What happened to all the laughter?
BY JAMES ALTUCHER
Dan Harris, the anchor of the ABC show Nightline, had a total panic attack on TV in 2005 in front of 5 milion people. He simply shut down and couldn't continue while live on the air. Everybody saw it and he thought his career would be over.
He wrote a book about it, called "10% Happier" and
we talked about it on my podcast. I won't give it away. I hope you listen to it.
But I thought of my post the other day about endorphins and one statistic I found:
A kid laughs on average 300 times a day. An adult laughs on average....five times a day.
What the...!?
How did we go from 300 to 5? What the hell happened to us? That's why we start to panic during the day!
Did we cross some bridge of crap and tears and now here we are: drones that wake up, go to work, backstab each other in office politics, watch Breaking Bad, and then go to sleep and Die? Every single day?
Did someone slip a pill into the Starbucks coffee we drink every day? A no-laughing pill?
Laughter is really hard as an adult. It has to be. Else, how did we go from 300 to 5! That's a HUGE gap. There is no arguing that something really bad and scary and sad happened to us between childhood and adulthood.
And laughing is so critical.
How many times have you heard the story: So-and-so got diagnosed with chronic bad terminal disease XX and was given three months to live so she decided to watch a comedy movie a day for the next three months and now 15 years later she's still alive.
Doctors even call laughing, "inner jogging" because it does all sorts of good things for our health, our brain, releases endorphins, and makes us happier, etc etc.
So let's go back to 300. I thought about why the gap exists. Here's what I came up with:
