This thing that we call happiness has at least three levels or layers that we filter it through when we ask ourselves, "Are we happy? How do I be happier?" This element of contrast with negative experiences seems to be a repeating theme, momenta mori being a negative sort of dark cloud from which we're supposed to see the light and act in the light.

Happiness exists in religious narratives, philosophical narratives, and scientific reality. I can imagine three layers. The first is sensory experience. The reason to take a cold shower, folks, in addition to the fact that it'll save you on your heating bill, is that the warm shower that follows, in fact, that's how I do it, feels so good.

10 times better than it would if you had just gotten into the warm shower, I promise. Same thing about getting out of the cold plunge. There's a lot of debate about these things, but this is just pure sensory experience and contrast of the sort that we're talking about today.

Hunger and then eating a delicious piece of food or eating a not so delicious piece of food, but you're hungry and so it's that much more delicious, okay? Million examples we could spiral towards. So there's sensory experience, there's raw sensory perception and experience from which the contrast creates this thing that we like feel better, aka happiness sort of.

Then there's story, like, "God, last year was a tough year. This year was better." There's also, and I've seen this before, like, "We were killing it for two years and then this year was kind of a meh year." This is not the case, by the way, but I'm very fortunate that the podcast has continued to grow and expand.

But for some people, they're not as happy with their whatever salary this year because even though it's spectacular by somebody else's standards, by their standard, it's down from previous years. So there's the story that we create that has... It's not sensory experience, it's perception based on dopamine and it's perception based on reward and punishment, etc.

And then there's this third layer, which is meaning. Like, you said, yeah, you know, spending time with in-laws, like, okay, every moment of it might not be as awesome as you might like, but there's meaning in spending time with people that are extended family, especially when elders and younger are in the same room.

It's something really... It layers on story to create this sort of other level that we call meaning. And so what I'm realizing is that these are three timescales. So we have the immediate timescale of happiness, we have the kind of intermediate one where we introduce a story, and then we have meaning, which is kind of like this whole picture.

So it seems to me that we need to approach happiness from all three levels, that it's not enough to just be like a dog, which are in the sensory experience, presumably, of happiness. If they tell stories, they don't tell them to us. And if they have meaning, I don't know.

But they seem to like nail the first level. So and there are probably five more. And they probably don't have the capacity to do the other two. So it's not like they're not doing it and kind of missing out. They kind of have brains that don't let them notice they're missing out.

But we unfortunately have brains that would feel like we were really missing out if we just had the sensory experiences, you know, without the good stories. I think you're pointing to this idea that sort of being happy in your life and being happy with your life. The "with your life" part has the kind of medium timescale stories, but also the really big ones, right?

You know, is my life, am I doing anything really meaningful with my life? Am I finding purpose? And so on. The funny thing, though, is to get to that big timescale to find a sense of purpose and stuff like that, sometimes it pays to do stuff at the local level, at the medium and shorter term timescale.

And one of the things researchers have found is that if you're engaging in activities at the short term timescales that kind of fit with your values or what these positive psychologists have often called your strengths, that can be a way to sort of achieve purpose. So what are strengths?

So researchers do this thing where they want to look at like all the valuable things people can do out in the world, right? And so what are the things that you value? And folks like Chris Peterson and colleagues have come up with this list of what they call different character strengths.

And there are things that like, you know, you can actually if you Google online character strengths, you'll get the big list. Often people talk about there being 24, but they're just universally good things like being brave, you know, citizenship, humor, like, you know, social intelligence, love of learning, right?

You know, kind of empathy, fairness, right? These kind of sets of values that we have. People differ in how much they value one or the other, you know? So I could ask you, Andrew, like, what's better, like bravery or humor? Probably both pretty high for you, I would imagine, but like about prudence versus love of learning, I guess.

Yeah, I mean, if I had to pick between bravery and humor, I think bravery is probably more important to me. I see, more humor, yeah. I mean, I love humor, but if I had to pick, it's sort of like, you know, steak and coffee, I'm going steak. Yeah, okay.

Well, the point is we, there are individual differences in this and there are formal tests you can do online. If you Google the VIA character strengths test, you'll see these 24 and you can do one of these very systematic, you know, kind of tests to do it. But really just trying to think about like, what are the values that you value?

And the ones that come to mind as being particularly about you, the ones that you resonate with are what somebody like Chris Peterson would call your signature strengths. They're the ones that when you execute them, you kind of feel like things are meaningful and purposeful and so on. And so the idea is that one recipe for a purposeful life at the local level is trying to engage in behaviors that allow you to use more of these values or strengths.

And one of my favorite pieces of research that looks at both the power of this and how, even though if it seems like that those are hard things to bring in, like you should bring them in more, is some work by this woman, Amy Resninsky, who's a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

And she does these studies on what she calls job crafting, which is a practice where you take your normal job description as whatever your job is and figure out ways that you can infuse your signature strengths into them. You know, so you as a podcaster, if your signature strength was bravery, you could bring in guests that made me feel a little bit intimidating to you, probably like me, I imagine.

Or like you could take on topics that are a little bit harder, right, that kind of push you a little bit, right? If your signature strength was humor, you'd add more company or make more jokes. If it was love of learning, you'd pick topics that like you didn't know anything about, but you kind of dive in, right?

You take whatever your normal job description is and you find a way to build in your strengths. And the reason I love Amy's work so much is that she studies signature strengths not in academics like us who have very flexible jobs or podcasters. She studies signature strengths in hospital janitorial staff workers who are, you know, these are people who are cleaning the linen in a hospital room or mopping the floors and stuff, not a job where you think there's lots of flexibility or you could build in things like, you know, humor and love of learning and the stuff.

But she finds interestingly that like around a quarter to a third of these janitorial staff workers say that their job is a calling. They love it. They get a lot of purpose from it. And they're the ones that are naturally building in their signature strengths. And she tells in her work, she tells these lovely stories.

This is a story of a janitorial staff worker who worked in a chemotherapy ward. And if you've been unlucky enough to have cancer and had to have chemotherapy or know someone who did, you know that people tend to get really sick because the medicine makes people really nauseous. So a big part of this guy's job was like cleaning up vomit basically.

But he said, you know, my job isn't to clean up vomit. My strengths are like humor and social intelligence. And what I do is I make a joke. This is somebody who's having a really crappy day and I'm going to do something that's going to make them laugh. And if I do that, then I won.

It's not my paycheck. And I guess he had a standard joke, which was like, oh, my God, this is a big pile of vomit. Overtime, like for me. And like, you know, you're laughing. Listener's probably laughing. He's like, that's my job. I talked to another worker who worked in a coma ward.

So this individual couldn't talk to the patients because they're in comas. But her strength was creativity. And so every day she like moved the artwork and the plants around, you know, just kind of created some changes. And she thought maybe that would pop people out of their coma. I don't know if that's medically plausible.

Probably not. But it doesn't matter to her. She felt like she was executing her creativity. And so the moral of this job crafting work is no matter what your job is, there's probably some room to building some more purpose. If you take some time to think about like what are the strengths, what are the things that get you going?

If you need a tip, you can kind of Google these things. But then how could I infuse that into my normal job description? And there's probably a lot more flexibility than you think. You don't need to quit your job and become a podcaster to like get this flexibility. Whatever you do, there's some window where you can build that in.

That's awesome. Those are awesome stories. I also was just thinking about the janitor cleaning up the vomit, like to like restore some dignity to these people that clearly know they're making a mess and like, you know, humor being the ultimate bridge. And darn it, why'd you make me have to choose between humor and the other thing?

Because humor is so awesome. Sorry, now you're like, "Humor's pretty good. Humor's pretty good." Now I'm rethinking my answer. It's very brave to clean up vomit as well, I think, right? Yeah. I mean, you bring humor to a place where, you know, some people might presume humor's not allowed, but goodness.

The signature strengths in the list of, you said 24 of them, where can people learn more about these signature strengths? I think this would be a really powerful exercise and we can always find the link and put it in the show note captions, but is there like a place that people can find this stuff?

The values in action is the viacharacterstrengths.org. So I can share the link and you can stick it in your show notes, but yeah, people can go on there for free and do one of these kind of, you know, formal psychometric tests where you measure your strengths, see what they are.

And it's a fun website too because you get to kind of – they give you some suggestions because some of these, you know, values are like prudence is one of them. It's like, "How do I exercise prudence and love?" You know, these are different things. They also make the suggestion – this is a homework assignment I give in my happiness class of suggesting you do this with a good friend or a romantic partner.

Have each of you do this and find strengths that you share together and then you can go on what researchers call a strength state where, you know, if you both have bravery, then that means you guys should do the – I don't know, the obstacle course or do some really scary hike.

If you both have humor, now you go to a comedy show. If you both love learning, now you go to a museum or something. So you find the thing that's like your convergent strengths and you do something that exercises them. So that means you can use your strengths to get purpose not just in your work but in your leisure too.

I think this is another spot where we get stuff wrong. I think a lot of us have work that tends to use our strengths. We tend to gravitate towards careers, many of us, where we can use our strengths. A lot of folks aren't that lucky. But in our leisure time, we don't often do that so much, right?

Often our leisure time is like plop down, watch Netflix where a lot of folks like – if you think about how you can build your strengths into your leisure time, it gets even more exciting. So you're talking about working with your hands and doing all this stuff like build the bravery and the humor into that somehow and now you get your leisure time doing double duty for giving you a sense of purpose and meaning too.