You 2.0: Our Pursuit of Happiness

Sometimes, life can feel like being stuck on a treadmill. No matter how hard you try to get happier, you end up back where you started. What's going on here? We kick off our annual You 2.0 summer series with happiness researcher Elizabeth Dunn, who explains how to fight the treadmill feeling.

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You 2.0: The Mind’s Eye

By Shankar Vedantam

/ August 15, 2022

Some challenges can feel insurmountable. But psychologist Emily Balcetis says the solutions are often right in front of our eyes. This week, as part of our annual series on personal growth and reinvention, we revisit a favorite 2020 conversation about how we can harness our sight to achieve our goals.

Transcript

*The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode.
Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.*

SHANKAR VEDANTAM, HOST: From NPR, this is HIDDEN BRAIN. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Summer is usually a time when we relax and reset. But this year, with a pandemic and a recession, unwinding seems out of reach. It feels like an accomplishment if we even know what day of the week it is. Every day feels like Blurs-day (ph).(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)VEDANTAM: So for this year's You 2.0, our annual series about reinvention, we are focused on reframing our circumstances. We may not be able to change some of the most important facts of our lives right now, but we can change how we experience them. These episodes will give us new ways to think about loss and empathy. They'll help us set goals that we can actually reach and take stock of the bigger picture.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)VEDANTAM: We start our series with the pursuit of happiness and a story that takes us back to 2008. Psychologist Liz Dunn was invited to go on a vacation. The man she had just started dating and three of his high school buddies wanted to go on a road trip with their girlfriends. They planned to drive an RV from their home in Vancouver to the Arctic Ocean. Liz said yes. It seemed like an adventure. It sounded like fun. It felt romantic. It was a mistake.ELIZABETH DUNN: I would rank it as probably top three worst vacations ever.VEDANTAM: One by one, the other girlfriends decided that an RV trip to go swimming in the Arctic Ocean was not their idea of fun. When the RV rolled out of town, it was just Liz and four men who thought they were having the time of their lives.DUNN: So it was kind of like living through one endless day on this highway that never ended with four Canadian men who were increasingly driving me crazy.VEDANTAM: That road trip led Liz to important insights about human nature. Today we look at how things that start out fun can turn miserable and how our minds can take miserable experiences and remember them as fun.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)VEDANTAM: Anticipation, memory and the winding road to happiness, this week on HIDDEN BRAIN.Elizabeth Dunn is a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia. Along with Michael Norton, she's the author of "Happy Money: The Science Of Happier Spending." Liz told me that at one point in the interminable journey to the Arctic Ocean, she decided she'd had enough. She tried to escape.DUNN: Yeah, I think this was one of my low moments of my life. Like, my smartphone didn't work there because we were so far north. So I sought out a payphone. This was shortly after the waste disposal system in the RV had sprung a leak. And I was just like, I am over this vacation. And I called Air Canada. And I said, how can you get me out of here? And they said, well, we can't get you back to Vancouver, my home, but we can get you to Edmonton. And I was like, can you put that ticket on hold for me - because at that very moment, all I wanted was to get out of there.VEDANTAM: Did you actually manage to catch one of those flights? What happened?DUNN: You know, by the time I got back from making this phone call, the guys had realized that I was losing it. And they made a plan to try to make things better for me (laughter). So one of my friends, who's a cancer researcher, like, took me aside, and he's like, let's have a nice science talk. That will make you feel better. You know, and other guys were like, why don't we, like, read women's magazines and talk about them? Like, they had somewhat misguided ideas of what was going to be helpful. But, like, they were really trying. And so then I was like, OK, you know, they convinced me. Like, it's almost time to turn around. Like, you can do this. And, you know, in the end, I did make it through, but I will never go back.VEDANTAM: When the waste disposal system sprang a leak, I understand this is how you derived a nickname on the trip. Tell me about that.DUNN: Yeah, so the guy's nicknamed me Blackwater Liz. Blackwater refers to waste disposal in an RV. Let me be clear; I had nothing to do with the RV waste disposal system springing a leak. But for whatever reason, like, this name stuck to me. And they still refer to me that way. Like, this has not gone away.VEDANTAM: And did you actually go - did you see the Arctic Ocean? Did you go swimming in it? What did you do when you got there?DUNN: Yeah, so we did - when we finally made it to the Arctic Ocean, we did get to go swimming in the Arctic Ocean. We got to see belugas in the wild, so that was, you know, very cool and very special.(SOUNDBITE OF BELUGA WHALE CLICKING)VEDANTAM: So here's the question that arises from this whole trip. You were obviously miserable through much of the trip. But looking back on it now, do you sort of think of the trip as being a miserable experience? Or do you think of it as being a rewarding experience?DUNN: Well, I think that it makes a good story. And so I appreciate that. Like, it's this aspect of my life that, you know, was very unique. Not many people have swum in the Arctic Ocean or gotten to hang out with belugas in the wild. And so it was this unusual experience that contributed to sort of my overall life story. It also is this really powerful source of bonding for me and those four Canadian men, you know, one of whom I ended up marrying. And so we still, you know, talk about it. When one of us is going through a rough time, we pull up pictures from that trip and talk about it. So we really enjoy the memory of it. But, you know, I still remember that I was not having a good time while it was happening.VEDANTAM: So there's been this really rich debate in the field of psychology, but also just as people have thought about their own lives, about the value of spending your money on buying things versus buying experiences. And I'm wondering when you think about an experience like your trip to the Arctic Ocean, how does that dovetail or contradict this larger body of research that has looked at the differences between experiences and things?DUNN: Well, the research on the value of buying experiences really suggests that a lot of the benefit that we get from buying experiences comes after they're over. So, you know, one of the great things about experiential purchases is that we can reminisce about them. And I really do enjoy reminiscing about this experience. Of course, you know, many experiences are enjoyable in the moment, but that's not necessarily where the real value of experiential purchases comes from. Instead, the big sort of benefit of experiential purchases over material purchases seems to come after they're over, which to me is pretty interesting because, you know, material things stick around. So I am not, like, a frequent clothes shopper. So I literally still have clothing that I had on that trip, right? Like, that stuff has stuck around. That experience, of course, is gone. It's, you know, long since over. But, you know, it lives in my memory.And it turns out memory is a great place to store stuff, right? So when we store stuff in our closet, it kind of gets outdated. It gets torn up over time. But our memories have this amazing property of being able to make things more positive or at least funnier over time because we've retold this story so many times. Like, just starting to think about it kind of makes me laugh. And so that's kind of the magic of experiential purchases.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)VEDANTAM: Perhaps you've noticed

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