Finding the Magic in Everyday Life with Thoreau and Eric Weiner

As we move through our busy lives, it’s easy to stop noticing the tiny, beautiful things all around us. But rediscovering the sense of wonder we had as children might not only bring us more joy — it could also help us better navigate life’s hardest moments. Dr. Laurie explores that idea with traveling philosopher and former NPR correspondent Eric Weiner https://ericweinerbooks.com/, author of The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers https://ericweinerbooks.com/books/the-socrates-express/. Eric shares what he’s learned from walking in the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau, including how the 19th-century philosopher can help us live better in the modern day and see beauty in the things we usually overlook. Experts Mentioned: Eric Weiner https://ericweinerbooks.com/, journalist, author, and philosophical traveler Henry David Thoreau https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thoreau/, 19th-century American philosopher, poet, environmental scientist, and political activist Socrates https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates/, ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/, ancient Greek philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/, 19th-century German philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emerson/, 19th-century essayist, poet, and philosopher Confucius https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/confucius/, ancient Chinese philosopher Nathaniel Hawthorne https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/nathaniel-hawthorne, 19th-century American novelist and short-story writer Leslie Perrin Wilson https://concordlibrary.org/events/library-news/author-talk-leslie-wilson-former-curator-of-the-special-collections, author and former curator of the Special Collections at the Concord Free Public Library Henry Miller https://www.ndbooks.com/author/henry-miller/, American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist Resources Mentioned: The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Z43RY5J?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback, by Eric Weiner (2020) Walden https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm, by Henry David Thoreau (1854) “Walking https://faculty.washington.edu/timbillo/Readings%20and%20documents/Wilderness/Thoreau%20Walking.pdf,” by Henry David Thoreau (1862) Bhagavad Gita https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/index/ (second or first century BCE) The Journal of Henry David Thoreau https://www.walden.org/collection/journals/ “The playful mediator, moderator, or outcome? An integrative review of the roles of play and playfulness in adult-centered psychological interventions for mental health https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17439760.2023.2288955,” by Xiangyou Shen and Leland Masek (The Journal of Positive Psychology, 2024) Related Episodes: “Happiness Lessons of The Ancients: Confucius https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/happiness-lessons-of-the-ancients-confucius” “The Science of Attention and Distraction https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/dial-d-for-distracted” “The Power of Awe… and Where to Find it https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/the-power-of-awe-and-where-to-find-it” “Sight and Sound: How to Joyfully Awaken Your Senses https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/sight-and-sound-how-to-joyfully-awaken-your-senses” See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 3:31Speaker 03

  If you're a fan of the Happiness Lab, you know we talk a lot about the power of attention, how small shifts in what we focus on can make a huge difference to our psychological well-being. But making those shifts is often easier said than done. Many of us have plenty of things in our lives to be grateful for. Friends, family, an awesome pet, maybe. There's also all the smaller stuff. A TV show you really enjoy, that first sip of coffee in the morning, or cutting into an avocado and discovering that it's perfectly ripe. But at a time when we're bombarded with scary news about AI and war and the climate, when it's so easy to spend hours online doom scrolling, those good things can start to fade into the background. So how do we change that?

• 4:13Speaker 03

  How do we stop the stressful stuff from consuming so much of our attention so that we can appreciate the wonderful stuff that's still out there? Well, for the final episode in our fall book series, I decided to call in a little help.

• 4:26Speaker 04

  My name's Eric Weiner, and I am a philosophical traveler or traveling philosopher, depending on how you look at it.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  Eric is a journalist by training. He spent years as a foreign correspondent for NPR before turning his attention to philosophy. Now he's the author of multiple bestselling philosophical books. But today I wanted to talk with him about one philosopher in particular, a scholar who I think offers an important solution to our modern attention crisis.

• 4:53Speaker 04

  Henry David Thoreau.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  I've been thinking about Thoreau a lot lately. You see, I've been spending time in Cambridge, Massachusetts for my sabbatical. And Walden Pond, that place that Thoreau famously wrote about, is just about a 20-minute drive from my house. It is absolutely beautiful there in the fall. The trees are just starting to change colors, the summer tourists are mostly gone, and you can hear the sounds of wildlife all around you and the Pittsburgh Railroad softly rumbling in the distance. These are sounds Thoreau himself would have been familiar with when he lived here. I try to feel his presence as I walk around the pond, something Eric has done many times, too.

• 5:31Speaker 04

  I'm a place person, I'm a traveler, I need to go somewhere. Like, as soon as I think of an idea for a book or anything, really, I don't think the what, I think the where. Where can I go?

• 5:41Speaker 03

  That instinct took Eric all around the world when writing the book that I wanted to chat with him about today, The Socrates Express, in search of life lessons from dead philosophers.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  And so, you know, I went to Athens, of course, in the footsteps of Socrates and Epicurus and the Stoics and others. I went to Germany in the footsteps of Schopenhauer. And the idea was to sort of shrink down or reduce their vast philosophies into one simple how-to question. I didn't want it to be anything complex, like, you know, how to disambiguate the categorical imperative, nothing crazy like that. It's things like how to get out of bed, how to wonder, how to see, how to listen, how to enjoy, and also how-to questions for later in life, how to have no regrets, how to cope, and even how to die.

• 6:36Speaker 04

  And the idea is that each of these 14 philosophers answers that question, channeled through me. So my book is interactive. I'm trying not to just learn about these philosophers intellectually, but to imbibe them and to employ their lessons in my everyday life.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  But unlike all the other dead philosophers in that book, channeling Henry David Thoreau didn't require Eric to take a trip to some far-off city. It brought him to the same place I've been trying to retreat to more and more this fall.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  So I'm going to Concord to try to walk in his footsteps and try to live the way he lived as much as I could.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  I'm curious, like, when you first heard about Thoreau, what did you first think about him?

• 7:18Speaker 04

  Didn't really care for him. I think, you know, like most Americans, Thoreau was thrust upon me in high school. I was 15 years old. Probably didn't care about too much, but certainly found Thoreau and his most famous book, Walden, a little bit annoying, to be honest. I mean, this guy going into the woods and he's going to, you know, live simply. And I found it a little preachy, like, oh, I'm not simple and noble enough for you, Henry David. So that didn't give him much thought past high school, to be honest.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  But that philosopher who Eric found annoying and preachy, and who, as we're about to find out, was indeed very far from perfect, would eventually change the way that Eric saw the world. And I'm pretty sure that he can help make things a little more beautiful for you, too.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy, but what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  And so give me kind of like the deep dive into Thoreau or sort of Thoreau 101. What was his deal?

• 8:37Speaker 04

  Thoreau 101. Okay, he was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, spent almost his entire life there. I mean, he said he is made of Concord dust, you know? And he spent a few months in New York and met Walt Whitman, actually, and that must have been a cool meeting. But Thoreau did not care for New York. He was not a city person. He was a small-town person. So lived in Concord, went to Harvard, I think mainly for the library privileges because he loved books. And he lived during a time of great change. The railroad was just coming to Concord. The tensions that would ultimately lead to the Civil War were heating up all over the US.

• 9:20Speaker 04

  And so it was a tense time, a time of transition. He was also at the forefront of this spiritual and philosophical movement called transcendentalism, which, really, in a nutshell, transcendentalists believed in the inherent goodness of humans. There's a concept. And in the notion that the divine is not off there in some far-off heaven, but it's right here, right in front of us in the here and now. And Thoreau and his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson were sort of the leaders of this movement.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  His most famous book is this book called Walden. And that was kind of, you know, his version of a personal experiment. So explain to me what Walden was about.

• 10:00Speaker 04

  So he gets this idea in the 1840s that, you know, what if he were to go off and live simply? Get away from society, go live in the woods on Walden Pond. And it seems very modern in that sense, because, you know, you can picture someone today saying, I just have to get away from it all. But that's not a new concept. I mean, even back then, with the railroad coming to town, with the economy heating up, with all this technological change, the telegraph, et cetera, there was this feeling that you wanted to get away from it all. So he took this to the next level, built a cabin on Walden Pond, and said, hey, I'm going to live there, live simply, grow my own vegetables, et cetera. There's an asterisk to that, but that was the idea, at least.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  Now, about that asterisk. Thoreau did not, in fact, get away from it all, at least not entirely. The cabin that he built was small and basic and completely lacking in indoor plumbing. But it was also only about a mile and a half away from downtown Concord. Henry's family lived nearby, and he regularly visited them. He even had his mother help with his laundry. But even though the popular image of Thoreau had him completely disappearing into the wilderness, total isolation was not the point of his experiment. So what was he trying to do?

• 11:19Speaker 04

  To live life deliberately was his famous sentence. He wanted to live deliberately and to not wait until he's dead to realize or dying that he had not really lived at all. So it was that sort of impulse to, you know, what the heck am I doing with my life in this, in the rat race?

• 11:37Speaker 05

  And one of the things he really wanted to do during this time, kind of living simply and living away, was to sort of learn as much as he could. In the book you call Thoreau: Wisdom Scavenger. What do you mean by this?

• 11:47Speaker 04

  He didn't care about who said something. He cared about what they said. And that's not our way, really. We tend to look at, you know, okay, Laurie Santos, she's at Yale, so I'm going to pay attention to her because blah, blah, blah. We tend to focus on the source of information rather than the information itself, not Thoreau. So we're talking, you know, 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, and he's reading not just the ancients, as many people did, you know, the Stoics and the ancient Greeks and Romans. He's also reading Confucius. And at his cabin, believe it or not, on Walden Pond, in 1840s, he's got a copy of the Bhagavad Gita.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  So this idea, you know, it's sort of like early Eastern mysticism, new age philosophy, a century before, really, we think about it coming to the foreign America. So he would just pick up bits and scraps of wisdom from wherever he could find it, like a scavenger or forager.

• 12:48Speaker 05

  And so the way you're describing him now, he sounds kind of cool, right? You know, there's all this change happening. He's like, I guess I gotta get off the grid and, you know, read the ancients and read this cool Eastern philosophy. But there's some controversy over Thoreau, too. He wasn't kind of roundly considered this guy that everyone loved, is that right?

• 13:04Speaker 04

  No, he was not loved at all. In fact, he was just seen as an oddball in Concord and kind of standoffish. But, you know, as I say in my book, if we only focused on the nice, likable philosophers, we have a very thin pamphlet on philosophy. Nathaniel Hawthorne, his neighbor, and I would say acquaintance, not friend, talked about a certain iron pokerishness to Thoreau. Other people were not so kind. They found him kind of egotistical. Again, I say standoffish, but I think the truth is he was an introvert. And as you know, a lot of introverts can come across as unfriendly when that's really not the case. They're just inward looking. And I think that was Thoreau.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  I mean, he had this prominent nose. He had these kind of piercing eyes that people find kind of scary, to be honest. You know, he would just look at things for a long time with those eyes. And he had this almost superhuman sense of smell, and he could hear things that other people couldn't. So there was something odd about him.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  Eric's book shares stories about Thoreau taking a single glance at a tree and correctly estimating its height, or using his acute senses of the land to spot Native American arrowheads buried in the ground. Thoreau was unusually attuned to the world around him. He noticed things that other people simply missed. Eric believes that we can all learn something from Thoreau's careful attention, and that by following his example, we can all start noticing more of the good stuff that's right in front of us. And Eric will share how to do that when the Happiness Lab returns in a moment. You know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself reaching for over and over again? The sweater that somehow works with everything?

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  Visit tacha.com and use code HAPPINESS for 15% off your first purchase. That's T A T C H A dot com and use code HAPPINESS for 15% off. I'm speaking with traveling philosopher Eric Weiner about his insights on Henry David Thoreau, a scholar I've been turning to again and again this fall as I try to reset my own attention. To learn from long-dead philosophers for his book, Eric decided it was important to spend time in the places where they actually lived and worked. And for the philosopher I've been obsessed with lately, that meant exploring Thoreau's hometown of Concord, Massachusetts.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  I started at the Concord Library, which is a beautiful, amazing library, and they have a lot of Thoreau's original manuscripts, which is very cool to touch it even through laminated plastic, to just see his handwriting. And so I was thinking like, what is this chapter going to be? As a writer, you go in with preconceived notions, and you just have to be open to changing those notions. But my preconceived notion was, oh, this will be a chapter called "How to Live Alone Like Thoreau," or "How to Live Simply Like Thoreau," because that's what we think of him. So I'm in the library, and I'm talking to the curator of the rare manuscripts, a woman named Leslie Wilson. And I tell her my idea, and she says, no, no, no, no, that was not Thoreau. He was about how to see.

• 20:16Speaker 04

  And she said, you need to read not just Walden, but his journals. And then I find out that the journals are about 2 million words. Did not read all of them, but I read a lot of them. And I, I saw what she meant about seeing, that really the journals are about his observations and this amazing ability to see what other people didn't see. And so I switched gears and called the chapter "How to See Like Thoreau."

• 20:44Speaker 05

  So in your book, you talk about how Thoreau was interested not in this idea of the nature of reality, which is what a lot of, you know, scientists and philosophers care about, but he was really interested in the reality of nature. Talk about what that means and how it's connected to this idea of seeing.

• 20:58Speaker 04

  Right, so he was an empiricist. Now empiricists believe basically that we're born a tabula rasa, a blank slate, no preloaded software, and all our knowledge comes in through our senses. So, most empiricists, and Thoreau included, are not really interested in metaphysics, in something that you can't touch, taste, hear, smell. So, he was much more interested in what we can learn through our senses as opposed to speculating with our mind about the nature of reality. Do we really exist? Those sort of questions which some philosophers find fascinating. Not Thoreau. I mean, he famously said, "Who can say what is? He can

• 21:41Speaker 04

  only say what he can see." And that was his philosophy in In Nudsho.

• 21:45Speaker 05

  And talk about how this philosophy kind of plays out in terms of the value of seeing too, because you know, part of it was about the sort of metaphysics, but part of it was about the value of connecting with reality in this really rich sense too, right?

• 21:56Speaker 04

  We tend to think of vision as a very sort of mechanical process, that seeing is like photography, you know, where our eye takes a picture of the screen I'm looking at now, or my coffee mug, which is right here, there it is, and then it's just, you know, maybe printed in our brain. And that's not how it works at all. I mean, scientists know this now. In fact, vision is much less like photography and much more like conversation. So by that, I mean, what happens is my brain is having a conversation with itself. The coffee mug I'm looking at now, in fact, there's something there. It's cylindrical, it's got a liquid in it, and you quickly search your database for what it might be that you've

• 22:39Speaker 04

  seen before. And your brain essentially tells you, "Oh, that's probably a coffee mug, and that's coffee, and you like coffee, so that's something good." And all this happens so instantly that we're not aware of it. And I think Thoreau was aware of that, that seeing is something that we do with our mind more than our eye. So it was sort of full body, full mind seeing.

• 23:03Speaker 05

  I think this idea of full body, full mind seeing also gets to this connection between seeing and feelings, which is something else that Thoreau talked a lot about. He really got a lot of kind of positive emotion out of seeing.

• 23:15Speaker 04

  Right. So even though he was a natural philosopher, what today we'd call a scientist, and had a very scientific mind, he was not interested in what he called the view from nowhere. The view from nowhere is this notion of the scientist who's, could be a psychologist as well, who's studying, oh, I don't know, happiness, maybe, and is like, you know, "I'm just studying happiness. I don't have any skin in this game, no dog in this hunt, you know, I'm just looking from above." Thoreau thought that was nonsense, that there is no view from above. That view is empty and cold, and he didn't have any time for it. And so he was very much into this notion of seeing as something that was subjective, and that

• 24:00Speaker 04

  came from the heart as much as the head or the eye, really. The things that matter to us most, like happiness and love, are in fact the most subjective. And so Thoreau very much believed in valuing the subjective, that, you know, with the right perspective, we can see beauty and experience beauty, I think would be the key word, almost anywhere.

• 24:23Speaker 05

  And part of the value we get from this subjective is a particular kind of emotion that I think Thoreau really got deep into, which is this idea of wonder. You talk in the book about how you can't read Thoreau without seeing him like some awestruck teenager. Give me some examples of this.

• 24:38Speaker 04

  There's this great scene where he's just like staring at something for like hours, and this farmer, you know, looks at him, says, "What's he doing?" walks away, and comes back like five hours later, and he's still there. Thoreau's still there, the same place on the pond or wherever he was, and the farmer says, "What are you doing?" And he says, "Mr. So-and-so, I'm studying the habits of the bullfrog." And the farmer was just like, "Oh, man," you know? But children, God, that was the thing. You know, adults were wary of Thoreau, but kids could spend all day with him watching a duck hatch her eggs, for instance, because children have that sense of wonder. You know, it's been

• 25:22Speaker 04

  said that a philosopher is a seven-year-old only with a bigger brain. And Thoreau embodied that. He had the wonder of a child, of a seven-year-old, but the brain of a naturalist who knew birds and knew his science and knew the Bhagavad Gita. And so a lot of seeing, quote-unquote, "better" is not doing more, but doing less, and unlearning habits that have just layered on top of us like a scaly skin that we have to slough off. So Thoreau was, he never grew up, basically.

• 25:57Speaker 05

  There's a lot of scientific work showing the power of play. If we get kind of curious, we can sort of play with ideas or really pay attention in a way that's playful, as opposed to like, we're trying to do some particular thing. And this seems to be another kind of thing that Thoreau seemed to embody, the sort of playfulness of seeing as well.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  Definitely. It was not work for him. It was fun. And I think the key word, and this applies, I think, both to happiness and to seeing, is expectations. I think expectations are the enemy of happiness, and I think they're also the enemy of seeing. Thoreau certainly thought so, that when you've decided ahead of time what it is you're going to see, you don't really see it. So you have to slow down that process. I mentioned earlier that seeing is more like a conversation, but it's a conversation we have very quickly. And, you know, normally, that serves us very well. If it took me a half hour to figure out this is a coffee mug in front of me, my coffee would get cold by then. Not so cool. But sometimes it doesn't serve us well because we've decided ahead of time that we know

• 27:00Speaker 04

  what we're going to see before we see it. We know what it is. And as a scientist, you know, that can trip you up too, that nine out of 10 times, it's always been a coffee mug, so it must be a coffee mug this time. And Thoreau didn't make that mistake. He he saw everything as if you were seeing it for the first time.

• 27:16Speaker 05

  And I think that's a really powerful concept for happiness generally, right? I think seeing anything like you're seeing it for the first time can give you all these positive emotions. It can make you curious. It can give you a sense of awe. But I think that kind of flexibility with everyday objects is really good practice for the tougher things, right? You know, this challenging situation comes up, and I could see it as a challenging situation, or as I could see it as an opportunity, right? Kind of builds in this interesting flexibility.

• 27:40Speaker 04

  Right. So I think where you're getting at there is altered perspective, and that's really what Thoreau was about. So we're talking about vision, and it may sound very, in a way, superficial, always looking at things, but no, he's altering his perspective. And I think you're totally right, that in order to alter your perspective about the big things in life, I mean, big things, a cancer diagnosis, losing a loved one, being fired from your job, you know, in order to alter your perspective about those big things, the way to build up that muscle, I think, is to alter your perspective about the small things. To see, you know, beauty in your coffee mug, the way the water kind of swishes around, to look at that same stack of books in your office, it's been there every day, and see it slightly

• 28:23Speaker 04

  differently. This is, by the way, why I travel. So my all-time favorite travel quote is from the writer Henry Miller, who said, "One's destination is never a place but a new way of looking at things." And I think most people don't travel just for pleasure or for hedonistic reasons. It's to find that new way of looking at things. You can play this trick at at home. You can pretend to be a tourist in your hometown, just walk around like you're seeing it for the first time. And, you know, it takes work at first, but you can do it.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  So practicing a new perspective on the small things can help us build the flexibility we need to navigate life's hardest moments. Eric has already shared a few ways to start that. Slow down, let go of expectations, and try to look at the world through the eyes of a tourist. But how do we do that more often in our busy lives? How can we become more present if we don't have hours to spend sitting in the woods staring at bullfrogs and ducks? Eric will share his tips for following Thoreau in the modern day, when the Happiness Lab returns from the break.

• 29:28Speaker 01

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• 33:54Speaker 05

  Author Eric Weiner believes that Henry David Thoreau, a philosopher who he once considered quite obnoxious, can teach us to see the small things around us with fresh eyes, and by doing so, can make life feel new and beautiful again. I asked Eric to tell me about one of Thoreau's favorite ways of shifting his perspective: long walks, or, as Thoreau famously called them, saunters.

• 34:15Speaker 04

  He never walked. He sauntered. It was his favorite word. And if you think about it, it's different. A walk has, you know, it sounds like it's for health reasons, or it's purposeful, and walking to get somewhere. A saunter, I think, implies a kind of playfulness and also an aimlessness, no expectations. So each morning, he would do his morning pages, sort of just writing down his thoughts from the day before. And in the afternoon, he would go for a walk, and he would walk four, five, six miles a day without a problem. Sorry, I said walk. He would saunter. And as you probably know, there are all kinds of health and psychological benefits to walking. And I think one of them is that we are able to see better, you know, not sitting still and staring at something, but glancing at

• 34:59Speaker 04

  it as you walk by, because enough of your brain is busy with the task of walking and enough is freed up, I think, that you're able to see more things. So he did a lot of his seeing when he was sauntering. In fact, he even has one expression where he talked about a sauntering of the eye, which is a great, great line, I think. This idea of just sort of glancing about, you know, not looking for anything in particular, sort of seeing the way you saunter.

• 35:27Speaker 05

  He talked a lot about this idea of us all being lazy seers and that we need to see more slowly. What did he mean by this idea of seeing more slowly?

• 35:36Speaker 04

  It means slowing down this assumption that you make about something, like even what it is you're looking at. It's being able to remain in a state of unknowing. Now we're getting philosophical, you know? And it's an uncomfortable state. This is why we always want to lurch towards certainty. This is why we put people into boxes. This is partly, I think, why this country is so divided, because certainty is more comfortable. Henry David Thoreau was more comfortable with uncertainty. Or let's just say he was able to tolerate that uncertainty. And yes, he did it with seeing, but I think he did

• 36:18Speaker 04

  it with everything in his life. He worked at it. I mean, he would look at Walden Pond from different perspectives. He looked at it during the daytime, at nighttime, on a boat, on the surface, underwater. He even would invert his head and look between his legs at the pond upside down.

• 36:35Speaker 05

  And this was something that you actually tried out yourself when you went to Walden Pond?

• 36:40Speaker 04

  I did. I found a spot where there were no tourists, and I turned my head upside down and looked at Walden Pond. And I have to say, all the blood rushed to my head, and I thought I was going to pass out. And it didn't really work the way I'd hoped. But I think Henry David Thoreau would say, okay, that's, you don't need to do exactly like that. You don't have to go nuts going upside down. By the way, his real name was not Henry David Thoreau, but David Henry Thoreau. He even inverted his name.

• 37:08Speaker 05

  I think one of the reasons he's big on the inversions is this idea of not jumping to conclusions, this idea of sort of not fault finding. I think this is something that has big implications for happiness, too, if you can kind of open your perspective on things, right?

• 37:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. There's a great line that he says, "The fault finder will find fault even in paradise." And I think that's very true. And maybe you've met people like that, or they're on vacation, and you're like, wow, this is beautiful. But, you know, they're just complaining that the food's no good, or it's cloudy today, whatever it is. But we tend to segregate beauty and whatever the opposite of beauty is in our culture. We sequester beauty in museums or concert halls, and then we tell ourselves, okay, now I'm going to go to, you know, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and I'm going

• 38:01Speaker 04

  to experience beauty. And now I'm gonna, you know, walk down Third Avenue, get on the subway, and experience the opposite of beauty. But in fact, you may find more beauty on the subway and less beauty in MoMA. So it's the idea of being open to beauty in the garbage dump. And yeah, if you're a fault finder, you'll find it.

• 38:25Speaker 05

  And so in your process of sort of trying to get to know Thoreau, you know, you started out by saying he seemed very particular and sort of not very relatable. Did you wind up thinking that he was the kind of person that you should be following more if you want to learn how to see?

• 38:39Speaker 04

  I mean, I won't say I came to love him, but I came to appreciate him. And maybe with these philosophers, that's all we can hope for. I'll just give you one example is, you know, a few months after I was in Concord, Massachusetts, I live in the Washington, DC area, I was walking down the street, and I dropped my cellphone. And of course, it landed face down on the screen. And of course, it shattered, and it's in a million pieces. And I'm like freaking out because it's my life on there. And I'm trying to text my wife to tell her what happened, but I'm texting her on a shattered phone, and

• 39:19Speaker 04

  I'm bleeding now because I cut myself. I just paused, and I, you know, just looked at the phone. And I don't know if you've ever shattered your phone, but sometimes it can make very beautiful designs, these patterns and shapes. And for a moment, you know, just a moment, I thought, wow, that's, that's beautiful. That shattered phone. And I think Thoreau probably would not have a mobile phone. I'm not sure. He would definitely have like a low data plan. He would not have the unlimited. But I think if he did have a low data plan cellphone and dropped it, I think he too would find beauty in the shattered phone. So that's just one example of how Thoreau has stayed with me.

• 40:02Speaker 05

  And so let's talk about what we can all learn from this idea of trying to see a little bit better. If you're going to give some advice about strategies that people could take to try to be less of a lazy seer, what would you suggest?

• 40:14Speaker 04

  Okay. Number one, I would say, is to change your notion of what seeing is, to just rid yourself of this idea of it being photography. It's much more interactive than that. You know, Thoreau would even say that he is, when he's looking at an apple, he's kind of collaborating with it. You know, if he's looking at the apple, the apple's looking at him. Sounds a little nuts, but lots of artists will tell you something similar. When they're painting something and looking at it, it's a collaborative process in a way. So I think one thing is to try to think of seeing as less that you're just taking from the world around you, but that you're collaborating with the world.

• 40:55Speaker 05

  And I love that idea because it really shows another thing we can do with our senses, right? Which is that we can actually infuse our own kind of preferences. We actually have some control over the preferences we bring to our seeing. Like, we could be fault finding, and that might be our natural kind of way of going about things. But when we start to look for the beauty, when we start to look for the delightfulness, we can often find it in strange places. And so that's kind of part of the collaboration, right? Is if you say, hey, Apple, like, I want to look at you in a different way. You're like, oh, actually, you're really much redder than I thought. Or that shape is kind of neat, you know? Or the broken phone, like, I can find some benefits in even looking at those things. It's kind of a process of like, using your senses to benefit find, as it were.

• 41:34Speaker 04

  Yes. And what you see the first time is not the final word. That seeing is a much more fluid process. And think about how maybe you've changed your attitude about certain places or works of art. Let's take Thoreau. And Walden didn't care for it as a 15-year-old. As a 50-something-year-old, you know, I'm like, hey, It's actually pretty good. Well, the book hasn't changed. The words are all the same. So that's one thing you could do is to sort of suspend this idea of of seeing as being something just sort of binary, zero, one, you know, it's much more than that. The other thing is simply to focus on seeing. So Thoreau's advice was to hold all other senses

• 42:17Speaker 04

  in repose while focusing on one. Now, that can work with just, you know, closing your eyes to hear something. We do that naturally, or to smell something. But it also means blocking out sound when you're trying to see, hone in on that one sense. Biggest advice, I think, is to slow down, to just take the time and really see. I met with some Thoreavians, as they're called there, and said, you know, where can I go and experience the seeing? And this one guy, a real diehard Thoreavian, said, you know, you don't need to go out into nature, because I confess, I'm not that much of a nature person. Nature is something that I experienced between air-conditioned house and air-conditioned car. Okay. He said, you know, you can go to Starbucks and do a little experiment there. So I went to the

• 43:00Speaker 04

  Starbucks in Concord, which of course is all done like old style, you know, everything's so cute and perfect in that town. I spent five hours in Starbucks just seeing. You can easily do that, spend five hours there. But people start to look at you funny at some point.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  What were some of the beautiful things you saw in Starbucks? I'm curious what popped out?

• 43:20Speaker 04

  First, I'm only hearing things, because I used to work for NPR, so I'm very attuned to hearing. And I'm like, oh, that would be such a good tape cut, that whoosh of the espresso machine. I was kind of an anthropologist, and I observed how people stand, like at the little milk and sugar station where people go to tank up, and how people will like approach, step away, and like they'll do almost like a little dance with each other. There was this sort of a protocol, but no, everyone was not quite sure of it. Oh, am I standing here too long? And just something like that. It was like choreographed in my mind and quite beautiful. So you don't need to go to the Grand Canyon or go to the

• 44:01Speaker 04

  Louvre to see beauty. It's this notion of of beauty in the everyday that Thoreau has to teach us. And expectations, you know, along with slowing down, is dropping expectations. And when you start to do it with physical objects, you've opened the door, I think, to being able to do it with your mental processes. You know, this is called the Happiness Lab. And to bring it back to that, seeing and happiness, in fact, are closely intertwined. A flexible seer becomes a flexible thinker, becomes a happier person.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  While I've been enjoying my visits to Walden Pond this autumn, I do love Eric's reminder that we don't have to travel somewhere new, or spend hours staring at the world upside down, to see things a little differently. We can practice wherever we are, just by taking a moment to notice the tiny, beautiful things all around us, to find something extraordinary in the ordinary. And maybe, like Eric and his shattered phone, we'll start finding a little more wonder in places we never thought to look. You can read more about Eric's adventures with Thoreau and the other philosophers he tried to learn from in his book, The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers. And that brings us to the end of our fall book series. But not to worry, as next week, we'll be starting something

• 45:23Speaker 03

  a little different. I'll be sharing some of my favorite live conversations from the past year, shows I recorded with some of my best friends, and the people I admire most when it comes to the science of happiness. That's all next time on the Happiness Lab, with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

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