Mark Fabian — Rethinking Happiness, Wellbeing, and the Power of Public Policy

[00:00:00] What if happiness wasn't simply a personal pursuit, but a collective responsibility, shaped by the policies, institutions, and communities in which we build? Drawing on Gallup's world-polled data from more than 160 countries, it consistently reveals from the World Happiness Report,

[00:00:26] it consistently ranks Nordic nations as some of the happiest in the world, highlighting the importance of social trust, accountability, strong public services, economic security, and supportive communities.

[00:00:48] Meanwhile, the global wellness economy reached $6.8 trillion in 2024, representing approximately 6.21% of global GDP, and it's expected to grow to approximately $9.8 trillion by 2029, according to the Global Wellness Institute.

[00:01:16] These developments raise a compelling question if happiness and well-being are increasingly becoming important measures of societal progress. How can governments, organizations, and individuals move beyond simply measuring happiness to creating the conditions which allow people to flourish?

[00:01:42] Dr. Mark Fabian is an associate professor of public policy at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, an affiliate researcher at the Bennett Institute of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, and an associate at the Institute of Social Change at the University of Tasmania.

[00:02:11] He previously served as a Fulbright Scholar at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C. He's an interdisciplinary researcher, author, and thought leader who has dedicated his academic career to exploring the relationship between human being wellness,

[00:02:36] happiness, happiness, psychology, and the institutions which shape our everyday lives. His research challenges conventional assumptions of what it means to live a quality life, rather than treating happiness as a fleeting emotional state, or an individual achievement.

[00:03:05] Fabian examines how happiness and well-being can be understood, measured, and meaningfully incorporated into public policy decisions. And he joined me this week to tell me more. I'm Kevin McShan. Let's have this conversation.

[00:04:00] Fabian is the author of Beyond Happy. How to rethink happiness and find fulfillment. It's an Amazon bestseller. Exploring psychology, philosophy, and self-help. His academic work focuses on the science of well-being, and how the knowledge can be meaningfully and responsibly incorporated into public policy.

[00:04:29] Therefore, I naturally began my conversation with Fabian by asking him what inspired him to study happiness throughout the course of his career and human flourishing and what it means to live a meaningfully fulfilling and productively happy life. Yeah, sure.

[00:04:57] Yes, I'm an associate professor of public policy in the UK, and so I mostly work on how well-being science, but not just well-being science, like well-being wisdom, so also stuff that we get from folklore, philosophy, religion, all sorts of different domains, can be applied in public policy or can inform how the state operates. But before I got into public policy, I was much more interested in well-being and happiness at the individual level.

[00:05:25] So I had done undergraduate studies in philosophy. I had spent most of my 20s, like, wandering the world, doing all sorts of odd jobs, reading literature, kind of thinking widely about well-being. And I had, yeah, amassed a lot of thoughts on it at that point, and that's what this book that I've written is about, Beyond Happy. It's more about the individual and cultural aspects of well-being and happiness.

[00:05:50] And then I have another book coming out in 2028 that will be more on the public policy elements, but I'm very happy to talk about both today. If you want. Yeah, absolutely. So, Professor, I'm wondering your thoughts on how we can cultivate a more happier society based on the work you've done and the societal climate that we're living in today. What are your thoughts there, my friend?

[00:06:17] So, it's a very big question, and I think there are a lot of angles we could take on it. But maybe as far as what individuals can do and what we can do culturally, so not what we do politically or through the government, I'm very captivated by this idea called metamodernity. A lot of what we experience at the moment is the sense that a lot of the old maps of meaning that we used to use to make sense of life in the world and what's valuable in it and what we all care about, what our shared values are,

[00:06:46] that these maps are kind of dissolving, and they've been dissolving for a very long time. So, we can wind the clock back all the way to kind of the 1700s and the slow decline of agriculture relative to manufacturing and now the services sector. So, small agrarian life around a village gave way to kind of factory life in regional towns. That has now also given way to the metropolis and people working in these huge megacities in services.

[00:07:16] Then we also had the loss of like nationalism and patriotism and these kind of things in World War I. Then we had the loss of like totalitarian ideologies in World War II. Religion has been in steady decline for more than a century. So, all these maps of meaning are gradually dissolving. And postmodernism was the kind of final kick in the teeth. And metamodernism is kind of what comes after postmodernism. And it's characterized in particular by people caring a bit less about rationality

[00:07:44] and the reasons why people do stuff and more about the sentimental reasons for those things. So, the basic idea is just that if you care about something, you have to sort of earnestly care about it. You've got to not try to be cool about it. You just put the things that you care about, the things that you love out into the world. And you say, all right, I'm going to be over here doing these things, whatever it might be. Building matchstick models of the Titanic, playing Warhammer. I don't know, working on your hiking club or something like that.

[00:08:11] And then you invite other people over to join you in whatever it is that you care about, whatever it is that they care about. And you do that thing together. And you invite other people to keep building that thing that you're doing. And I think this is very important in the earnestness and the openness of it. So, it's a very kind of empathetic culture. And it's very contested by cancel culture. So, I would say that as much as there's a lot of kind of animosity and pathos floating around at the moment,

[00:08:39] the main way that we have to respond to that is by going to people and trying to talk to them and seeing if we can find some common ground on which to rebuild our communities. Yeah, absolutely. Professor, I wonder what public policy initiatives from a governmental perspective that you think needs to be better adopted or strengthened in order to, you know,

[00:09:08] cultivate or foster a healthier, happier community. What do you think the government can do from a public policy perspective to cultivate a more happier environment? What are your thoughts there? Another big question. And as I said, I have a whole book coming out on it. But let me just highlight two things. So, the first one is that for the last 40, 50 years or so,

[00:09:34] governments in the rich world have been very focused on economics and economic growth as their kind of overarching objectives. And we have been very reluctant to combat market forces. I think that has had a lot of positive benefits, but we have been inattentive or lacking in attention to psychosocial issues. And part of that is because psychosocial issues are very touchy. They're not usually things that people want the government to get involved in.

[00:10:02] So, things like what brings our community together? What are our shared values? These kind of things. We don't want those prescribed by the government. But that doesn't mean that the way we do public policy, so the kind of things that we fund, for example, can't have an awareness of psychosocial issues. So, for example, through the 80s and 90s, there was a very big emphasis on not helping places that were collapsing.

[00:10:29] So, places that were de-industrializing factories were moving out of. The view was that you shouldn't stop that from happening. What you should instead do is help the people there to move to wherever there is opportunity. That makes a lot of sense from within economic logic, but it's kind of missing the psychosocial picture. So, the jobs that those factories provide also support this kind of wider ecosystem of community organizations,

[00:10:55] of a high street that people walk down, small shops, bars, cafes, whatever, that people participate in, the life of a community. And as these different aspects of the life of a community get peeled away, that community gradually collapses. You get lots of despair settling in. And then we get this so-called politics of discontent where people vote against these kind of issues.

[00:11:19] And it's hard to address that feeling of frustration, resentment and despair with just more economic policy. You now need to start getting involved in a more sociological and psychological way. So, I think that's one of the main things. And there are other things that I could talk about, but I think that's probably the most accessible aspect. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:11:38] And from an economic perspective, how does the psychology of economics and the philosophy that people take when it comes to body, how does that affect our happiness in your opinion, my friend? Well, I guess the main way is, I mean, taking a very broad notion of economics. So, I think some of my colleagues might disagree with me on this.

[00:12:03] But if I interpret economics more in terms of capitalism and more in terms of this kind of ideology that what's good in life is that we grow, that we have more. The problem with this is that really exacerbates or aggravates this natural psychological tendency we have called the hedonic treadmill. So, the hedonic treadmill has two bits. One is that our moods tend to return to a baseline in quite short order.

[00:12:28] So, when you're joyful or depressed, it's very hard to maintain those states. You usually come back to a fairly neutral state quite quickly. The second aspect of the treadmill is that we are capable of or we tend to always notice ways that our life could be slightly better.

[00:12:47] And capitalism, particularly the kind of the form of it culturally that exists in America today, because it's very competitive, it's very hierarchical, it's very material, and it's very like quantitative. So, it's always focusing on things that have more or less. It makes you really prone to social comparisons. So, you're always looking at ways that you could have more, who has more than you, where are you in a hierarchy, something like that.

[00:13:15] And this really aggravates this hedonic treadmill. Whereas what I kind of advocate for in the book is that we've got to make that treadmill a place we want to be. But in order for that to happen, we have to focus more on like qualitative things that we might care about, like the strength of our relationships, what we're doing in our communities, and less on these kind of material quantitative things. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:13:37] You know, Professor, I'm generally curious to ask you, what do you think it means to you to live a meaningfully happy and content life, my friend? What do you think it means to live with happiness and contentment, both from a personal and professional standpoint? What do you think that concept means to you? So, I would say that it's something like wholeness.

[00:14:06] So, your life fits together in a way that is coherent to you. And that fitting together takes many different forms. So, at the kind of individual level, your emotions, your motivations, your values, and your reasons why you do certain things, why you hold certain values, they will make sense together. So, it's not that you're always having positive emotions. Sometimes you will have negative emotions like frustration or stress. But that's because you are engaged in projects that you really care about.

[00:14:36] And in order to achieve in those projects, you have to put in effort. And so, inevitably, you feel frustration and stress. But you will also be doing some things in your life that are really just about pleasure and pleasantness and joy. And you won't do those things so much that they interfere with the things that bring you, say, meaning and purpose or fulfillment. So, all these things will be kind of calibrated in a way that makes sense to you.

[00:15:00] Similarly, stepping out into the social world, you are going to be fraternizing with joining groups, making friends, becoming involved in political movements that also make sense to you. And you'll be able to articulate for yourself why it is that you participate in these groups. And in order to get to this state of wholeness, you have to go through a process of self-actualization. And in the book, I provide a model of how to do that. So, you have to learn how to recognize your emotions and what they're trying to tell you.

[00:15:29] You have to be able to kind of be mindful of your motivations, recognize what you're motivated to do and what you're not motivated to do, what you should be investing more in, this kind of stuff. And then I talk about how to introspect on the feedback you get as you go about your life so that you can make these calibrations until you're living a life where...

[00:15:50] I would say that your kind of week-to-week experience is that your life generates pleasant, fulfilling, and valuable experiences for you on a regular basis. It's got this lovely dynamic to it. Yeah, absolutely. So, Professor, building on what you just said, I'm curious to ask you about the psychology of self-reflection and human behavior.

[00:16:17] So, how do you think a self-reflection can contribute to our happiness as human? What are your thoughts there, my friend? Yeah. I think it's extremely important. It's one of the most fundamental skills for well-being. It goes all the way back to, like, Socrates saying, the unexamined life is not worth living.

[00:16:38] So, it's very important, I think, when you're initially trying to figure out what values might be authentic to you, what sort of life might be right for you, that you are able to turn inwards and you're able to do some internal reflection. It doesn't mean that your peers or your family or your society or whatever have necessarily given you the wrong advice, but you have to get a bit of distance from it so that you can hear yourself. And listening to yourself is very difficult.

[00:17:03] I mean, anyone who's kind of started journaling for the first time will often notice that it's not quite clear what it is that you should be asking yourself, how to understand the words that randomly come out onto the page or whatever. But this is definitely a skill that we can develop. And as we develop this skill, we start to be able to get more information out of our everyday experiences. So, often, I don't know, let's take a simple example.

[00:17:31] You think that I want to get healthy, I want to get fit, so I need to do some exercise. Maybe the best way to do that is to join a club and try to do it socially. And so, you'll join, like, one gym. And maybe that gym will be, like, a real kind of corporate gym and you just won't really like the vibes there. And so, you have to then introspect on that sensation. Why is it that I don't quite like this gym? Why don't I go there as much as I should go there?

[00:17:58] What is good about this environment that I could find somewhere else without the bad stuff? And you might find that you really like lifting weights and you actually kind of like the sort of meathead bros that go to the gym. You don't really like the corporate vibes. And then you might find one of these much minor kind of grungier bodybuilding gyms where people are really dedicated to Schwarzenegger. But a lot of them are like, you know, I don't know, mechanics or whatever, not corporate types.

[00:18:24] And that culture might fit your desire for weightlifting much better. And you can find these kind of environments because you have this ability to self-reflect. Yeah, absolutely. Professor, I know that you've shared your insights with organizations such as the Solo Club and APMG.

[00:18:43] And I'm wondering, because I know your passion lies in sort of breaking down these academic insights into practical knowledge that people can actually use to transform organizational culture. So talk to me about why it's so important for you to break down these complex, you know, academic topics into practical and usable information.

[00:19:12] What are your thoughts there, Rekrit? Well, my main motivation is that I don't like to see people miserable. I want them to be happy. And I think a more selfish motivation is that I think a lot of the kind of misery and emptiness that we have at the center of our lives is contributing to things that are very harmful for other people. So in particular, I think a lot of the environmental breakdown that we are experiencing at the moment with climate change,

[00:19:41] with plastic pollution and with air quality and all these kind of things, this is a function of our overconsumption. Overconsumption is in turn a function of us being empty. A lot of the things that really make a life good are totally immaterial. Being able to cook nice food for yourself, having good relationships, being part of a community that shares your values and performs those values in a ritualistic way.

[00:20:08] These don't require carbon emissions for the most part. A lot of these firms that I'm working with, these are full of very high performing individuals. They really want to do well in life. They are very optimized. But I think they are often optimizing for the wrong goals. They're trying to kind of be a winner, be a success. And that is measured in ways that are, I think, potentially quite toxic for our wider society.

[00:20:34] So I really like to break it down for them to help people who have all this capacity or this privilege or this ability to redirect all that talent and effort that they have to slightly more constructive ends. Yeah, absolutely. And as we've been discussing today, your work explores the relationship between individual well-being and the broader public policies that shape our societies.

[00:21:01] So when we examine the challenges as we've been discussing, like economic inequality, social isolation, and political polarization and pressure and declining institutional trust, what issues are most concerning for you in terms of closing the gap of equality when it comes to, you know, living a happier life?

[00:21:30] And what issues most intrigue you as well? I'm curious to get your answer there, my friend. That's a great question. Thanks. So I suppose the two areas that I think are most important for well-being and happiness from a public policy point of view, one is very old. It's just the securing of basic needs. I think over the last 40 years or so, in many countries, the state has actually retreated

[00:21:56] from a lot of this kind of provisioning and a lot of risk has been passed back to individuals. The easiest place for most Americans to understand this is in healthcare. So the state does not provide healthcare of a particularly resilient, wide-ranging sort. And there's often a lot of administrative burdens associated with getting access to healthcare.

[00:22:18] And that, the sense of anxiety that accompanies that and the kind of crippling financial cost of getting healthcare when you need it, if you're not well-insured, is totally devastating to well-being. So I think just kind of providing basic social safety nets in a way that are not administratively burdensome is very, very important. The second thing that is a bit more new is that I do think that there has been a very concerning

[00:22:46] collapse in social capital over the last 40 years or so, maybe longer. Social capital is the kind of strong and weak ties between people in neighbourhoods, in communities, in countries. Things like bowling clubs, little leagues, parent-teacher associations, church groups, this kind of stuff. And I think it is actually the case that as much as these things in the past were funded through

[00:23:13] voluntary organisations, donations, that sort of thing, the world has fundamentally moved on. And it is the case now that the state is an appropriate vehicle through tax collection to revive a lot of these institutions. And a lot of the things that we want the state to do, like to provide services to homeless people, to reactivate, to help them get back on their feet and re-enter society and re-enter the economy,

[00:23:36] these services are actually much more effectively delivered if we have this social capital infrastructure of community organisations, food banks, church groups and all the rest, through which this policy can multiply its effectiveness. So this is something that we need to pay a lot more attention to. And I think these are the two kind of main policy areas that I would flag for any average person to think about. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:24:02] So, building on that point of view, I'm wondering your message to policymakers about, you know, effectively balancing economic prosperity with emotional and psychological and social well-being. What do you think policymakers need to know about their role in this entire discussion? What are your thoughts there, Professor? So, I'd point to two things. One's a bit kind of nerdy.

[00:24:31] So, I think first, policymakers need to have a richer conception of what a good life is. I think, unfortunately, a lot of our politicians are a very peculiar type of person who is very ambitious, very interested in power, very interested in money. And as a result of that, they have a conception of a good life as kind of winning or being on top of a hierarchy or having power, this kind of stuff. For the average person, that's not really what a good life is.

[00:25:01] But a good life is also more than just being rich. And in fact, we know from the science that above kind of middle class levels of wealth doesn't seem to have that much of an impact on your well-being. So, I would like first for politicians and policymakers in government to have a kind of richer conceptualization of what it means to have a good life. One that focuses on meaning. One that focuses on joy and other positive emotions in life. One that allows people to explore fraternity and community and these kind of things.

[00:25:30] The second thing, and this is what I mean by being a bit nerdier, is that a lot of the administrative architectures of the state at the moment are very tied to single interventions. So, here's one policy to do a particular thing that we're trying to achieve rather than thinking at a systems level about all the many different overlapping policies that we have producing something like childhood obesity.

[00:25:58] And we also tend to hold to account the people delivering these policies in ways that are very objective, monetizable, quantifiable, and observable. So, for example, employment or income, these kind of things. But oftentimes, there are a whole bunch of other psychological dimensions that are determining whether these policies are successful. And we should also add them to the outcomes.

[00:26:25] So, for example, when you are working with homeless people, often they have a lot of quite toxic relationships in their life and a few people who have good intentions for them. And in order to get them to something like employment, which is a very far downstream outcome, you have to help them over the long term disconnect from those toxic relationships and build out those positive relationships that they have.

[00:26:51] This is only something that you can engage with subjectively with that person. It's quite qualitative. So, we've got to take that seriously as well. We've got to change the way we manage and administer public programs. Yeah, absolutely. Professor, I don't need to tell you that education has an extraordinary influence on the way that individuals develop their identities and understand the world and contribute to society.

[00:27:18] So, how do you believe the relationship between education, leadership, and human flourishing has evolved in today's, you know, complex world, my friend? What do you want people to know? And what are your thoughts in that regard, my friend?

[00:27:37] So, I think this is a very important question that's really being turbocharged by artificial intelligence at the moment where a lot of people are feeling quite demoralized about the whole idea of getting educated because they feel like the bots are just kind of smarter than they will ever be. And I think this is a bit of a slight misguided attitude. And I would flag two things.

[00:28:00] So, one is that in a job market or a labor market dominated by artificial intelligence, it is going to be so important to have a craft. So, something that you are genuinely an expert in, that you care about, where you've done the work, you've built a deep knowledge base. And the only way to get to that level of craft is to follow your intrinsic motivation.

[00:28:22] So, you need to find something that you are just spontaneously interested in for its own sake, something where you wake up in the morning and you don't need any incentivization to go and do. Discovering your intrinsic motivations, your personal strengths, these are things that educational systems are capable of teaching people how to do. At the moment, I think we focus a little bit too much.

[00:28:46] This is an important focus, but a little bit too much on just like giving people skills that the workforce wants. And we don't think enough about giving people the skills that those people want and helping them to discover what those skills might be. So, that's the first point I make. Intrinsic motivation is king. The second point I'd make is that, again, related to AI, but more generally, there are skills that you need to prosper in life, to flourish in life, that are independent of the skills you need for the workforce.

[00:29:15] At the moment, I think education prepares people a bit too much for work rather than for life. So, we can also teach people interpersonal skills. We can teach people mindfulness, metacognition, how to manage your emotions, how to be aware of your emotions. We can teach people conflict resolution, all these kinds of things that social media has undermined quite badly.

[00:29:37] All these things that are relational, that are very human in that regard and something that is always going to be difficult to do synthetically. So, I think these are very important in a future dominated by artificial intelligence, but also in futures where we have a lot of wealth and now we need to use that wealth to have a good life. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:29:58] Since you've run it up, I'm curious to ask you about your perspective on how do you think social media has influenced our ability to be a more human society? How has it affected our humanity and how we treat people? I think this is a very difficult question because social media is quite heterogeneous.

[00:30:28] There's a lot of variety in it. I think Reddit is a very different platform from Twitter. And Twitter today, which is a kind of fascist cooker, is very different from Twitter six, seven years ago, where there were much more kind of small nerd communities on it specializing in certain things of interest. I would say broadly, I think social media has been bad for our ability to relate to each other. The anonymity is not good.

[00:30:55] Generally, the tendency of a lot of these platforms to build casino-like structures in with the doom scrolling has also been very bad for our cognition, bad for our attention spans, bad for getting deeply immersed in something and really thinking it through carefully. So, reading books is better than reading things on TikTok.

[00:31:22] TikTok is particularly, I think, terrible for cognition and we're really worried about what it's doing to the youth. As educators, we often notice that attention spans seem to be deteriorating and there does seem to be a correlation between that and social media. But I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater in the sense that I think online spaces where people are able to interact can be extremely beneficial for people's well-being.

[00:31:47] I'm thinking especially of kind of marginalized groups like people of trans identities. They are able to find a community online that they would never would be able to find in person. And to take a more benign example, like I used to be part of a kind of miniature wargaming group and it was a national group in Australia. And we got together once a year for a big tournament. But otherwise, the community was very fragmented into little groups of four or five players. And the only way we could stay in contact was through social media. So it can have benefits.

[00:32:16] But I think on balance, I'm inclined to think it's been bad. Yeah, absolutely. You know, Professor, I wanted to ask you about the role society plays in this entire discussion. Because, you know, society often encourages us to pursue habit as though it was a permanent emotional destination.

[00:32:43] Rather, yeah, human emotions are constantly changing, as you know, and are even difficult to experiences to contribute to a meaningful life. You know, so I'm curious, how do you and how can individuals develop a healthier relationship with their emotions? And what role do you think emotional resilience and self-awareness plays in that goal?

[00:33:13] What are your thoughts there, my friend? I love this question. The first thing I'd note is just that we have a tendency, and I have it too, to talk about emotions as positive or negative. I think that's quite dangerous. We want to think about whether our emotional response is a normal response to something. So grief, for example, when a loved one dies, is totally normal. And I don't think it's abnormal to be grieving weeks or months after something terrible has happened.

[00:33:43] I remember a friend of mine separated from her partner against her desire years ago. And yeah, she was really rocked by that for more than a year. But you could see the adaptation going on. You could see the work that she was doing gradually. And she would cry quite a lot. But the crying was part of the processing of that emotion. It was a totally normal and healthy response, not negative, not pathological, not disordered.

[00:34:08] So we need to be careful about trying to eradicate these negative things and only have the positive. That's not a good attitude. The second thing I'd say is that, yeah, we definitely shouldn't think of happiness in particular or joy, these kind of things as a goal. Because of that hedonic treadmill that I mentioned earlier, it's just not possible to be happy all the time. What you instead want to do is think of your emotions as information. So they are giving you all sorts of signal, all sorts of feedback as you go and do things.

[00:34:38] So if you do something expecting that it will bring you joy and it doesn't, then that is a really important bit of feedback. And you need to unpack the emotions that you are feeling because that will help you to organize your life, to recalibrate it in a way that you get the emotions you expect from the things that you do. Sometimes you will do things not expecting joy. Sometimes you will do things expecting pain, like, I don't know, when you run a marathon or something. But maybe at the end of the marathon, you feel a sense of achievement.

[00:35:07] You feel a sense that this, like you've proved something to yourself. These are also very powerful emotions that we can think about the role that they play in how we perceive ourselves and how we organize our life. So the short answer to your question is, emotion is information. Use it to organize your life such that it generates good experiences for you. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:35:29] And, you know, one of the most compelling arguments surrounding the self-help industry is the promise that small and effortless changes can produce extraordinary results.

[00:35:41] And I know that you challenge that narrative, suggesting that our desire for simple solution often overlooks the complexities of, you know, commercially appealing and what, you know, those messages can tell us about a broader way on providing our own self-support.

[00:36:09] So I'm wondering if you can dive into that and why you challenge that narrative specifically, my friend. Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure. So, yeah, small changes, big transformations, these kind of taglines are very common at the moment. And I don't think it's a mystery why these things are popular. If you could really revolutionize your life with small and especially low effort things, then that would be amazing. But I think this is basically, this is a myth.

[00:36:38] If someone is selling you magic beans here, you can make small changes, small changes compounding over time, making many, many small changes will eventually add up to quite a big change. But even small changes, I would say, usually take quite a lot of effort. And they're usually not something that can even be distilled down into a simple piece of advice.

[00:37:03] I'm very puzzled by some things that are like take a shower before bed or get sunshine for 10 minutes a day. Make sure you stand up from your desk at work, this kind of stuff. These sort of tips, which are very small. I think if your life is organized in a way where you don't get sunshine, you're blue lighting yourself to answer your emails before bedtime. You don't stand up from your desk at all at work. These kind of things.

[00:37:31] And I feel like maybe there's something really fundamentally off about your life. And maybe it's not a hack that you need. Maybe it's some deeper structural reorganization of what's going on. I think what usually is the case is that it takes a lot of effort to even make a small change because we are usually quite stuck in our ways. Habits are hard to change. We need reasons to change them. We need to have emotions that reinforce that the change we have made is positive.

[00:38:01] And often we need to work through what's called our introjected motivation. So it's not a particularly strong form of motivation. We value something that is contingent on the change we've made. So we want to get healthy, so we exercise. But we don't actually like exercising. We just like being healthy. These kind of situations, this is a very difficult form of motivation to maintain.

[00:38:24] So yeah, I would say that the truth of the matter is actually that you need to work hard to make small changes and they won't be transformative. But if, in the words of Nietzsche, you persist in the same direction for a long time, then you will produce something of great value. So it's mostly about maintaining the course. And for that, you need to be very attentive to motivation. Yeah, absolutely.

[00:38:49] Professor, I don't know how your research challenges linear models of well-being and examines well-being as a complex system, including the limitations of separating our intrinsic value from, you know, instrumental values.

[00:39:08] So for listeners that are unfamiliar with these philosophical and scientific distinctives, how would you explain the idea of well-being as a, you know, a complex sort of system? What do you think people need to know about that perspective, my friend? This is a very technical question. So I'll try to keep it as accessible as I can.

[00:39:37] But yeah, the basic idea is that philosophers, especially for a long time, have been trying to really narrow down what well-being is. Is it pleasure? Is it having your preferences satisfied? Is it living in accordance with your nature? Is it fulfilling your values? These kind of quite specific things. And what I would argue is that if you take a step back from any of these definitions of well-being and think about how you get that well-being, then you start to notice that all these things are interlinked.

[00:40:07] And that whatever part of well-being you are looking at, you're going to get a slightly different impression of what well-being is. But if you take a look at the whole picture, you can see that a lot of these things overlap with each other. And that's this complex systems perspective. So, for example, in order to figure out what values you should be maximizing in order to feel good about your personal well-being, you need to find out what things bring you pleasure.

[00:40:34] So, almost inevitably, in trying to organize your life for pleasure, you are also going to organize it for satisfying your appropriate values. In trying to organize it for that, you are also almost inevitably going to have to figure out who you are authentically, what things you care about, because that's where you're going to find your values. So, here I'm talking about the hedonist, Aristotelian, and values fulfillment theories of well-being. They all overlap.

[00:41:01] So, what I mentioned earlier about wholeness and that life is about bringing all these different things together in a way that is coherent for you, that's the complex systems view of well-being. You have individual-level complex systems with your psychology that interacts with external systems where you have your relationships, your community, and that interacts then with environmental systems, the political economy, the socio-economy, your prevailing culture. All these things have to be brought together in a way that is nice and coherent for you.

[00:41:32] Yeah, absolutely. Professor, we're living in uncertain and socially divisive times. And I'm wondering your message to when we talk about healing the societal divisions and coming up with a more hopeful sort of outlook or hopeful in terms of, you know, gratitude practices.

[00:41:58] What is your message to people about finding happiness through social uncertainty and societal time of division? I'm wondering your thoughts there, my friend. It's a great question. Let me answer a bit artistically. So, there is an African-American rapper called Joyner Lucas. He's quite, you know, renowned but not that well-known.

[00:42:26] He has a song called I'm Not Racist, which is an attempt to kind of appeal to across the various divides at the moment in a lot of these very acrimonious aspects of our contemporary culture. And a lot of what is represented, particularly in the music video of that song, is people who might be inclined to see each other as villains, see each other as just impossible to talk to,

[00:42:56] trying to sit down and listen. And I think that's really the key thing is the listening. There is too much of a discussion always in our society of free speech. And free speech is usually in a system where we have inequalities of power about people with power yelling at people who don't have power in one form or another. This is not a way to heal anything.

[00:43:21] I think if you instead focus on listening and in particularly on creating environments that are conducive to listening, where people speak softly, where people have time to articulate the nuances of what they're talking about, where people are able to be vulnerable, but also where people are able to kind of vent their trauma and have people... And trauma is a strong word, but I mean like vent all the things that have hurt them in their life and have people not react defensively.

[00:43:51] Often when someone is venting their hurt at you, there's a tendency for you to treat that as a critique, to be like this person is attacking me personally. But instead what we need to do to heal is to give everyone an opportunity to vent that hurt, be heard, for people in that space to take accountability for that hurt. Maybe not immediately, but I think often the problem is that we want them to take accountability straight away, to capitulate straight away.

[00:44:16] But instead if we have this kind of conversation, if we are able to listen to each other and have dialogue, then we will have authentic connection. Authentic connection is a joyous experience. It is visceral, palpable, it feels very real. That then leads to hope, optimism, the sense that, okay, we can do this together. I think that's where we need to begin with listening. Yeah, absolutely. And Professor, you know, I've got two questions left for you.

[00:44:44] And the first of those two questions is this. I'm interested in your perspective on resilience as it relates to diversity and inclusion. You know, Professor, as I infer this question, I'll use myself as an example. So, Professor, I was born with a spastic quadruplegic cerebral palsy.

[00:45:07] And I found out at the age of nine that I wouldn't be able to walk for the duration of my life without assistance because of the severity of my disability. And I've often been championed for my level of resilience and getting through life. And I'm wondering your thoughts on the relationship between resilience, inclusion, and diversity of perspective.

[00:45:35] What are your thoughts there, Brett? It's a great question. So, I think one thing here that is often dealt with, I think maybe not as well as it could be, is the balance between when the environment or structural factors make someone's life difficult or impossible. So, in the case of disability, there is a long tradition of the social model of disability,

[00:46:04] that it's not that individuals are disabled. It's that society disables them. So, for example, if we have wheelchair users in our society, and as in London where I live, a lot of the shops are extremely small, very narrow aisles, everything's stacked, you can't navigate a wheelchair through that space, then you are disabled by that space. So, this is a structural feature of the world.

[00:46:30] And often, I think very reasonably, people are talking about the need to dismantle these structures, these environmental causes of oppression, marginalization, stigma, whatever it might be. Then you have this kind of opposite perspective that everything is about the individual, that if the individual is resilient, if the individual is gung-ho, if the individual pulls themselves up by their bootstraps, this kind of thing, then anyone can thrive, even in a society, even in an environment that's very kind of not conducive to their well-being.

[00:46:59] And I think we can balance these two things. So, you need to be resilient in order to fight for structures that are better conducive to your flourishing. And I think we can, yeah, kind of reframe this focus on the individual in terms of, yeah, the environment is crushing you. That's true. And we should convince other people that it's often environmental things. But in order to really kind of go into that battle,

[00:47:27] you need to have some of these individual qualities like resilience. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, Professor, my final question requires you to, you know, self-reflect on your own life because, you know, I'm interested in learning about how you define your life and your language, my friend, because I believe that we're all given a compass in life,

[00:47:54] and we have to point it in the direction that we want it to go. So, when you look at your life, your legacy and career, my friend, how do you want that to be defined from a personal and professional perspective? Professionally, I hope that my work does get people to think more into in this complexity perspective on well-being. I also hope that I kind of make some really meaningful contributions to well-being public policy,

[00:48:23] which I do think is the kind of next wave of the state. So, we had the welfare state. We had neoliberalism. I feel like these are both a bit played out. It's now time to have the well-being state, as I call it, and I hope I make a meaningful contribution to that. On a personal level, the three values that are kind of closest to my heart are honesty, accountability, and integrity. And I hope that at the end of my life, I can say, and people say about me,

[00:48:53] that these were values that Mark lived. So, like, honesty, that you're not lying, especially to yourself, about why it is that you do things or your weaknesses and this sort of stuff. Accountability. So, when you do say something that was bad or when you screw up in some way, that you own it, that you apologize, which is very, very difficult, and that you try to make amends. And then integrity is kind of related to all that,

[00:49:21] but especially that if you have certain values, that you really live those values. If you say that you don't like trash in the street, then when you see trash, you've got to pick it up. If you say that people should do more about climate change, then one of the things you should be doing is taking more trains and flying less and driving the car less and getting your bike out more and this kind of stuff, eating less beef. So, yeah, I think those are the three main personal values that I have, and they're quite important to me.

[00:49:50] Yeah, and just because you sparked something that caused me to think of another question, I wanted to ask you about your closing message to the audience today about our collective responsibility to be socially conscious about the humanity of ourselves, the humanity and how we treat others.

[00:50:17] So what's your closing message about being socially conscious about the prospect of humanity in the world that we're living in today? What a lovely question. Let me hold it up. So in this book that I've written, Beyond Happy, the two messages of the book that I hope people take away is that well-being is something we do together. It's not something that you can achieve on your own.

[00:50:46] And that the kind of highest levels of well-being and happiness are only attainable if you live a values-first life. You have to think about what it is that you care about, and you have to organize your life around that. And it doesn't need to be peace in the Middle East or whatever. Like maybe what you care about is something quite mundane, like making really good biscuits. You can go and work for a biscuit company. You can make sure that they make better biscuits. You might work for something totally different.

[00:51:14] You might be working for a company that sells tires or something. You don't really care about it. You're doing it to provide for your family. But you can still think about how you generate a better workplace environment for your colleagues, whether your supply chains are free of environmental destruction or animal cruelty, this kind of stuff. You've got to live a values-first life. And that then comes back around to doing well-being together. So we have to find people that share these values. We have to convince people that these values are things that are worth caring about.

[00:51:43] And so, yeah, find your values, find your people. Go out and live that values-first life. Yeah, absolutely. And finally, Professor, tell me if people want to get the book or contact you personally, what's the best way they can do that? So the book should be available internationally through Amazon. In the States, it comes out on December 8th, and you can get it kind of anywhere, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, all the big bookstores should have it.

[00:52:12] If you want to contact me, the two best places are probably my Substack. So profmarkfabian.substack.com. That's my blog. I post there quite regularly every couple of weeks. I also have a podcast, a podstomology, which is young academics talking about their work. And then LinkedIn and Blue Sky I'm also quite active on. But that's kind of more my shower thoughts. So there's quite a lot of academic commentary for other academics.

[00:52:39] But you might also get some value out of it for my other things that I post. Well, fabulous. You know, I really enjoyed this conversation about humanity, happiness, and becoming a more happier and content society. I want to applaud for the work that you've done and will continue to do to cultivate a more happier society.

[00:53:05] And I want to thank you for being here and engaging in conversation, Professor. It's most appreciated. Thanks, Kevin. I really, it's great that you're running this show, and thanks for the opportunity. Thank you.