The #1 Reason You Aren’t Happy - Yet. | Mark Fabian

Welcome to Behavioral Grooves, the podcast that explores the why we do what we do of our human behavior. I'm Kurt Nelson and I'm Tim Houlihan. We bring you conversations with scientists, authors, and fascinating thinkers to help you apply behavioral science to your work and life, and maybe even help you find your groove. This episode is one of those conversations that does both. We sat down with economist, philosopher, and author Mark Fabian to explore some deep, thought-provoking ideas about happiness, well-being, and meaning.

You know, his new book, Beyond Happiness, does exactly what the title promises. It takes us beyond the pursuit of fleeting joy and into the realm of self-actualization. values and something he calls generalized flow. Mark is an associate professor of public policy at the University of Warwick in the Department of Politics and International Studies. And we should note Mark brings a really fresh voice to this discussion.

Yes, he cites Mihai, Qing sent Mihai as one of those who systematically identified flow. He builds on self determination theory, which is a critical part of our sense of agency to go out and do what we want to do, but he also challenges the idea that c that this very common idea that happiness should be our end goal and uses the familiar frame of the hedonic treadmill to help us rethink it. And we've talked about the hedonic treadmill in the past, but just as a refresher, it's the idea that over the course of our lives, we have a relatively stable level of happiness, like being on a treadmill and not really going further or moving forward. But as we acquire more stuff and greater experiences in our life, We simply adapt to these new circumstances and we return to that base level of happiness.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (79 minutes, 14,813 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.