S3E11 – Rethinking Happiness, part 2, with Prof Mark Fabian

E: My name is Ellie. 


W: And my name is Will. 


E: Welcome to Lively Minds, the podcast about mental health challenges that go beyond the ebb and flow of the everyday. 


W: The podcast that looks at how developing an understanding of our mental health influences how we address it.


E: In today's episode, we're continuing our conversation about happiness, this time with Mark Fabian who is Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Warwick and an affiliate fellow at the University of Cambridge's Bennett Institute. In his new book Beyond Happy, How to Rethink Happiness and Find Fulfillment, he challenges the idea that wellbeing is just about feeling good and instead offers a richer and more demanding vision of what it means to live well. This is one rooted in values, community and complexity. Welcome to the show, Mark.


M: Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to speak to your audience.


E: We're very excited to have you here. I've really enjoyed the book and have lots of questions.


M: Right, yeah. Let's dive in.


E: So your book's structured into three sections. A pleasant life, a fulfilling life, a valuable life. And I just wondered if you could just talk through why you structured it in that way and what each of those things is.


M: Sure. So I guess the pleasant life is kind of riffing off the title of the book a bit. So what do I mean by beyond happy and why do we need to get beyond happy? So we open with this notion from psychological science of the hedonic treadmill, which people might also recognize from Buddhism, that basically all life you're just kind of desiring stuff. And when you get it, there's this short payoff where you're like, "Oh, sweet. I got it." You just need a plusher  couch and then once you've got that, you just need a better car and you just need a nice house, you just need a private jet. So you're always running on this treadmill, never getting to where you need to get to. And so the point of the first part of the book is to say that what I think we should be doing in life is trying to structure the treadmill such that it's a place we want to be. So a place that generates these pleasant, fulfilling and valuable experiences.


The fulfilling life then is about self-actualisation, so how to discover your dispositions, talents, things that sustain your interest, and then from there a process of self-creation. And that's about having certain values, thinking about what kind of behaviors flow from those values, pursuing those behaviors, pursuing the kind of person you want to be, and then getting, you'll get feedback from the world from your actions.  


And then the final, the kind of bridge over to part three is that historically, and humans generally build community on culture, on shared values, but not just on the values, but on the like the art, the ritual that we do around those values. So if you think about a football team, obviously we like the football, but a lot of it's about us wearing the colours, chanting the songs, or watching the same matches, talking about the history, these kind of things. And a lot of that has dissolved. And so part three of the book is about nihilistic issues and how we rebuild those kinds of cultural systems, but in a way that's not oppressive, in a way that's more liberal and open and lets people be who they wanna be and what suits them without stepping on other people's toes.


W: Our podcast is about mental health challenges that go beyond the natural ebb and flow of the everyday. So I guess aimed at people who might struggle quite a lot with their mental health and perhaps people who are regular users of mental health services. How do you hope your book will speak to people for whom happiness feels like an alien concept? 


M: Yeah, I love this question. And this reminds me of some work that I have been doing over the last couple of years with people in financial hardship or varieties of poverty across the UK, where we're trying to understand how you could thrive despite financial hardship or something of that sort. And this has been a consistent theme in that work that happiness and a lot of the theories that some academics have about what makes a life go well as being in a good mood, just feels very alien to these people. They talk a lot more about how they're resilient and in order to become resilient, which is a necessity in their life, they have to sort of not really be thinking that much about happiness and it's just not something that's high on their radar. Whereas having a sense of purpose, having a sense that your relationships are supportive, feeling like you're part of a community that cares about you, which the welfare state often doesn't. These kinds of themes that are much more live. So I do hope that I can speak to this a bit in the book. And the point of the book is to say, like, let's get beyond happy and let's think about life in more complex ways. The book also comes out of my own depressions from my late teenage years. But those depressions were mostly triggered by nihilism and I suspect that a lot of your readers are not, not coming from that same platform.


Yeah. So how do I want to speak to people for whom happiness doesn't feel particularly relevant? 


I think the main point to say is that the theory of well-being that's advanced in the book is something like well-being is about wholeness. It's about your life fitting together in a way that's coherent for you. And oftentimes depression and anxiety and these kind of things stem from a degree of incoherence, either because you're not living up to your own ideals or your own feelings of responsibility to what kind of person you want to be, or because you don't know what kind of person you want to be, or because you've internalised various views from society, or you're stuck in a society or a culture or a community that really wants you to be different to the way you are. And so the book is about helping you to develop a better dialogue with yourself, think about the social structures, the political economy, the arrangements that are giving rise to your situation, whether in a positive or a negative way, and then helping you to navigate through that kind of situation to a life that feels good to you. And I guess in the sense that it generates feelings and experiences that are pleasant, fulfilling and valuable. And happiness is probably going to be a part of that, hopefully, but it's really not the point.


W: And the way I think that your work from what I've read of it sort of speaks to me in that sense, is this idea that sometimes we have this impression of happiness as something that's so idealised, it kind of feels unreachable, and actually it's about recognising, as you said in your answer just there, it's not just about an idealised perfect emotion, it's actually about having more of a whole, I think, I think, was it a wholeness you used? 


M: Yeah a wholeness


W: a wholeness about life, an understanding, an ability to be able to find meaning in your life. I guess it's also a question of the extent to which people have the agency in order to be able to do those things as well, isn't there? 


M: mmm


W: And I think as part of that, we have to sort of recognise that quite often people may be subject to ways that they live their life, which they have little or in some cases, no control over. 


M: I could have spoken more in the book about the political economy and the power structures. I do reference it at various points, but I think it varies by country quite substantially.  So we're predominantly speaking to a UK audience, in the first instance, we've got this very big hangover from neoliberalism here. Neoliberalism was done more intensively in the UK than in most other countries, I would say. And that has meant that there has been a much greater individualisation of problems. We have much less social insurance, massive kind of defunding of social and community infrastructure, defunding of the parts of the welfare state that are concerned with community building over the last 40 years. And so you're often, your problems, as it were, individualised. And I think I could have spoken more about that in the book, but I guess because the book is in the sort of self-helpie type genre, I did want to speak mostly to things that people could do with themselves, but there is a very good, very substantial part of the book that's about understanding that wellbeing is something we do together and understanding that it's very heavily dependent on cultural structures, including like the attitude that you just got to work your way out of mental health problems by getting a job. Very crudely, I get that vibe a lot from the UK and that's often much more complicated than that. So I do speak about those kinds of structural factors quite a bit, particularly towards the end of the book.


The earlier stuff you mentioned about, in a sense, not having the agency, part of the agency is about how you're disempowered by the state or the structures that you're in. The book speaks more to an element of agency that I might call practical wisdom. So the capacity to think through your situation, the capacity to learn about yourself, to learn about which of your relationships are nourishing and helpful to you, which of them are toxic, who’s trustworthy, who's someone that genuinely cares for you and who's just using you in one particular way or another. I hope that the book has a lot to offer in terms of helping people develop that sort of practical wisdom.


E: You used the word coherence before and it's like when things are incoherent with your values and sometimes you just sort of have been doing life by accident passively and you might not know what your values are and actually the first step is probably to have a proper think about is what you're doing match up with what you care about.  Is that kind of thing, what you mean by practical wisdom? 


M: That's a huge part of it.


E: Yeah. 


M: And that's definitely where the nihilism stuff comes in. So I guess for me, when I was 18, 19, 


E: Classic nihilism age


M: I was sort of like, what should I do with my life? Yeah. And what is good? What is right? Who should I be? These kind of questions. And yeah, historically, the culture would have provided you a lot of those kind of answers. And today we've sort of stripped out all our cultural artifacts. Christianity, nationalism, patriarchy, all the rest of it, all in the bin, understandably, for the most part, but it does leave you a bit sort of lost. And we are in a situation where you're at liberty to be whoever it is that you want to be for the most part. And that's great. But it also means that you've got to then do the work of figuring out what values you want to have, what things do you care about? And we don't really give people any tools and we don't educate them to go through that process. We just prepare people for work, not for life. And I hope that the book kind of prepares people for life, not just for work. So there's a lot of stuff in there about how to develop a dialogue with yourself, how to listen to and then interpret your emotional signals and especially your motivational signals. So understanding why there are things that you can sustain effort on, sustain attention to, which is often very difficult when you're depressed. Everything feels kind of gray and bland and what's the point in doing this? But if you interrogate it enough, you will find that there are some things that do just kind of maintain your attention, maintain your hope and enthusiasm and these kinds of things. And that's a pretty good cue then that there's something here that you have intrinsic value for that you just want to pursue. And then you just want to kind of unpack that more and figure out how you can build a life out of that kind of space. And then you transition from there to who are my people? Where can I find people who I'm going to vibe with, who we can celebrate these values together, do culture together, practice rituals, and thereby kind of re-enchant the world and make it feel really powerful and meaningful. 


E: It's really nice to re-enchant the world. How do you feel people reading the book will interpret the part about nihilism


M: Yeah its a great question.


E: If they haven't gone through a particular existential dread of nihilistic thinking at some point as part of their kind of happiness? 


M: So nihilism is the sense that the universe has no kind of inherent meaning or purpose, particularly the purpose. So we're not going anywhere. There's not like a God that sits behind the universe that's preordained certain things. It's just like matter. It's just a bunch of stuff drifting the cosmos and you're just here when you don't really matter and it's all going to die in the heat death of the universe anyway.  And yeah, so it's not...


E: [laughter] I have no idea why I just find nihilism so funny today.


M: It is funny, but I like to explain it in the, hopefully the funniest way possible.


E: Yeah.


W: Yeah.


M: So like Rick and Morty really riffs on nihilism a lot.


E: Yeah.


M: kind of just drink yourself to death kind of attitude. But yeah, I think the way out of it that I advocate for in the book is basically that this is actually a really liberating realisation that the universe doesn't have value in it. It's not like we're going to discover the meaning of life. It's up to you. And that's really great. Like you, we as agents imbue the world with meaning, imbue the world with value. If you haven't had a nihilistic episode, I actually say at the beginning of part three, maybe just stop here. Like don't open this Pandora's box if you don't want to. But I think even if you haven't had a nihilistic episode, I think we are definitely living in nihilistic times.


E: Yeah.


W: So our politics in particular is really characterised by simultaneously like totally vacuous politics.


E: Yeah.


M: And then just like lots of screeching and culture wars, which is really weird and is emblematic of a nihilistic period. So I think if you want to understand the present moment and how it relates to values, how it relates to wellbeing, then I think understanding nihilism and how we get out of nihilism is quite important to that. 


E: And do you think that what is going on in the world at the moment with so much extremism all over the place and this really scary new reality attitude that some people have as part of that kind of political extremism?  Do you kind of feel that, these like nihilist politics are kind of in response to people's unhappiness or the other way round, that somehow we've ended up going in this mad trajectory and now people are going to be more unhappy because of it.


M: I think they feed into each other.


E: Both, isn't it?


M: Yeah. Let me say a few things here. So I guess as a whistle-stop tour, the rise of science gradually undermined a lot of sort of traditional religious beliefs. World War I really undermined nationalism and classism. World War II in particular the aftermath really kind of undermined fascism, totalitarianism, communism, capitalism, all this kind of stuff. And then the last 30 years has really undermined capitalism, I would say, particularly for the younger generations, just feeling like just making more money and burning the planet doesn't seem like a particularly great sort of value system to take us forward. Alongside that, so we have, I have got some academic work looking at populist voting over the last 15 years or so. And what we find pretty consistently in that literature is that one of the main determinants about voting is the disappearance of social and cultural infrastructure. So the disappearance of things like scout halls, community pubs, neighborhood fetes, parades, the sort of things that make people feel like they're part of a community and that community is healthy. So like I live in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in London and they go to church every, like, all the time, but especially on the weekends. But they also just have these regular festivals where they get double-decker buses. 


E: It's Pesach this weekend, just got there. 


M: Yeah, that's right. So that's kind of fun. And they have their Halloween equivalent as well. And so stuff's always going on and the whole community comes along to that. And that sort of sense that you're part of something bigger than just you. People care about you just because they're familiar to you and you're familiar to them, not necessarily because you have any kind of reciprocal arrangements or commercial arrangements 


E: Yeah


M: or even that you're useful to them, they just care about you because you're part of the community. This kind of stuff is really fun. The disappearance of that is a major drive on voting for populist parties.


E: I am like, So desperate to do a PhD on how losing pubs is basically, I think everything that's gone wrong.


M: I can show you a paper on that by Diane Blaise.


E: Oh my God. Yes, please.


M: Exactly that, the disappearance of community pubs and UKIP voting. And the explanation for it is that when you are worried about your life and when things aren't going so well and a lot of in these de-industrialised communities like in the British North or the Rust Belt in America, that's what a lot of people feel that the place is going under. You look for social support and if you don't have it locally because it's all disappeared, then you're going to look for some kind of macro identity. What's my race doing? What's my nation doing? What's my class doing? This kind of stuff? How can I participate in one of these bigger groups? And that then makes you feel that sense of social support. So what people are really doing there is getting a poor form of compensation for the inability to feel supported more locally. And so I think a large part of what I'm saying in the book is that as individuals we need to find that local support, but also if we want to heal our society then we need to get back to that kind of community building. And that's often quite costly. 


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W: I'm still just loving the idea of nihilism leading to happiness because in a sense, let me just lay this out. So if we have a nihilistic attitude of the universe and believe there's no meaning in the universe, and then we realise that therefore the responsibility is on us to find meaning and find values in order to offset that nihilistic feeling, then us feeling like we are living according to those values and connecting with other people in order to pursue those values, can lead to positive well-being and then happiness.


M: Yeah, absolutely right


E: and how beautiful that we have the luxury in that mode of thinking to imbue the universe with some positive, wholesome, healthy meaning?


M: Yeah, that's right. 


E: It just had an inherent one.


M: And one thing I want to emphasise is this is not something that we do rationally. And I think that's something that like the new atheist movement got really wrong. And I think that a lot of  people, including myself, who are trying to dig themselves out of nihilism, they just keep digging, looking for this kind of rational bedrock and you never hit it, but it's the abyss. What you've got to learn is how to float. And the way you do that is through art. And I think that we've really kind of denigrated, at least in the kind of social circles I move in over the last 30 years, culture, art, the body, emotions, intuition, all the kinds of things that make life feel, how I use this word earlier, like enchanted, like a sense of magic, play, these sort of feelings. And we need to get back to that. Like when you walk into one of the old cathedrals, regardless of what you think about Catholicism, you'd still feel the sense of awe. And we need to get that kind of energy back into what we're doing.


W: I'm interested that your academic focus is public policy. So can you tell us how a book about happiness and well-being fits into this?


M: I can. And I actually have another book coming out, hopefully late next year, that's specifically on wellbeing public policy, but it will be like pretty academic. I guess one of the thrusts of that is that, especially in the UK, but globally, we are in a very kind of metrics oriented way of doing public policy. So historically, a lot of public services, so take nursing, teaching, police work, this kind of stuff. The idea was mostly that you would employ people in those positions who are like mission driven bureaucrats. So people who care about public service. And obviously that doesn't always work out, but we could target that sort of thing much more deliberately if we wanted to. But there was this attitude from about the 1980s onwards that there were too many naves in these kind of jobs. Like people who weren't doing a mission-oriented approach, weren't interested in public value, they were just interested in their paycheck and working as little as possible to get that paycheck. And so in order to hold those people accountable, what you needed was some very discrete metrics. So what is it that you're trying to achieve? And so in some cases this works quite well like garbage collection. It's really obvious what you want done. You want this many bags of garbage or you want clean streets twice a week, whatever. And then you can just commission garbage collection services on that basis. But in a lot of the things to do with wellbeing, like mental health, the welfare system, community cohesion, the thing that you're trying to measure is very hard to measure. And so you can't commission services in this kind of legalistic contract based way in order to achieve those kinds of outcomes.  


So if you think about education, the metrics that we really fixate on in education is PISA scores. So numeracy and literacy. But obviously being an educated person, for example, having practical wisdom goes a lot beyond whether you can read and do basic math. But if we're just driving people to PISA scores, then the system is going to shift and game itself towards maximising those scores. And so a lot of what we're doing in wellbeing policy advocacy at the moment, trying to get kind of beyond neoliberalism is to look beyond GDP, but we're just replacing it with a new set of very narrow metrics and what we actually need to think about is a more sophisticated way of doing public administration that, for example, thinks about how it can recruit these mission-driven bureaucrats, thinks about how it can establish high-level values. So the Scottish Wellbeing Framework has things in it like, "You will grow up loved and cared for in Scotland." And a lot of my colleagues cringe at that because they're like, "Yeah, it's not measurable." And I'm like, that's the point.


E: Yeah.


M: The point is to coordinate across all sorts of government departments that are doing all sorts of different things that all feed into this emergent idea of feeling cared for. And we can't measure the feeling cared for, but maybe we can measure a bunch of antecedent stuff along the way. So I have a whole lot of work in this space. Some of it's about measurement because ideally we'd like to measure some things and I can talk about that. A lot of it's about co-production and how we can get the people who would be affected by policy involved in developing that policy. And I think participatory governance is really necessary when we're talking about what makes a life go well, because you have to make a value judgment to define that. And so we should be getting citizens in there, not politicians to make those decisions. 


W: Is it true that another advantage of coming at it from a policy perspective is that you can incorporate several different disciplines, sociology, psychology, politics? 


M: Policy does tend to be quite interdisciplinary, which is great about it. But since I started working on this stuff, I've always tried to integrate things as much as possible and say, how can we make all this stuff that people are saying about wellbeing and happiness mutually compatible? How can we make it coherent? And so I've always just tried to fold in more stuff.  So I started in philosophy, then I did economics, then I've done more psychology in recent years. Now I'm in public policy. Public policy has brought me into a lot of sociological circles. So I'm trying to feed all that stuff in. And meanwhile, I've also tried to read a lot of literature, folk wisdom, fairy tales, all that. And I think there's plenty to learn from there as well. And theology there’s even a sprinkling of that in the book. 


E: In your critique on self-help book culture, which I also share, 


W: Yeah I do too.


E: Because I think basically, yeah, all the, everything just says whatever's wrong with you is your fault and you're not eating a carrot at the right time of day. So 


M: Yeah, 


E: Everyone hates you and life's terrible. Yeah, you talked about it in terms of the problem with that culture being self optimisation and what seems to have become accepted as a norm that you can hack your way through your life, and the idea that you could exploit your mental health in a better way to make you more successful, like whatever that is, I did just have a quote I wanted to read you from your book - 
“Self actualisation requires you to identify where you belong, how useful, how you can be useful to the people you care about and how you can contribute to your collective goals. It is a very social endeavour.”


M: I'm really glad that like cuts through with you and your audience because yeah, these are some of the ideas in the book I'm most proud of. Yeah, I guess like the kind of culture I'm referring to is sort of like Huberman Labs, I guess, which is like quite a good podcast, but it's very intensely on this kind of stuff, like when should you take a cold shower? At what time of day should you optimise your coffee and take this kind of stuff?


E: It is just very exhausting


M: Yeah, it is. It's totally exhausting. And if you put all these little micro hacks together, you'd be doing them for three hours a day and you wouldn't be taking care of any of the really meaty stuff in your life, 


E: Yeah


M: Like what sort of values are you pursuing? What community are you in? And I find that the most pernicious part of some of this culture, and you've mention this in your question, is that it actually actively obfuscates the social element. For example, the way gratitude as a practice emerged out of religious beliefs in Buddhism or Christianity or any other religion really is, "What are the things in my life that I can be thankful for and who gave them to me? Where did they come from?" And sometimes that's going to be like God, if it feels like it's mana from heaven. But oftentimes it's just like acknowledging that my partner cooked for me today or someone got out of the way on the black path so that I could get by easily and I want to make sure I thank them for that. And you want to observe the ways in which we're interconnected, practice that gratitude to make you feel better about your life and then we'll also encourage you to help other people with their life. And I think in this kind of hack yourself to perfection self-help space, a lot of these kind of social and embedded practices have been transformed into take a cold shower at this particular time of day or keep a gratitude diary where you're mostly reflecting on just your own little personal experiences, not doing anything more widely with that.


E: Yeah, I feel like gratitude was like one of the first ones to get really co-opted into something it just isn't. So the things people are encouraged to do often are like thanking themselves for doing a good bit of self-care that actually was just behaving like a selfish asshole.


M: ah yeah.


E: But now all those words are now that are so important, like about toxic relationships and like authenticity. They're really important words in the conversation about happiness and they've just been kind of misused.


M: Yeah, and often corrupted.


E: Corrupted yeah


M: I mean, I think that the one that you mentioned about optimise your mental health, oh that drives me like, that's so cringy. 


E: Why?  I'm not a computer. So, cringe and gross. 


M: My mental health is not a resource that I'm trying to like, exploit to get ahead. Like, that's probably the whole problem. It's probably your environment that makes you feel that you need to put like, iron bars on your mental health to make it resilient enough to that toxic environment. Very rarely in the discussion of optimising your mental health is there an acknowledgement that it's maybe the social structures that are grinding you down and that those social structures are unjust and we need to find other people who agree with us that they're unjust and work together to change them. And so I do think this is very much a kind of like, capitalist commercial co-option of a lot of these ideas. And unfortunately, I think even some of the best intentioned people get their ideas co-opted into this kind of stuff. Bob Edmonds, who was one of the progenitors of the academic research on gratitude, he's a very Christian person as I understand it. And I suspect that he wouldn't like a lot of the ways that people use gratitude today, but he can't just go up to all the TikTok people talking about it and say, "Hey, that's not what I meant." 


W: We had a conversation about happiness in a previous podcast with William Tove from Singapore Management University. And we were talking about how in certain cultural contexts, being happy in inverted commas, means fulfilling a role within your specific cultural context. And so for somebody in a Western society, that might be a more individualistic self-driven approach. Whereas within a, he was talking particularly about East Asian contexts, that would be potentially more like recognising your role and actually not being too individualistic because you'd distract from that and therefore it impacts your happiness. And I guess it's an interesting balancing act, isn't there, between on the one hand, not wanting to be too bound to cultural expectations and cultural norms in so far as that impacts your happiness, but at the same time, not be so individualistic that you're completely rejecting what cultural norms are around you, because doing so might make other people feel quite unhappy and therefore, and also have a reflection back on you to feel, because it feels like a bit of a balancing act there.


M: It is a balancing act and quite a difficult one. I think there are some times where we do need to compromise on ourselves and take a hit in order for other people around us to have a better time. I think one thing that's really pernicious about contemporary Western culture is the sort of hierarchical competitiveness of it. And the ‘hack yourself to perfection’ stuff is part of that. It's about being better than other people and that alienates us from each other in ways that are very unhelpful. And I think it's quite different to what a lot of athletes do, but maybe I'm a bit culturally biased here. So like in Australian Rules Football, no matter how great a game you played, at the end if someone says, "mate, you played that so well," you've immediately got to deflect and say, "no, like I couldn't have done it without the boys and everyone was playing great." We do have quite a flat egalitarian culture back home, and I think it really comes up through the sporting culture as well, that as much as you are celebrated for being really good at particular sports, you're always expected to acknowledge the role that your teammates or your coaches or the fans or the crowd or whoever had in that achievement. And I think that's something that we can work on getting back to a bit in the West, is thinking about success and achievement and these kind of things, as things worth celebrating, it's hard to do good things and it's hard to encourage people to achieve really amazing feats if they don't get any payoffs and if no one cheers for them at the end. But to encourage people to think of that as something that we have achieved and I'm just the vehicle for our kind of achievement and everyone's going to celebrate me for that. And that makes it a bit more of a collectivist thing. And maybe one last thing I'd say here is that I really want to heart this point that familiarity needs to be the basis of a lot of these interactions, that we want to live in a society where we just take, we help people, we care for them because we can. It's not actually costly to us and we don't expect reciprocity. We don't expect payback down the line when we need help someone to help us out. And a lot of that is about just helping people who are in your orbit, not because you especially like them or because they share your interests or whatever.


E: Yeah.


M: Just because they're familiar to you.


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E: Mark's book Beyond Happy How to Rethink Happiness and Fine Fulfillment is published by Bedford Square and is available to buy now.


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W: Thank you for listening. As always you can find us on social media @LivelyMinesPod.


E: Make sure you subscribe to Lively Minds wherever you get your podcasts and tune in again next month for another episode.


W: Please note that as always this show does not constitute medical advice and is not a replacement for seeking professional help. You can find signposting to support on our website livelymindspod.com. 


E: Take care and bye for now. 


W: Bye bye.


[wooshing]