9. Why Is It So Hard to Be Alone With Our Thoughts?
33:28 Share

Hey there, Stephen Dubner from Freakonomics Radio here to tell you the national sales event is on at your Toyota dealer. Now is the perfect time to get a great deal on a dependable new SUV like an adventure ready RAV4. Available with all wheel drive, your new RAV4 is built for performance on any terrain.

Or check out a stylish and comfortable Highlander with seating for up to eight passengers. Available with a panoramic moonroof, you can sit back and enjoy the wide open views with the whole family. Check out more national sales event deals when you visit buyatoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places.

This episode is brought to you by AARP. 18 years from tonight, Grant Gill will become a comedy legend. When he totally kills it at his improv class's graduation performance, knees will be slapped.

Thor, you've got 20 sharpened sticks leaning against the wall. Why do you need another one?

I'm Angela Duckworth. I'm Stephen Dubner. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions. Today on the show, how often do you sit with your thoughts without any other form of stimulation? You're just supposed to lie there on your mat with your own thoughts. I fell asleep many times.

Also, how much influence do parents have over their children once they've hit adolescence? They say, your kid said this to me. It was such a thoughtful, considerate thing to say. And I'm like, my kid said that? Who? What? Angela, let me ask you this. How comfortable are you being alone with your thoughts for an extended period of time?

I guess it depends on how extended you mean, but I can go for hours at least. Not reading, not on your phone, not talking to anyone, just with your thoughts. Just with my thoughts. Yeah, I would say hours. And by the way, I might be vastly overestimating if you ask me when's the last time.

I sat in a room by myself. When's the last time you sat in a room by yourself with your own thoughts for many hours? I would say that the time that this happens to me most often is when I am going to get out of bed in the morning and I find myself lying there thinking. And I think for that sort of activity, it's probably more like 20 minutes. Okay, not three hours, but still something substantial. Yeah.

And on the spectrum, then, of people around the world, do you think that puts you at a deep extreme? I don't even have to say I think because there's research on this. Tim Wilson, great psychologist, got really interested in reverie, which is this state of daydreaming or musing, but it's not.

But it's pleasant, right? So I think that's one of the key things about Reverie, that you want to be alone with your thoughts. And so he designed this experiment where undergraduates are in a room, there's like nothing to do. And that's really the whole thing. It's like, how comfortable are you or how long can you be in this room where there's nothing to do? There's no cell phone. You're just...

there with your own thoughts. And it's so torturous for them for even just a matter of minutes that a good number of them, I think it was three-fourths, would rather be shocked electrically than to do nothing at all, just because being shocked is something and doing nothing is worse. I'm assuming it's a relatively low-level electric shock they're getting, yes? Yes, but

you know, electric shocks are painful. And if you want to get a sense of how hard it is for young people in particular to sit with their own thoughts, you can Google phones down challenge. And the first hit that should come up in YouTube is this

video of teenagers who are brought into an empty studio and they have their cell phones with them. They're on a table in front of them. That's the whole challenge is to not pick up your cell phone. And it is both amusing, but also a little horrifying to see just how hard it is for them to just sit there and think about things and go inward. So we've all read that people are very reliant on their phones these days and other devices and other stimulations.

And it's a reliance that some people worry borders on addiction. So what I want to know from you are things like why it can be so hard to be alone. Is it necessarily a bad trait? Because I could imagine that coming from the evolutionary side, someone might say, well, you know, humans really were meant to interact with others.

And so the mind was not really meant to sit and cogitate. I don't think anyone knows whether we have a shorter attention span than we did, although lots of speculation. It would seem to many people that we do. But do you think that like the cavemen, like that's why they whittled, like they couldn't just sit there and do nothing. I got to.

sharpen this stick. They had their own version of like opening another tab. Yeah. And then like Thor, you've got 20 sharpened sticks leaning against the wall. Why do you need another one? He's like, what am I supposed to do? Just sit here? Okay. So first I will say that the ability to go inward and to mind wander, to daydream, to just think and not be focused on a goal or certainly on an action that does seem to be the province of this world.

recently examined area of the brain. Neuroscientists have in the last decade got interested in what's called the default network. That doesn't sound like a part of the brain, the default network. Oh, you've never heard of the default mode network? I haven't. I'm used to words like amygdala and cerebral cortex, and then there's default network?

I know it makes you think like, is it alone? Is it a behavioral economics nudge? But no, in this case, the default mode network is an area of the brain. It's the medial surface of the cortex. And it was discovered, I think, what happened was that neuroscientists have a fixation cross. And this is like you're sitting in the fMRI. fMRI, we should say, is a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine which measures brain activity while it's happening, right? Yeah.

That's correct. Brain activity in real time. And whatever experiment you're in, they're often looking at a comparison between baseline and, you know, what happens when we show you these shapes or what happens when, you know, you're looking at these words. So baseline is typically you're just looking at this little X on the screen. So the question is,

relatively recently emerged, which is like, what are we doing when we're doing nothing? What are we doing when we're staring at this fixation cross on the screen? And it turns out that we're not doing nothing. The default mode network is what we're doing when we're not doing anything else. And the activity in this network does seem to be inversely correlated to activity in executive function areas, which are really goal-directed, task-directed.

That makes sense, right? Yeah. And as scientists have gotten more interested in this, the question is, what is it for? And the research suggests that it's when you're thinking about self-relevant things. So a lot of our mind-wandering or daydreaming is not about like, oh, I wonder what the weather is like in Tahiti. It's more like, I wonder what this person thinks of me. I wonder what I'm going to do tomorrow. So it's very self-relevant mind-wandering. And

You could ask the question, as you did, Stephen, wouldn't evolution favor more of a goal-directed occupation for our brain activity? But I think there are some things that we do when we're in the default mode that are useful. Processing information and self-relevant thinking are probably helpful.

It's also associated with imagination and creativity. So the current understanding is that we tend to toggle back and forth between the default mode and more goal-directed activity.

That is so interesting, what you just told us, if true. And I don't mean that you're making it up. I just know that fMRI studies are at their very, very early days of really understanding how the brain drives thought behaviors and so on. Fair. But it did make me wonder. So you said the default mode network is inversely correlated with executive function, which makes sense. But I'm curious if there are other correlations, positive or negative, with physiological correlations.

In other words, is it good for us on some dimension to sit and think about close to nothing? Well, the study I'm about to tell you about is not a neuroscience study. There was not a fMRI component. But Matt Killingsworth and Dan Gilbert, two psychologists who used a different way of studying mind-wandering, something called experience sampling, where you ping someone, send them a text message or otherwise alert them. And then just in the moment, you ask them some questions. So you're sampling their experience.

And what Matt and Dan found was that when they pinged people and the answer was that they weren't doing much of anything, that they were basically mind wandering or daydreaming, there wasn't a goal or task, that actually they were less happy. And so it may not be that most people like this state, or it could be other things like maybe...

when you are less happy, then your mind wanders. So maybe the direction of causality goes the other way. Okay, so let's say that I don't want to be on my phone all the time, and I don't want to administer electric shocks to keep myself from being unable to be with myself at the moment. Can you give us any specific feelings

fruitful or useful ways to engage our mind? Is thinking out scenarios useful? Is going back into our memory bank? Is trying to tell ourselves stories or come up with counterfactuals to actual events? What do you suggest? Well, you know, I'll be honest. If I even sat on the couch, let's say for hours, I think by the time I got to like minute 30,

I would have forgotten anything that I had thought about at minute five. And I think the mind really is a sieve. And so usually what happens when I'm thinking, I whip out a journal to write in. Well, if you're like most people, or at least like the research that I've read in the past, writing actually helps the thing.

Exactly. Writing is this great invention because it kind of extends human memory. When we're thinking and we've got a pencil in our hand and we've got a notebook in front of us, then we can write down those thoughts and move on to new ones and then like look back and see what we wrote and then connect them. And we're still in reverie. I think that counts, frankly, as the state of just thinking and not doing. I mean, you do this, right? Do you not write in order to think? Yeah.

So yes, it is true. Thinking and writing, to me, feed each other. But what's really transfixed me is this tangent that you took us on here about memory. As you say, the mind doesn't seem to be very good at that. On the other hand, Anders Ericsson, when he was starting out, trained a couple guys to memorize many, many digits and found that they were able to go way beyond what you would normally think.

And then if we think back to generations and generations ago, like the Torah, the Jewish Bible was just passed from generation to generation orally. So that does suggest that the human mind is certainly capable of engaging with that component, the memory component and the storytelling component and the

the fact retention component much more than we do now. And the reason we don't do it now is because we don't have to do it now, right? But it does make me think that, oh my goodness, what potential there is in each and every brain to think harder, deeper, longer in a way that we're just absolutely not now. So I'm less worried about someone, quote, wasting their time by being on Snapchat for an hour.

and more just thinking about the waste of the potential of literally the brain power in all of us. Not that we want to use it to memorize Gilgamesh necessarily, but what are we losing by not engaging our brains regularly

in realms beyond the standard kind of problem solving, decision making, and so on. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I do think that we mold ourselves to our current situation. I mean, I don't even know my own daughter's phone numbers. But why? Because they're in my favorites. It's funny you say that. My son is always berating me for not knowing his phone number. And you should tell him, why should I know it?

That's exactly what I say. But then he says, yeah, but when we were little, you forced us to memorize your phone number so that if we ever needed to call you, and he's totally right. He's like, what if you lose your phone and you need to reach me? And then my answer to him is, if I lose my phone, I have bigger problems than needing to reach you. Exactly. That's not a very satisfying answer if you're my child, I think. Yes, that usually doesn't help much. But look, nevertheless, like your broader point, I think, is that

Everything about us is like use it or lose it. And what are we losing by not using just because our cell phones make it possible? And I do wonder, you know, Walter Mischel, another psychologist, used to contrast self-control with stimulus control. And this is because when he studied young children, he realized that one of the things they really struggled with is the ability to really take control of their own thoughts.

their own emotions and their own behavior, they seem to be controlled by their environment, by their situations. And I do think that is one of the things that is easy to slip into, that you're just kind of reacting all the time. What are your thoughts on meditation?

Yeah, that was the other thing I was going to bring up. So, you know, I said, look, I like writing in a journal that helps me extend periods of reverie and make them more productive. Meditation, mindfulness. I went to a workshop now several years ago. I wasn't intrinsically that interested, but I thought like, oh, mindfulness sounds like the panacea for problems of self-control. And that's what I was working on with kids. So I went to this workshop by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

It was a one-day workshop. And I remember distinctly, first of all, that it was really hard, right? Because much of that day, you're just supposed to lie there on your mat with your own thoughts. I fell asleep many times. He said not to feel bad about it. I felt a little bit bad. I'm like,

room of 250 people. And then this is my last memory of it. So the workshop ended at something like 4.30 and I think I had mistimed it and I had to leave at 4.15. I'd roll up my mat and then as everyone else was like mindfully ending the session, I was like, excuse me, sorry, excuse me. Oh, so sorry, so sorry. Just picking up people's water bottles that I had knocked over.

So anyway, I'm not very good in mindfulness. I do think that the idea is really important. And the definition that I like for mindfulness is nonjudgmental awareness of the present. And that sounds a lot like reverie, right? That you're noticing what's going on when you're just alone and that you're not judging, but you're observing in a very attentive, curious way.

So, yeah, mindfulness as a practice could be a way for people to get better at reverie. And what are your thoughts on the relationship of walking in the mind? Because there are people who say that the act of walking is mentally stimulating much more than you'd think because.

because you're constantly mapping and adjusting and so on. And then you also read that many creative people in history from arts, philosophy, and so on, that they were big walkers. You know, Dickens would take his hour and a half constitutional every day. On the other hand, there was nothing else to do back then because we didn't have Snapchat. Yeah, if he had Snapchat, he would just sit there. But I'm curious if you know anything again about the kind of psychological...

slash physiological connection between walking and thinking and whether that's a profitable route for people to pursue? I think there's research by Art Kramer that says that cardiovascular exercise has benefits for executive function. That's research that says if you work out a lot, then your executive function can be maintained or improved. I don't think that means that while you're working out necessarily that you have better brain function or executive function in particular. My

My guess is, you know, if there isn't an abundance of modern scientific research, we do have all these examples. We also have the peripatetics philosophers who did all their thinking while walking. There's also something called a walking meditation. And there are also these religious traditions where you like walk a maze.

And while you're walking, you're thinking. And my guess is that what these things have in common is that unlike rock climbing, where you are really actively engaged in like what's going on around you, and therefore you're probably not daydreaming or mind wandering in these predictable walks that you take.

You're busying some part of you in a pleasant way, and that is actually liberating your mind to go off in directions that wouldn't be otherwise. And for a lot of people, it probably is a lot easier than just like literally sitting cross-legged on the floor trying to just be with their thoughts. Golf, I should say, is a walking meditation to some degree. You are a walker in New York and you're a golfer. Are you like in reverie when you're doing these things?

When I walk by myself in the city, the act of walking seems to be a catalyst for a certain kind of thinking. And it's my favorite kind of thinking. Sometimes I'll have really big thoughts. Sometimes I'll have very specific like, oh, that sentence I was working on, I now know why it didn't work. I need to flip the last two phrases. But these are the kinds of

thoughts that just don't happen when I sit and try to think. And so that's why I'm interested in, you know, for people who have a really hard time

sitting alone with their thoughts, if there are ways to kind of trick yourself by finding an activity that inspires or that conspires to produce some of this nice sort of thinking. Because, you know, I can't see how it'd be a very good feeling to be addicted to your phone, honestly. I think that's right.

The idea that if you could occupy yourself in some way that makes this reverie or daydreaming a little better for you, I think it's a great idea. And I think this is why there are people who not only take long walks in New York or golf, but also just pacing. I mean, aren't there lots of lithographs of people with...

with their hand and a fist, just like pacing and thinking. So it seems like we're both pro-thinking. I think we both worry about the opportunity cost of being constantly stimulated by these cheap thrill technologies. And I think that if journal writing or walking the streets helps people do less of the mindless reacting to stimuli, I think that's a good thing.

Still to come on No Stupid Questions, Stephen and Angela discuss the unique relationship between parents and adolescents. I've done a lot of research showing... No, I thought you were going to say, I've done a lot of harm in my teenage years. No, I'm trying to do less harm.

Hey there, Stephen Dubner from Freakonomics Radio here to tell you the national sales event is on at your Toyota dealer. Now is the perfect time to get a great deal on a dependable new SUV like an Adventure Ready RAV4.

Available with all-wheel drive, your new RAV4 is built for performance on any terrain. Or check out a stylish and comfortable Highlander with seating for up to eight passengers. Available with a panoramic moonroof, you can sit back and enjoy the wide-open views with the whole family. Check out more national sales event deals when you visit buyatoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places.

No Stupid Questions is sponsored by Rosetta Stone. Traveling to a place where people don't speak a lot of English? Then Rosetta Stone, one of the most trusted language learning programs, is for you. Rosetta Stone teaches through immersion, like matching audio from native speakers to visuals, reading stories, participating in dialogues, and more.

The true accent feature even provides feedback on your pronunciation. Plus, learn on the go with convenient, flexible, and customizable lessons as short as 10 minutes. Rosetta Stone can be used on a desktop or as an app, and you can download lessons for offline use. See for yourself why Rosetta Stone is beloved by millions.

For a very limited time, our listeners can get Rosetta Stone's lifetime membership for 50% off. That's 50% off unlimited access to 25 language courses for the rest of your life. Redeem your 50% off at rosettastone.com slash questions.

This episode is brought to you by AARP. 18 years from tonight, Grant Gill will become a comedy legend. When he totally kills it at his improv class's graduation performance, knees will be slapped.

Hilarity will ensue. That's why he's already keeping himself in shape and razor sharp today with wellness tips and tools from AARP to help make sure his health lives as long as he does. Because the younger you are, the more you need AARP. Learn more at aarp.org slash healthy living.

Every sandwich has bread. Every burger has a bun. But these warm, golden, smooth steamed buns? These are special. Reserved for the very best. The Filet-O-Fish. And you. You can have them too. For a limited time, the classic Filet-O-Fish you love is joining your McDonald's favorites on the 2 for $3.99 menu. Limited time only. Price and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer. Single item at regular price. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

So, Stephen, you know my husband, Jason. Do. Very nice man. He's very nice. So he said about our two teenage daughters who are, you know, close to adulthood. One is 18 and the other one is nearly 17. And Jason said there's not much you can do after a kid turns 10 to influence really anything about them. Now, that's a pretty extreme statement. And I wondered if you...

Would agree. I'm sure that he was kind of exaggerating-ish. Yeah. Otherwise, we wouldn't, you know, be parenting, right? I do tend to mostly agree, but not entirely. So the mostly agree part is related to the fact that there's a ton of research showing that

what you do in the early years of a kid's life, and maybe even more important, what you do before the kid is born, like what kind of person you are, has a great effect on how they turn out. You know, obviously there's nature, genetics, which is at least a large component, if not the majority, but not even necessarily in the direction that people think. So, you know, one thing that we wrote about was the effect of what we called culture cramming, you know, baby Mozart, taking him to museums,

Plainly, that was not the magic bullet. There's a lot of correlation because the kind of families that tend to do that a lot are high IQ families. Families that had a lot of books in the home tended to have kids who read a lot better. But it wasn't that these books magically jumped off the shelves into the kids' brains. It's the kind of parents who have a lot of books. They're doing lots of things. Yeah. And they tend to be higher IQ people. But...

The thing that is showing up in data over and over and has been for years is that what you can do for kids is it boils down to love them, give them basic cognitive and physical and emotional support. And that seems to work really well. And there is evidence, I think, from your field, Carl Pickhart, who wrote about the ages at which a parent exerts the most influence on children. Here's a short passage from

The child up to ages eight to nine admires, even worships parents for the capability of what they can do and the power of approval that they possess. But in adolescence, beginning around nine to 13, parents get kicked off the pedestal. It seems they can do no right. So I'm sure that's an overgeneralization, but that resonates for a lot of us. It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, if nothing else, that adolescents are moving toward independence and therefore they are marginalized.

much less likely to take our advice. Exactly. To do as we say. Yeah. But really, the parents of teenagers, we all experience this. There's the difference between like coming home from work if you work outside the home and just being like enveloped in this kind of like, Mommy! Dad!

Daddy, like you're home to what feels like the opposite, right? My kids are often just annoyed at me, just a low level baseline annoyance that sometimes spikes if I say or do the wrong thing. There's a really brilliant neuroscientist named Nim Tottenham.

She's a Columbia, and she's done all this research on stress and fear. And so she had this graph where you can just see this sharp inflection point at age 10. So when you're a child, you are easily comforted by your parents. And so they can buffer you against the fear response. You can be assured by them that everything's going to be OK. And this doesn't really work as well when you're an adolescent. So adolescent children,

human beings are not buffered as it were against like fear and triggering of the amygdala and so forth when they're older. There's also research that I'm sure you know showing the influence of peers that grows as you get older, which is another contributory argument. It's part of the package, right? The whole package is it's time to become my own adult and not

just a carbon copy of my parents. But I would say this. So, you know, I think this is an interesting and important question about like, what is the optimal age or the cutoff age at which parents can exert a lot of influence? Although I would say the cutoff age is probably like five.

50 or 70 or something. I mean, honestly, because, you know, the relationship between parents and kids plainly doesn't end when the kid becomes 12 or is out of the house and so on. But I think this is going to probably sound a little more negative than I mean it to sound. But I think with parenting, as with a lot of other leadership positions, teaching or coaching or whatever, it's a lot easier to

to make something terrible than it is to make something great. You can do more harm than good. Yeah. I think with parenting, as with teaching or coaching, there's potentially more downside than upside. So if anything...

You know, I'm not saying we need a parental Hippocratic oath, but the idea is right. First, do no harm. Yeah. The poet Philip Larkin has this wonderful, terrible poem. Terrible in the sense of, you know, horrifying. It's called This Be the Verse. And the famous verse is, they f*** you up, your mom and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you up with the faults they had and add some extra just for you. Yeah.

So that, I think, is maybe a rather stark way to point to what's important to think about parenting, which is it may be that if you look at all the parents who are consumed with helping their kids to become better, kinder, smarter, healthier, etc.,

I think it's almost a paradox. Like, there's probably not that much you can do, except that if you already feel that way about your kid as a parent, you're probably already doing it. And more important, you're not going to do the negative stuff. You're not going to do either the absenteeism or the discouraging or the violence or any of those things.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I mean, in general, there's this concept in psychology that bad is stronger than good. I mean, it kind of goes with the second law of thermodynamics, right? Like, it's just easier to destroy than it is to create. And therefore, then as parents, we should just first and foremost try not to do harm. So that all makes sense. And there's a lot of research that shows that having

Having neglectful parents who just allow there to be chaos in your life, even when you're a teenager, it can do a lot of harm. In fact, I've done a lot of research showing. I thought you were going to say, I've done a lot of harm in my teenage years. No, I'm trying to do less harm. But I have done some research showing that when you look at teenagers and they just tick off on this little list of terrible things that could have happened.

in their lives, the more things they tick off, they have an emotional negative reaction, right? A stress response. Then that leads to failures in self-control of all kinds. So, yeah, it's bad and you can easily do harm. And, you know, Walter Mischel, the psychologist behind the marshmallow test. I feel bad that I only know Walter Mischel because of the marshmallow test. And I know he had a long, distinguished career, right? He did. He's most famous in the public for the marshmallow test.

this test of kids waiting and delaying gratification and then it being an index of their self-control. But he's also famous for a second thing, for looking at person effects, as he called them, like things about you that influence your life, and then situation effects.

What does that mean, person effects? Meaning your internal characteristics and how they drive outcomes? Yeah. Self-control, or you mentioned IQ, or, you know, other things that would be, say, part of your personality. And then the situation effect would be like things that are not your personality, right? Like your opportunity or, you know, how many people are in the room. And his famous quote,

claim is that the situation can be more powerful than the person. And so that our life is at least as much our circumstances than who we are and what we bring to those circumstances. So that's what he's famous for also.

But parents would track him down. They would ask him for parenting advice. He would say to them, if you are coming to ask me for parenting advice, you don't need any advice because you're the sort of parent who would track down a Columbia professor to get advice and you're probably fine. I think that's roughly true. I think that with teenagers, though, I wonder, and I'm now speaking out of turn in a way because I don't know if there's data on this, that when you try to give your teenager some pointers and

You know, it's not always like the smartest thing to do because they're just not in that mode where they're receiving it the way they would have when they were nine. But I think there might be some nuance there. And I personally think that with my own two kids that things that they would not seem to be listening to might be seeping in in other ways. Do you kind of have that suspicion that like.

You're going to get rejected in the most overt or obvious ways, but somewhere in there, your kid is registering your values. I do. I also see that it seems to be a pretty common strategy with teenagers or older kids to...

to overtly ignore the advice or the sensibility even while in the presence of the parent. But then when the parent is not around, they exhibit it. So like I've had people that my kids met at some event or whatever, they say,

Your kid said this to me. It was such a thoughtful, generous, nice, considerate thing to say. And I'm like, my kid said that? Who? What? You sure you were talking to my kid? I remember when I was a teenager, like the last thing I wanted to do was to follow the kind of moral or ethical advice right then and there. But I think it does soak in. But getting back to your husband's original question about like, does the influence really diminish a lot?

I think there's probably, as we've agreed, good evidence that yes, it does, but obviously not to zero. And also, I think there's a lot of variance. And I just wanted to say from my own experience, I was the youngest of eight and our dad died when I was about 10. And then for the last several years of high school, it was just me and my mom. So obviously we spent a lot of time together and I loved her very much, but I could not wait to get out of there.

And she was very, very religious. And I was not feeling that. I was never really overtly rebellious. But if you had asked me then, you know, is she a big influence on you? I would have said absolutely not. And then I went off to college. I was playing in this band and I really wanted to drop out of college. And she said to me,

not a stern tone because she was trying to not be outright rejected. She said, you know, I don't think that's a good idea because you may not do music forever and you may want to go to grad school and it's going to be a lot harder to go back to college and finish up. And I was like, grad school? We were trying to become rock stars. We weren't thinking about grad school. Yeah, a band here. But I thought about it and I figured she was smart and she was much more experienced in life. And I

And I was a little scared of her, honestly. So I listened and I stuck it out. And then when I ultimately did quit playing music, I was really glad I had listened because I ended up going to graduate school almost immediately afterwards. And it turned out to be really useful in my future. She planted a seed. Yeah. And so, you know, thanks, mom. And for your husband, tell him maybe not to give up so quickly if he's so inclined.

Well, he's very, well, shall I use the word gritty? I might. And here's something that he has done. He writes letters to my kids. It's so cute, right? I mean, and he prints them out in hard copy. He's a little bit of a Luddite, so he doesn't really like the idea of electronics or anything.

especially if it's something where he feels like there's going to be a lot of pushback and there's going to be a lot of conflict and there's going to be a lot of emotion and then the conversation's not going to go anywhere. So are these letters intended to be retelling

now or much later or indeterminate? I think they're written to be read now. Are they read now? I'm not 100% sure they all are. In one case, I asked, you know, like, your dad wrote you a letter about this and my daughter was like, yeah, I know. And I didn't read it. I don't know if that meant that she was never going to read it. My guess is that they're all read at some point. And I'm guessing that he's getting his

message through. And I would also hazard a guess that the kind of parent who writes a letter to his kid is probably the kind of parent that's not going to pull a Philip Larkin and totally screw up the kids. Yes, one would think that he is at least doing no harm.

No Stupid Questions is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Lee Douglas. And now, here's a fact check of today's questions. In the first part of the show, Stephen and Angela discussed both walking and writing as catalysts for reverie. But they left out one big one, the shower. I was reminded of this while reading memoirist Glennon Doyle's most recent book, Untamed. In an early chapter of the book, Doyle's daughter says to her, Mom,

Doyle responds to her, She goes on to explain to her child that this is called, quote, thinking, and it's something folks did before Google.

Also, I'd like to recommend the Reddit page Shower Thoughts for those who are interested in this particular kind of reverie. This is a subreddit dedicated to, quote, those miniature epiphanies you have that highlight the oddities within the familiar.

During the conversation about parental influence, Angela mentioned psychologist Walter Mischel's belief that situation has greater influence on human beings than individual personality traits. This is a controversial stance called situationism, which many of his peers disagreed with. In his 1968 book, Personality and Assessment, Mischel concludes that the very concept of personality is problematic because people behave so differently depending on the situation.

Interestingly, his famous marshmallow study seems to contradict this idea. The study measured children's willpower and conscientiousness by timing how long they could resist a marshmallow. Children who resisted longer ultimately went on to achieve higher education and experience lower drug use than children who displayed lower willpower and conscientiousness, thus demonstrating the power of personality. This reportedly drove the poor situationist crazy. That's it for the fact check.

No Stupid Questions is produced by Freakonomics Radio and Stitcher. Our staff includes Allison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, James Foster, and Corinne Wallace. Our theme song is And She Was by Talking Heads. Special thanks to David Byrne and Warner Chapel Music.

If you'd like to listen to our show ad-free, subscribe to Stitcher Premium. You can also follow us on Instagram and Twitter at NSQ underscore show and on Facebook at NSQ show. Also, if you heard Stephen or Angela drop a reference to something that you'd like to learn a little more about, remember to visit Freakonomics.com slash NSQ to check out all of the studies and references that you heard here today. Thanks for listening.

You need a sandwich. That's your answer to everything. It is. I think the whole world would be a better place if we could all sit down and break sandwiches together. Stitcher.

Hey there, Stephen Dubner from Freakonomics Radio here to tell you the national sales event is on at your Toyota dealer. Now is the perfect time to get a great deal on a dependable new SUV, like an adventure-ready RAV4. Available with all-wheel drive, your new RAV4 is built for performance on any terrain. Or check out a stylish and comfortable Highlander.

with seating for up to eight passengers. Available with a panoramic moonroof, you can sit back and enjoy the wide-open views with the whole family. Check out more national sales event deals when you visit buyatoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places.

Every sandwich has bread. Every burger has a bun. But these warm, golden, smooth steamed buns? These are special. Reserved for the very best. The Filet-O-Fish. And you. You can have them too. For a limited time, the classic Filet-O-Fish you love is joining your McDonald's favorites on the two-for-$3.99 menu. Limited time only. Price and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer. Single item at regular price. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.