A Stoic Mantra For Your Sh*ttiest Moments (And Other Ancient Wisdom That Holds Up) | Jonathan Haidt

Hey hey everybody. Welcome to the Ten Percent Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. This whole show, and in fact my my whole Post. T V news anchorman career is based on the mix of ancient wisdom and modern science, which really are two great tastes. That taste great together, as they used to say in the Reese's peanut butter cups ads when I was a kid. Um and there's so much to be learned at the intersection of of these two fields. Which is why I was really excited when I heard from Jonathan Haidt, who wanted to come on to talk about his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, which really takes Pillars of ancient wisdom and then pressure tests them against modern research. You might know Jonathan Haidt. He is a social psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business. He has written many, many best selling books, including The Anxious Generation, but today we're really going to focus on the happiness hypothesis, which is actually

twenty years old, it's celebrating its twentieth anniversary, and he has just put out a revised edition of the book, Jonathan Height. Welcome back to the show. Dan, thanks so much for having me on. Tell me about the idea for this book of I think I might have given away the headline, but the basic idea, as I said, is let's look at some Pillars of ancient wisdom and see how they hold up in light of today's science. Mm-hmm. That's right. So the book grows out of my teaching psych one oh one at the University of Virginia. My first academic job beginning in nineteen ninety five was there. I was assigned to teach psych one oh one. I have to teach a room of three hundred nineteen year olds everything from physiological psychology through love and dieting, everything. And I would often quote Shakespeare or Buddha. So it was clear that like there are certain ideas, like for example, there's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so from Hamlet. And that is the foundation of stoicism, of Buddhism, of cognitive therapy, like that idea. And

When I was coming up for tenure. I didn't have a lot of of experimental publications and I thought I might not get tenure. And if I don't get tenure, I don't want to just transfer to a lower ranked university. You know what? I'll I'll drop out And I'll try to write up this trade book. Collect all these ideas and and write it up. So I did get tenure, all that was just barely, I happened to know my vote because they made a mistake and revealed it to me accidentally. But anyway, I I got tenure at UVA and I decided to write the book anyway. It was so much fun. I basically just read every work from ancient China, India, everything that you know, religious text, anything that had sort of statements about humanity in it. And I had a big long word perfect back then. A word perfect file with all these quotes. I organized um And it turned out they really fell into cluster and they were all true. Like none of the you know, if an idea has survived for two or three thousand years, it's not gonna be like wrong. But

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