JOSH: Hello, and welcome to Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, the podcast about ideas that matter. I'm Josh Castle, the producer of the podcast, and I'm so glad you've joined us today. In this episode, Spencer speaks with Stephanie Harrison about misconceptions about happiness, individualism and suffering, and challenging archetypes of emotionality.

SPENCER: Stephanie, welcome.

STEPHANIE: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here with you.

SPENCER: What do most people get wrong about how to be happy?

STEPHANIE: I think that the idea of happiness has just been painted with all of these different brushes over the years, and so in many ways, it feels like there's this process of unwinding all of those different ideas that has to begin. I think that one of the biggest ones is how it's really wrapped up in our culture of achievement and idolizing success and viewing that as the pathway to happiness. That seems to be one of the biggest barriers for most people.

SPENCER: It seems that a lot of people feel that they're going to be happy when they get to a certain point in life, like, "Oh, if I graduate from my degree, I'll be happy. If I am a successful entrepreneur, I'll be happy." I think usually they find that that's not the case, that they're not substantially happier in the long run having achieved that. Sure, they're happy in the moment when they get their achievement, but probably not after that. Would you agree?

STEPHANIE: Yeah. No one's ever going to say that it doesn't feel good to be successful or to have some progress or a major win or to be recognized, but I think the real key lies in what you're bringing up, which is the fact that it doesn't last, and therefore it can't be a sustainable source of happiness. You can't place all of your eggs in that basket.

SPENCER: Now a skeptic might say, "Well, maybe life needs to be a series of achievements, where you're constantly achieving things, and then you can get a boost each time."

STEPHANIE: It's true. And maybe that is a strategy that works for some people, but I think my question for that person would be, what's the cost of that strategy? How does that affect all the other areas of your life? Because we live in a very competitive culture that is continuing to accelerate in that dimension, in terms of how much work is required to get ahead and to be successful in the world. A lot of people would feel and describe the world as feeling harder than ever to get ahead or to improve your station in life, which means that the demands are much higher. So what are you sacrificing in order to get that constant stream of achievements to boost your happiness?

SPENCER: I agree with you. A lot of people do seem to feel that way, and it doesn't seem likely that it's harder to achieve things now than it was a hundred years ago. Do you think it actually is?

STEPHANIE: I think that economically, my understanding of the data is that there is a lot less social mobility in the United States now than there was in the past. It was easier, for example, to improve your economic class or to improve your station in life, maybe back in the 50s and 60s. I think that it's certainly in many ways easier to achieve certain things. When I think about my career and my life, I would never have gotten to do the things I get to do were it not for the advent of the Internet and the opportunities that that created with respect to being able to create things and share my thoughts. I think that there are more systemic barriers that seem to be in place, but there are also these other opportunities that have arisen as we've progressed technologically.

SPENCER: I could see that, but at the same time, so many more people get education today. Women have so much more respect and so much more flexibility than they ever had. There's way less racism. There's still racism, obviously, but if you look back a hundred fifty years ago, it's absolutely shocking the degree of racism. So I don't know, it seems hard to believe that it's actually worse, but maybe it is.

STEPHANIE: I think that the interesting thing we're chipping away at in talking about this is also how it feels to people, and whether or not putting aside the facts, if people feel disempowered, they feel like they don't have the support or the institutions or the resources to do the things they want to do. Psychologically, that's really hard on people, and ultimately, that experience of feeling like you can't do the things that matter to you, that hurts. So perhaps it's about going to the heart of the feeling that people are experiencing and trying to understand that a little bit more.

SPENCER: I think that's a very astute point. It really doesn't matter, at the end of the day, the relative comparison of how hard things are now versus in the past. What matters is how you actually feel today. If you feel disempowered, if you feel like you can't achieve your goal, that is really important. Regardless, even if it's much easier than it ever was, it would still matter.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, and it's obvious that sometimes I get frustrated by this. You're completely right to bring this up because how am I supposed to compare my life as it is today with how it would have been had I been born in 1920 instead, or whatever it is. There's no control group here. There's no way to really understand that. If I can identify the trends and the likely outcomes that would have happened, and I think about my grandparents and my grandmothers and the opportunities they had access to compared to what I have, obviously it's a world of difference. And yet, this crisis of hopelessness and of feeling like there are huge barriers in place for people getting what they need and what they want, I find that really interesting and important to attend to.

SPENCER: What do you see as some of those big barriers right now?

STEPHANIE: I think that in many ways, we have been trapped by our ideas of happiness, and I think that's really what has motivated me in my work. I remember being in college, I was living in New York at the time, and I was doing these internships, trying to figure out what kind of work I wanted to do, and getting on the subway and looking around and seeing all these people who just looked really unhappy and distressed and burnt out. I remember thinking, "Man, in so many ways, these people are 'living the dream.' They have all of these incredible opportunities, and they're presumably working on things that matter to them or providing for their families and finding meaning in that way. And yet, why are we still so unhappy? What is it that's not fulfilling us about this?" I guess I've come to believe over time that when we have this misguided understanding of happiness, if we don't question it, then it's going to affect so many of our choices, and we won't even have the awareness of it because we're essentially acting on autopilot. These ideas that persist in our culture about happiness being something you get for yourself, by yourself, through achieving more and more, are highly individualistic and very different from what we know from the research on the sources of happiness. I think that has been my hypothesis, at least, that we have to reorient ourselves towards what really matters, and then once we know what matters, we also need to build a world where it becomes easier to do what matters.

SPENCER: You mentioned individualism, and obviously that's a major part of, for example, American culture. Do you think that actually impedes people's happiness?

STEPHANIE: I think it does both. I think it can contribute to happiness, but in the current form, in the extreme form that we have here, I think it ultimately is harming us. I, of course, staunchly believe that every person is an individual who has unique qualities and traits and who matters for who they are, and is somebody who can self-actualize and pursue the things that matter to them. Where my qualms lie is with the hyper-individualism that we see, which extends that to basically say, "You're entirely on your own. You're separate from other people. They don't matter. It's only you that counts. You can never struggle or lean on anybody or be a part of a community that needs you, and you should never be inconvenienced." And all these extreme messages that really seep in. Ultimately, I think we've just taken it too far.

SPENCER: Where do you see those messages coming from that you should depend only on yourself? You shouldn't be part of a community. You shouldn't be doing things on other people's behalf.

STEPHANIE: I see them, honestly, all over the place. I think when I was doing the research for my book, New Happy, I looked into where these messages come from. What is really hard to disentangle is they're so pervasive. It's really sort of the water that we're swimming in. Some of the studies that I found have tried to trace where these individualistic messages are coming from. For example, there was one researcher who went through all of these media programs, all of these books, and tried to trace the rise of individualistic language, and essentially found that over the last 50 years, the increase in words like "I," "me," and "mine" has increased incredibly significantly. They then went and looked at television programming and looked at the messages that come through in, for example, kids' television shows, and found that while in the 80s, a lot of the messaging was much more about being kind to people and being a part of the community, over the last 30 years, it's really increased in focus, in terms of focusing more and more on the self and the self being the most important thing. Those kinds of studies, I think, are really helpful in pinpointing these specific examples of where it comes through. But even if you think about how many people suffer in silence, the impulse that we have when we're struggling, when we're having a hard time, I don't think many people at all find it easy to raise their hand and say, "I'm having a tough time and I need some help." I know I don't find it easy. I'm not sure about you.

SPENCER: Ironically, something that helps me is that I tend to not like to do deceptive things, even when they're really minorly deceptive. So when people ask, "How are you doing?" I feel weird saying "I'm great" when I'm actually not doing well. So that's kind of a funny hack.

STEPHANIE: That's awesome. That's really interesting because that connects it to a core value of yours to be true.

SPENCER: Exactly. You got it.

STEPHANIE: That's really cool. I haven't thought about it like that before, but I think those hacks are really important. The way I taught myself to ask for help was realizing that a lot of the experiences of happiness in my life have come from helping other people, and I realized that in closing myself off to letting other people help me, I was actually denying them the chance to be happy, to experience the same joy that I was feeling. That made me really reflect on the ways in which I was not only harming myself by not leaning on other people, but also failing to offer these opportunities to contribute to other people in my life who love me and care about me and want to try and make me feel better. So I am a big fan of hacks that connect to your values and try to figure out ways to make that easier.

SPENCER: Do you have an example you feel comfortable talking about where you felt you would have benefited from talking to friends or sharing it and you didn't? And kind of why you felt that was hard to do?

STEPHANIE: Of course. Oh God, I have so many examples. So you know about, let's see, six years ago, my partner, who I had just met at the time, came down with a mysterious illness, and we had no idea what was going on. It was very sudden; one day, he sort of started declining, and he kept getting worse and worse. I took him to every doctor I could find, trying to figure out, "Okay, let's rule out this scary diagnosis and this one," and we just kept coming up blank, essentially. It was over a year of desperately trying to find these answers to figure out what was going on. I was in my 20s at the time. I didn't have any sort of experience that prepared me for that. I had never been a caretaker. I had never had to fundamentally disrupt my own life in service to another person. I was watching this person who I loved, who was in the prime of his life, and who was the epitome of health suddenly struck down for no apparent reason, and no one could help us; no doctors could give us the solutions. As somebody who used to believe that doctors could always help you, it was very devastating to realize the limits of our current medical knowledge.

SPENCER: Yeah, it's a terrifying situation to be in.

STEPHANIE: It is, and I didn't talk about how hard it was. I thought that the best thing I could do would be to shut up and smile and pretend that I was fine, even though I very much wasn't. In doing so, I ended up creating a lot of walls and barriers with the people who loved me because I wasn't, to your point about your values, being true to myself. I wasn't sharing my authentic experiences, my emotions, and my pain. When you don't do that, you're no longer connecting in the same way with that person. I thought that doing that was the way to cope; I had a reason for doing it, even if it was an incorrect reason or it wasn't fully realized or conscious. If I could go back in time, what I would say to that younger version of myself is, "Dear God, please go talk to somebody. Please go tell your friends how scared you are and how anxious this makes you feel, and how you're worried that you're going to have to go through this trauma and all of this kind of stuff, you know?" I didn't, and I really wish I had, and it took me a long time to learn that lesson.

SPENCER: I think it's such a tricky situation to be in where you can benefit a lot from leaning on your friends, but a lot of people are afraid of how their friends will react. Either that they'll react in a way that's not helpful or makes them feel bad, or that they'll get overburdened by it. If you're telling your friend all the time about how bad things are for you, they might just get sick of it and feel punished by it. So yeah, how do you think people can navigate that?

STEPHANIE: I think that one of the maxims of this hyper-individualism that we're talking about is that other people are ultimately not as important as you. You are the center of things, and there's a limit to which you can help other people. The important work we have to do for one another is to find ways to let each other know that we're not burdens, even in our suffering, pain, and needs. People are so afraid of being needy. They hear it all the time, the pain of feeling like they're asking for too much or that they're a burden while simultaneously not getting their needs satisfied. Why is that happening? It breaks my heart, and I think that for me, at least, it led to a very radical shift in my worldview, realizing how much need there is in my fellow human beings and how important it is that I show up to meet that need where I can, and to have other people who are willing to meet my needs in the same way as well. I think that shift has transformed my life. While I think again, the kind of conditioning that we've been subjected to would say, "Oh, God, how could that make you happy?" It has made me happier. In many ways, it was a great gift out of that experience.

SPENCER: Something I think about with friends or even with other loved ones or romantic partners is that you can't talk about bad things every single time you see them. It will actually create a kind of negative pall over your relationship. It's kind of funny because there was this idea of the critical positivity ratio, also known as the Losada ratio. I don't know if you've ever heard about that.

STEPHANIE: Yeah.

SPENCER: But in early positive psychology research, they found that, in theory, it was like 2.9013 positive to negative statements in your relationships, in your life, and your company would lead to positive results, whereas below that critical ratio of positive to negative, things would fall apart. The funny thing is that paper was absolute garbage. It was one of the worst papers I've ever seen in my life, and it was discredited. That being said, oddly, I think it's right — not that it's 2.9013, but that there's something to this idea that you need to have enough positive experiences in a relationship relative to negative for it to be sustainable in the long term. That's something I think about, trying to lean on my friends but not lean on the same friend every time. Do some rotation, do some balancing. What do you think about that?

STEPHANIE: Yeah, it's so funny — correct me if I'm wrong — but I thought that the Gottmans had something where they came out and said that in their studies on couples, they found a similar finding — not the exact number, obviously — but something like five to one positive to negative interactions was predictive of health for the couple. Have you ever heard about that?

SPENCER: It doesn't surprise me, because it seems to me that something like this has to be true, that if you have, imagine if 90% of your interactions are upsetting or negative with someone, that's going to be a pretty hard relationship to maintain. I do think people fear that. But I think if you're a bit conscious of that, you could just balance. It doesn't mean, if the ratio is zero, you're never telling your close friend the bad things in your life, that's not the right ratio.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, exactly. I think there's something really interesting in this, which I haven't reflected on until now because of your question, which is that I also think we have a bit of a skewed understanding of positive versus negative. Alex was sick for many years, and we had just years of difficult experiences. There weren't a lot of wins; everything was pretty tough in a lot of ways. What sustained us during that time, and we were also very isolated, was both of us really leaning on each other. What helped us was recognizing that you can have a positive experience that's about suffering, and that recognition makes it possible to navigate those difficult times with your loved ones, especially if they're going through something prolonged and difficult, and still find the joy, love, peace, and connection that help with well-being, even in those moments.

SPENCER: That's a great observation. Absolutely, I mean, sharing about a negative experience you had could help you and the other person feel closer together and more bonded, and they could feel happy that they're able to help you. So yeah, I think you're right to point out that sharing a negative experience doesn't have to be a negative experience for the other person. On the other hand, it can be, and that's something to be mindful of. If you're talking about something very upsetting, it could upset the other person to hear about it. If you're talking about the same upsetting thing over and over again every time you see them, that could wear on them over time. It doesn't mean you shouldn't share, but it's just something to be mindful of.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, totally. I think that's really well said. I think that having pain with love, to me, becomes an experience of love and connection and all those good things, so it can be a positive one. I think what people tend to have difficulties and struggles with is more of what you described, like venting about the same topic and the kind of helplessness that can feel, or the sense of people perhaps not being able to help and feeling helpless. It's almost like if I were to come to you and complain about a problem that I was struggling with, maybe it would feel like a negative experience if you felt burdened by it and you couldn't help me, and therefore it wasn't solvable. You know what I mean? Does that make sense?

SPENCER: Absolutely, and I think it could be especially frustrating if the friend feels you're not taking the actions you should be taking, and you bring up the same problem over and over again. Let's say you have a boyfriend that's terrible. And the friend is like, "Okay, you constantly complain about your boyfriend. You have a terrible relationship." That can be really frustrating because it feels like you're banging your head against the wall.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, It's interesting because it kind of ties back to the helplessness thing we were talking about. I don't think people like to feel helpless, obviously, but I don't think they like seeing other people feel helpless. It's very frustrating to witness that.

SPENCER: I think that's right.

[promo]

SPENCER: Another thing I found in difficult times when things are bad is when a close friend asks me how I'm doing, it's hard for me to say, "I'm great." Maybe I could do that with a stranger, where it's obviously just a polite thing, but I find it can be good to do a really quick catch-up on the bad things at the beginning of the conversation, then move on to other topics. You know what I mean? Be able to talk about it, but not linger on it the whole time. It's not the focus of everything.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, totally. It's sharing what's going on, almost in a boundary way, right?

SPENCER: Exactly.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's really smart.

SPENCER: Now turning to your topics a bit. A big theme in your work is how to be happy. Do you think that life really is just about happiness, or should we be trying to do more than just be happy?

STEPHANIE: I love that question. I think that we should be trying to be happy, but in new ways that I'm talking about, not the old ways that we've been conditioned into. I have sort of wrapped up a lot of things in happiness, including meaning, purpose, contribution, service, authenticity, and self-actualization.

SPENCER: You're using a very broad definition of happiness that encompasses lots of good things. Would you put all the good things in life, all the good things?

STEPHANIE: [laughs] All the good things. I'm being a little facetious.

SPENCER: But there's a little asterisk that's everything that's good.

STEPHANIE: I always liked the kind of phrasing of a good life. I think that resonates with people. Because it gives you the chance to conceptualize it for yourself, and it can encompass a lot of different things. I don't want to pursue happiness in a way that issues pleasurable experiences or denies meaning or my connectedness to other people. I want to live a life that honors all of the elements of the human experience. To me, that's what a good life is, and trying to find ways to deepen that understanding and embodiment of it.

SPENCER: I'm glad I asked this up front, because I've had such frustrating experiences in life of talking about happiness only to discover half an hour into the conversation that our definitions were completely different, so we got that out of the way [laughs].

STEPHANIE: I'm so glad [laughs].

SPENCER: You mentioned your concept of the old happy. Let's start there. What is old happy? How do you define that? What's wrong with that?

STEPHANIE: Basically, I argue that we've been, as I mentioned, conditioned into a pursuit of happiness that's actually making us miserable, and it sort of centers around these three core pillars and ideas that tell us that in order to be happy: we have to perfect ourselves, we have to achieve certain societally approved or culturally approved goals, and we have to do everything by ourselves. The core values that underpin that include things like perfectionism, competition, extrinsic achievement, isolation, and hyper-independence. Those core values that we end up chasing, thinking that they'll make us happy, I argue that they backfire and end up making us quite unhappy instead.

SPENCER: Do you see this fundamentally linked to capitalism?

STEPHANIE: Yes, I do [laughs]. I argue that a lot of these beliefs stem from the ways in which living in an extremely capitalist society, as we do, and the values that it inculcates in us, and the way it forms our behaviors. I link happiness to individualism, which we talked about, capitalism, and then domination being the oppression of other human beings, or the ways in which we view ourselves as being in competition for a sense of worth and therefore well-being.

SPENCER: I don't know if you agree with this, but I feel like capitalism is such an interesting double-edged sword because it creates tremendous wealth, which I do think has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in an amazing way. You see how China has developed, and there are so many fewer poor people than there were. I think a lot of that is due to capitalism. But at the same time, capitalism creates consumerism. It creates this sense of social comparison. It creates frivolous pursuits towards whatever the other person wants. You want it too because you see it on television. It comes with all these really bad side effects.

STEPHANIE: I agree completely. There are obviously those amazing benefits of the economies we've created and how they have improved well-being. Being poor is terrible for your well-being. We need to create the conditions for everybody to be able to afford what they need and to be able to survive. I do think it is a double-edged sword, and I try to be careful about acknowledging that whenever I talk about it.

SPENCER: We talk about achievement and individualism a bit. Let's touch on self-perfection. How do you see that fitting into capitalism?

STEPHANIE: I think that in many ways, we've witnessed this sort of commodification of self and this really interesting approach to selfhood. There's a scholar who wrote about this back in the 60s. His name was Philip Cushman, and he called it the formation of the empty self. The self being construed in this form as being empty means that it has to be filled up, and it has to be filled up with stuff and with the accouterments of a successful person, through your achievements and all of that. Because those things don't bring us the meaningful, lasting well-being that we're looking for, we're always being depleted essentially. It's like that short-term high we talked about around achievement. It might make you feel good for 10 minutes, but then it goes away pretty quickly. The empty self powers the economy because if everybody needs to continually fill themselves up, there's always a market for stuff and for more things and for whatever new invention we're being sold that we're told we have to do in order to perfect ourselves. I think that really ties into the way that we now treat ourselves as personal brands, who have to do all of the things and look a certain way to be taken seriously and all the rest of it, and how we are constantly chasing this better version of ourselves. We think if we can get there, then, yay, finally, we'll be happy.

SPENCER: As a man, it's a lot easier to critique this and see it from the outside, but if I look at the beauty industry, it just seems shocking to me the amount of pressure that women feel to be beautiful all the time. With makeup, with clothing, with high heels, all of these things, men feel way less pressure. Sitting here as a man, looking at it, I'm like, "Wow, that is an intense amount of pressure to experience."

STEPHANIE: It's wild. I wasn't really on the internet during the 2020 to 2022 timeframe, just because I was going through all those challenges that I mentioned and was really busy with that. I didn't have any sort of personal presence on social media. I remember when I came back to it, I was shocked at how intense the pressure felt, even then, how renewed it was. I kept wondering if it was because people in the pandemic were like, "Oh, I'm going to use this time to really amp up my appearance." There were all these trends about weird body parts that women have and how to fix them. Every person was talking about their cosmetic procedures and how you have to do this and that in order to look a certain way. I just felt so overwhelmed by it, and the pressure it places upon people. I don't know if you've seen this, but the fact that there are nine-year-olds going to buy these mature women's skincare products because they're worried about the wrinkles under their eyes makes me feel sick.

SPENCER: It's really wild. I think that men have other forces. It's not that they're immune to these kinds of forces, just that they're operating in different ways. It's less about beauty; maybe it's more about achievement, or achieving some level of status in society, or being a good provider, or these kinds of pressures.

STEPHANIE: Exactly. With men being the ones who die at the highest rate by suicide, it gets relatively little attention that most men don't have anybody except for their spouse who they trust and can confide in. The fact that loneliness rates are the highest among men. This pressure to do all of those things that you're talking about, as well as the other thing I would mention being able to be vulnerable and share your emotions and how painful that is.

SPENCER: I think it's pretty hard to deny that men have a harder time talking about their emotions, or at least less of a propensity to do so.

STEPHANIE: Why do you think that is?

SPENCER: I think there are multiple forces going on. On average, men are a little bit less likely to feel intense emotions, and that's probably a factor. It's not a huge difference, but if you look at differences between men and women, that is a small difference. Another factor is this conception of being manly, which a lot of people aspire to. This conception of manliness involves a certain level of independence and strength, and maybe talking about your emotions kind of works against that. When I was in high school, I could totally see a kid being made fun of for talking about their feelings too much. Someone could say, "Oh, you're such a girl," or that kind of feeling.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, the fact that kids used to tease boys for showing their emotions and saying that they were girly or any other kind of harmful thing is so devastating because having somebody to talk to about your emotions makes all the difference in the world. I feel so sad thinking about all of the pent-up suffering and pain that's being hidden within people who don't have somebody they can talk to about it.

SPENCER: I think there might be some people who can work through their emotions all on their own, but for most people, they have to talk about them to work through them. It's just something about humans.

STEPHANIE: I agree. And I think, again, tying this back to these ideas of having to do everything by yourself, we've been sold these ideas. I lay a lot of the blame here on where those messages come from, from self-help content and the ways in which we teach people about this stuff. It's all very grounded in an individualistic worldview. What that means is that even if you go out there trying to improve your mental health and you've taken the brave, proactive step to do that, you're being taught that in order to do that, you should be doing it by yourself, rather than through co-regulation or in a community or having a safe place to share. I've been really encouraged by the rise of things like men's groups and communities that are creating space for people to share because I think that offers another dimension of healing that's really important.

SPENCER: Do you think there's a positive trend in that direction of men being more willing to share?

STEPHANIE: I do. I've really noticed it. Have you?

SPENCER: Yeah, I get the sense that in the younger generations, like Gen Z, there's more acceptance of male emotionality.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think that looking around at some of the men my age, as a millennial, I see them doing a lot of work to unpack those messages, and I wish they didn't have to. It's a lot harder when those messages have been internalized, but I see so much progress in the fact that they want to and they're trying. It's almost like they're opening up to realize that they deserve that too, that they deserve that level of emotional support and to feel like, "I can talk to their friends about the things that are hard, embarrassing, or stressful." Obviously, women have really leaned on that instinct over the years, and I think that it's been attributed in studies to be one of the things that helps women with their longevity and overall well-being as well, is the ability to lean on their friends and talk about those things.

SPENCER: Do you have any advice for how to broach these kinds of subjects for people that don't feel super comfortable talking to their friends about their emotions?

STEPHANIE: Yeah, I think that the most important thing, the thing that's going to really help is to feel safe. If you think about the safety of a relationship, the mental picture I have is like a circle. With your current group of friends, you may only feel safe talking about a few topics in that circle, like your work, your families, your favorite teams, and the news. Those are the topics that you regularly traverse. I always think about what it would look like to expand that circle just a little bit. For example, if you're comfortable talking about your family with your friends, then maybe you could tell them about something that's a little bit hard that's going on with your family. The reason why this helps you feel safe is because you have a bridge there. If you're always talking about your wife and how her life is going, maybe opening up about something else that's going on in your relationship with her that you wouldn't normally share is a way to expand that circle. Over time, as you do that and continually go outward to new topics, you're increasing this space of safety. Once you have enough of a baseline, then you can start adding in new topics, like bringing up your mental health, or bringing up trauma that you're coping with, or difficult experiences in your life that you need help with, and asking for advice. I think that the idea of slowly expanding the circle makes it feel a little bit more approachable for people.

SPENCER: I like the idea of broaching certain subjects, maybe not the most intense emotional subjects at first, and seeing how people respond, seeing if they react in a way that's positive and helpful to you, and then you can go into the more intense stuff later when you build trust. I think that's really nice advice.

STEPHANIE: Thanks. I'm not sure how it's been for you, but I know in my own experiences, it's easy to be cynical, to say, "I can't bring that up. It's going to be too much for them," or "They won't be able to cope with it," or "I'm too scared," whatever it is. We often write ourselves off before we get started in a lot of moments. I like to think about giving them a chance to be there for you. If you do, I've had amazing experiences in my life where I've tried to give somebody a chance to show up for me, and they did, and it ended up changing the trajectory of our relationship.

SPENCER: Yeah. You might be really positively surprised in some cases, and it can actually really bring you much closer together.

STEPHANIE: And that's beautiful, and it does take a leap of faith. Make the leap small. Make it small enough so you feel comfortable jumping over.

SPENCER: This conversation reminds me, I once read a tweet that had gotten a lot of likes and attention, that was something like, "It's only acceptable for a man to cry when his father dies," or something like this. I was like, "This is such an insanely toxic viewpoint to put in the world." It shocked me how much attention it was getting.

STEPHANIE: Wow, people supporting it?

SPENCER: It's hard to say, but it was going viral, you know. Maybe a bunch of it was retweets of people being like, this is terrible advice but it was going viral.

STEPHANIE: It's wild though. I've recently been working through and watching a bunch of old movies, kind of the best movies. I never really did that when I was younger. We've been watching a bunch of the old westerns. The image of masculinity that's presented there, as you described, that stoic person who handles it all himself, copes with pain by just gritting their teeth and pushing through it. I really think that messaging is still out there for men.

SPENCER: I think that we form archetypes, and then when we have an archetype, we want to differentiate them from other archetypes. So you get this archetype of the ideal man, the archetype of the ideal woman, and there's some tension to make them farther apart from each other. And it exaggerates the differences. The ideal man is super manly and super unfeminine; any feminine features you want to strip out of it. But actually, the ideal person has elements of both. It's crazy to have an ideal man and an ideal woman. It doesn't make any sense.

STEPHANIE: That's so insightful, isn't it? Because that polarization then ends up making everybody feel inadequate.

SPENCER: Yeah, or just having certain valuable parts of themselves that they're asked to suppress for some reason.

STEPHANIE: Yeah. I remember growing up, I was always called bossy, right? And too outspoken, too opinionated, etc., all those things. It made me really hide inside of myself and shy away from expressing any sort of assertive nature that I had. Even now today, decades after those experiences, I still have to battle against that all the time, and that feeling of, "Oh God, people aren't going to like you if you're bossy; you better be more chill," whatever it is, and carrying that. We sort of carry those things with us, don't we?

SPENCER: I think that women politicians in the US are in a really tricky bind where there's a lot of pressure to be very cold and tough to counterbalance perceptions that they're going to be weak or flighty if they're not that way. You can see this in Hillary Clinton, especially, where the archetype that she pushed herself into is really not a very pleasant archetype, but it seems like it was a protective mechanism, because what other archetype was she going to go into? "Is she going to be sweet and docile?" No, obviously not. People are going to say, "Well, she can't stand up to Putin." It's really tough.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, so interesting. You're right. I want to see men who are able to cry whenever they need to cry, and I want to see women who are empowered to lead when they want to lead. I want us to have a world where all of that is possible and we can just be our human selves, rather than feeling like we have to get slotted into one of those different archetypes. Maybe — I'm curious to hear what you think — the only way to accomplish that is through coming up with new archetypes and then expanding them enough so that people start to see themselves in more and more different versions of these images.

SPENCER: I guess I think about how for each person, there's a type. There's the ideal Stephanie and there's the ideal Spencer. Part of life is trying to move into the more ideal version of yourself, but it's sort of uniquely you in a way. Your ideal archetype might be different from everyone else on Earth, or maybe there are some other people that have the same one, but it's not that many.

STEPHANIE: It's such a freeing thought, though, isn't it? Because it means that you don't have to put yourself into one of those boxes. You can just be who you are, and I think we'd be so much better off for that.

SPENCER: Yeah, and I think about, for myself, the ideal me is a me that acts even more in accordance with my values, that corrects my flaws that stand in the way of me achieving the things that I care about. So it's still me, but it's just amped up in positive ways, with some of the rough edges smoothed away.

STEPHANIE: Your rough edges are great and totally acceptable. I know exactly what you mean, though; it's the deepening of your character. Continuing to cultivate that is really something important to strive for.

SPENCER: So jumping back to what we were talking about before. You mentioned old happy, what is a new happy?

STEPHANIE: Funny, because we've sort of been touching on it in a lot of ways. I argue that real happiness comes from one, being who you really are, and two, using who you are to help other people.

SPENCER: And why is that? Why focus on that rather than you can imagine other definitions of happiness that are figuring out what's deeply meaningful for you and going after that, or other options.

STEPHANIE: Yeah, when I was doing the research, I came across this paper that found and tried to document the hundreds of definitions of happiness that have been proposed throughout history. I thought it was so interesting because it shows how hard it is to describe these things in a way that gets people to agree on it, but also that captures it. My attempt is equally as inadequate as any other attempt. I would say that I'm doing my best to put words to something that might be simply impossible to capture in words.

SPENCER: But you're not trying to define happiness. You're trying to give a recipe for happiness, right?

STEPHANIE: Yes, exactly. And you took the words right out of my mouth, "How do you do it? What does that look like?" All those other definitions sometimes take an approach of happiness as subjective well-being, the number of positive experiences you have and your overall view on life. Some of them take it in the direction I am, which is, here's the pathway to follow in order to do it. Then some of them try to describe it as the subjective experiences and what you get out of it, or even the outcomes of pursuing happiness and how that contributes to things like self-esteem, better relationships, or whatever it is. The reason I chose those is because in all of the work that I did, I started to notice these patterns coming up again and again. I noticed that over and over again the focus was on people describing their experiences of happiness and scientists describing pathways to happiness. There was always the acknowledgment of both the self and the context of the self, whether that's their relationships, community, or the environment, and then the pursuit of personal growth for the self and how that connects to their broader context, and how to navigate those relationships between the two. I just started noticing this pattern coming up again and again. Then I started collecting research around it, trying to back it up and show here's the evidence for these different elements. Ultimately, I wanted to provide people with something that was simple enough that they could follow and actually apply in their lives. That's how I landed on those two.

[promo]

SPENCER: It's nice how short and simple it is. Be who you are, use it to help others. What does "be who you are" mean though?

STEPHANIE: Great question. There are a number of different elements here. I like to break it down into self-acceptance, so learning how to treat yourself as worthy and deserving of good things, and learning how to integrate difficult experiences into your sense of self, and pursuing that sense of wholeness. There's also the discovery of the unique things that make you you. I call them your gifts, but they could also be your character strengths or talents, or whatever else is your preferred language. Then there's the cultivation of that, because, as we were talking about just before, you're not a stagnant thing. You always have the opportunity to grow. Being yourself is also an active process of what you choose to put your attention on and pursue and develop within yourself. That, in turn, equips you to be more effective in service to other people.

SPENCER: Then the second piece of it, using it to help others. Why focus on helping others rather than, say, helping yourself?

STEPHANIE: I think that the ways in which we have been conditioned to see ourselves as separate from others is ultimately the greatest source of our unhappiness. When we think about help, whenever I talk about how people sort of default to thinking I'm talking about charity or volunteering, I try to take a much broader perspective on help, which is essentially seeing it as any action that contributes to another person's well-being. Some of those acts of help are obvious. You invited me on your podcast; that's an act of help that was really kind of you, and I'm super grateful for you. Then somebody listening to this, hopefully getting something out of our conversation, maybe they will be helped by that act, but I'm never going to know about that, and you might not either, unless they choose to reach out to you.

SPENCER: Hope they'll email you and tell you.

STEPHANIE: I hope they email you; that's more important. You're the one doing all the hard work. All of these little actions that we take add up to creating, hopefully, a world where more and more people are able to experience well-being. But that's not a default, that's something we have to do. It's something we have to devote ourselves to. In many ways, our sense of loneliness, our sense of despair, our sense of helplessness, all of these things are the result of thinking that we don't owe anything to anybody, and I think that we owe a lot to everybody. We all have a role to play in contributing back to that and being a part of that system of interconnectedness. When we share ourselves with others, we don't just get the benefits of growth, self-esteem, and the development of those talents, but we also get the sense of purpose and meaning, and of knowing that our lives are useful and that we're making a difference in the world.

SPENCER: This reminds me of a Steve Jobs quote that I really love, which is, "I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow, I did not breed or perfect the seeds. I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I did not invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics I use. I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and I do not enforce or adjudicate." At the end, he says, "I love and admire my species, living and dead. I am totally dependent on them for my life and well-being." And then, funnily enough, it says, "Sent from iPad." At the end.

STEPHANIE: I remember that; I just love that quote so much. I use that quote in my book. I love it. Yeah. You got it; you nailed it. If I take his words and think about my own life, I am brought to my knees in terms of what has been given to me and all of those contributions that I have benefited from. When I feel that way, I feel so motivated because I want to do the same. I want to give back in return. I want to try and make the world better for other people. I want my actions, my energy, and my efforts to matter. I want to feel like they're going somewhere and making something bigger than just my own self-interest, and ultimately, in many ways, I think that our happiness problem is really stemming from that.

SPENCER: So when you talk about our separateness being this really core aspect of unhappiness, what is the opposite of that? Are you talking about communities? Are you talking about deep friendships? Are you talking about romantic relationships? Are you talking about being connected to strangers?

STEPHANIE: I think all of it, to be honest. I think the best word is interconnectedness and interdependence, and that can take many different forms, but ideally it would manifest through all those different types of relationships. The relationship that I have with my partner is obviously going to be really different than the one that I have with my neighbor or the person who works at the coffee shop that I see when I go there. But that doesn't mean that that relationship with the person I'm less close to isn't valuable and important and worthy of care. More broadly, our interconnectedness is the human species, and even more broadly than that, with all beings and with our planet and how dependent we are on each other. I find that the recognition of that dependence we have is almost like a sacred perspective on life that has fundamentally shaped the way that I treat myself, the way that I treat others, and hopefully the way that I show up for them as well. The more that I can find those relationships of mutuality and of care and of giving and receiving, I find myself growing in greater happiness.

SPENCER: So suppose a listener is sold on your recipe to happiness. They need to work on being who they are and using it to help others. Where do they start? What are some steps they can take that are actionable?

STEPHANIE: I highly recommend starting to figure out what your unique gifts are, because that can be the bridge for both of those two pillars. One of the exercises I have people do when they come and learn about the philosophy is I ask them to reach out to five people in their lives and ask them to reflect on that person's gifts and share examples or things that they've noticed. I give them prompts and scripts to use because everybody finds it so incredibly uncomfortable. Even if you find that a little scary, if you can harness your courage and do it, you will be amazed at what you find, because so often, we are very poor judges of our own capabilities. We take our amazing strengths for granted, and we think that they naturally become easy for us. Of course, everybody can do those things, and we also don't notice strengths that we have within us. I think that's a really great first step of simply reaching out, asking for this feedback, and then once you get it back, thinking about how you can start to use some of those things that were called out in your daily life. You don't have to quit your job, you don't have to change your whole life. You can just start trying to bring those gifts more to the forefront in your activities.

SPENCER: So what's an example of a message you might send to get this feedback?

STEPHANIE:: I run this free book club, where we go through this together. I always tell them they can blame me. I gave them a script that says something like, "Hey, I'm in this book club, and the leader is forcing me to ask five people about my strengths. I was wondering if you could take a minute."

SPENCER: Podcast listeners can do that. Stephanie Harrison forced me to.

STEPHANIE: I'm demanding every single person listening. You better do it, or you'll be in trouble.

SPENCER: So then you ask about five strengths they think you have?

STEPHANIE: Yeah, five, depending on the language with your loved ones, you could say, "What five strengths do you think I possess? Could you tell me about times that you've noticed I look alive or seem really happy and energized? Any particular traits that you appreciated in me," things like that.

SPENCER: How do you see this as connecting to Martin Seligman's work on character strengths?

STEPHANIE: I think that it's really related to it. I think where I differ on character strengths is that I've been calling something similar gifts of humanity, which is who you are as a person. I really appreciate the work on character strengths and all the amazing research that's been done. I think we have the capacity for all of those strengths. Unfortunately, in the work that I've seen in trying to use that method with people, it hasn't connected with them in a way that they've really been able to take it on and internalize it. I'm not sure what that is. I don't know why it doesn't quite resonate with people in those ways, so I wanted to try offering a different spin that maybe would be more adaptable or approachable for people.

SPENCER: For those who haven't heard about it before, Seligman's character strengths try to capture the kind of virtues that are across many societies, such as appreciation of beauty, bravery, creativity, curiosity, fairness, forgiveness, gratitude, and so on. He has a test where you can learn about your character strengths.

STEPHANIE: It's great. It offers a really nice framework for people and breaks it down into those different dimensions. I think I've broken gifts up into three different buckets. The first is humanity strengths, which encompass a lot of the character strengths, but not all of them, and has a slightly different split. The second is your gifts of wisdom, which come from your unique life experiences and all of the things you've learned along the way. Each of us has navigated a completely unique life, and along the way, we've captured a lot of important lessons and information. I think of those as important gifts that can be shared. The third is your talents, the things you can do. Maybe it's something innate to you, or maybe it's something you've trained yourself in, but those talents are most often cultivated through practice and effort.

SPENCER: It's neat to think that everyone has these three things they can draw on: their humanity or character strengths, their wisdom or what they've learned in their lifetime, and then their talents, the things they're good at. That's really nice framing.

STEPHANIE: Thank you. I talk to people a lot who feel like they have nothing to offer, and it really breaks my heart because everybody has so many amazing treasures within them. I want to give people a way to discover them and understand how wonderful, unique, and special they really are. Hopefully, that can give them the tools to build upon those, to take their life experiences and turn them into more gifts, and then to find ways to share them.

SPENCER: Do you find a lot of people that read your work have imposter syndrome?

STEPHANIE: Everybody [laughs].

SPENCER: Wow, that's a lot.

STEPHANIE: I don't know if I've ever met a person who doesn't have imposter syndrome.

SPENCER: Oh, I don't have imposter syndrome. If anything, I have the opposite.

STEPHANIE: You're my first person. This is so exciting.

SPENCER: That's crazy.

STEPHANIE: Tell me more.

SPENCER: I've always believed I could do things that I definitely can't do. I've always just assumed, "Oh, yeah, if another human can figure out how to do it, I can figure it out." Which is clearly false.

STEPHANIE: That is awesome.

SPENCER: Honestly, it kind of works for me. I've been trying to tamp down on it to become more calibrated about what I'm capable of, but it also has some advantages where it gets me to try hard things.

STEPHANIE: What do you think made you that way?

SPENCER: I don't know. Honestly, I've always been that way. I can't remember a time when I wasn't that way. So no clue.

STEPHANIE: Interesting, isn't it? It's like, is it innate? Is it part of your childhood? It's fascinating to think about that.

SPENCER: Yeah, I don't mean all of my siblings are like that, either.

STEPHANIE: It's fascinating.

SPENCER: It's hard to make sense of. But why do you think so many people have imposter syndrome? It's wild that you find it's almost ubiquitous.

STEPHANIE: I think that if you've always been taught to value yourself based on how you stack up to others, there's always somebody higher up in quotations that you can compare yourself to. No matter how far you go, no matter what you achieve, no matter how successful you are, you can always look around and find somebody else who's better than you, and that's one element. The second element is the incredible hollowness of the sense of self that's cultivated in our culture, that empty self we were talking about, feeling this very fragile sense of self-esteem and looking around for things to fill that up rather than believing in yourself. The third thing is a misunderstanding of what is required in order to do things. A lot of people think that if it doesn't come easy immediately, then they're not meant to do it. Therefore, they end up feeling like they're not capable of doing the things they want to do.

SPENCER: It's funny; that reminds me of a theory I have about why so many people hate math or are stressed out by it, including a lot of really smart people who are really good in school. I think part of it traces to the fact that if you're in history class or English class, you never really are that confused. Maybe your attention disappears for a minute and you're not really sure what they're talking about, but they're speaking in English, and you get the basic gist of what's going on. In math class, you can miss something at the beginning and literally have no idea what's happening the rest of the time. It's like an alien language.

STEPHANIE: It's so true.

SPENCER: Yeah. As a mathematician, I've had so many classes throughout my life at every level, undergrad, grad, and during my PhD where I was very deeply confused, and that's just normal in math. Unless you're an incredibly gifted prodigy, that's just part of the experience. But people are not ready for that.

STEPHANIE: No, I totally endorse your theory. That makes perfect sense to me. One other point of evidence is my partner, Alex, who is a designer. He is single-handedly responsible for helping me overcome a lot of these beliefs. I was like that in high school. I could not cope with math because I couldn't handle how difficult it was. I didn't have any of the emotional regulation strategies to sit with my discomfort, so I would give up or tap out, and then I'd lose track and be lost for the rest of the year, basically. I didn't realize no one ever taught me that the struggle is how you get to where you want to go. It's not something you should avoid; you should actually run towards it. I think that Alex, being a designer and trying to solve tough problems, shows that so much of design is about sitting with problems that haven't been solved and then trying to come up with new solutions that feel surprising or come out of left field or don't make sense to other people right away. Watching him embrace the struggle taught me that that's where the magic is. Having avoided the struggle for so long, I had to really retrain myself to face it in a new way.

SPENCER: Honestly, I think people would be a lot better off if they're told early in math, if you understand everything in this, then this is too easy a class for you to go to the next.

STEPHANIE: That would have made me feel so much better, though, for real.

SPENCER: You should expect to feel like you have no idea what's going on 30% of the time, at least.

STEPHANIE: Exactly. Yeah. And knowing that ratio, my God, that would have brought me so much comfort. I feel like what I was taught was, if it doesn't come easy for you, then either one, you're bad and stupid and you'll never figure it out, or two, you're not meant to, so just give up. And then, of course, if you're trying to be perfect, it's a reflection on you. If you can't do it perfectly, then that makes you bad and unacceptable.

SPENCER: This is math, middle school level, high school level, etc. But this applies to so many things. When we get out of school, there are things that are sort of unlimited in difficulty. If you haven't learned that you can fail and fail and fail, and that's normal in some activities, until eventually you begin to understand and come out the other side, then, yeah, you might learn that you have to avoid those things that you really don't.

STEPHANIE: Then you never get to fulfill your potential. You never get to grow in the ways that you're capable of, and then you don't get to help people who could benefit from those struggles that you go through. I think that the embrace of that difficulty becomes so important, and maybe discomfort is a better word than difficulty, because the difficulty part is relative, but we all feel the discomfort when we're being challenged at that level.

SPENCER: One reason I like bouldering. Have you ever done it?

STEPHANIE: No, I haven't

SPENCER: You start out, and every climb in many gyms is labeled with how hard it is, like V0, V1, etc. It's labeled, it's right there. That's how hard it is. What happens is, you start out being horrible at it, unless you have some innate talent. You start to get the lowest level at the gym, and you see people doing god-like behaviors all around you. You're like, "Oh my God, that's impossible." Even if you're at a V0 level or a V1 level, a V3 seems literally impossible; you can't even conceive how someone could do it. But then you push out, and you push it, and eventually, you find yourself doing a V3. You're like, "Oh my God, I can't believe it." But a V5, that's like superhuman.

STEPHANIE: I love that. That's such a great way to describe it. I just started trying to learn the piano, and I'm doing it because I want to challenge myself again, to sort of sit in the discomfort of it all. Right now, the idea of being able to play a song feels impossible, but I want to persist. In my better moments, I can remind myself of what you just said: if somebody else has done this, if a child can learn how to play the piano, then I probably can too. I might just find it really hard at first, and that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with me. It doesn't mean that I'm broken. It doesn't mean that I'm never going to get there. It just means that it's hard right now, and that difficulty is helping me to grow. Gosh, I wish I had learned that when I was younger.

SPENCER: Stephanie. Before we wrap up, I just want to ask, what do you want to leave people with? If there's one thing that should stick in their mind from the conversation today.

STEPHANIE: I would love to leave people with the message that they are completely acceptable as they are, and more than that, they have so much to offer other people in the world. Keeping that tucked away, keeping that hidden, doesn't help you, and it doesn't help anybody. I want to encourage anyone listening to share themselves boldly, because the world needs you, and you have the power to make a big difference. I hope that in doing so, you can discover this different type of happiness that actually lasts and is much more sustainable.

SPENCER: Stephanie, thanks for coming on.

STEPHANIE: Thank you so much for having me. I loved our conversation.

[promo]