Vlan #51 Hack your brain to be happy with Mo Gawdat

GRÉGORY : I’m with Mo Gwadat who is the marketing director or rather the business director of Google X. You’ve embarked on a mission to make people happy with a desire to have 1 billion people happy. Let’s talk about happiness. Happiness is sometimes considered the opposite of marketing. So I’d really like to get your perspective on that and also on the impact of artificial intelligence, innovations, smartphone, etc. Does any of that have an impact on happiness?

MO: To begin with, marketers are human beings. I think everyone listening to us right now wants to be happy. Wanting to be happy is an innate human desire. All of us, everything we all do, the successes we strive for, all the relationships we’ve built, all the things we acquire, etc., are ultimately attempts to find happiness. I hope that by the end of this podcast, I will be able to help everyone find happiness more easily in their lives. Marketing, depends on the marketer’s message about the product that is being marketed. Honestly, the majority of the approaches we use to market products, most of the time in the modern world, lead to sadness. I’m sorry to say this and I apologize for it, but it’s the truth. I mean, The idea is that if you use an equation to describe happiness, your happiness is equal to the difference between the events in your life and your expectations. If you look at every moment in your life when you felt unhappy, it was a moment when life didn’t give you exactly what you wanted. It’s really easy to understand. Does the rain make you happy or unhappy? If you ask anyone that, they’ll say, “It depends,” right? It depends if I wanted to take sun, in which case, the rain could make me unhappy. If I wanted to water my plants, the rain might make me happy. Right? Marketing systematically makes us feel that what we have is not good enough, right? It creates this constant feeling that I could be better at life if I had a red car instead of a blue car, if I had an iPhone X instead of an iPhone 7, if I had what my neighbor has, etc. So this constant approach to trying to make people think that they’re missing something unfortunately leads to unhappiness.

GREGORY: You’re making a difference with success, but, marketing generally sells the success of happiness, joy and fun, of course. So what are the differences?

MO: So to begin with, you know, when I was trying to define happiness, trying to find the equation to define it, I realized that we have a very fuzzy definition of the concept. If you look at the equation I just described expectations. In this definition, happiness would be that inner peace, that contentment we feel within ourselves when we are aligned with life as it is. Do you feel happy with your partner? You know what? You can never be with a partner who is amazing in every way. Every person will necessarily have something that you don’t like. But in this case, you’ll look at your partner and you’ll say to yourself I’m okay with this situation, I’m not going to change this, I love being with this person, with their good and bad sides. Right? That’s happiness. That’s the peaceful contentment of “I don’t want to change anything, I’m happy with life as it is, above happiness”. In this definition, you can’t be happier, you can only be happy more frequently. I gave the definition to a category I called joy, a state in which you feel happy most of the time. I’m sure you know a few people who are always happy, no matter what the situation, they are happy. They’re happy with everything that’s going on in their life, they seem to be fulfilled just surfing through life, right? These kinds of people are in a state that I call a state of joy. They’re not happier, they’re just happy most of the time. Below that state is the state of unhappiness. You know, the state of unhappiness and the opposite of the state of happiness. The happiness equation, compares an event and an expectation and then realizes that this situation in life is not exactly as it would like life to be. What does your brain then do to alert you that life is not safe and not exactly how you want it to be? It gives you an emotion. That emotion could be worry, it could be fear, it could have been sadness. These negative emotions are what we call “unhappiness”. This state is a temporary state that happens every time you have these kinds of thoughts. This state is a state that is a survival mechanism. I don’t know if people realize it, but unhappiness is a simple survival mechanism of the brain, which tells you to change something because I don’t like the world as it is.

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