S1: The Happiness Equation- How a Friend’s Suicide Propelled Neil Pasricha Toward a Happier Life(Stories of Suicide & Loss)

Neil Pasricha’s life is falling apart. His marriage, which gave him a sense of purpose and value, is over. His best friend has died by suicide. Therapy helps, but he still struggles with all of the negativity swirling in his head. So Neil does what a lot of people did in the mid-aughts: He starts a blog — a blog about awesome things that make him happy. 

Right now, a lot of us rely on the internet and social media for connection and instead find the exact opposite. If that’s you (and it probably is), this episode is for you. 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

---

I’m Nora McInerny, and this is Terrible Thanks for Asking.

And today we’re talking about a hot new topic that’s sweeping the nation. It’s called the Internet.

On a good Internet day, I’ll tell you about how a complete stranger reached out to me to say that they saw a still-kicking shirt on their vet tech, who turned out to be my cousin. And isn’t that marvelous? It is.

On a good Internet day, I’ll tell you about the Hot Young Widows Club and how a group of thousands of widows convenes in our own little corner of the Internet for mutual support.

And on a bad Internet day, I will tell you that I’m on a mission to get to the very source of the Internet and pull the plug because it’s a garbage place for garbage people. What can I say? I’m the human Fox News, fair and balanced, baby.

The Internet is neither the best nor the worst. It’s just a thing, a huge, inextricable part of our lives that affects how we connect with each other, how we do our jobs, how we present ourselves to people, how we see ourselves.

Without the Internet, I would have to record this podcast on CDs and mail them to you, like it’s 1999 and I’m offering you 60 minutes of America Online. The Pew Research Center says that today 9 out of 10 Americans use the Internet.

The tenth one, that’s my uncle Denny, who’s an angel and types postcards to me on his typewriter. He also writes books on a typewriter. He does not use the Internet.

Nobody show it to him. But as we also know, the Internet is not all rainbows and sunshine. The Internet can also be a huge source of stress and anxiety for a lot of us.

It can distract from real life. It can mess with our work-life balance. It can cause us to compare ourselves to our peers and people we don’t even know.

But that’s the Internet now. To start our story, we’re going back to the Internet of 1995. Not just in 1995, we’re in Canada, where Neil is a junior in high school, and Neil is about to take a class field trip.

One of our science teachers offered to take us down to the Ontario Science Centre in downtown Toronto and check out the new exhibit, which was The Internet.

Full page ads printed in the newspaper were advertising the fact that the Internet, the thing that you’ve heard about, the information superb highway, you could go visit yourself. We went down on a school bus.

I took a school bus to visit the Internet. When we got there, my friends and I, we were just so curious. We were like, we’re interested in the character Casey on Baywatch.

I wonder what she’s up to. So we had this dream of like, we’ll go over to this website we’ve heard of called yahoo.com. We’ll type in Casey from Baywatch, played by Pamela Anderson, and just do some research.

Just kind of check out what she’s all about. Well, it took us the entire three hours that we had there to A, wait for a plastic yellow chair to actually sit down, and B, type in the word www.yahoo.com.

And then another, I’m not kidding, half an hour for the things to start to load, and then the page was just overwhelming. We didn’t know what to do. We started clicking links, and we had to go home.

We accomplished no swimsuit model research that day, but our young, fertile adolescent brains were struck with the possibility that we one day could.

For our younger listeners who may think of Baywatch as a movie featuring Dwayne The Rock Johnson and Zac Efron, no, no, no, it was initially a TV show featuring David Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson, who truly was the most glamorous, sexy person I had

ever seen and maybe still holds that title. Fun fact, like Neil, she’s also Canadian.

But shifting from my deep knowledge of 90s TV that I wasn’t even allowed to watch, but for sure snuck in when my parents weren’t paying attention, there’s an important thing that Neil said about what the internet represents for him. Possibility.

Not just the possibility to see what information you can find about hot actresses, although do not check my search history, but the sheer possibility that a kid in Canada could connect with a world bigger than himself. That’s how Neil feels.

You could look anywhere. I mean, it was the idea that you could research anything, in any way, anything you wanted at any time was staggering and overwhelming.

And so my friends and I, six other nerdy males in 11th grade, we put together a little conspiracy. We all want to beg our parents to get the Internet at home, whether that’s at Comprac Presario or dialing into AOL or Prodigy. So over time, we do.

And the Internet in those early days included a bunch of words that I actually haven’t thought of or used for a really long time, like Trumpet Windsock, Yadora Mail, local BBSs.

I mean, it’s kind of like before the sort of World Wide Web and the browser thing. So we would dial into a local BBS in an attempt to research what Casey from Baywatch was up to.

And the very first thing I remember was the fact that a friend of mine and I passed the point in the evening where we were allowed to talk on the phone, of course, one family phone and one family place.

And we connected over a box on a screen where I could say, hi, Scott. And he would say, Neil, is that you? I’m like, yeah, it’s me.

What are you doing? He’s like, I’m sitting in my room. I’m on the computer.

What about you? I’m like, I’m also on the computer right now. And what was hilarious was just the idea that we could talk and it wasn’t on the phone.

That’s where Neil starts, just talking with his friends, not on the phone, not face to face, but on the computer after they were supposed to be in bed.

We would just talk about whatever we talk about on the walk home from school, but we could do it in a new place.

That was outside of the controls and the eyes of our parents. So it created like a little new lunchroom hangout place. I think in 12th grade, I was invited to go on a week long enrichment camp to a local university.

I signed up at the opportunity. I sat in the backseat of Miss Hills like Toyota Camry in grade 12 between two girls with pointy hip bones, and they signed up for German and philosophy, and I signed up for how to make a website.

So I spent the whole week learning basic HTML and JavaScript, creating my own first website. I called it Neil’s Haven of HTML and JavaScript.

It was a page where I would have tiny little JavaScript images like the precursor to the gifts everyone texts to each other now, but it was like a little bouncing ball, a constantly winking smiley face, and my website was meant to, you can tell I had

a deep desire to teach stuff to the world. So I was like, you could just copy this code and then you could have a perpetually bouncing ball or a perpetually winking smiley face on your website. Why do I tell you that story?

Because when I got back to Sinclair Secondary School in my high school, we had one computer in the entire school with the Internet on it, and I could type in a series of backslashes and tildes like some bizarre URL, and what would load up was Neil’s

Haven of HTML and JavaScript. I remember being struck by the fact that I made this like two hours down the road, and here it was live. Then I noticed on the side, there was a little stats counter, and the stats counter said something like 158.

My friends were all like, what’s that? I’m like, I think that means 158 people, perhaps some people in the middle of the Congo. I’m picturing like a small community of schoolchildren in rural Afghanistan.

People, worldly people from around the whole world were like dialing into my website as a way to like expand everyone’s thinking on how to build their own website.

It took me some time to realize that the 158 clicks were probably just me, like while building my website over at the university.

Like, I don’t know if it registered that that was kind of just, who was going to, no one could even find the thing if they wanted to. It’s just a bunch of tildes and backslashes not connected to any other thing.

But the high I got from that 100 hits was incredible.

The idea that you could make something and show it to the world, or the idea that someone around the world can make something and show it to you, I found that and I still find that in some sense, intoxicating.

That, the intoxicating feeling of the internet, I wanna hang out with that feeling for a little bit.

My friend who I met once, Erin Walsh, is a speaker about kids and technology, but anytime you’re talking about kids and technology, the same shit applies to adults because we’re just kids in more restrictive clothing.

Erin says technology isn’t good or bad, it’s powerful. The power being the reaction it gives us, because oh my god, it feels good to be liked. It feels good to make things that get 150 hits.

Actually now, if something I made got 150 hits, I would cry my face off and be convinced I’m a huge failure, but it feels good to make a thing and have it seen, have it be recognized.

Now, this is the early days of Internet, so Neil doesn’t have Instagram likes and notifications, but he does have a hit counter that tells him how many times his website has been viewed.

And every time that number increases, his brain releases a little bit of dopamine. That’s the neurotransmitter chemical our brains release when we eat, or have sex, or have good social interactions.

It rewards us for behaviors by making us feel good, which makes us want to repeat them. So duh, it feels amazing to be Neil right now. It’s instant gratification and that is personally the only kind of gratification I’m interested in.

You call them, you know, hits or visits to your website, but there is an interesting origin to the idea that traffic was originally measured in hits, because that’s what you got from it, a hit.

Oh, yeah.

I wanted to be loved, to be praised, to be liked, to be crowdsourced into the stratosphere.

You know, I just wanted to have that love and attention. I guess for me and my friends, the idea was that we could all be little kings.

That’s hard to do when you’re just a bunch of geeky kids in Canada, or a kid anywhere, I guess.

But Neil and his friends are hooked on that feeling of being little kings, of building their little online kingdoms where 158 people could visit any website they made.

So in the late 90s, my friends and I, we were like, well, how do we get more hits? How do we get more traffic? And so my friend Chad was like, hey, I know, let’s start a website.

And so him and I started a website, we call it WIWAK, W-I-W-A-K. It stands for when I was a kid. The idea, because we were now old 17 year olds, we would post things that we believed were true when we were kids.

So we’d write about like, I thought that little thing hanging down the back of everyone’s throat was like to separate food and drink, as if you had like different compartments in your stomach, like the way that you have bins under the sink.

And only one person ever submitted one, and it was my sister. And she said she used to think that all dogs were boys and all cats were girls.

A lot of people think that she’s not alone. Neil and his friends start all kinds of websites that nobody visits but them. But that doesn’t seem to stifle their sense of possibility.

They thrive on ideas, their little idea factories. In their last year of high school, they have the idea for something that will change everything. They have the idea for YouTube.

My friend Rob is in like a garage band, you know what I mean?

He’s like, I don’t want to get paid money from like a percentage of the bar at the local like, you know, the local town pub. Why don’t I just upload my music for free on the internet?

Someone watches an advertisement and then they can download it for free. I’m paid from the advertiser and the advertiser’s paying to have somebody watch their ad. We were like, brilliant, brilliant.

This is a fantastic concept. You just have someone watch an ad and then the music is free.

There’s just one problem, a small problem, teeny, minuscule, barely even counts.

Well, we realized we knew nothing about programming, approaching advertising firms, talking to companies or bands, like nothing that you would need to do to do that.

So Neil and his friends do not invent YouTube. They go to college at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and the area around their campus is like a lot of campus neighborhoods. It’s kind of crappy.

It was like the series of dilapidated houses run by a famous slumlord, Oligopoly, and everybody was always complaining about their houses.

My house is tippy and no one ever fixed my sink.

Neil and his friends made a website where students could review their houses. It was a hit because apparently everyone wanted to complain about their crappy college house.

People were like, oh, cool, like read about 258 Albert Street. My fridge is attached by Velcro and no one swept the floor in two years. There’s a raccoon living in my friend’s bed.

It was like whatever it was. But then it got so popular that the Queen’s University student government bought it from us for $1,000 or five of us that made the website. We got $200, which at the time was like dinner for a month.

Neil makes that cool $200 and he keeps making blogs and websites that nobody really cares about.

He’s also doing all the real life stuff that gives him purpose and a sense of value. He graduates from college, he gets his first job. He ends up quitting just before he’s fired, which feels awful.

He and his dad start a restaurant, which eventually gets sold. He meets a woman just as he’s getting into grad school and they have a long distance relationship while he goes off to the US to study at Harvard. Ever heard of it?

I won’t make a joke like that ever again because when I did it about Princeton, I got several terse emails from people who have not heard a joke or don’t like jokes about Princeton. Neil is now all grown up.

He and his girlfriend get married in between his two years at grad school. He graduates and gets a really great job at a great big company doing great big important stuff. His life is really, really great.

He’s married. He has zero websites, zero internet hits, and he feels content, happy.

I’m in charge of something called leadership development, which is just training people on how to be leaders. We buy a house. We’re talking about starting a family.

I’m keeping in touch regularly with my best friend, Chris, who is my best friend from business school. We talk every couple of days. And, you know, when things in life go the way you want them to, you call it like planning.

And when things in life go the way you don’t, you call it change.

And with that, we’re going to change into some ads.
We’re back, and Neil is living a good life with all the components that society told him are necessary. Not a successful blog, who cares about that? He has zero hits as far as the internet goes, but he has a marriage, a house, a career.

Every day, he goes to work and helps people develop their leadership potential. He comes home to his lovely wife in their lovely suburban home. By every measure, Neil is killing it.

But one day I drove home from work and my wife was waiting for me on the front porch.

And she was very courageous and she was very honorable and she was very vulnerable. And she said, Neil, I just don’t know if this is going to work.

I don’t feel as though I’m in love with you the way I want to feel for us to keep being married for another 50 years.

She had a lot of tears and she sort of had to summon a lot of courage, but she did so in a way that I look back on and I think it was very respectful. But at the time, I was just in shock because I didn’t anticipate losing my marriage.

Neil is spinning. His marriage, which gave him a sense of purpose and value, is falling apart. Then his best friend, Chris, the one he went to business school with.

One month later, Chris dies by suicide. It was his second attempt after a long struggle with mental illness.

I mentally lost my marriage, my house and my best friend kind of in one swift and violent act, all at the same time.

Two of the most important relationships in Neil’s life have just been severed in different but permanent ways.

Like, I just, I’m so stressed. I’m tossing and turning all night. We’re in that period post deciding to lose the marriage, but before we actually can sell our house and move out.

So we’re living together in a very awkward kind of post marriage, pre-departure, like weird roommate sort of phase in different bedrooms with a lot of tears and sort of awkward pauses and silences. I start losing a lot of weight.

I develop pegs under my eyes. I’m not sleeping very well. And of course, because I’m not sleeping very well, I can’t sleep the next night either.

And the next night either, I get therapist for the first time in my life and I have like a huge mental block to even getting a therapist or seeing a therapist. I’m like, that’s for people with problems. Like I’m like a therapist, really?

But then it fills me with such jubilation after that first conversation, because I’m starting to dump these emotions somewhere that I then start seeing him twice a week.

Therapy helps, but Neil still comes home to his house every night, goes into a different bedroom than his nearly ex-wife, and struggles to fall asleep with all the negative thoughts swirling in his mind.

He’s still deep in grief over the death of his best friend. He doesn’t want to be like this. He doesn’t want to live under the cover of these dark clouds.

He wants to feel something else. Where does he go? What does he do?

What can help him feel good again?

I went to Google, I typed in how to start a blog, and I clicked on Feeling Lucky. And the reason I did that was because it had been a while since I started a website, and I didn’t know where to begin again.

So it took me to a website called wordpress.com, and I clicked a button saying, start a new website in 10 minutes for free.

And I picked the name 1000 Awesome Things because it seemed like a small number, 1000, and Awesome Things was just what I wanted to be thinking about.

The goal for Neil’s website is just to write a simple post every day, to find something good in his dark world and write about it. He can pick anything in this whole entire world. The blog is a countdown, so he’s starting with 1000.

The first post to kick off a list of 1000 things that are awesome. He stretches his fingers, he starts tapping at the keyboard.

And so, that night, I wrote a post called Number 1000, Brockoflower, where I talked about the strange, mutant, hybrid child of nature’s ugliest vegetables, which of course is green cauliflower.

And it wasn’t that funny, and it was kind of sarcastic, but that’s how my mind was. I was not that funny, and I was kind of sarcastic. I was trying to put myself in a good mood, and so Brockoflower came to mind, I wrote about that.

That’s it, that’s the only awesomish thing he can think of.

Brockoflower. But that’s one down, and 999 more to go.

I can distinctly remember doing this. I got home one night from work, and I was like, I better come up with all that, I better come up with this list of every single positive thing I could think of.

And I worked on it for about three hours, I’m not kidding, I was like, what’s another thing that’s positive? Like, what’s another happy thing? And at the end of it, Nora, I had 12, total.

Total, in total, all my brain could come up with in total, like good things in life, a thousand awesome things, was 12, that’s it. And I was like, uh-oh, I’m not going to make it more than two weeks on this blog.

But Neil keeps going, and his expectations are low. Nobody’s going to read this anyway, right?

Well, so here’s the thing that happened. Nobody visited my website. No one knew it existed.

50,000 blogs were started a day. I remember one day, my mom forwarded it to my dad, and my traffic doubled, which was incredible. And then one day, I got like ten hits.

And one day, I was like, wow, tens of hits, this is incredible. Like they must have sent it to my uncle, you know, or my sister.

We’re getting into the double digits here, folks. We’re getting double digits.

Exactly. I was like, well, maybe I can get to 100, just like Neil’s Haven of HTML and JavaScript. This is like going triple digits here.

So the interesting thing that happened is that as I continued to write the 12 that I did have, getting called up to a dinner buffet first at a wedding, you know, flipping to the cold side of the pillow in the middle of the night, or walking by the

like Cinnabun place in the subway station, you know, briefly interrupting the smell of urine with cinnamon buns for like two seconds. A couple of things happened. Number one is I started seeing more of them myself each day.

So the little notes to myself I was keeping on scrap papers would get a little longer at the end of the day instead of having one, I might have two at the end of a day. Friends that I told I was doing this typically had one come to their mind too.

So they’d be like, oh, have you written about waking up and realizing it’s a Saturday? You know, or have you written about hitting a string of green lights when you’re late for work or snow days when you’re a kid? Snow days, you know?

And then I’d come home and be like, snow days, yeah, what’s awesome about snow days?

I’d be like, well, there’s the snow day that’s planned in advance, there’s the snow day where no one thinks it’s going to be a snow day, there’s the snow day of like, you know, they didn’t have time to give you extra homework.

Like, I would start to layer them and texture them, and like, before I knew it, I was spending three hours writing about snow days, and inevitably, what was happening was my brain was just tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny baby step towards thinking

more positive thoughts. And because the website started growing, more and more people started sending me suggestions, leaving thoughts in the comments, and I was coming up with my own.

So over time, the snowball effect happened, and the blog became like some sort of heavy sun in the solar system of my mind, denting my entire thinking patterns and just slowly tilting all my thoughts towards positive things.

In other words, it worked. Neil wrote about awesome things and he started to feel more awesome. Not because he’s getting any external feedback about his blog, but because it’s putting him more in touch with his actual world.

With the things he can see and feel and touch and remember that are good. This blog is for him and him alone.

And then, Nora, it happened. I wrote post number 980. Old Dangerous Playground Equipment.

I wrote that post about a month, a month and a half into my countdown.

And I talked about how slides used to be hot, so you’d like burn the underside of your knee, and you wouldn’t fall into like a padded little, cute little padding outside of the slide.

You’d fall into like a bunch of milk thistles and cigarette butts and like crack your head. And like kids had casts. Remember casts?

You’d like sign someone’s cast, and everyone just has black bags under their eyes. And I was like, it was like a fist to this guy, like proclamation against the like safety alliance, like keeping our kids protected.

And a website called farc.com, fark.com, which I believe builds itself as the sixth most popular social media site on the internet. They posted it on their front page on that Friday afternoon.

At this point, it’s 2008. So if farc.com doesn’t mean anything to you, as you listen to this, you’re not alone. Neil is 2008 viral.

Now nothing in Neil’s real life is any different. He’s still in the midst of a divorce. His best friend is still dead.

His blog is the same as it’s always been. He is still the same, sitting in a cubicle, watching that hit counter surge from two people to hundreds and thousands, and then tens of thousands of people.

And suddenly this dramatic, huge influx of people came. I remember being in my cubicle and like seeing the traffic surge, and I actually had to get up from my desk and like walk to the bathroom and splash cold water on my face.

Cause I was like, I wasn’t having heart palpitations, but like something visceral was happening to my body, where it was just like feeling electric. I was like, oh my God, I’m here.

I am sitting in an office, and yet 50,000 people are watching what I write and then they can see me.

At another point in his life, when his marriage was still intact, when his best friend was still alive, maybe this would have been just a little entertaining for Neil. Maybe it would have been something to laugh about, like the fluke that it was.

But for Neil, it’s intoxicating and invigorating. It’s the ultimate validation. And it’s coming at a time when he really, really needs it.

So think of my life at this time.

I’ve lost 40 pounds just due to stress. I’ve got black raccoon bags under my eyes. I actually go to a local drug store to buy like cream or like cover up from my eyes.

I’m so embarrassed going to work, like looking like I’m not sleeping. I’m just found out I’m going to be getting a divorce. I’m too nervous to tell anyone at work that that’s even happening.

So I’m still like wearing my wedding ring. I don’t want people to like notice I’m not wearing it and ask questions. I’m like, I’m just like all stuck by that.

I’ve just lost my best friend. I’ve got like three contacts in my phone. It’s like my mom, my dad and like one friend or my sister.

I’m like super lonely. I have such low confidence. I feel like a shell of myself in every way.

I feel unlovable. I feel like I’m not good looking. I’m not attractive.

I’m not worthy of love. I’m not someone that people like to be married to because in my sample size of one, it’s a zero, like it’s zero out of one.

A hundred percent of people you married did not want to be married to.

Exactly, exactly. So I’m like, my confidence is like below grade. It’s like zero.

And so getting this huge dopamine hit from this website not only gave me a little uptake on my confidence, it was all my confidence. I had nothing other than that.

So I would come home from work and I would feed everything into this system, this machine. I would get takeout and I would sit from like five or six p.m.

till three in the morning, writing tonight’s post, writing the next day’s post, looking for photos, editing it, answering emails, doing a radio interview. I would do anything for this thing because it was all I had.

Because to feed this machine, to keep getting those hits from the system that rewarded him for that post about dangerous playground equipment that he wrote just to make himself smile, he’s got to figure out what else could get him back up there.

If the internet is a game, he wants to be back on the leaderboard. This is no longer just a silly website meant to help him shift his perspective to see the good things in life, this is.

It’s everything to me. That’s the unfortunate part. And we get sucked in this thing.

And the problem with the internet today, I think, is that you look in, when you peer inside that looking glass, you can’t see out, you know? You actually fall in. We’re Alice’s.

We fall in and we’re like, this is life. We forget that serotonin and oxytocin are only produced from seeing someone you love and giving them a kiss.

And holding hands with your child and going for a walk with your wife or your husband or your partner and giving your mom a call and having lunch with your dad and carrying up that family tradition that you’ve been doing since you were a child and

decorating the tree at Christmas and singing a song or having a family dance party before you go to work and mouthing lyrics to music when the blender is going or whatever it is that is connecting you to your family and to your friends and making

your eyeballs glisten and making your skin just light up with senses and making… All that stuff is pretty much absent, unless you’ve got some USB plug-in that I don’t know about, when you fall into the looking glass. And the looking glass and the

dopamine that you get from that looking glass, it feels so real and so rich. And it can bathe our senses in almost the same feeling, except at a more fervent pace, at a more aggressive rate, and at an almost higher high.

If love is what we’re chasing, then it’s the cracked version of love. And I definitely, while writing my blog 1000awesomethings.com, definitely fell into that trap.

It’s time for us to lead you into a trap. That is ads, please don’t fast forward through them. We’re back.

Neil’s Just For Fun blog went viral in the 2008 sense. He has tons of readers, he’s being flown to fancy award shows to pick up awards, he’s being offered book deals. And now it’s not so fun anymore.

Now it’s an all-consuming machine of self-esteem. He puts in words and pictures, and he gets likes and hits and shares and comments and dopamine, and pickups on bigger websites that bring him more likes and hits and shares and comments and dopamine.

This phenomenon that Neil is describing is not an experience that’s exclusive to the Internet. That outsourcing of self-esteem and value to the opinions of others stretches into all kinds of places in our lives.

The dopamine reward system was in place long before the Internet existed. When Neil’s blog, 1000 Awesome Things, is turned into a book, he sucked into a whole different world of external validation.

Because you can’t measure how many people read your book or pick it up and read the back cover at the bookstore, but you can measure how many people buy it. Those results are public. They’re a badge of honor you can put on your book cover.

People like this thing. People like me.

I became seduced by the bestseller list rankings.

I became tempted into literally flying around, signing every book in every bookstore, emailing every radio station in every city to tell as many people as I could to try to ratchet up that sales number so I could stay on that bestseller list for as

many weeks as possible. I became seduced by numbers and metrics and things that told me how good I was instead of thinking or feeling how good I was.

Back then, I was chasing the proverbial million dollars or I was chasing the proverbial growth clock or counter or hit.

And where was Neil getting his validation now?

I was outsourcing it. I outsourced it to other people to tell me how happy I should be based on how many times they clicked the link that I wrote.

There are a million ways for us to be pulled into that looking glass to look for validation of how good we are or how good we are not. I know people who delete photos from Instagram if there aren’t enough likes on them.

Like if nobody liked it physically by double tapping with their thumb, they must have disliked it. It must be a bad photo. They must not like the person in the photo or the person who posted it.

That sounds kind of extreme, but is it? Because I know that I easily find myself absorbed into this sort of thinking. Part of it is, yeah, it is actually my job to make things people like.

If none of you download this podcast, or if you all skip through the ads and advertisers stop advertising with us, then there’s no show and I have no job. It feels good to have people like the things you make.

Even if it’s not your job, even if you don’t get paid for it. It feels good even when people like the things that are not my job. Of course, it feels good to have people like an Instagram photo or retweet something.

Even if we’re not aware that we’re seeking validation, when we get it, we want more. The dopamine tells us to keep doing whatever gave us that feeling, and we do.

When I noticed that photos of my husband got more likes than photos of myself, which, rude, I started posting more photos of him. And he doesn’t even like or use the internet. What was I doing that for?

Who was I doing that for? Because it wasn’t him. Neil said a few minutes ago that the eyeballs changed him.

The internet isn’t the only place we get eyeballs or validation. It’s not the only place where we present better versions of ourselves than the versions who exist at 6 p.m.

on a Thursday when you’re exhausted and late, and the person in front of you is driving like a butt head. It’s just the most extreme, fastest acting version of that.

I almost feel like we’ve all gotten to a place, or at least many of us, including myself here, where we’ve walked across a bridge that’s led us to a palace that’s full of marshmallows and beautiful lighting that is taken from a top-down camera, so

when you smile at it, your nose doesn’t look big. So we live in a filtered marshmallow top-down castle, and it’s awesome. It’s a hedonistic paradise. It feels like endless pleasure.

There’s only two problems. Number one, over time, marshmallows don’t seem like a special food anymore.

When everyone’s photo is a top-down filtered one, none of us look good looking again, because we live in a palace of top-down photos and marshmallows, and so it looks like everyone looks the same.

So one thing that happens is that this becomes normal, and our senses get so short-circuited, or get so fritzed out, or get so fried that we can’t go back away from the castle, because everything will be cold, straight-on shots, and ugly.

At this point, I need to say, I mean, not all internet, of course not all internet, because the internet does bring us connection. It does bring us a space where we can be the ugly, straight-on-broccoli versions of ourselves.

I found that in the Hot Young Widows Club, an online support group I started with a friend when we were both widowed. We’ve seen people find it in the Terrible Club, our group for listener supporters of this show.

There, look, there are lots of places on the internet where you can be your worst self, and other people will be like, that’s okay. I get it, I scooched over to make room for you.

The point is not, everything on the internet is fake, and the only things that matter are the things right in front of you. The point is that a lot of things matter and that you matter.

No matter what kind of feedback and reward system your brain has created from the things you’ve done in your life.

The point is we need to find the things that don’t just release the dopamine, but that truly, truly can help us find some form of happiness.

I’m starting to think that the straight on photograph without the filter and the plate full of broccoli is actually where I want to be. I want to be in that world.

I want to be in a world where people have pimples, where people make mistakes, where they say the wrong thing and it’s okay, where resumes don’t have gaps erased, but they have gap years and strange occurrences filled in, where failures aren’t

glossed over, but they’re talked about and discussed, where people are people and holding hands and eating dinner at the table and not having an interruption from a text message or an alert or notification every two seconds is actually a richer and

deeper and more meaningful way to go through your life. So I’m starting, you said, how do I inch back? I’m starting to just look out the window of the castle and say, I think I want to go back across the bridge.

Back across the bridge, not to a world without the internet, but to a world where a sense of self-worth isn’t so dependent on one source of input, where it hasn’t been outsourced to the opinions of other people on or offline, where our worth isn’t

tied up in one relationship or one platform, where we don’t fall into the looking glass, where we know what we’re even looking for when we peer in. Is it confirmation of what we already think of ourselves? Is it encouragement, validation?

Neil described the Internet of his youth as possibility. Isn’t that what keeps us head down, thumbscrolling?

In line at the grocery on public transportation, in bed before we even set our feet on the ground for the first time, anytime we’re made to wait alone with our thoughts for more than a moment.

When we unlock that screen, we’re leaning into that possibility. If we keep scrolling, we’ll find it.

The thing that will plug that hole inside of us, the thing that will be much more interesting than the thing that’s happening right in front of us, which is just a guy with dandruff who’s for sure buying 10 gift cards for a scam.

He’s not aware he’s being taken advantage by, and isn’t that interesting?

In the years since 1000 Awesome Things, Neil has remarried, become a dad, written several books including the recent You Are Awesome, and started the Global Happiness Institute.

The book of his that hooked me is called The Happiness Equation, and I asked him what his own happiness equation means, and he told me a lot of details about how specific he is about spending time with his wife and his family, and how focused he is

on work when he’s working on things like his podcast and website and newsletter. All that have metrics he can use to measure their success.

And even though, yes, it sure feels good to have his latest book hit the bestseller list, he feels differently about those numbers than he did before.

I became so fixated on them because they were something I could control, something I could count, something I could see. These days, I know that most of what makes me happy, I can’t see, I can’t count.

I just have to believe that it comes from the time we share with the people we love.

As a person who struggles to separate her own personal value from the success of the things she makes, I thought a little bit about my own happiness equation too.

And mine does include the success of this podcast, and it does include connecting with listeners on Instagram and at our shows, and it also includes not having email on my phone, and it includes having coffee with my husband every single morning and

going to yoga and tucking in our kids and listening to them breathe sometimes. It means that sometimes when I open Instagram, I tell myself or my husband, I’m just going to go get a little dopamine because that’s what I’m doing, and I don’t have to

disguise it as anything else. Our former producer Hans and myself once had a conversation, and then we never spoke again after he left. I’m kidding.

But we had this conversation once where we said that a thing we have in common is the feeling that we’re only as good as our next accomplishment.

That is a pretty miserable way to exist, and it has led me to the brink of exhaustion many times, and I think I’m at my happiest when I’m focused more on what’s now than I am on what’s next.

Talking to Neil, I thought that might be a good thing for all of us to think about. Maybe this is a mindful exercise and maybe it’s just dumb and none of you will do it, but maybe you will.

Maybe you’ll think about the things that make you happy and the things that make you, you. Your own happiness equation. If you want to share it with us online, Instagram or Twitter or wherever, email it to us.

Write it out and mail it to me at American Public Media. Some of you send me letters. They’re very nice.

Or keep it for yourself. A little reminder to yourself of who you are and of what really truly matters. I’m Nora McInerny, and this has been terrible.

Thanks for asking. Our producer is Marcel Malekebu, our former intern, Megan Palmer. We miss her.

She helped a lot on this episode. Good job, Megan. Jordan Turgeon is our digital producer.

Phyllis Fletcher is our editor. John Hernandez, Jacob Maldonado Medina, and Alex Baumhart all helped on this episode. Thank you.

You can find Neil Pasricha online at globalhappiness.org. You can also follow him on Instagram if you want to be told all the ways that you shouldn’t be on Instagram. He’s a good dude.

You should go buy all of his books, too. This episode was mixed by Johnny Vince. Our theme music is by Joffrey Wilson, and we are a production of American public McInernys Media JK.

Guys, we love jokes.