#657 - Erik Angner - An Economist’s Guide To A Happy Life

27:46I suppose the problem is that your expectations and and your aspirations are going to be quite tightly tied together, which suggests that the more you expect of yourself, the more you aspire to, the higher your goals, the closer you get to achieving some things, you know, the people that consistently overachieve, like ridiculously overachieve over and over and over again, that doesn't happen by accident. They're not just doing this, like, oh, there we go again, the king of the world for the third time in a row or whatever, like it's just, it doesn't happen. It's people purposefully, neurotically going out of their way to very carefully design a system that creates this outcome A one that's very similar to it.

28:29I think... Well, actually, how have you given this sort of knowledge that you have around Where satisfaction comes from, happiness, aspiration, expectation, how have you adjusted your own approach to your life To try and integrate this to maximize your sense of well -being and happiness? Now, I don't want to hold up myself as a model in this regard at all, but I did read up on a literature on goal regulation. There's a whole psychology of goal regulation, which is precisely about this. Like, how do you select goals in life to motivate you to accomplish things, you know, to live the best life that you can without tripping yourself up?

29:08Right? So we agree that you need some goals to perform, right? We ought to have goals. They make life worth living. they structure our existence and so on, but at the same time there are limits to the goals that you should set for yourself. And I'll say that one of the things that I've done quite successfully is to be satisfied with being mediocre in almost everything. If it comes to like sports, all sorts of activities, music, I sometimes enjoy engaging in these activities, but I'm perfectly happy being mediocre. Then there are a couple of things that I do in my work. I want to do the best possible work.

29:47The best work I can do, the best work that anyone can do. I fail, right? And all sorts of ways. But that's my goal. But then this is very narrow little domain in my sub -sub -sub -discipline of the academic world or whatever. But being happy with mediocrity, I think, is really great. And it's something that more people should try. That's very interesting, because there would be an argument to be made that how you do anything is how you do everything, that setting yourself high standards is advantageous and it will begin to bleed. You know, if you make your bed and your pajamas are always folded and the kitchen counter is always cleaned and so on and so forth, that this is just going to seep into all of the other areas of your life and the reverse as well, that if you don't do those things, you're just going to become a lazy piece of shit in your academic career.

30:39Now, I don't disagree with you. I mean, maybe that works for somebody else, right? But what worked for me is just settling in like almost every domain except the ones that I really care about. And then I focus on. Yeah. So I have to talk about comparative advantage, right? Is focusing where you do best relative to what others are up to. And this is an application of that idea. Yeah. I would not be the best at house cleaning or whatever, which is why we've got a maid. I've made it come around and she does the house, so I've sacrificed some of the things that I am good at, which is making money for something that she's good at, which is cleaning the house.

31:15One of my friends has a coach of some kind, and he told me a few months ago that this coach has got him, he made him take up a hobby, and he had to not care about how good he was at the hobby. And I think the hobby that he took up was something to do with art. It was some kind of watercolor painting or drawing or some sort of something. Maybe it was even in a class, still life class or something. And there is a part of him. He's quite a hard charging type A type guy. And there was a bit of him that just wanted to write, I'm going to go home and I'm going to watch all of the YouTube videos about how to become better at my art style.

31:56And I'm going to get all of the best pencils and I'm going to do extra work outside. And his coach said, you are forgetting the purpose of the exercise. The purpose of the exercise is to do a thing simply for doing a thing. Do you enjoy it when you go and you try this thing? It's like, yeah, I'd enjoy it more if I was better. And she's like, that's not the point. The point is for you to be able to let go of the desire to be better at this thing. It's a very, very interesting, like intersection or vector that we're talking about, which is in a world where everybody applores growth and development and I do too.

32:32It's one of the things that I've taken an unbelievable amount of joy from in my life. How do you draw? Is it possible to draw boundaries around that beyond which you can let go, which actually teaches you lessons of where to which hills to stand on with a flag and then start swinging a sword? And which hills to say looks like the cleaner is going to get this one or looks like I'm going to be shit as an artist or do you know what I mean? Because I do think that there's an associated psychological suffering that comes with holding yourself to an incredibly high standard across the board and this is the, I suppose, the behavioral economics element of this or the behaviorist element of this.

33:14It's unrealistic. Like you know, you know that if expectations As soon as you posit an expectation for yourself and you fall short of it, that's going to create a degree of suffering. The fewer expectations that you have, especially the ones that you do not need to have, does it matter about how straight the bed is? Does it really matter? Or would it be better? Let's imagine a world in which you could silo off, compartmentalize the different elements of things that you have to be good at in your life. Okay. Well, if I could be great at academia and and not give a shit about how the bed's made, I would no longer need to make the bed.

33:54So it's almost like our expectation of this global, how you do anything, how you do, is how you do everything, movement, is become self -fulfilling in a way, and inescapable, and maybe not actually that advantageous. This isn't exactly an answer to your question, but so often it seems to me that we should focus more on consistent practice than on outcomes. If I wanted to become a marathon runner and I measured my performance by reference to the best marathon runner out there, I would feel short every day, right? I would feel awful about myself every time I went out there. So the key to becoming a runner is to commit to a certain training schedule.

34:32You go out there, you train every day or whatever and if you keep it up, even if the only thing you care about is the outcome, you're better off focusing on consistent practice than constantly trying to measure up your performance against some effectively unattainable yardstick. And I think that it applies in lots of domains. I had a phase in college when I wrote poetry. I sat down, I wrote a poem, I compared it to like the best poem of whoever I was reading at the time, Learned and Cohen, and then I said, look, this is not as good as he's and I tossed it and I stopped, right? That's a sure path to failure.

35:09If I really wanted to become a poet, I would have had stick with it independently of how good it was. And so to some extent, we need to select like which hill we're going to climb, right? Stick with your metaphor and then just do it, right? Now which climb, which climb should you attempt? Well, that's going to depend on your values. It might depend on like what you have a natural talent for and so on. For sure, it might depend on things like what your friends are up to. Sometimes it's more fun to climb in the presence of your friends, but at the end of the day, that's going to be a matter of values.

35:42But once you've committed, the best way forward is probably to commit to a plan, not to constantly assess your performance. Yes. So it's got me thinking about something I used to do in my old business. I ran nightclubs for a long time. And when you do that, you get a guest list of people that are sent through. And this was a period where we were the biggest events company in the city by an absolute mile. And this Saturday party that we had was a monster, thousands and thousands of kids would turn up every week. So we would just have hundreds and hundreds of groups of people and it would be submitted as a first name, second name, plus group size, right?

36:20So it would be John Smith plus five, Chris Williams and plus three, whatever. I remember that there was a long period of probably six months to a year where I went through and meticulously moved the plus number into a separate column so that all of the numbers were completely aligned straight up and down. Let's not forget that this was a night, a club night that was making like thousands and thousands of pounds of profit a week. And I was spending my time in the build up to the event moving individual numbers that had been texted in by 18 -year -olds that were pre -gaming, battered, absolutely.

37:01Most of them wouldn't even show up, right? You know, 50 % more of the guest list wasn't even going to show. But I had convinced myself that this was one of the important things that needed to be done. And this is why I think a degree of reflexive, reflective practice. Okay, what are the things that I'm doing? Does this contribute to the particular hill that I'm supposed to go up, no, it doesn't. You're spending 90 minutes a week dicking about with an Excel spreadsheet. Perhaps you could spend that doing anything, even if it was just watching TV or chilling out or exercising. I guess many very successful people have this insane attention to detail, right?

37:41In architecture, design or movie making or whatever, you find that. But in order to be great at something, you have to pay attention to the right details, right? And if the orientation of the pluses or whatever really has no effect on the outcome of the event, then you know, the opportunity cost is overwhelming. What role does inequality have in happiness? So, we've spoken about the fact that there is a relationship, although it does taper off to do with money and happiness. It continues to go up. So this number beyond which $70 ,000 a year happiness doesn't increase. I'd already heard that that was mostly bollocks diminishing returns seems to make sense.

38:21But I would imagine that the curve is different if you are living on a street filled with millionaires. So there has to be inequality and the keeping up with the Joneses comparison that we have in our brains must mediate our happiness with regards to wealth. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to be said about happiness and inequality. First off, there are ways in which at least some inequality is good for total happiness. So some inequalities reflect preferences, for example, maybe I just want to lay in bed read a book, maybe you want a ton of money in order to travel the world and play golf or something, right?

39:00Then a maximally happy society where both of us get to do what we want to do requires a certain degree or entails is a certain degree of inequality. So some inequality is probably good for happiness. There are other effects as well. But then there are various ways in which an inequality or inequality can harm total happiness. So for example, if you're desperately poor and I'm super rich, an additional dollar would make a much bigger difference for you than for me. Like, you can imagine scenarios where some degree of redistribution, redistribution would make a difference. And then the keeping up with the Joneses is really important, I think, when we assess how well we're doing in life, very often we don't look at some objective yardstick because those things really don't exist.

39:47What we do is we compare ourselves to somebody around us like what's a nice car? Well, what do I know? Right? I look at the other people in my office and see what they're driving. What's a nice watch? What's, you know, reasonable salary or whatever. And to the extent that we spend a lot of time comparing ourselves to others, we might get involved in these very harmful arms races where I try to make a little more to have a shinier car or whatever than you, and you respond by working a little more to have a shinier car than me. At the end of the day, we're the same, right? But both of us work a lot more and we're applying money into, you know, capital goods that neither one of us really wanted.

40:30And so I think one key to happiness is sort of opting out on this of this process when it makes sense. Right? I want the shiniest new iPhone. Many of my friends get the latest iPhone and I feel the urge to buy one too, but I succeed in talking myself out of that and I save a lot of money that way that I can spend on things that give me more happiness. Yeah. I've always thought about this north a lot. But I don't have much materialism. Like I'm not a very keeping up with the Joneses person with regards to what I own or what I wear or anything. I feel quite fortunate. Like I don't know everything's heritable, right?

41:11You know, whatever, everything that you are psychologically is on average 50 % heritable. So I guess I have my parents to thank for it. But I would love to know what that is. a materialism set point or something or a comparative set point, what psychological dimension that sits upon and what interventions we could use to nudge people away from that, because I do think that it's a very low cost way to improve people's quality of life. Like you get more bang from your book because you are not spending your books on things that you don't need to spend them on. Right. I mean, we're living in the world where one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy is like storage, right?

41:52People have so many things, so many things that they become a problem for them, a psychological problem. People seek therapy to deal with the quantities of stuff that they've accumulated. So I think there's a lot of evidence, both from the science and from everyday experience, to suggest that we tend to favor material belongings to a greater extent than we probably should if we want it to be happy. Like so many people love going camping, right? Their best moments is when they're in the tent somewhere in front of a campfire and they've got a guitar and a couple of beers, right? That's the spirit.

42:29Like some of us really want quite simple things. And if we can see that and favor those sorts of things, we can make ourselves happier. Now of course camping can be super expensive, right? Depending on where you go and what sort of gear you bring. So this is not like a solution that's going to work for everyone, but I think the general insight is true, right? As a result of external pressure or upbringing or whatever, we tend to give too much weight to material belongings when there are other things that are cheaper and better for us. One of the things I was considering to do with the level of inequality that you could have within a society or within a country, you could have a correlation between high GDP and high happiness, but that could be skewed with high earners, because high GDP is contributed to overall by everyone.

43:24And let's say that you have a country which has captured some non -insignificant percentage of the world's billionaires. Okay, the GDP is increasing and there would be a way that that could skew the relationship between GDP and happiness. Have you ever looked at this? Have you looked at happiness versus inequality and GDP and how all of that folds in? Yeah, so I haven't looked at it myself, but I think the general point is true. In the sense that like GDP is an average, right? It takes all the stuff that gets produced in a country and you divide it by the number of people. GDP doesn't say anything at all about how it's distributed.

44:00And the happiness data seems to respond to the ways in which various resources are distributed. Is there one guy who owns everything or a thing sort of distributed in a different way? People who need things, do they get things and so on? So you can modify, as it were, the relationship between happiness and GDP by distributing it in various ways. And it's worthwhile thinking about that, I think. Is there a sex difference in happiness? Yes. I don't think there are any major sex differences to my knowledge. It's not a major factor anyway in the literature to my knowledge. Yeah, because we have increasing rates of depression and anxiety in young girls, I think that females overall got a higher risk for depression and anxiety.

44:53but I think white men between the ages of 40 and 45 are at the highest risk for suicide at the moment. So there's, you know, there's kind of a ushaped curve to life satisfaction, which I'm sure that you'll have seen. And it seems to bottom out at around about like 44 or something like that. Yeah, these sorts of things that you're talking about ought to be visible. It seems to me in the happiness data. I just haven't looked at it. Like there is evidence, as you said, that happiness over the course of the life cycle is like ushaped. You're pretty happy when you're young, you're pretty happy when you're old, you're miserable in the middle.

45:28But then it turns out like where I am, right? I'd be at the trough there. But then it matters what you control for. So, you know, do you control for whether you have kids or not? Well, many people have like teenage kids in middle age. And having teenage kids is awful, right? They're super expensive. They stab you in the back like every day. So much discipline. Treturus. And what are you doing? Treturus busted that they are. Right. And so the phenomenon like what it looks like is going to depend on to a great extent, like what you control for. And then these are averages, right? It doesn't apply to each and every individual.

45:59This is one of the things I was having a conversation about. What was I talking about? I was talking about the differences in the pains that people feel within the dating market, that the problems that women have and the problems that men have and like how many men that can't grow any taller is worth a woman that can't afford a boob job. Basically, if we were to talk about trying to create an equivalency between the challenges that presenting both men and women have for increasing their visual make value. And it's not, you can't compare these two things. There is no currency exchange between these two things.

46:40And I think that the conversation here as well about, you know, our men or women happier on average. Well, women have got a predisposition toward depression and anxiety and young girls, whatever, 60 % of them say they've got persistent feelings of hopelessness or listlessness or something, but men in the 40 to 45 range that are killing themselves at unprecedented rates, these aren't the same things. And I think that trying to fold them into happiness, this is one of the reasons why I appreciate guys like you breaking down happiness, well -being into component parts, because I do think that there is a lot that can't be captured when we just use happiness to talk about how's life going overall.

47:23It's just not sufficiently precise. Yeah, no, I think that's a very important point. So you mentioned depression, right? And of course there's a correlation between depression and the opposite of happiness, but they're not as correlated as you might think. Some people report laughing a lot and they also score high on depression. These things can come apart. So I guess mental health or well -being is a multi -dimensional thing. And if you want to grasp what's really going on in your life for in society, you have to pay attention to these various things. When it comes to unhappy people on the dating market, I wouldn't know myself.

48:00But to some extent, this has got to involve aspirations, right? If you're alone at home in your bedroom and you're thinking, oh, the woman or the man of my dreams is going to look like this. It's going to have this profession. It's going to make this much money, whatever. You're bound to be disappointed, right? It would make so much sense to go for somebody who's kind and generous and caring and you know, who shows up when you need them to and whatnot. Then the one with a certain height or a certain, you know, process or what have you, right? Asperations matter in all domains probably. What about race differences in happiness?

48:40Have you ever detected any of those? I have not looked at that. I haven't. So I hesitate to. So the reason that I think it's interesting is religion, religiosity seems to be pretty strongly correlated with levels of happiness. That seems to make sense to me. Community, the ritual, degree of connection to something beyond just you. We talked about meaning and the sense of awe and dread, which I do think is really, really important, but you will have racial disparities in religiosity. So I totally spit all this and maybe get it wrong. Mexicans on average may be more religious than whites in America, let's say, right?

49:31So if you have people from Mexico and that would show a race difference to central Americans in terms of happiness, but where's it actually coming from? Maybe it's actually coming from something else that's hiding within that. So the three or the four big things that seem to be indicative of happiness, poverty, unemployment, poor health and religiosity, those seem to be the big four. Is that right? You're quite right about religiosity. So that's something that people have studied extensively. And people who are religious seem to be on the average significantly happier than atheists. So this is kind of interesting.

50:09It's not quite clear to me where that comes from. So people who go to church regularly, for example, have more companionship, right? They see people, they have, they're in touch with people. They belong to a community. And those things are also known to be conducive to happiness. So that might be that might be part of it. Now an interesting or sort of curious thing about this result is that Conservatives have argued for a while that this proves that we were right all along, right that being religious living a religious life going to church or temple or whatnot is good for a person and They might be right about that.

50:50There might be sort of causal connection between these two things But somebody else who might have been right was Marx. So when Marx talked about religion being opium for the people What he meant was not that you know religion allows you to go out and get high or or whatever What he meant was that it has a soothing effect Much like opium or you know anesthesia might So it makes you feel less bad if you live under awful conditions and that might be true too, right? So there's a sensing which both the conservatives and Marxists were right about religion. Wow. The whole shoe theory comes back to bite everybody in the ass again.

51:31It's that sort of thing. Yeah. What about unemployment distinct from its effect on wealth and poverty? Yeah. So unemployment is a huge predictor of unhappiness. Obviously part of getting unemployed is that you lose the source of income. And so people who are unemployed should, you know, have make less money than people who are employed. And that matters. But unemployment seems to matter beyond the loss in income. And the obvious suggestion there is that when you lose a job, it has effects like it makes you feel redundant. It makes you feel unappreciated. It makes you feel useless. You lose contact with maybe your friends.

52:14Yeah. Many people socialize more with their friends or with colleagues at work, then with anybody else in their lives, right? You lose contact with that. And so having a decent job to go to seems to be really important for human happiness, even beyond the consequences for your income. So that thing about companionship again, right? That's one of the things that people talk about in this literature seems to be really important, and it might be involved both in like the unemployment effect and in the religiosity effect. Hmm. Have you ever looked at relative happiness between only children and children with siblings?

52:54I haven't. Do you have siblings? No, I'm an only child, which is why I'm miserable. No. It makes me think we... I know this from a million conversations on the show to do with the importance of having community, the importance of having friends. But if that's true, not everybody gets on with their brothers and sisters, but you have a degree of connectedness and community. And we've already said that, you know, kids tend to move away from their parents more quickly. 18 years old, 19 years old, I'm off to university. That's maybe the last time that you're going to live with your parents. That was how it worked for me.

53:3518 years old, that was it. And I never once thought, oh wow, like this is it. That's it now, probably 97 % of the time that I'm going to spend with my parents during my entire life is now over. Holy fuck. But it's wild. When you think about that, when you think about the fact that 18 years old you've hit some unbelievable proportion of the amount of time that you're going to spend with your parents, it's kind of sad in a way. And parents talk about wanting to make the most of the time with their children, but children never think about having to make the most of the time with their parents. And yet it's something that all children should be taught.

54:11And yet they don't have any perspective at all because you're 15. So what do you care? Like you just don't want to be grounded or you want to go out play with your friends. So I wonder what sort of impact it does have on happiness, you know, whether or not someone who, because if you're going to move away and you go to Manchester University in your brother or sister goes to Newcastle University, you're not together anymore in any case, right? So is there a sense, is there a way in which just knowing that there is someone out there that is a sibling that kind of has your back so to speak, does that act as a a salve or an anesthetic somehow to life's vicissitudes as it sort of wobbles around?

54:58I wonder, that would be an interesting one to look at. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's true that people's relationships with their siblings vary a lot, right? Some are really really functional and some really aren't and then there is the effect where if you're a single child living with your parents You might have more adult contact, right? If you have seven siblings your parents are gonna have less time for you than if you're an only child and so you had the benefit of getting your parents attention to much greater extent than you would have if there were six other crisis. Yeah, very good point.

55:30That depends on how likable you are as a child though, as a chronically unlikable child. So I wonder whether that offset it a little bit. And then the final one, the fourth sort of horseman of this happiness apocalypse is poor health. Yeah, so, so health, right? Now there's one thing about health, which is that we have a certain degree, a certain ability to adapt to it. So getting symptoms is terrible, like getting a diagnosis is terrible, adapting to a new condition is terrible. But when it comes to so many conditions, we have an ability to live a pretty good life nonetheless. This is often surprising to people, but somebody who would not have been surprised is Adam Smith.

56:11So Adam Smith talked about a man who gets a wooden leg. He loses a leg in an accident. He cries like a baby. He thinks his life is over. He's never going to have any fun again. And then as time passes, the man realizes that he can enjoy what Atomsmith called pleasures of solitude and society. You can still play chess, you can still talk, you can still go drinking with your friends, you could be able to go horseback riding. And as you realize that things aren't so bad, your happiness might return, not quite the baseline maybe, but it's going to get better. So health matters, but it depends on the extent to which it affects your ability to enjoy the pleasures of solitude and society.

57:00And that in turn is going to depend on conditions. So my vision is terrible, right? But the fact that my vision is terrible has effectively no consequences for the way I live my life. I live in a grocery store. I throw up our glasses on and now everything's right. Raise a shop again. Technology, I can afford it. Right, I have a profession that allows me to wear glasses. Some people even think glasses are kind of stylish, right? So given these conditions, having poor eyesight makes no difference to my life. In a different era, even just a couple of hundred years ago, I would have been dead. like, you know, four decades ago, I would have been eaten by a bear or a lion or or something.

57:44And this is important, I think, because something similar applies to many other conditions as well. You're in a wheelchair, well, depending on what society is set up like, it might not make that much of a difference to your quality of life, or it might have a huge difference. If you live in the mountains of Nepal or somewhere. If you can't get out of your house because there's no banks or, you know, the doorways to narrow or something. Of course, it's going to have a massive effect on your quality of life, but it need not. And so for many of these conditions, having the condition doesn't doom you to low happiness, a lot is going to depend on the sort of conditions under which you live, which is a decision, it's a political decision to build a world that can accommodate people with poor vision, wheelchairs, or whatever.

58:32Is this adaptation, is this what's going on where people are becoming a climatized to their new level of health? I think that that's a serious hypothesis. We have a huge ability to adapt much like we adapt to different levels of light in a room, right? Our eyes adapt and we feel much the same independently of what the level of lighting is. We have an ability to adapt to conditions around us to a very great extent. To some extent, that might be functional. If you end up in jail unjustly accused of some awful crime, you might adapt to conditions and end up being okay, even though you're imprisoned.

59:16So there are conditions when it's good. But then we also have an ability and a tendency to adapt to things that are quite good. We all know people who are like constantly whining, right? Objectively speaking, if you live in the US or the UK right now, you're one of the richest people who've ever walked the face of the earth, right? Unless you desperately pour right now. Most of us are hugely affluent by comparison to almost everybody who's ever lived, and yet some people do nothing but complain, right? And the story is got to be that they've adapted to the riches. They probably have genuine concerns and genuine things to be upset about, but some people don't, right?

1:00:02And that's certainly a sure way to make yourself unhappy unnecessarily. Fascinating insight. Yeah, the the hell thing is is a particular interest to me because I ruptured my Achilles two and a half years ago. So full detachment, which is a serious injury. It's a 12 -month rehabilitation process. It's not good. You go to go through surgery. It's very painful too, isn't it? So I didn't feel anything. Apart from I knew that something had snapped and it sounded a little bit like a gun went off. I wouldn't advise it. But I remember I was in the car. It's the first time I'd started playing cricket again.

1:00:43My dad and me would do this thing. I think it was the sport I played obsessively throughout my sort of from 10 to 19. It was all that I did. Mum and Dad would come to the games, especially Dad. He was a fan of the sport and then he used to come. And I thought to the back end of COVID while I was still in the UK, I might end up going away to America. This would be an amazing thing for me and Dad to rebond over. It would also be cool for me. It's probably good to get fresh air. COVID kept me in the house for ages. I'm going to play some cricket first game, having a great time playing great. And, uh, Bing, yeah, don't take a sport back up at the age of 32 and think that you're just going to be able to do it.

1:01:19The number of people that I've got friends of that started playing basketball again. They were basketball players at the age of, you know, 14 to 21 and then they leave university. They don't play and they play a game of pick up at 36 and they rupture an ACL because the body is not conditioned to. The men are aged, tend to not warm up properly and stuff. We didn't take the new tears. Right, and we were trying last time. So yeah, the last time I played two decades ago, I didn't need to warm up. So anyway, my point being that at the time, it was quite distressing. I'm very big into my health and fitness.

1:01:55I wasn't able to do the things physically that I wanted to. And it's so immediate that the inconvenience is so rapid with its onset. I remember I was laid there the day happened, the day happened or the day after it happened. And I was just laid up, but I can't do anything until I get the surgery. So I'm not even on the road to improvement at this point. I just have a foot which is essentially not attached to the rest of my leg. That's awful. And I'm just laid up, just feeling sorry for myself and feeling like shit. And yeah, it felt pretty sort of destitute. and I was kind of despondent, but I knew that I was working toward here's the next state and here's the next state.

1:02:37And this was probably one of the most interesting things that I've learned from your work, which was the difference between somebody who is dealing with chronic pain and somebody who is dealing with a malady that they are able to adapt to. Can you explain the difference between those two? Yeah, so chronic pain is awful, right? Chronic pain interferes with basically everything you try to do during your day. It's constant reminder that you're ill and it's an obstacle in no matter what you're trying to do. That means it's very hard to adapt to something like chronic pain. You're unlikely to see a scenario where over time you adapt to baseline.

1:03:20Other sorts of conditions might be easier to adapt to. So something like prostate problems like many men develop prostate cancer at some point in their lives. like getting a diagnosis is terrible, right? Nobody wants cancer and so on. But in so many cases, doctors will suggest, I guess they call it, watchful waiting where you're monitoring things. And if you're lucky, the cancer will develop so slowly that you can die from something else. You get killed by something else before they come to guess. And then you might be able to live your ordinary life in much the same way that you did before, you got the cancer.

1:03:57And so that sort of thing might be quite easy to adapt to relatively speaking, right? So different, the conditions aren't the same as what I'm saying. Some are easier to adapt to and the ones that are easier to adapt to are not going to harm your happiness quite as much over time as the others do. Yeah, it's really interesting to think. What was the other thing? There was another example. It wasn't just chronic pain. There was something else you gave as an example of a type of... So in one study that I did, we found that incontinence was a similar, had a similar effect. So people who have incontinence will tell you that it affects every domain of their life.

1:04:39It affects their dating life. It affects whether they want to hang out with their friends. It affects their ability to go to the movies and things like that. it's a problem that makes itself known throughout the day, presumably, you know, when you wouldn't want it to, right? And that sort of condition is then going to be hard to adapt to, and you would expect to see what we found, which is a lasting effect on happiness levels. For all of the people who are not living with chronic pain or incontinence, I think we can breathe a sigh of relief. Eric Agner, ladies and gentlemen, Eric, I really appreciate you.

1:05:15I love the insight in this intersection of economics and philosophy. If people want to check out more of the stuff that you do, where should they go? I have a book called How Economics Can Save the World, which I recommend to everyone there. Look, and maybe you'll learn something. Thank you so much Chris. It was great talking to you. I enjoyed it. My pleasure. Thank you, mate.