What Happens When You Dedicate A Year To Optimising Your Life | Carl Cederstrom

Carl Cederstrom is an Associate Professor at Stockholm Business School, an author of several books and a writer for The Guardian, The New York Times and Harvard Business Review. Carl dedicated a full year of his life to immersing himself in the Human Optimisation Movement. This is the equivalent of going completely dick & balls on a 12 months of back to back Life Hacks episodes and Carl's experience is both hilarious and insightful. We also discuss his new book The Happiness Fantasy which analyses society's obsession with becoming happy and offers a fascinating alternative view to what we should be aiming for in our lives. Expect to learn why optimising masturbation is a difficult process, how you can write an entire book in a single month, what he found to be the single most effective optimisation strategy and why happiness might be a redundant word. Further Reading: Follow Carl on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cederstromcarl The Happiness Fantasy Book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Happiness-Fantasy-Carl-Cederstr%C3%B6m/dp/1509523812/ Desperately Seeking Self Improvement: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Desperately-Seeking-Self-Improvement-Optimization-Movement/dp/1944869395 - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0XrOqvxlqQI6bmdYHuIVnr?si=iUpczE97SJqe1kNdYBipnw Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Chris Williamson?

  Hi friends, we are back again and this week we're talking about life hacks but perhaps with a little bit of a different angle. Carl Cederstrom is an associate professor at Stockholm Business School, part of Stockholm University and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic and Harvard Business Review amongst many others. Carl spent 12 months immersed in the human optimisation movement. Him and his co-author Andre Spicer dedicated one month of the year to a different area of their life and trying to optimise it as much as possible.

• 0:45Chris Williamson?

  This is the absolute zenith Mount Everest of trying to optimise your life and the experiences that Carl went through have elicited some really, really interesting results. He'll tell us exactly what out of 12 months of pure optimisation was the single best tool that he came across, how he was able to optimise his sex, his relationships, his vanity, his looks, his finances and a whole bunch of other things. And then we move on to his new book, which is called The Happiness Fantasy. Now, recently we've discussed happiness quite a bit with Susanna Hallinan and in the Q&A that I did with Johnny and Youssef and it's interesting to see Carl's approach to it.

• 1:26Chris Williamson?

  He makes a strong case that happiness isn't something that any of us should be aiming for and that there are much more worthy terms that would make us much more fulfilled and content within life. I'm going to leave it there, I won't present any spoilers for the rest of the episode, but I wanted to give another shout out to Scott McGrath who sent in a screenshot of him sending out on another company internal intranet, one of our podcast episodes. Now, thanks very much for that Scott, I really appreciate it. Again, if you do manage to share one of the episodes on a big network, please let me know and I'll be able to give you a shout out on a future episode. Coming up soon, we have got How to Survive

• 2:10Chris Williamson?

  University, me, John, you and Youssef talking about that. And the long awaited Life Fails 101 Edition, which is essentially the antithesis to our very slick approach to human optimization. So there's lots of exciting stuff coming up, but for now, here's Carl.

• 2:40Chris Williamson?

  Mr. Carl Cederstrom, how are you today?

• 2:43Speaker 01

  I'm very good, thank you. How are you doing?

• 2:45Chris Williamson?

  Very good, thank you. All the way from the increasingly cold England at the moment. Where are you in the world?

• 2:53Speaker 01

  I'm in the increasingly cold Sweden, Stockholm, to be precise.

• 3:00Chris Williamson?

  Very nice. You're an associate professor at Stockholm Business School, right?

• 3:04Speaker 01

  That's right, which is part of Stockholm University.

• 3:07Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. For the listeners at home, could you give us a little bit of a background to yourself, please?

• 3:12Speaker 01

  All right. Well, I live in Sweden, been living in the UK in Cardiff for a few years, but now based here, live in Stockholm, two children, a wife, and the author of a few books, which I believe we will talk a little bit about. What else can I tell you? That's it, really, I think, that would be necessary to know.

• 3:36Chris Williamson?

  That's the brief, the zeitgeist tape to Carl Cederstrom, I like it. Did you, did you manage to tune your hearing into the Welsh accent very quickly when you were over there?

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I could, I could still now today spot it and recognize it quite easily, much more easily than before, but I was never able to imitate it or speak anything like the Welsh accent. It's very, it's very subtle. I mean, I'm, you know, my English is just too inferior to imitate any kind of accent. Just the Swedish, maybe, maybe I could do a French, German or Danish accent if I really tried to.

• 4:16Chris Williamson?

  I got you. Well, I won't, I won't make you jump through that hurdle today.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 4:20Chris Williamson?

  That's okay. So I want to get straight into it. You have had an interesting journey with the field of human optimization. Would that be fair to say?

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fair to say.

• 4:36Chris Williamson?

  So as a lot of the listeners will know, we have our most popular series is a sequence of episodes called Life Hacks. And on those, we try and find tips and tricks, strategies and approaches for a productive and efficient life. And you took the human optimization movement to an extreme for 12 months, yourself and your co-author and friend Andre Spicer, is that right?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  That's right. I mean, the background to that project is that both me and Andre, two university professors who've spent just too much time in our life in front of a computer, sitting on a chair in our offices and studying various things. And we've both been interested for a long time in the optimization movement. We've been interested in self-help culture. And we wrote a book a number of years ago called The Wellness Syndrome, which was really a critical diagnosis of what we call a wellness society, a society where everyone is really sort of commanded, where there is an injunction to be well, to be happy, to be healthy, unless

• 5:44Speaker 01

  you, you know, live up to those requirements, you're seen as a worse person. So, I mean, this is really what it all began with many years ago. And you were interested in understanding this culture from a more sociological, political and philosophical perspective. And then when that book came out in 2015, a number of people said, but look, guys, did you really try any of these things? And the truth was that we had rarely left our offices for the last, I don't know, 10 or 20 years. So I never tried, you know, I'd never been to a gym, I've never tried mindfulness, I really.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  I I I tried nothing really. So we thought, why not write a book where we start on January first and spend an entire year and try all of those things that we've written about from a more uh theoretical uh perspective, a very sort of distanced approach and just immerse ourselves into this culture and do everything that a human being could possibly do to optimize every area of of our lives. So we sat down together over lunch when I was visiting Andre in London where he lives. And we thought out twelve to main broad categories of optimization areas, various things that you could optimize in your life.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  And so we just wrote down these twelve categories, starting in January with productivity, February optimizing the body, March was optimizing the brain, then relations and spirituality, then sex, enjoyment, money, creativity, uh morality, uh vanity, and then finally trying to work out what this deeper or wider implications of this project was. Uh so that was the kind of optimization project which um uh took place in twenty sixteen, starting in January and ending by the end of December.

• 7:50Chris Williamson?

  What was that like, living that year?

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Well, I think I think now it's it's it's like you're you're in your forties and look look back uh to your twenties and thinking that that was probably fun, but there's no way I would ever do it again. But it was, I mean, there there were some things which which were quite quite interesting. I think on on a more sort of fundamental level, what it means to start playing with your life and start experimenting with various aspects of your life, which really uh allows you to do things you which you would uh normally uh not do. And I think also for us doing this thing together really helped because uh we pushed ourselves to do things we we would never have dreamt of doing uh otherwise. And it was also something strangely comforting waking up.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Uh, every morning and knowing exactly what it was that you were supposed to do. And some people said that one month was a very, it's a very short period of time. And there's no way you could optimize an area in one month time, which is true.

• 8:52Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  But also you realize when you do that, how long a month is.

• 8:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  And I think, you know, during many of these months, it felt as though they would never, never end.

• 9:06Chris Williamson?

  So of, of all of the areas that you moved through, which one was the most trying? Or which one did you find to be the either most difficult or most uncomfortable?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Yes, sex, definitely was.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  And, and I'm pretty sure Andrew would have said sex as well. But that was really the most difficult one. And also since we're both married, we have to, we had to try and find alternative routes to go down. And for me was to try and optimize masturbation, which you know, sounds absolutely outrageous. But of course it turns out that there's a whole body of literature and gurus and, you know, professional wankers who would tell you how to optimize.

• 9:49Chris Williamson?

  I'm pretty certain that I've worked with some professional wankers in my time, actually.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, it's fascinating when you begin listening to them because they would really see life as being a sort of pre and post, um, you know, learning to become a sort of um, sexual kung fu master, which means that you could, um, you know, master multiple uh orgasms. And, uh, you know, reject on a metaphysical level, almost um, the ejaculation. And instead of embrace orgasm as this uh, uh, very powerful energy that is opposed to.

• 10:26Chris Williamson?

  Greater than the physical, the physical manifestation that it is itself. So I need to, I want to ask a question that I'm sure a lot of girlfriends and wives at home are thinking, which is what did your girlfriends or wives, what did they think about the, the year that you were doing? Were they just sort of turning over in bed at night and hoping that you weren't going to wake them up to something else mental in the morning or what, what, what was the, the sentiment?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think I think my my wife, more than anything, was really tired of hearing that question over and over again. And I think I think the most the most uh testing bit really was people around asking, you know, how do you feel about this? Uh what I tried to do was to, you know, when you put yourself through um you here a year long experiment of this kind, you need to be very careful about the things you're ready to sacrifice and the things you don't want to sacrifice. And I think in my case, the family was was very important. So I tried to keep the the project and the experiments uh whenever possible within uh, you know, working uh or office hours.

• 11:38Chris Williamson?

  So you can keep keep the family life insulated, so to speak, from the from the experiment?

• 11:43Speaker 01

  I tried to. Of course, I I I didn't.

• 11:46Chris Williamson?

  A little bit of overspill, a little bit of overspill here and there, I'm gonna guess, yeah.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:52Chris Williamson?

  So we've talked about one of the the lower points of the journey. What were some of the the real highlights that you took from it? Can you tell us? Can you tell us anything that you thought was really, really good that you went through?

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, uh, a lot of it. I mean, okay. So I mean, one of the things that really worked was uh maximizing uh productivity. So so the book that you were supposed to interview me about, The Happiness Fantasy, it's a book that that that was the book that I had to write in one month's time. Um so this was the first um the first test was to see if we could uh if we could finish an academic book in in the period of one month.

• 12:32Chris Williamson?

  From from scratch?

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Uh, well, I had, when starting, I had about, uh, I think, one chapter finished and had to finish five chapters. So I think pretty much, well, say eighty percent of the book I had to write, I had to write.

• 12:50Chris Williamson?

  Plus then prove it and go back through it all again and?

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I did send it off to the publisher, which I had, which was under contract. And, you know, this is just going to ruin the whole story now, but they rejected the manuscript when they when they saw it.

• 13:06Chris Williamson?

  Oh, no.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  But, but, uh, uh, and then I was just, and, and, and interesting thing is, okay, so, so this is what happens. I wake up, uh, January one, and, uh, I know that in thirty one days, I need to write this freaking book. And, uh, there's really no, no time to lose. And, um, so what I do is I meet a sort of productivity coach and he gives me a series of, of really helpful advice. I think the advice I would really recommend to everyone, especially if they work with writing or, uh, many other sort of creative tasks, is the Pomodora technique, which may sound very, you know, simple, almost, uh, you know, uh,

• 13:53Speaker 01

  silly, but it's, it's really fantastic. And, and I would say if there's, if there's one thing that really came out of this year, which I still use on a daily basis, it is the Pomodora technique, which very simply means that you sit down and work in a very concentrated fashion for twenty five minutes. And then there's a small beep from your app or whatever, or if you use just a, uh, an egg clock. And, uh, I'm sorry, egg timer, and then, uh, you take a five minute break. And the rule, which I think is very important to follow, is that when you take the break, you should do nothing. Ideally, just stare out the window or on a boiling kettle. And as soon as the five minute break is over, you sit down again. And this may sound really counterintuitive.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Let's say you're in the middle of a sentence, you know, crafting a sentence and things are going really, really well. And then the beep goes. Of course, you know, you would think that I should sit here and, and, you know, let this sort of creative flow, uh, continue. But I, I, I think if you just stand up, take the break and then after five minutes go back again, you know exactly where to start. And then you can recuperate enough so you could keep going. And it's interesting if you do this over the course of, of a day, because I think the first. Uh, five or six pomodoros, you think that, okay, I don't really need to take a break now, but it really gives you the stamina to carry on working for a much longer period of time

• 15:21Speaker 01

  and still in a concentrated fashion. So that and also the addition of some medications, which I was experimenting with, which worked really well. But uh, that was really the key to getting the book done, even though it's fairly short. And it was rejected by the first publisher.

• 15:42Chris Williamson?

  Oh dear.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  And uh, but the finished product, the one I've sent to you, as I did have to work it over uh, last autumn anyway, but uh, so yeah, I think uh, if I had to single out one thing that really worked over the course of that year, I'd say productivity.

• 16:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's, the Pomodoro technique is a common theme. I'm, I promised to the listeners at home that we're not sponsored by the Pomodoro technique, but the uh, there seems to be, it definitely seems to be a tool of choice for writers and creative types. Dr. Ewan Lawson, who I did a podcast with, that was a lot to do with the ergonomics of your desk environment, your general working environment. He said that he could go back through a hundred and fifty pomodoros that he did, and he could track absolutely everything he'd done during his contribution to the book that he wrote, which he co-authored, and he could go back through. And he actually came up with, it's interesting that you, you touched on looking out of the

• 16:42Chris Williamson?

  window, because he came up with a rule called the twenty twenty twenty rule, which I guess with a pomodoro will be the twenty five twenty twenty. But what he talks about is um, refocusing the eyes on an object which is twenty feet away for twenty seconds every twenty minutes. And one of the reasons for this is to reset the uh, oculus muscles within the, within the eye, um, to reduce eye strain, reduce tension headaches and a few other bits and pieces. But I, since that and over the last six months, have tried to implement the Pomodoro technique as much as I can. And for anyone who is listening, they will know that we are a massive fan of the Pomodoro technique for productivity.

• 17:25Chris Williamson?

  I think time boxing, anything, like Parkinson's law is just. It's like gravity, right? I think for a lot of people, it's just something that you cannot get around. Work expands to fill the time given for it. And when you give yourself that countdown clock in the corner of the screen, or the little turning away egg timer, or whatever it is, it just reminds you, it usually reminds you how much fucking time you're wasting.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, definitely. I mean, it was really remarkable because I was, for every chapter I was writing, I was just, you know, in the app, you could choose what activity you're going to spend that pomodora on. So I, I could see when the book was done, that I had spent almost exactly the same amount of pomodores on each chapter, which is really quite strange when you think about it. But it means there really is some kind of, I think, sort of intuitive process that really works if you just make sure to sit in front of the computer and don't just

• 18:32Chris Williamson?

  Actually do your fucking work.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 18:36Chris Williamson?

  So getting on to the larger topic of optimization overall at the moment, have you, have you managed to come to a conclusion about why there is a modern day obsession with optimization?

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think by the end of the Desperately Seeking book, I, I kind of, I was left with sort of three, three theories. And the first one is that there is a deeply, there's a deep human desire to be someone else or somewhere else, basically just to escape the confines of who you are. And I think everyone is born with, you know, multiple dreams of what you could become. And I think that's just something, something deeply human. So of course,

• 19:32Speaker 01

  optimization, or self-help for that matter, promises, and that is really powerful, is that you could live a different life. I mean, your life could be different from how it looks now. So I think that's a very, very strong, deeply human impulse. And then the second theory is

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Um. Really, now we we live in a time where uh we're expected to do these things. I mean, I think we do live in a culture which is very individualized and we are being trained at an early age in school and elsewhere to begin think of ourselves in terms of uh what we can do uh in relationship to um this sort of the market economy. I mean, what are we going to do when we grow up? How are we going to make money? And not only in terms of what are you going to become in terms of your your trade, your occupation? But, you know, what are the kind of creative and innovative ways that you could um think about remaking yourself as a valuable commodity?

• 20:41Speaker 01

  So I think there's a kind of um commodification of of life and and where we're really expected to.

• 20:49Chris Williamson?

  That's a really good way to put it, the commodi- commodification of life. Yeah, you're totally right.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we we're really so indoctrinated in to think, thinking about what can produce value and where there's really no distinction between the work that we do and the person that we are. And it's not only working on other things, but working on ourselves. I think the whole sort of optimization culture is very strongly linked to that kind of competitive element of uh modern day capitalism.

• 21:17Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  So that's this sort of second theory. And then the third theory is is also very sort of classic one, which I think is uh uh escape from death, really. And I mean, I don't say that uh in a sort of facetious way or or that uh there's something wrong with escaping death. I think we're we're all trying to escape.

• 21:37Chris Williamson?

  Nobody wants to die.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  Ways. Nobody wants to die and uh but there there are different ways, obviously, to escape death. But I mean, if you take one of the more radical things I did during the optimization uh uh the the year of optimization, it was to have plastic surgery. So this was a month where I was going to uh spend every day and all the money I had try and become as beautiful as as possible. So I went to um one of these clinics where you get injections, you know, um it's called Restylane, these sort of filler injections.

• 22:11Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  So I was going to get a sort of broader and sort of sharper um uh uh um what.

• 22:18Chris Williamson?

  Jawline.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  A jawline, that's right, a sharper jawline. And and you know, when when I come in there, uh, there's this woman in a white robe and she looks at me and I tell her. I want to be as beautiful as as possible and you know, she looks at me and you know, for her, that's a perfectly normal question and she. Moves me over to the uh mirror and I I look in the mirror and she said, well, you have a slightly boyish look, so maybe we could try and make you look a little bit more like. Uh George Clooney and I've been thinking more something like uh uh Cristiano Ronaldo or Justin Bieber, but I thought. George Clooney sounds great, so I went for the for the big picture line.

• 23:01Chris Williamson?

  The full George Clooney makeover.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  The full the full George Clooney makeover, but but I mean, if you go into a clinic like that and also this this woman who I met, who it was absolutely impossible to say how old she was because. You couldn't see a wrinkle anywhere uh in in her face or any other people I I met in in that clinic and and obviously that's a way of escaping death. I mean, you could you could see how different forms of of exercise. I was going to a CrossFit gym, a membership which lasted until just a few months ago, uh it was getting too expensive, but. That is also a place where you meet forty, fifty, sometimes sixty year old people who really believe that they are going to be younger, I mean.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  They they take all of these different fitness tests which will tell them that, you know, from a bodily perspective, physical perspective, they're only twenty or twenty five. I think again, that is a way of trying to escape death and uh. Uh so I think all of these different activities of of optimization, I think even when it comes to in part optimizing productivity, you really want. Uh to be able to do do all of these things in life before life is over.

• 24:15Chris Williamson?

  Totally.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  So again, that's uh that's a form of of escaping death again, so I mean, I'd I'd say those are the three sort of broad uh models I could could think of. And then my my friend Andres, uh when we had a discussion about this by the end of the year, he he thought it was also. About escaping, especially, you know, if you're a middle aged person, uh as we are with with families, so for him, it was also a way of escaping. The family was a way of escaping yourself as well, I mean, I think.

• 24:46Chris Williamson?

  That normality of human life almost.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  That's right. The normality of human life and also the the distress and the anxiety that a lot of people feel in those, you know, everyday life situations.

• 25:02Chris Williamson?

  So you've touched on something. I promised to the listeners at home that we haven't shared notes before we did this, but you've touched on something I really wanted to get to. Do you think that optimization is people searching for meaning in life through progression? That overcoming an obstacle and chasing down a task is a good way of artificially inseminating a feeling of meaning in your life? Because when you reach the goal, it's the same as, I want to get the bigger house. I want to have the bigger car. I want to do X, Y, and Z. I train in CrossFit gyms all the time, and a lot of the people that are there, they want that 200 kilo deadlift. They want that 120 kilo clean and jerk. And you're like, okay, well, when you get there, all that you're doing is moving the, you're moving

• 25:44Chris Williamson?

  your PB up by five kilos and going for it again. There's a, there's got to be a broader question about what makes life worth living. And is it these little, the little intermediary targets? Or are people using that as an escapism mechanism to, to forget the fact that the overarching, that life, a lot of the time for a lot of people is suffering? What's your, what's your take on that?

• 26:09Speaker 01

  That's, that's a great question. I think, I mean, we, I think we need to put this in the perspective of how we are being brought up today in, in school, and especially when it comes to the point, you know, when you're in your early twenties and you, you need to start thinking about what you should do with your life. And we're really brought up, you know, through commercials and through a kind of business type thinking that we need to progress. In some ways, our lives should be like that toothpaste commercial when you see how wonderfully rich and healthy your teeth become after using a toothpaste,

• 26:52Speaker 01

  or your hair become after using a shampoo. And again, when it comes to work. And reading any kind of, you know, business related literature. I'm from a business school, which is also partly why I'm interested in this. But how we've really been taught and trained, trained into thinking that everything needs to progress. But then we find ourselves in a situation today where people who either are looking for jobs and doing everything they can to sell whatever resources they have, the sort of human resources on a market that is usually quite cold and you don't really know what to do in order to progress and to make it. And also for people who do have work,

• 27:38Speaker 01

  they may be working in marketing or sales and they may be working their ass off. And still by the end of the day, they're not really sure when their effort really paid off or not.

• 27:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  But then when it comes to the gym, now you step into CrossFit gym and you're there and you struggle and you fight and you sweat and you're really put in all of the hard labour. And it pays off. I think it's really one of the few areas in life today where you can see progress.

• 28:15Chris Williamson?

  You've got a much more, you've got a much more direct line of causation between your efforts put in and the results that come out the other end. Totally right.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 28:26Chris Williamson?

  You need to navigate the, the office politics. You need to grease the right shoulders and there's a lot more hurdles to get over. I think for some people, that's why CrossFit is incredibly liberating because people who maybe aren't at the top of their game in terms of societal values for what their particular job is, can go in and if they've been working their ass off and you as a successful businessman have been being lazy, they're going to wipe the floor with you in the workout today. And it evens, it evens the playing field in an incredibly fair way.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:57Chris Williamson?

  But I think one of the things that you touched on was really, really interesting was about this, the, the fact that someone's progression and they're, they're almost inseparable from their job, right? I mean, what's one of the first things when you meet somebody? Hi, what's your name? What do you do? You know, you, you are your job.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  That's right, you are your job and then at the same time, uh you we also know that most people find their jobs uh essentially meaningless. So you have David Grayber who came out with a book Bullshit Jobs and um this was based on an essay he wrote a few years ago. So a bullshit job is a job that is not only meaningless for you, but you consider the job to be meaningless uh on a more fundamental, social, political level.

• 29:45Chris Williamson?

  Literally has no use at all.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  If that job would not exist, the world would either be better off or uh ask us at least the same, right. And uh they followed up uh after this essay, uh they made a a survey, a YouGov survey which showed that something like thirty seven percent of uh UK uh workers find their jobs to be bullshit. And I think this is hugely relevant uh when understanding the commitment and the addiction that a lot of people have to gym culture. That we're supposed to find meaning and again at progression and we're supposed to be able to

• 30:30Speaker 01

  display that progression and show people that we are progress and we're supposed to do that in our working life. But it's just really, really difficult for those people to be able to do that. I mean, if if you do find yourself in a bull, in a so-called bullshit job, how are you going to be able to do that? And I think this is a this is a great frustration for for a lot of people. And uh really so that tells uh tells us a lot about how uh you know, our culture is is shaped today where work is so essential. I mean, the only way to really be able to convincingly tell someone else that you have a meaningful life is to say that.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  You do this meaningful work, well, that you are your work in some respect.

• 31:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're totally correct there. I think what's what's really insidious about it is that someone's position within a hierarchical structure or how their job is regarded by society at large becomes conflated with their value to society. I know an awful lot of people, and I'm sure that you do as well, who are commercially incredibly successful, but I don't think that they add an awful lot to society. I don't think they have a massive amount of value to add. However, I've also got some friends who are struggling students or singers who can't make it, haven't made a break yet, but that adds so much value to my life. I think they're fantastic, fantastic members of society and their value in quotation marks is, in my

• 32:02Chris Williamson?

  eyes, significantly higher. And it's this conflation of value of a job status with value in society that seems, it seems we should treat that with a lot of trepidation, I think.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yeah, I agree.

• 32:17Chris Williamson?

  I think one of the other things that's interesting to kind of bookend the optimization bit, coming at it from the other angle, you're a professor of business and in business, the way that, the way that companies have become better or more effective over the years is that you try and approach, you look at what works, remodel that, you refine it and then rinse and repeat over time. That it's split testing, right? It's a way of the commercial world essentially emulating what happens in the evolutionary world. And to one degree, there must be more effective ways and less effective ways to operate within the world.

• 33:01Chris Williamson?

  There must be good ways to exist as a human and there must be bad ways, or there must be better ways and worse ways are probably a more effective way of saying it. So is this optimization movement a bit of a bastardization of that somehow? Is it where that's kind of become twisted?

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Well, so one thing that really came out of the optimization project is that there are, I think, clear limitations on what can be optimized and what areas allow themselves to become optimized. So obviously, when it comes to, say, productivity or making money or anything that would be of a more kind of practical or instrumental nature, you could optimize. But as soon as it comes to raising, you know, deeper philosophical question of what it means to be a human being, what does it mean to be an ethical human being, what does it mean to connect in a loving way with other human beings, then all of

• 34:02Speaker 01

  a sudden you see the algorithms, the apps, all of these different sort of operating systems to crash down.

• 34:12Chris Williamson?

  They all break down.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  They would have very, very little to offer us. So, I mean, I think as much as we could find useful advice to help us through the day, I think the danger, I mean, the great danger of optimization culture is that we begin losing sight of those deeper questions of what it means to be human and what it is that we want to do with our lives. Because obviously, and this is kind of how you phrased your question previously, is that as soon as you've reached this target or save up a bit of time by having implemented a new technique, then you use time that you've saved up to find more ways, more techniques

• 34:54Speaker 01

  to save up more time. And then all of a sudden, you have no freaking clue what to do with that time. And so I think that's, that really is a great danger of applying these mechanisms to all areas of lives. Now, I deeply believe there are things and very important things, I'd say the most essential things in life are really so outside the scope, outside the reach of optimization.

• 35:22Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. So you've touched on something there that I wanted to talk about as we move into the discussion on your new book to do with happiness. Is halfway between the two, is the optimization movement, is it to do with individual sovereignty versus more of a collective, kind of altruistic, community, society approached, desire to move everyone forward together? Is it the isolation, a byproduct of the 21st century and capitalism, do you think?

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Sorry, so you meant the optimization movement would be one of these two alternatives?

• 36:06Chris Williamson?

  No, but the optimization movement, are people obsessing over the optimization movement because they no longer have that sense of community anymore?

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, I get you, sorry. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think clearly, I mean, this is what a lot of sociologists would say, and usually you would date this back to sort of the 1970s, and you have, you know, some, some key reference points like Christopher Lash writing in The Culture of Narcissism, you have Philip Reeve, a little bit earlier than that, speaking in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, that really today we have lost faith in these various institutions that used to give us meaning in lives, and those institutions would be the family, would be church typically, would be work, all of these different social institutions that shaped and gave a sense

• 36:58Speaker 01

  of meaning to our lives, just crashed down. And instead, we are supposed to find out by ourselves what the meaning in, in life is, and you really see how this sort of the movement of the 1960s, which really had more of a kind of collective and political flavour to it, turned into something different in the 1970s. Now, these are very sort of generalised remarks that I do here, but they would be, be true at least when, when looking at this sort of development of, of the self-help movement, and in particular, the many kind of, these huge seminar trainings that popped up and

• 37:40Speaker 01

  became very popular in the 1970s, where really the new emphasis was on the self and the authentic self, and the best one could do is to look inside and to forget about

• 37:54Speaker 01

  At the world and injustices that may exist elsewhere. Because now, when you're here with yourself, it's only the cosmic universe and yourself that that matters. And this was the kind of stuff that was being trained uh at a very famous uh seminar that I write about in a book. Called EST, called Earhart Seminar Training. Where um I can't remember now, but some something like seven hundred thousand people, I believe.

• 38:23Chris Williamson?

  Oh my god.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Uh went there between uh nineteen uh seventy one and nineteen eighty four. And really, the the the message that uh people would receive during these very intensive week uh weekend long. Trainings is that there are no victims in the world. That was a very, very crucial point. And that uh nothing in your life is decided. Everything could be uh changed and uh there would be uh no excuses for for anything. So this was like a new kind of uh it was a new version that sort of became a sort of global or or at least a national in the US phenomenon.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  This this of course spread to many other countries as well, but which had the kind of uh the same message. That you find in the self-help books of the nineteen thirties, you know, Norman Vincent Peale, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

• 39:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Uh Thinking Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, which also interest but but the kind of interesting uh parallel there is that they came out. At the back of the Great Depression and this was a time when people really had to believe that there was some kind of of hope. You know, in the face of a very sort of dark and depressing feeling of of hopelessness. But interestingly, in the nineteen seventies, and this is after a time of, you know, three decades of economic growth. Uh you have a a new uh generation of relatively wealthy, middle-class people. And there's a wonderful essay written by Tom Wolfe that came out in nineteen seventy six.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  That said that what all of these people did when they finally get a little bit of money was to take them and run. And went off to places like the S L N Institute and EST. To have what you call a um a loop job uh for the soul. So base so and every the only thing that really mattered was me, myself and I and I kind of um uh lifting up and hailing the uh um selfishness and being egocentric was all of a sudden a virtue rather than a vice.

• 40:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, i- isn't it weird that uh uh oddly a byproduct of liberation has become isolation?

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 40:49Chris Williamson?

  Um it seems here one of the things that you've you've come across there is that individual agency and freedom to make your own decisions and this limitless, bottomless, sideless, topless world that you can create for yourself makes you the master of your own fate, but it also means that all of your failures and successes are entirely yours to bear. And as we all know, there's luck and environment play a huge part in everything that goes on. If you were born in Rwanda in a terrible period during the nineties when there's a massacre going on, that that's not your fault. Like, you're not the master of your own fate there. You haven't died murdered by bandits on the back of jeeps because

• 41:33Chris Williamson?

  you weren't sufficiently well educated or something. You're doing it because that's what the situation the the situation occurred is what was going on. So I guess that that leads us very nicely into the next topic, which is to do with happiness. Um so is is it a crisis of of a lack of meaning that's leading to happiness being a almost replaced with progression and and optimization at the moment? Could you could you see a a time, a paradigm or a spectrum, so to speak, between the two books?

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, first of all, I don't believe in happiness. I mean, in the sense that there is a true definition of happiness, so that you could could measure happiness in any clear or scientific way. And if you look at it historically, there's a really rich and

• 42:32Speaker 01

  strange conceptual development. And you could see how his, you know, if you look down the history, you could see how happiness had meant all different kinds of things in different eras.

• 42:45Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 42:46Speaker 01

  Um, well, I mean, if you take the in ancient Greece, for example, and if you take the way Aristotle understood happiness, it was very strongly connected to developing a set of virtues. It could be to become more courageous and become brave, or, you know, to become a better human being. But very fundamental to the belief of happiness at that time was that true and complete happiness could only be enjoyed by the gods, not by human beings. The best that human beings could do would be to strive for happiness, but never to attain happiness.

• 43:23Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  And that notion of happiness remains for a very, very long time. I mean, it remains during the Middle Ages, at which point happiness did not really exist at all in the life on earth, but only in the afterlife, in heaven. So true and complete happiness was again something that was beyond what the human could could achieve. And in the Renaissance, that was the first time that happiness started to become seen as something that humans could not fully grasp, but something that they could glimpse at.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  And then it's in the Enlightenment and with, interestingly, philosophers like Marquis de Sade. But. Also Rousseau and others, where happiness becomes not only something that you could achieve, but something that you should achieve. So now, all of a sudden, happiness is something that is, you know, something that we need to achieve. And interesting, the first thing that happens is that that itself creates a lot of trouble and a lot of misery.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Because when happiness is supposed to be there, supposed to be something that you could hold on to and live, then people start to feel miserable because they could not achieve.

• 44:58Chris Williamson?

  They say that true agony is the person you are meeting the person you could have been, right? That's the worst kind of hell. And then, rolling back to our last point, when we were going through optimization, this individual agency making you the master of your own fate. What does that mean? That means you are not happy, therefore you are unhappy, and it's your fucking fault.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I mean, but if you carry on, it's, I mean, even into the 20th century, I mean, the dominant understanding of happiness is that this is something that man, and this is what Freud said, man, the human being, is not particularly well-designed to achieve or be able to handle happiness. We're really good at unhappiness. Unhappiness comes from everywhere. It comes from our body, it comes from our surroundings, it comes from everywhere. Happiness, on the other hand, is very fleeting, it's very difficult to know where it comes from, when it comes, you know, you can't really hold on to it.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  So the human being and happiness were never really a couple made for each other.

• 46:10Chris Williamson?

  Do you agree with that?

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Um, I think, I think, I, I, I do, I do agree. I mean, I'm not, I'm not always in bed with Freud, but I think when it comes to.

• 46:20Chris Williamson?

  I wouldn't ever want to be in bed with Freud. He had some very odd ideas about what happens in bed.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not jumping in bed with him. But what's interesting is that uh in the nineteen twenties, and this is uh one what I write about in the, the happiness book, The Happiness Fantasy, that uh there's this other psychoanalyst, who's really young at the time, called Wilhelm Reich, and he makes a great impression on Freud. Freud believes, you know, he's, he's great, but there's a very strong disagreement between the two, which becomes very um obvious after a while. And that is how they see the relationship between

• 47:02Speaker 01

  uh happiness and the, the self, and also the relationship to society. So for Freud, as I just said, you know, the, the human being is not really cut out for happiness, and society's role is to, you know, keep the human being uh under control. I mean, so we don't go berserk and do, uh, you know, go around and, and slaughter people. That's his, his view and why society is important. Reich, on the other hand, thought that society was really what uh repressed the human being, and it was society's fault with all its

• 47:41Speaker 01

  rules and regulations and norms that people could not be as happy as they had the potential to be. And he thought that true happiness was about becoming liberated as a human being. It was to become authentic, it was to become yourself. And very, very uh crucial to that process to become yourself is also to uh free yourself sexually. And for him, it was to find your uh org- uh uh orgasmic uh potency. In other words, be able to have uh multiple orgasms or, or at least in a more

• 48:20Speaker 01

  uh sort of abstract way to, to be free from various forms of sexual inhibitions.

• 48:27Chris Williamson?

  Was that, is, is that partnered with being polyamorous as well? Was he advocating multiple sexual partners?

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, he was, I mean, I mean, he would be uh uh uh in favor of that. And he hated family. He thought the family was a disease. He called this a disease and called it a familitis. And but this was a, so this is a really strange uh guy who's were really worth to to to look look into.

• 48:54Chris Williamson?

  Sounds fascinating.

• 48:56Speaker 01

  And he became more and more obsessed with his theories of this orgasmic uh energy. And started to design what is called Orgone Accumulator, which is this wooden box.

• 49:08Chris Williamson?

  Oh, my god.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Like one of these sort of, looking like one of these old telephone booths. And they were made out of wood and then coated with uh some metals. And you were supposed to stand inside of these uh Orgone Accumulators. And then receive the Orgone energy. And this then supposedly was going to to heal you, make you whole, make you authentic and make you sexual. And all of this may sound nuts.

• 49:39Chris Williamson?

  It sounds like Scientology.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Well, uh, I mean, it's it sounds not like Scientology.

• 49:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  But but the interesting thing is that Wilhelm Wright becomes extraordinarily influential in places like Big Sur in California uh in the nineteen forties with uh you know, the kind of early uh B generation. Uh like, so Henry Miller is one of the first people to really pick up Wilhelm Wright and to find him as a guru and an inspiration for the new kind of bohemian lifestyle that was beginning to take form.

• 50:18Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  And when the S L N Institute started in nineteen sixty one, Wilhelm Wright was one of the key people that uh they were influenced by. So much of what we see from that point onwards and here in this time, you know, the nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties is really. The first time where happiness becomes something that everyone is supposed to achieve.

• 50:47Chris Williamson?

  And you think, is that an artifact of Wilhelm's, Wilhelm's work, do you think?

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Uh, not, not, not only, but I mean, I think, I think the notion of happiness that we subscribe to today

• 51:00Speaker 01

  is, is to a very large extent, uh, shaped by some of those ideas that, uh, uh, Wilhelm Reich, uh, developed in, in his work. And because if you think about, uh, happiness, which I do in this book, as being, uh, something that changes over time. But really what it does is that it mirrors a set of values that happen to be endorsed by that society in that particular time. Then really what is being favored today, and this sort of goes back to our previous conversation, is, uh, to be authentic, right? You need to be yourself. You need to develop your own individual

• 51:42Speaker 01

  sort of unique core of, of who you are. I mean, that's really the essential thing of, of being human today. The second thing is, uh, we need to live a life which is filled with, with pleasure. And, uh, I mean, the entire sort of consumer, uh, capitalism, uh, is, I mean, the moral and, uh, I mean, the moral and cultural foundation for consumer capitalism is, is hedonism. It is that we should be able to enjoy ourselves. And then finally, I think, uh, the third value, which is really key to understand how we are under, to how we, uh, think about happiness today is, uh, work.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  And, and whether or not we are, you know, successful through our work, or if we're able to achieve ourselves through, through this work. So it's really there in, at the Esalen Institute in the nineteen sixties, which Wilhelm Reich helped, uh, inspire, that you had new ideas, such as the human potential movement, that what we should do in order to become, uh, true to ourselves and fully happy is to, uh...

• 52:54Speaker 01

  Uh is to find and that untapped potential within ourself and to fully uh develop uh our arena potential. And that is really the kind of notion of of happiness that we subscribe to still today. But now uh in in the era we live in now, which is very different from how it was in the nineteen sixties.

• 53:15Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Uh the happiness fantasy consisting of these values is used, I believe, more often than not as a way uh as as as a way of of exploiting people.

• 53:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Or even uh, you know, as a euphemism for for making us do things which we know is bad for us, such as, you know, just work more or or and then uh, you know, brainwash ourself and say that this is really what what I want to do.

• 53:45Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think it it's interesting that you touched on capitalism earlier on, that as soon as you have a desire for anything, inevitably that opens up a market for it. I recently recently did a podcast with um Dan Harris's co-writer Jeff Warren. And on that podcast, we discussed the fact that meditation and mindfulness practice are supposed to be this, it's the dissolving of the ego, right? It it it's it's complete openness, et cetera, et cetera. But as there's a a move towards mindfulness on a societal level, that also means that there's the option for people to make money. And as soon as this is the option for people to make money off it, charlatans appear. And people who want

• 54:26Chris Williamson?

  to exploit others who want that in their life and think that it's going to give them meaning. So, you know, people chasing happiness, the demand, if the demand is there for something, the supply will not shoot shortly afterwards follow, surely.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think I think just one sort of short example or illustration uh of how ludicrous it has become today to to think about, you know, where where you would find instances of of happiness or even authentic happiness is a Pret a Manger, which you know about, obviously, living in the UK, the uh, you know, the uh, the the the fast food chain, where as part of their work culture, the employees are supposed not just to be happy, you know, smile and greet the customers and and take the money and give them a sandwich, they also need to do that authentically.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  And that is when you when you begin to see how these values, when they were first developed, you know, in this case then with Wilhelm Reich in the nineteen twenties, how they have been transformed through market capitalism, through corporations, which, you know, very cunningly have been using

• 55:44Speaker 01

  these words, but then twisted them and made use of them for their own ends.

• 55:51Chris Williamson?

  That's really, it's quite disturbing, isn't it? That you've got you've got someone who is saying that you need to be authentically happy. And by the way, the happiness that we're talking about is narrowly defined within the last hundred years or so.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 56:08Chris Williamson?

  So of all of the definitions of happiness that you've come across, have you got one which you have found to be closest to what you think happiness is? Of all of the years, the several thousand years, or without it, it seems to be a fairly despondent barren wasteland where this happiness word is almost useless.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  No, I mean, not at all. I mean, I think I think you could live a life with without happiness. I mean, I think, okay, so my my my best sort of definition of happiness is not really a definition, but this this sort of back and forth between Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot. And I think this is really a great illustration of what happiness is. So I think it's Vladimir who goes first to Estragon, or the other way around. Anyway, he goes, say that, say that you're happy.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Why? Well, just say that you're happy. Okay, I am happy. Say it again, I am happy. Okay, we are happy. And then they say, we are happy. And then Estragon goes, what should we do now, now that we're happy?

• 57:20Speaker 01

  And I I love that line because I mean, I think I think that really, you know, if we've become happy, the question is, okay, what do we do now? Not if we're happy. And and I think it points to to kind of the, I mean, it's it's such a powerful concept because and it really, I think it's really a guiding principle for how we live our lives. And and in that sense, I mean, I think I think it's important because it it really constitutes the templates for what what we consider to be a good life as opposed to a bad life. Uh, which of course is is contingent on on the culture we live in. But I believe you could live without a clear

• 58:04Speaker 01

  uh definition of happiness and instead um use other words such as meaning or you could use uh, you know, words such as love or or friendship. I mean, I think we we do have enough concepts to guide us uh in in our pursuit to live meaningful, good, uh fulfilling uh lives in whatever way we like to do that. But but happiness is just such a broad and vague abstract term that is now, I think, used and have been for a long time by politicians and corporations in in very cunning and disingenuous ways.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  So I mean, I'm I'm quite tempted to think that happiness is something we could leave to uh the people uh working on the next advertisement for uh a a soft drink or um some some fast food and then uh the rest of us could could live happily.

• 59:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, whatever whatever form that is. It's it's interesting that you talk about this kind of meta term of happiness. And it it sounds to me an awful lot like someone saying you need to be good at sports. And in no way does me telling you that you need to be good at sports help you become a good runner or become a good cyclist. Because sports and the achievement of being good at sports is created by a much more granular set of effects that build up towards that.

• 59:43Chris Williamson?

  And I think, yeah, it's a very, a very interesting view to have that. I mean, I'm sure everybody who is listening and probably you yourself at some point on social media will have seen the quote, happiness is the path, not the destination.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:01Chris Williamson?

  To, in one of this weird twists of fate, that this incredibly Instagram worthy sort of, it sounds like the sort of thing that you could buy at Ikea, quote, actually isn't, isn't a million miles away. If what I'm to take that you've said today is true, happiness is a set of guiding principles. In fact, to a degree, happiness is almost the optimizer, it's the pinnacle of the optimization, optimization strategy. And you aim, you aim your trajectory towards that. And along the way, you pick up the appropriate prerequisites to meet happiness.

• 1:00:44Chris Williamson?

  And as long as you don't expect it to ever arrive, what actually happens is you find fulfillment in the small tasks that you accomplish along the way.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that that could, that could be one way of, of, of doing it. Definitely. But I mean, I think, I think happiness, or I mean, another term which, which some people prefer to use, and I would agree with them is, is joy, where joy is, is something that could arrive in a more spontaneous way. And I think some people have argued, and Pascal Broknerr is one, Lynn Segal is another, and I'd agree with, with both of them, that what we need to be able to do is to be open to and, and not push happiness or joy away. But at the same time, being quite careful with how happiness and immersing yourself.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, doing everything you can to achieve happiness is is also in in many ways dangerous because it could it could lead you astray. I mean, because uh there's so many people who will, you know, tell you what what a happy life is. I mean, I think another definition of this, of course, is is from a sort of feminist movement, how how a happy uh woman has been very uh closely bound up with how a woman should be like.

• 1:02:09Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  You know, it's the happy housewife and her happiness is bound up exclusively with making sure that the family is happy, that the man would have her his uh clean.

• 1:02:20Chris Williamson?

  Dinner on the table.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  Ira dinner on the table. And there's really no happiness at all for for that. Housewife, I mean, if you if if you go back and and read read the studies about how housewives felt in the nineteen fifty's. I mean, they felt anything but but happiness, but still they were really that model of of happiness. I mean, another example would be um gay people and there's a sorry for all this name dropping, but it's just but Sarah Ahmed wrote this, Sarah Ahmed wrote this book, uh, The Promise of Happiness and and and she makes a really good point, I think, where uh how some parents would speak to the gay people that, well, you know, I just want you to be happy,

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  which is a euphemism for just please keep your sexual identity to yourself and live a normal heterosexual life. So this uh decide to be happy and and follow the roots of happiness could also be extraordinarily constraining.

• 1:03:19Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Because we have so specific ideas of what it means to be happy. And our sort of happiness fantasies, as I call it in this book.

• 1:03:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Tend to be very regulating. And you could be happy in in in a number of different ways, but not too many different different ways. You need to you need to act it out according to uh an accepted formula. So in that sense, and this is interesting if you look at the feminist movement, because they were very rarely speak about happiness, but rather about freedom.

• 1:03:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  And and for them, it would even be, if you take the housewife example, freedom from happiness. Because happiness to them or the kind of happiness fantasies that they were being trapped inside.

• 1:04:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  Were just miserable, they just produced misery. And so I think, you know, it might come a day where I will embrace happiness fully again. But but but for now, I think, um, uh, you know, I'm still I'm still waiting and and keenly so to see new happiness fantasies to arrive of of new templates of what a meaningful life look like, which are, you know, less individualistic than they are at the moment, which are less focused on competitiveness, which are less focused on on self mastery and instead more focused, I think, on on vulnerability, on on love,

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  on precariousness, I mean, how we really are deeply dependent on on each other. And a more sort of communal and collective idea of how we want to live together. I mean, that to me is is what hopefully our future happiness fantasy would would look like.

• 1:05:00Chris Williamson?

  What whose feet do you think this falls at in terms of us um planting the flag on what proper happiness or your potential remodeling of happiness there could be? Is it a top down? Is it governments? Is it education? Is it the individual's responsibility to realize this? Do you understand what I mean? This movement needs to come from somewhere in exactly the same way as it was potentially led astray by some ideas that have occurred within the last couple of hundred years. The same thing needs to happen again to send it back in the right direction. Have you got an idea of where that trajectory could come from?

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think I think that's the sort of very, very sort of basic question of of sociology and and social and and political change. And and and even though there would be no, uh, you know, definite account of of how those changes um.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  Emerge, I mean, they they're always going to be an interplay of of of a huge number of of actors, you know. Uh, and and uh, I I wouldn't be able to to to speculate exactly how uh such um.

• 1:06:11Chris Williamson?

  A phenomenon is gonna gonna manifest itself, yeah.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  Uh, no, but I mean, I I just think that the kind of happiness fantasy we have now, which I trace back to the nineteen twenties. In this figure of of Wilhelm Reich and really comes to fruition in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies. Have now developed in the age of Trump, who's also someone who really endorses these values of our present day happiness fantasy. Uh, that it's it's really come to a a point where we need other templates for. Happy, happy lives. And of course, there are other uh templates out there, but I think the one that.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  Uh, have been so dominant in um the large parts of the twentieth century and and and up to today. Uh, would really need to be challenged in a more uh radical way than than it has. And um, and we'll, we'll see where where that may come from, or or if if it won't come from from anywhere.

• 1:07:22Chris Williamson?

  Or may not, yeah. Um, so Carl, I I've absolutely loved this. I I like how we can see the trajectory from. The wellness syndrome then moving into what you did with the optimization and then. It it does seem like there's an awful lot. Consider, if you'd said in advance that these three books have all got. Uh, uh, an awful lot in common, I would have probably struggled to to to work out where it would go. But it does sound like there's a a certainly a a story arc to what you're looking at or what you've been researching over the last few years. Very nicely tied together.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. I mean, I think I think that's this has been been an an occupation and uh. Happiness and and and health and self-help culture and and how central that they are to our present day culture. And finding ways to just understand it a little bit better.

• 1:08:15Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm. I understand completely. Would you be able to tell the listeners at home where they can find you online?

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  Um, well, yeah, I mean, I'm kind of on Twitter. That's it really. I mean, apart from that, I'm not, I'm not very present online.

• 1:08:31Chris Williamson?

  You're a ghost. You're a ghost in the dark. That's what you are.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I'm, I'm, I'm out there, I guess.

• 1:08:41Chris Williamson?

  So I'll, I'll make sure, I'll make sure that the link to your Twitter is in the show notes. Um, when is the happiness fantasy being released? Cause I've got a manuscript version on my Kindle at the moment. I'm going to guess it's not that one that's going out.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  I think, I think, I mean, I, I just got an advanced copy a few days ago. So I think it's coming out in, in a couple of weeks, probably.

• 1:09:02Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Well, I will make sure that the, uh, will there be a pre-order link up on Amazon?

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, there should be something like that.

• 1:09:11Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Well, I'll make sure. You can kill it. You can kill the publishers if not. Um, I will make sure that the link to desperately seeking self-improvement, the wellness syndrome, and the happiness fantasy, or potentially the email address of your publishers. So everyone can send them a nasty email is going to be in the show notes below.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah.

• 1:09:32Chris Williamson?

  It's been an absolute blast, Carl. I, I've, I've really enjoyed all of the insights and good luck with whatever you move on to next. I'm sure it's going to be very interesting.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  Thank you, Chris. Really enjoyed.

• 1:09:42Chris Williamson?

  Have a good time. Cheers.

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  Okay. Cheers.