. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:23.000 --> 00:04:25.000 The first was moral, 00:04:25.000 --> 00:04:29.000 that psychologists and psychiatrists became victimologists, pathologizers, 00:04:29.000 --> 00:04:34.000 that our view of human nature was that if you were in trouble, bricks fell on you. 00:04:34.000 --> 00:04:37.000 And we forgot that people made choices and decisions. 00:04:37.000 --> 00:04:41.000 We forgot responsibility. That was the first cost. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:41.000 --> 00:04:45.000 The second cost was that we forgot about you people. 00:04:45.000 --> 00:04:49.000 We forgot about improving normal lives. 00:04:49.000 --> 00:04:55.000 We forgot about a mission to make relatively untroubled people happier, 00:04:55.000 --> 00:05:01.000 more fulfilled, more productive. And "genius," "high-talent," became a dirty word. 00:05:01.000 --> 00:05:03.000 No one works on that. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:03.000 --> 00:05:07.000 And the third problem about the disease model is, 00:05:07.000 --> 00:05:10.000 in our rush to do something about people in trouble, 00:05:10.000 --> 00:05:15.000 in our rush to do something about repairing damage, 00:05:15.000 --> 00:05:18.000 it never occurred to us to develop interventions 00:05:18.000 --> 00:05:22.000 to make people happier, positive interventions. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:22.000 --> 00:05:24.000 So that was not good. 00:05:24.000 --> 00:05:29.000 And so, that's what led people like Nancy Etcoff, Dan Gilbert, 00:05:29.000 --> 00:05:33.000 Mike Csikszentmihalyi and myself to work in something I call positive psychology, 00:05:33.000 --> 00:05:35.000 which has three aims. 00:05:35.000 --> 00:05:40.000 The first is that psychology should be just as concerned 00:05:40.000 --> 00:05:44.000 with human strength as it is with weakness. 00:05:44.000 --> 00:05:51.000 It should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage. 00:05:51.000 --> 00:05:53.000 It should be interested in the best things in life. 00:05:53.000 --> 00:05:59.000 And it should be just as concerned with making the lives of normal people fulfilling, 00:05:59.000 --> 00:06:04.000 and with genius, with nurturing high talent. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:04.000 --> 00:06:08.000 So in the last 10 years and the hope for the future, 00:06:08.000 --> 00:06:12.000 we've seen the beginnings of a science of positive psychology, 00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:15.000 a science of what makes life worth living. 00:06:15.000 --> 00:06:19.000 It turns out that we can measure different forms of happiness. 00:06:19.000 --> 00:06:23.000 And any of you, for free, can go to that website 00:06:23.000 --> 00:06:26.000 and take the entire panoply of tests of happiness. 00:06:26.000 --> 00:06:31.000 You can ask, how do you stack up for positive emotion, for meaning, 00:06:31.000 --> 00:06:35.000 for flow, against literally tens of thousands of other people? 00:06:35.000 --> 00:06:41.000 We created the opposite of the diagnostic manual of the insanities: 00:06:41.000 --> 00:06:46.000 a classification of the strengths and virtues that looks at the sex ratio, 00:06:46.000 --> 00:06:48.000 how they're defined, how to diagnose them, 00:06:48.000 --> 00:06:52.000 what builds them and what gets in their way. 00:06:53.000 --> 00:06:57.000 We found that we could discover the causation of the positive states, 00:06:57.000 --> 00:07:01.000 the relationship between left hemispheric activity 00:07:01.000 --> 00:07:07.000 and right hemispheric activity as a cause of happiness. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:08.000 --> 00:07:11.000 I've spent my life working on extremely miserable people, 00:07:11.000 --> 00:07:13.000 and I've asked the question, 00:07:13.000 --> 00:07:16.000 how do extremely miserable people differ from the rest of you? 00:07:16.000 --> 00:07:21.000 And starting about six years ago, we asked about extremely happy people. 00:07:21.000 --> 00:07:23.000 And how do they differ from the rest of us? 00:07:23.000 --> 00:07:26.000 And it turns out there's one way. 00:07:27.000 --> 00:07:29.000 They're not more religious, they're not in better shape, 00:07:29.000 --> 00:07:32.000 they don't have more money, they're not better looking, 00:07:32.000 --> 00:07:35.000 they don't have more good events and fewer bad events. 00:07:35.000 --> 00:07:40.000 The one way in which they differ: they're extremely social. 00:07:40.000 --> 00:07:43.000 They don't sit in seminars on Saturday morning. 00:07:43.000 --> 00:07:47.000 (Laughter) 00:07:47.000 --> 00:07:49.000 They don't spend time alone. 00:07:49.000 --> 00:07:51.000 Each of them is in a romantic relationship 00:07:51.000 --> 00:07:54.000 and each has a rich repertoire of friends. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:54.000 --> 00:07:59.000 But watch out here. This is merely correlational data, not causal, 00:07:59.000 --> 00:08:04.000 and it's about happiness in the first Hollywood sense I'm going to talk about: 00:08:04.000 --> 00:08:08.000 happiness of ebullience and giggling and good cheer. 00:08:08.000 --> 00:08:12.000 And I'm going to suggest to you that's not nearly enough, in just a moment. 00:08:12.000 --> 00:08:17.000 We found we could begin to look at interventions over the centuries, 00:08:17.000 --> 00:08:19.000 from the Buddha to Tony Robbins. 00:08:19.000 --> 00:08:22.000 About 120 interventions have been proposed 00:08:22.000 --> 00:08:25.000 that allegedly make people happy. 00:08:25.000 --> 00:08:30.000 And we find that we've been able to manualize many of them, 00:08:30.000 --> 00:08:33.000 and we actually carry out random assignment 00:08:33.000 --> 00:08:35.000 efficacy and effectiveness studies. 00:08:35.000 --> 00:08:39.000 That is, which ones actually make people lastingly happier? 00:08:39.000 --> 00:08:42.000 In a couple of minutes, I'll tell you about some of those results. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:49.000 But the upshot of this is that the mission I want psychology to have, 00:08:49.000 --> 00:08:53.000 in addition to its mission of curing the mentally ill, 00:08:53.000 --> 00:08:57.000 and in addition to its mission of making miserable people less miserable, 00:08:57.000 --> 00:09:01.000 is can psychology actually make people happier? 00:09:01.000 --> 00:09:05.000 And to ask that question -- happy is not a word I use very much -- 00:09:05.000 --> 00:09:09.000 we've had to break it down into what I think is askable about happy. 00:09:09.000 --> 00:09:12.000 And I believe there are three different -- 00:09:12.000 --> 00:09:16.000 and I call them different because different interventions build them, 00:09:16.000 --> 00:09:19.000 it's possible to have one rather than the other -- 00:09:19.000 --> 00:09:21.000 three different happy lives. 00:09:21.000 --> 00:09:24.000 The first happy life is the pleasant life. 00:09:24.000 --> 00:09:29.000 This is a life in which you have as much positive emotion as you possibly can, 00:09:29.000 --> 00:09:31.000 and the skills to amplify it. 00:09:31.000 --> 00:09:33.000 The second is a life of engagement -- 00:09:33.000 --> 00:09:40.000 a life in your work, your parenting, your love, your leisure, time stops for you. 00:09:41.000 --> 00:09:43.000 That's what Aristotle was talking about. 00:09:43.000 --> 00:09:45.000 And third, the meaningful life. 00:09:45.000 --> 00:09:48.000 So I want to say a little bit about each of those lives 00:09:48.000 --> 00:09:50.000 and what we know about them. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:50.000 --> 00:09:55.000 The first life is the pleasant life and it's simply, as best we can find it, 00:09:55.000 --> 00:09:57.000 it's having as many of the pleasures as you can, 00:09:57.000 --> 00:10:00.000 as much positive emotion as you can, 00:10:00.000 --> 00:10:06.000 and learning the skills -- savoring, mindfulness -- that amplify them, 00:10:06.000 --> 00:10:09.000 that stretch them over time and space. 00:10:09.000 --> 00:10:13.000 But the pleasant life has three drawbacks, 00:10:13.000 --> 00:10:19.000 and it's why positive psychology is not happy-ology and why it doesn't end here. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:19.000 --> 00:10:22.000 The first drawback is that it turns out the pleasant life, 00:10:22.000 --> 00:10:27.000 your experience of positive emotion, is heritable, 00:10:27.000 --> 00:10:33.000 about 50 percent heritable, and, in fact, not very modifiable. 00:10:33.000 --> 00:10:37.000 So the different tricks that Matthieu [Ricard] and I and others know 00:10:37.000 --> 00:10:41.000 about increasing the amount of positive emotion in your life 00:10:41.000 --> 00:10:45.000 are 15 to 20 percent tricks, getting more of it. 00:10:45.000 --> 00:10:53.000 Second is that positive emotion habituates. It habituates rapidly, indeed. 00:10:53.000 --> 00:10:58.000 It's all like French vanilla ice cream, the first taste is a 100 percent; 00:10:58.000 --> 00:11:02.000 by the time you're down to the sixth taste, it's gone. 00:11:03.000 --> 00:11:07.000 And, as I said, it's not particularly malleable. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:07.000 --> 00:11:10.000 And this leads to the second life. 00:11:10.000 --> 00:11:12.000 And I have to tell you about my friend, Len, 00:11:12.000 --> 00:11:18.000 to talk about why positive psychology is more than positive emotion, 00:11:18.000 --> 00:11:20.000 more than building pleasure. 00:11:20.000 --> 00:11:24.000 In two of the three great arenas of life, by the time Len was 30, 00:11:24.000 --> 00:11:30.000 Len was enormously successful. The first arena was work. 00:11:30.000 --> 00:11:32.000 By the time he was 20, he was an options trader. 00:11:32.000 --> 00:11:35.000 By the time he was 25, he was a multimillionaire 00:11:35.000 --> 00:11:38.000 and the head of an options trading company. 00:11:38.000 --> 00:11:43.000 Second, in play -- he's a national champion bridge player. 00:11:44.000 --> 00:11:50.000 But in the third great arena of life, love, Len is an abysmal failure. 00:11:50.000 --> 00:11:56.000 And the reason he was, was that Len is a cold fish. 00:11:56.000 --> 00:11:57.000 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:11:58.000 --> 00:12:01.000 Len is an introvert. 00:12:02.000 --> 00:12:06.000 American women said to Len, when he dated them, 00:12:06.000 --> 00:12:10.000 "You're no fun. You don't have positive emotion. Get lost." 00:12:10.000 --> 00:12:16.000 And Len was wealthy enough to be able to afford a Park Avenue psychoanalyst, 00:12:16.000 --> 00:12:20.000 who for five years tried to find the sexual trauma 00:12:20.000 --> 00:12:23.000 that had somehow locked positive emotion inside of him. 00:12:23.000 --> 00:12:27.000 But it turned out there wasn't any sexual trauma. 00:12:27.000 --> 00:12:31.000 It turned out that -- Len grew up in Long Island 00:12:31.000 --> 00:12:37.000 and he played football and watched football, and played bridge -- 00:12:37.000 --> 00:12:42.000 Len is in the bottom five percent of what we call positive affectivities. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:42.000 --> 00:12:46.000 The question is, is Len unhappy? And I want to say not. 00:12:46.000 --> 00:12:50.000 Contrary to what psychology told us about the bottom 50 percent 00:12:50.000 --> 00:12:53.000 of the human race in positive affectivity, 00:12:53.000 --> 00:12:56.000 I think Len is one of the happiest people I know. 00:12:56.000 --> 00:12:59.000 He's not consigned to the hell of unhappiness 00:12:59.000 --> 00:13:05.000 and that's because Len, like most of you, is enormously capable of flow. 00:13:05.000 --> 00:13:10.000 When he walks onto the floor of the American Exchange at 9:30 in the morning, 00:13:10.000 --> 00:13:13.000 time stops for him. And it stops till the closing bell. 00:13:13.000 --> 00:13:15.000 When the first card is played, 00:13:15.000 --> 00:13:19.000 until 10 days later, the tournament is over, time stops for Len. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:19.000 --> 00:13:23.000 And this is indeed what Mike Csikszentmihalyi has been talking about, 00:13:23.000 --> 00:13:28.000 about flow. And it's distinct from pleasure in a very important way. 00:13:28.000 --> 00:13:33.000 Pleasure has raw feels: you know it's happening. It's thought and feeling. 00:13:33.000 --> 00:13:41.000 But what Mike told you yesterday -- during flow, you can't feel anything. 00:13:42.000 --> 00:13:46.000 You're one with the music. Time stops. 00:13:46.000 --> 00:13:48.000 You have intense concentration. 00:13:48.000 --> 00:13:53.000 And this is indeed the characteristic of what we think of as the good life. 00:13:53.000 --> 00:13:56.000 And we think there's a recipe for it, 00:13:56.000 --> 00:13:58.000 and it's knowing what your highest strengths are. 00:13:58.000 --> 00:14:00.000 And again, there's a valid test 00:14:00.000 --> 00:14:03.000 of what your five highest strengths are. 00:14:03.000 --> 00:14:09.000 And then re-crafting your life to use them as much as you possibly can. 00:14:09.000 --> 00:14:12.000 Re-crafting your work, your love, 00:14:12.000 --> 00:14:15.000 your play, your friendship, your parenting. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:15.000 --> 00:14:20.000 Just one example. One person I worked with was a bagger at Genuardi's. 00:14:20.000 --> 00:14:22.000 Hated the job. 00:14:22.000 --> 00:14:24.000 She's working her way through college. 00:14:25.000 --> 00:14:28.000 Her highest strength was social intelligence, 00:14:28.000 --> 00:14:33.000 so she re-crafted bagging to make the encounter with her 00:14:33.000 --> 00:14:35.000 the social highlight of every customer's day. 00:14:35.000 --> 00:14:38.000 Now obviously she failed. 00:14:38.000 --> 00:14:41.000 But what she did was to take her highest strengths, 00:14:41.000 --> 00:14:45.000 and re-craft work to use them as much as possible. 00:14:45.000 --> 00:14:47.000 What you get out of that is not smiley-ness. 00:14:47.000 --> 00:14:49.000 You don't look like Debbie Reynolds. 00:14:49.000 --> 00:14:54.000 You don't giggle a lot. What you get is more absorption. 00:14:54.000 --> 00:14:58.000 So, that's the second path. The first path, positive emotion. 00:14:58.000 --> 00:15:02.000 The second path is eudaimonian flow. NOTE Paragraph 00:15:02.000 --> 00:15:04.000 And the third path is meaning. 00:15:04.000 --> 00:15:08.000 This is the most venerable of the happinesses, traditionally. 00:15:08.000 --> 00:15:14.000 And meaning, in this view, consists of -- very parallel to eudaimonia -- 00:15:14.000 --> 00:15:20.000 it consists of knowing what your highest strengths are, and using them 00:15:20.000 --> 00:15:26.000 to belong to and in the service of something larger than you are. NOTE Paragraph 00:15:27.000 --> 00:15:32.000 I mentioned that for all three kinds of lives, the pleasant life, 00:15:32.000 --> 00:15:37.000 the good life, the meaningful life, people are now hard at work on the question, 00:15:37.000 --> 00:15:41.000 are there things that lastingly change those lives? 00:15:41.000 --> 00:15:47.000 And the answer seems to be yes. And I'll just give you some samples of it. 00:15:47.000 --> 00:15:49.000 It's being done in a rigorous manner. 00:15:49.000 --> 00:15:54.000 It's being done in the same way that we test drugs to see what really works. 00:15:54.000 --> 00:15:59.000 So we do random assignment, placebo controlled, 00:15:59.000 --> 00:16:02.000 long-term studies of different interventions. 00:16:02.000 --> 00:16:06.000 And just to sample the kind of interventions that we find have an effect, 00:16:06.000 --> 00:16:10.000 when we teach people about the pleasant life, 00:16:10.000 --> 00:16:12.000 how to have more pleasure in your life, 00:16:12.000 --> 00:16:18.000 one of your assignments is to take the mindfulness skills, the savoring skills, 00:16:18.000 --> 00:16:22.000 and you're assigned to design a beautiful day. 00:16:22.000 --> 00:16:27.000 Next Saturday, set a day aside, design yourself a beautiful day, 00:16:27.000 --> 00:16:31.000 and use savoring and mindfulness to enhance those pleasures. 00:16:31.000 --> 00:16:37.000 And we can show in that way that the pleasant life is enhanced. NOTE Paragraph 00:16:38.000 --> 00:16:44.000 Gratitude visit. I want you all to do this with me now, if you would. 00:16:44.000 --> 00:16:46.000 Close your eyes. 00:16:46.000 --> 00:16:54.000 I'd like you to remember someone who did something enormously important 00:16:54.000 --> 00:16:58.000 that changed your life in a good direction, 00:16:58.000 --> 00:17:01.000 and who you never properly thanked. 00:17:01.000 --> 00:17:04.000 The person has to be alive. OK. 00:17:04.000 --> 00:17:06.000 Now, OK, you can open your eyes. 00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:08.000 I hope all of you have such a person. 00:17:08.000 --> 00:17:12.000 Your assignment, when you're learning the gratitude visit, 00:17:12.000 --> 00:17:16.000 is to write a 300-word testimonial to that person, 00:17:16.000 --> 00:17:19.000 call them on the phone in Phoenix, 00:17:19.000 --> 00:17:24.000 ask if you can visit, don't tell them why, show up at their door, 00:17:24.000 --> 00:17:30.000 you read the testimonial -- everyone weeps when this happens. 00:17:30.000 --> 00:17:34.000 And what happens is when we test people one week later, a month later, 00:17:34.000 --> 00:17:39.000 three months later, they're both happier and less depressed. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:40.000 --> 00:17:44.000 Another example is a strength date, in which we get couples 00:17:44.000 --> 00:17:47.000 to identify their highest strengths on the strengths test, 00:17:47.000 --> 00:17:53.000 and then to design an evening in which they both use their strengths, 00:17:53.000 --> 00:17:56.000 and we find this is a strengthener of relationships. 00:17:56.000 --> 00:17:58.000 And fun versus philanthropy. 00:17:58.000 --> 00:18:01.000 But it's so heartening to be in a group like this, 00:18:01.000 --> 00:18:05.000 in which so many of you have turned your lives to philanthropy. 00:18:05.000 --> 00:18:08.000 Well, my undergraduates and the people I work with haven't discovered this, 00:18:08.000 --> 00:18:12.000 so we actually have people do something altruistic 00:18:12.000 --> 00:18:15.000 and do something fun, and to contrast it. 00:18:15.000 --> 00:18:18.000 And what you find is when you do something fun, 00:18:18.000 --> 00:18:20.000 it has a square wave walk set. 00:18:20.000 --> 00:18:26.000 When you do something philanthropic to help another person, it lasts and it lasts. 00:18:26.000 --> 00:18:30.000 So those are examples of positive interventions. NOTE Paragraph 00:18:30.000 --> 00:18:35.000 So, the next to last thing I want to say is 00:18:35.000 --> 00:18:38.000 we're interested in how much life satisfaction people have. 00:18:38.000 --> 00:18:42.000 And this is really what you're about. And that's our target variable. 00:18:42.000 --> 00:18:46.000 And we ask the question as a function of the three different lives, 00:18:46.000 --> 00:18:48.000 how much life satisfaction do you get? 00:18:48.000 --> 00:18:54.000 So we ask -- and we've done this in 15 replications involving thousands of people -- 00:18:54.000 --> 00:18:56.000 to what extent does the pursuit of pleasure, 00:18:56.000 --> 00:19:00.000 the pursuit of positive emotion, the pleasant life, 00:19:00.000 --> 00:19:03.000 the pursuit of engagement, time stopping for you, 00:19:03.000 --> 00:19:07.000 and the pursuit of meaning contribute to life satisfaction? NOTE Paragraph 00:19:07.000 --> 00:19:11.000 And our results surprised us, but they were backward of what we thought. 00:19:11.000 --> 00:19:16.000 It turns out the pursuit of pleasure has almost no contribution to life satisfaction. 00:19:16.000 --> 00:19:19.000 The pursuit of meaning is the strongest. 00:19:19.000 --> 00:19:23.000 The pursuit of engagement is also very strong. 00:19:23.000 --> 00:19:27.000 Where pleasure matters is if you have both engagement 00:19:27.000 --> 00:19:31.000 and you have meaning, then pleasure's the whipped cream and the cherry. 00:19:31.000 --> 00:19:39.000 Which is to say, the full life -- the sum is greater than the parts, if you've got all three. 00:19:39.000 --> 00:19:42.000 Conversely, if you have none of the three, 00:19:42.000 --> 00:19:44.000 the empty life, the sum is less than the parts. NOTE Paragraph 00:19:44.000 --> 00:19:46.000 And what we're asking now is 00:19:46.000 --> 00:19:50.000 does the very same relationship, physical health, morbidity, 00:19:50.000 --> 00:19:55.000 how long you live and productivity, follow the same relationship? 00:19:55.000 --> 00:19:57.000 That is, in a corporation, 00:19:57.000 --> 00:20:03.000 is productivity a function of positive emotion, engagement and meaning? 00:20:04.000 --> 00:20:07.000 Is health a function of positive engagement, 00:20:07.000 --> 00:20:09.000 of pleasure, and of meaning in life? 00:20:09.000 --> 00:20:14.000 And there is reason to think the answer to both of those may well be yes. NOTE Paragraph 00:20:16.000 --> 00:20:23.000 So, Chris said that the last speaker had a chance to try to integrate what he heard, 00:20:23.000 --> 00:20:28.000 and so this was amazing for me. I've never been in a gathering like this. 00:20:29.000 --> 00:20:32.000 I've never seen speakers stretch beyond themselves so much, 00:20:32.000 --> 00:20:35.000 which was one of the remarkable things. 00:20:35.000 --> 00:20:39.000 But I found that the problems of psychology seemed to be parallel 00:20:39.000 --> 00:20:44.000 to the problems of technology, entertainment and design in the following way. 00:20:44.000 --> 00:20:48.000 We all know that technology, entertainment and design 00:20:48.000 --> 00:20:54.000 have been and can be used for destructive purposes. 00:20:54.000 --> 00:20:58.000 We also know that technology, entertainment and design 00:20:58.000 --> 00:21:01.000 can be used to relieve misery. 00:21:01.000 --> 00:21:05.000 And by the way, the distinction between relieving misery 00:21:05.000 --> 00:21:08.000 and building happiness is extremely important. 00:21:08.000 --> 00:21:11.000 I thought, when I first became a therapist 30 years ago, 00:21:11.000 --> 00:21:17.000 that if I was good enough to make someone not depressed, 00:21:17.000 --> 00:21:23.000 not anxious, not angry, that I'd make them happy. 00:21:23.000 --> 00:21:28.000 And I never found that. I found the best you could ever do was to get to zero. 00:21:28.000 --> 00:21:30.000 But they were empty. NOTE Paragraph 00:21:30.000 --> 00:21:35.000 And it turns out the skills of happiness, the skills of the pleasant life, 00:21:35.000 --> 00:21:38.000 the skills of engagement, the skills of meaning, 00:21:38.000 --> 00:21:42.000 are different from the skills of relieving misery. 00:21:42.000 --> 00:21:45.000 And so, the parallel thing holds 00:21:45.000 --> 00:21:49.000 with technology, entertainment and design, I believe. 00:21:49.000 --> 00:21:56.000 That is, it is possible for these three drivers of our world 00:21:56.000 --> 00:22:02.000 to increase happiness, to increase positive emotion, 00:22:02.000 --> 00:22:04.000 and that's typically how they've been used. 00:22:04.000 --> 00:22:07.000 But once you fractionate happiness the way I do -- 00:22:07.000 --> 00:22:10.000 not just positive emotion, that's not nearly enough -- 00:22:10.000 --> 00:22:13.000 there's flow in life, and there's meaning in life. 00:22:13.000 --> 00:22:15.000 As Laura Lee told us, 00:22:15.000 --> 00:22:19.000 design, and, I believe, entertainment and technology, 00:22:19.000 --> 00:22:23.000 can be used to increase meaning engagement in life as well. NOTE Paragraph 00:22:23.000 --> 00:22:27.000 So in conclusion, the eleventh reason for optimism, 00:22:27.000 --> 00:22:31.000 in addition to the space elevator, 00:22:31.000 --> 00:22:36.000 is that I think with technology, entertainment and design, 00:22:36.000 --> 00:22:40.000 we can actually increase the amount of tonnage 00:22:40.000 --> 00:22:42.000 of human happiness on the planet. 00:22:42.000 --> 00:22:48.000 And if technology can, in the next decade or two, increase the pleasant life, 00:22:48.000 --> 00:22:52.000 the good life and the meaningful life, it will be good enough. 00:22:52.000 --> 00:22:58.000 If entertainment can be diverted to also increase positive emotion, 00:22:58.000 --> 00:23:02.000 meaning, eudaimonia, it will be good enough. 00:23:02.000 --> 00:23:08.000 And if design can increase positive emotion, 00:23:08.000 --> 00:23:11.000 eudaimonia, and flow and meaning, 00:23:11.000 --> 00:23:16.000 what we're all doing together will become good enough. Thank you. 00:23:16.000 --> 00:23:24.000 (Applause)