Satisfaction is defined by this deviously simple equation. When you get an emotional shock, good or bad, your brain wants to re. This is especially true for positive emotions, which makes evolutionary sense for survival. When it comes to success, you can never get enough.
Tiffany Norton: I've had a couple of interactions lately with family members that just kind of haven't gone the way I wanted. She says all of us are at a point where we're having very little empathy for others. Jules: It occurs to me that I've got to have more patience with people.
We were talking about this book from strength to strength. Is it a real friend or a deal friend? Where does some of this fixation that we have just as humans come from at all?
Satisfaction is defined by this deviously simple equation. When you get an emotional shock, good or bad, your brain wants to re. Equilibrate. This is especially true for positive emotions, which makes evolutionary sense for survival. When it comes to success, you can never get enough.
Successful people often were keep working to increase their wealth. The carrot is gradually getting further away despite the fact that you are running faster than ever. Thus the dissatisfaction problem compounds the decline problem.
According to evolutionary psychology, our tendency to strive for more and more is perfectly understandable. This explains our weird fixation all throughout life on social comparison based on position and wealth. Scholars show that keeping up with the Joneses creates anxiety and even depression.
Even more powerful than our urge for more is Our resistance to less. We try even harder to avoid losses than we do to achieve gains. A bad winner is blessedly not a mortal threat to almost anybody in the industrialized world. Yet we still have the urge to acquire more and to avoid less.
If satisfaction equals continually getting what you want, failure equals having less. Dissatisfaction is the malady that makes us chase our worldly rewards to even greater heights. As you increase your haves without managing your wants, your wants will proliferate and sprawl.
Because, you know, I think about it. If you're going through something like that, I'm sorry, and we're here for you. That's the only thing we're ever guaranteed. Constant change. So fun.
All right, everybody, have a great week. Stay centered, and we will see you next Sunday. Hope everyone has a wonderful week. And take care everyone in the chat.
Hi, everyone. Welcome. It's comedy centered. Hello. Hello. Happy Sunday. I am Tiffany Norton and I am screwing with my lights and I keep making things worse. You ever do that? You ever. You ever go, you know what? I'm gonna fix this real quick and then. It's not real quick. Yeah, I don't. I still. This is. It's. Anyway, hi. Trying to manage my expectations. Manage my, my, my, my desires for the mechanical world to obey my, my, my requirements. Hey, welcome on in, Phil. Happy Sunday. Hope you had a good weekend or at least a decent one.
I laid really, really low. I mostly just rested. I did not have a lot of ambition, which bums me out because I, I have things on my list that I wanted to do and I'm, you know, oddly enough, I've. I've just felt really, and I hate to just be such a bummer, but lonely lately. And it. I've. I've had a couple of interactions lately with family members that just kind of haven't gone the way I wanted. I think some of it was me. I think some of it was stuff that I maybe was projecting. Maybe the. Maybe, maybe the relationship at this point isn't strong enough for some of these conversations.
And I have a hard time with that sometimes when there's something that I want to talk about. I want to talk about it now. Kind of like I was just saying at the beginning, my lights weren't working the way I wanted to, wanted them to, and I wanted them to work right now. Right. But it occurs to me that I've got to have more patience with people and ask them if it's okay, a good idea or if it's okay with them if we talk about something a little bit heavier. Like I, you know, not without, you know, not getting into too many details.
But obviously we've got a lot of high conflict topics flying around right now in our country, if you're listening in the United States. And, you know, I want to preserve all my relationships and these. This was not a person I'm necessarily ideologically opposed to too. But I think I, I'm getting the sense that all of us are at a point where we're having very, very, very little empathy for others. And maybe it's because we're not having enough empathy for ourselves and how difficult this is to go through right now.
Hey, Ms. Jules, welcome in. Howdy. Howdy. Happy Sunday. But anyway, so kind of talking about like expectations and attachment and loneliness and all that kind of stuff. It brought me back with last week. We were talking about this book from strength to strength. And I only covered a little bit of it and there's a lot of good nuggets. And like I said, if you've got time to, to read or. I'm sure it's on an audiobook. It's a fairly new book, but there was a couple more things that I thought were worth delving into and I hope you guys find it interesting as well.
But in the book, the gentleman uses a lot of anecdotal stories. And one of the stories he uses is that he has a son. He takes his son fishing, and while he's fishing, he gets a phone call and the son is kind of a little bit put out. The dad's taking a break and paying attention to this phone call, but kid just sits there and keeps fishing and he can overhear his dad talk. And anyway, the dad comes back and it was about a work call and first couple minutes of the calls like, hey, how are you? How's the family?
Blah, blah, blah, what are you doing fishing? Blah, blah. And then he, then they get down to business and he hangs up. And the little boy, when he comes back, he's like, who is that dad? And dad's like, that's my friend. And he's like, is it. And the little boy says, and it's so true. He's like, is it a real friend or a deal friend? It's like out of the mouths of babes. Is it a real friend or a deal friend? And you know, we've talked about that in the past, but this little kid saying it to him and I, when I was, you know, after we got done, I was going back through and I'm like, you know, I, I feel like this book needs even.
It's a, it's a, it's a two parter. It's a two parter like they used to do in Little House in the Prairie or all those, those shows, like there's a cliffhanger. Then we come back the next week because as I was starting off the, the conversation, hey, welcome in, aj. I, I'm finding that because I'm doing a lot of internal work and I'm like appealing off and back a lot of stuff for myself. I'm expecting others people in my life to be excited about that journey and also want to talk about it and not necessarily.
And I, you know, I'm realizing that I've got to wade myself in there a little bit. But also too real friend or deal friend? I mean, sometimes family members, are they just that they're family members, but they're not necessarily friend friends. Do you know, like, there are family members that I would go to if I was in crisis. There are family members I absolutely would not go to. Right. A real friend. Not a deal. Friend. A real friend is someone you would go to in crisis. A real friend is someone that, you know, you know, if it was bad, bad, bad, you know, you could call them.
And so of course, we've heard the studies, right? And he even goes into it in his book a little bit. But so where does some of this fixation that we have just as humans come from at all? I mean, this has been happening for a really long time. Obviously there must be some evolutionary reason, right? Well, you know, you want to make it through the winter. You want to, you know, you wanna, you want to hoard as much stuff, I guess. But so he goes into some of this stuff and this is a. I'm jumping into the middle of a, of a chapter here.
Let's see. I don't think I grabbed the right part. Bear with, bear with, bear with. There we go. Okay. The Science of Satisfaction. Hey, Luke. Welcome in. So I'm just going to read straight from it here, okay. It only took a millennia, but popular culture and modern social science finally caught up with the wisdom of Sid Hartha and Thomas Aquinas. And they can help us understand the attachment problem even better. If you know the Rolling Stones song, it's probably I Can't get no Satisfaction. It's one of the most popular songs of all time.
Not because it's such a great piece of music, but it states a truth about life somewhere deep in our lizard brains, you know, our prefrontal cortex and our limbic system, right? Way below our level of consciousness. Satisfaction is defined by this deviously simple equation. Satisfaction equals getting what you want. I mean, that sounds right. Right? That sounds simple. What did I want when I was starting the thing? I wanted my lights to work. Don't believe me, right? He goes on. It's incredibly simple.
Even a baby follows it. Give a one year old a French fry she is reaching for. And watch her expression. That's more or less the same expression you get when you've received your last raise or promotion at work. Okay. Deeply satisfying as that is, for a couple of days at most. Oh, and then he goes into. Okay, okay, sorry. There you go. Okay. It's almost as if our brains won't let us enjoy anything for very long. That was the part I was reaching for. And that is exactly what is happening. To understand why, we need to introduce the concept of homeostasis, which is the natural tendency for all living systems to maintain cells, stable conditions in order to survive.
Right. You know, you want to keep the systems all alive and healthy. Right. Let's see here. Right. So like, if you have a stiff drink or a shot, you know, or like something. Some kind of a drug or something like that, I mean, boy, is, are you gonna feel it a lot? And your body's gonna work very quickly to get you back to your initial homeostasis. Right? So it goes on to. What are some of these other. Of these other equations that are kind of floating around underneath in the. The subconscious? The same set of principles, he asserts, can work on our emotions.
When you get an emotional shock, good or bad, your brain wants to re. Equilibrate. This is especially true for positive emotions, which makes evolutionary sense for survival. The joy that came to the caveman ancestor for finding sweet berry or a bush couldn't occupy him for very long, lest he be distracted from the threat of a tiger or from, you know, for whom your ancestor would have made. Like, you know, they would have. Would have gotten attacked. Right. So our brains are trained and designed more so is a better word to strive for the thing, get the thing, enjoy when we get it, but then we're on to the next thing.
That's for survival, Right. Okay. That is why when it comes to success, you can never get enough. If you're. If you base your sense of self worth on success, you tend to go from victory to victory to avoid feeling awful. Yeah, I get that. That is pure homeostasis at work. The buzz from success is neutralized quickly, leaving a hangover feeling. Knowing you will. Oh. Knowing you will be looking for the bump again very soon. Your brain ultimately adjusts to the baseline feeling of anti success. The baseline of anti success.
After a while, you need constant success hits just not to feel like a failure. Yeah, social media much, you know, right? Like, I'm a performer, you know, you got to get those. You got to get those. You need the. You need the hit. Okay. That's what we social scientists referred to as the hedon, not Heaton hedonic treadmill. You run and run, but you make no real progress towards your goal. You simply avoid being thrown off the back from stopping or slowing down. That's also why I don't go on treadmills because they're terrifying.
I almost always fall off of them. I'm like, no, no. I can just be on the ground and tripped. So that's Fine. Okay, so let's return to that equation. Right? The first equation was satisfaction equals getting what you want. Okay? Now, satisfaction has been updated to equal continually getting what you want. Oh, that's a little bit bigger of a jump, right? The carrot dangled in front of you is the fleeting feeling that you've made it despite the fact that you are emotionally running in place on the treadmill.
And it is that much worse when your abilities are starting to decline. Bill H. The carrot is gradually getting further away despite the fact that you are running faster than ever. Thus the dissatisfaction problem compounds the decline problem. Okay, he gives a little analogy here. I saw a cartoon some years ago of a man on his deathbed telling his grieving loved ones, I wish I bought more crap. Successful people often were keep working to increase their wealth, accumulating far beyond anything they could possibly spend and more than they even want to bequeath.
One day I asked a wealthy friend why this is so. His answer was that many people who have gotten rich know how to measure their self worth only in material terms. So they stay on the hedonic treadmill of earning and acquiring year after year. They hope at some point they will finally truly feel successful, happy, and thus ready to die. But it never works. Great. I know. Okay, so now he's talking about evolution again. Okay, According to evolutionary psychology, our tendency to strive for more and more is perfectly understandable.
For most of history, the majority of humans were at the edge of starvation. A rich caveman had a few extra animal skins and arrowheads. I mean like that's the guy, right? You know you've got to keep everybody going, right? Arcade man, Ancestor didn't want to just make it through the winter though. He had bigger ambitions than that. He wanted to find a mate and have kids too. And what would make that possible? Not just having enough. No, he had to have more than enough. Or more the guy in the next cave over.
Which would make him better in the dating dorm, right? This explains our weird fixation all throughout life on social comparison based on position and wealth. When we are talking about satisfaction from a success, there's another element to consider as well. Success is all relative. After all, social hierarchy is based on people in your community, whatever that means geographically, professionally or virtually. And this is interesting. This is not me saying it, this is the author. I know people with hundreds of millions of dollars who feel like failures because their friends are billionaires.
There are famous Hollywood celebrities who are depressed because someone else is more famous. Now we know that, that like we've Heard that. But really think about it. Can you imagine being so wealthy or popular or loved? Like, you're at the height of all these things and you're still not happy. You're getting all the things that should create happiness, and it's not there. Hey, how devastating. That would really suck, I think. But B, obviously there's something more we're supposed to be doing with our time, right?
Because of people that can have the absolute most of it of anybody. They don't like it when they get it. I don't know. Okay, so, okay, we all know perfectly well that social comparison is ridiculous and harmful. Scholars show that participating in keeping up with the Joneses creates anxiety and even depression. I know that's true. In experiments using human subjects solving puzzles, the unhappiest people were consistently those paying the most attention to how they performed relative to the other subjects.
So they're just testing puzzles. But the people that were unhappy consistently, we're always looking to see if they were better or worse than someone. The small rush of pleasure we get from being envied by others one minute is swallowed up by the unhappiness from having less than someone else the next minute. But the urge to have more than others tugs at us relentlessly. Okay, so from this, he's updated the equation again. Success again equals continually having more than other others. But it gets worse.
He says, on your treadmill, you're not just pursuing something. In a grand exercise in futility, something is pursuing you too. Failure. You may know perfectly well that you are not actually moving forward on your treadmill, but if you stop running, you know that you go flying off the back. That looks increasingly likely because the inevitable decline in our abilities means that when you run faster, you gradually fall behind. And that thought, of course, provokes fear and us. And so the last equation we'll go into, or I think it's in this book, is failure.
What does failure equate or equate? Failure equals having less. So if being happy is having more and being a failure is having less, what is the more and what is the less? I mean, obviously it is what we make of it in our own minds. For the caveman ancestors, it's enough food, you know, for billionaires, it's more billions, you know, and having less billions is failure. And it's such a binary way to look at things, you know, it's just a zero sum game. It's just 1 0, 1 0, you know, there's no. Anyway, okay, Even more powerful than our.
Than our urge for more is Our resistance to less. I know that's right. We want more, but we definitely don't want less, okay? We try even harder to avoid losses than we do to achieve gains. That's the insight that earned the Nobel prize in economics for Princeton University's Daniel Kahneman for work he did with Amos Travisky on prospect theory. Prospect theory challenges the assumption that people are rational agents who access gains and loss the same way. In fact, it asserts that people are much more affected emotionally by losing something than they are by gaining the same thing we have.
And then this is what is called loss aversion. And I'll give you an instance of loss aversion that I've seen in real life. So some of you may know I've worked in radio for many years, and I'm not really doing it right now, but one of the things I always loved was going out on for radio station promotions, right? And we had. It was common for us to bring a prize wheel. And it's just a wheel, right? And you spin it, and then if it lands on a little flag, you, Enterprise. That would coordinate, you know, with whatever the flag said, right?
Might be like whatever kind of a special the place we were at was having that day, or you'd want a pencil or something. Eraser, right? And I had heard of this concept, loss aversion, and I decided to see if it was true. And I noticed that there are certain people that don't care. Like, they'll just walk right up to the prize wheel, ask no questions, and spin it. But it's not. Many more people will walk around the prize wheel and walk away from the prize wheel. And if you ask them if they want to spin it and, you know, maybe I'm making too much of a leap or whatever, but this idea that if you spin the wheel and you don't win, you.
You. You're walking into the store with the exact same thing. All you have is a chance. But the idea that they wouldn't get the thing, that they spent the time to spin the wheel and then not get the thing and then be told to their face they didn't get the thing, they don't want it. They're not even gonna bother. That's my thought. But, hey, he's got some. He's got some things too. But okay, all right. Neurobiological instinct drives us even as prosperity has spread and been democratized throughout industrialization, globalization, and enterprise.
A bad winner is blessedly not a mortal threat to almost anybody in the industrialized world right now, okay? Or indeed most places in the world today. Obviously there's exceptions and the homelessness and all that, but this is just the book, right? Okay. Yet we still have the urge to acquire more, to get good feelings and to signal our success to others and to avoid less. To avoid bad feelings like fear and shame. Okay. It makes no sense in modern life to your energies to have five cars, five bathrooms, or even five shirts.
But we just want them. Neuroscientists. Neuroscientists, tell us why. Dopamine. Oh, our good old friend dopamine. Dopamine, the neurotransmitter of pleasure behind nearly all addictive behaviors. You know it's excreted, right? Okay. And it's excreted. In response to thoughts about buying new things, you get dopamine. About thinking about buying new things, thinking about these kinds of things, you get a little. They say you actually get a lot of times more pleasure from planning a vacation than the actual trip itself.
Cuz the planning is so fun. And nothing can go wrong in the planning stage. Right? It's going to be perfect. It's going to be wonderful. It's going to be, you know, I'm going to. Anyway. Okay. Don't me do, me do. Okay. Okay. It's excreted. In response to our thoughts about buying new things, winning money, acquiring more power or notoriety, or for that matter, having new romantic partners, the brain evolved to reward us for the behaviors that kept us alive and made it more likely to pass on our DNA.
This may be an anachronism in modern life, but it is in fact, it is a fact of our lives nonetheless. Crazy. Okay, so here's the last one. Here's the last. So to sum up. So he's, you know, and like I said, I'm. I'm cruising through this. I'm not giving you all of it, but. So to sum up, here are three formulas that explain both our impulses and the reason we can't ever seem to achieve lasting satisfaction from before. If satisfaction equals continually getting what you want, if success is equal to continually having more than others, failure equals having less.
Dissatisfaction is the malady that makes us chase our worldly rewards to even greater heights. The futility of attaining satisfaction is one of the reasons that professional decline is so painful. Desperate to achieve enough to be satisfied, we find that instead we are going backwards. We are slowly falling off the back of the treadmill. Okay, so then before you abandon all hope, that's what he writes. Okay. But before you abandon all hope, I have good news. Satisfaction is possible, just not with old formulas, not the ones we were just talking about.
We need to toss out all that bad math and use this one equation instead, which incorporates the wisdom of Siddhartha and Thomas Aquinas and the best modern social science. Okay. Satisfaction equals what you have plus what you want. I dig that. Your satisfaction is what you have. Oh, it's divided. Oh, there was a divided sign. Not plus divided. I didn't read that very well. Very small. I blame the font. You're satisfied. See? See, this is definitely not a math class. Okay. Your satisfaction is what you have divided by what you want.
Okay. Notice the difference from the earlier equations. All of the evolutionary and biological formulas focus on the numerator of halves. If you're unsatisfied in life, that's what you have most likely have been. That's a weird sentence. Okay. If you're unsatisfied in life, that's what you most likely have been doing all these years. But that ignores the denominator of the equation, the wants. As you increase your haves without managing your wants, your wants will proliferate and sprawl. Right, that makes sense.
You can easily be less and less satisfied as you move up the success ladder because your wants will always outstrip your halves. I've seen this a hundred times. Someone sees tremendous material success but feels less and less satisfied the richer and more famous she gets. The Mercedes brings her less satisfaction at age 50 than the Chevy did at age 30. Why? Because now she wants a Ferrari. She doesn't even know what's going on. She always just gets back on the treadmill and starts running, running, running.
The world is full of clever ways to make your wants explode without realizing it. So satisfaction, what you have, divided by what you want. Okay, I mean, I kind of get that, but I like that. I, I, I, I think I definitely agree with the part of managing the wants. You know, managing the wants is, you know, it's not easy, right? I mean, when you, when we create needs for ourselves. I'm someone who's gotten myself in really bad financial like I had, it was, you know, a couple decades ago, but I had to file a bankruptcy and I thought I could handle it.
I thought I was, I thought I could. I had rental proper, I had my own house and I had rental properties and I was doing remodeling and I was, you know, I thought I was smart. I thought I was doing all the things. I thought I was making things. Part investments. 2008 happened. Didn't mean that I'm A bad person didn't mean that. You know, whatever. Whatever. Right. But. And I held on for as long as I could. But what was really hard about that point, you know, talking about, like, you know, we fear having less and being compared to, you know, I was.
I was probably spending money and putting money towards things that made it all look like the kids still had everything the kid needed for school. Like I was gonna let anybody know what was going on. Right. And the embarrassment and stuff that we can. We can feel, but we really shouldn't. You know, the. The hardest thing is the comparison. The hardest thing is the compare. The hardest thing is looking at someone. You know, everybody else's stuff looks easy, and yours always looks so hard, and neither is exactly true, you know, usually.
But. Yeah, and I know that and my heart and, you know, go out to everybody who's unfortunately gotten news lately about being laid off and stuff like that. I've had that effect some of my groups. And I just want to say that, you know, if ever there's a time to start digging in on kind of some of this stuff and. And what are my wants and what are my needs and what. What's really important. You know, what. One of the things. And I'll wrap on this, but one of the things he really spends some more time on, and I'll.
I'll cruise through and see if there's some more stuff for next week, but he talks about in the last half of the year or the last half of our life that we should really be trying to look for opportunities to use our crystallized intelligence, because we have the intelligence of our work, and we have the life experience and the knowledge that goes with it, right? And so maybe these are opportunities to teach, maybe these are opportunities to work with, giving back, mentorship groups, things of that sort.
I know that doing recovery, like, one of the things that helps me stay sober and accountable is doing this for, you know, doing this with you guys. Because, you know, I think about it. I do, like, well, I feel like crap, and I want to just, you know, blow it all up. But you know what? I don't want to let other people down, too. So, you know, I mean, whatever reason is, whatever your why is, but if you're. If you're going through something like that, I'm sorry, and we're here for you, and, you know, that's the only thing we're ever guaranteed.
Constant change. So fun. All right, everybody, have a great week. Stay centered, and we will see you next Sunday. Hope everyone has a wonderful week. And take care everyone in the chat. Have a good night.
