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No, being heroic is the ability to conjure hope where there is none.
“I have tried to live my life such that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear.”
something needs to matter because without something mattering, then there’s no reason to go on living.
Our psyche needs hope to survive the way a fish needs water.
No, the opposite of happiness is hopelessness, an endless gray horizon of resignation and indifference.
Hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness, and depression. It is the source of all misery and the cause of all addiction.
Our psyches construct little narratives like this whenever they face adversity, these before/after stories we invent for ourselves.
Basically, we are the safest and most prosperous humans in the history of the world, yet we are feeling more hopeless than ever before.
Hope doesn’t care about the problems that have already been solved.
Hope cares only about the problems that still need to be solved.
To build and maintain hope, we need three things: a sense of control, a belief in the value of something, and a community.
“Values” means we find something important enough to work toward, something better, that’s worth striving for.
Fights require that two people give a shit.
His inner world no longer possessed lightness and darkness but was instead an endless gray miasma.
We’ve all wished at times that we couldn’t feel emotion, because our emotions often drive us to do stupid shit we later regret.
Even if you don’t give a shit about your wife or your job anymore, you should be able to reason that it’s still important to maintain them, right?
the idea that we can logically force ourselves to do things that are good for us despite our impulses and emotions.
Essentially, they became mindlessly satisfied zombies.
This assumption (that we must use our rational mind to dominate our emotions) has trickled down through the centuries and continues to define much of our culture today.
We see a lack of self-control as a sign of a deficient character.
The fact is that we require more than willpower to achieve self-control.
You Have Two Brains, and They’re Really Bad at Talking to Each Other
the Feeling Brain is driving our Consciousness Car.
The Feeling Brain drives our Consciousness Car because, ultimately, we are moved to action only by emotion.
16 Emotion is the biological hydraulic system that pushes our bodies into movement.
Because we don’t feel like it.
the Thinking Brain is “the supporting character who imagines herself to be the hero.”17
The Thinking Brain makes shit up that the Feeling Brain wants to hear.
And people are always mistaking what feels good for what is good.
This thinking gave birth to the Classic Assumption: that the only way to be a good person is through dominance of the Thinking Brain over the Feeling Brain, the championing of reason over emotion, duty over desire.
The overindulgence of emotion leads to a crisis of hope, but so does the repression of emotion.
It’s the anticipation and suspense; the joy of discovery and the satisfaction of resolution.
Because that’s the only language the Feeling Brain really understands: empathy.
“How do you feel about changing careers?”
Maybe think about all the benefits of some desired new behavior.
Maybe mention all the sexy, shiny, fun things at the desired destination.
Remember: feelings never last.
That’s why you start small. Just put on your gym shoes today, Feeling Brain. That’s all. Let’s just see what happens.
But whatever you do, do not fight the Feeling Brain.
The only way you consistently nail that illusion is by consistently communicating and aligning the brains around the same values.
Change their character and their shape.
The Thinking Brain is objective and factual. The Feeling Brain is subjective and relative.
getting our values straight with ourselves so that we can get our values straight with the world.
Put another way, the problem isn’t that we don’t know how not to get punched in the face.
The problem is that, at some point, likely a long time ago, we got punched in face, and instead of punching b...
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And we usually don’t lie out of malice—rather, we lie to others because we’re in such a habit of lying to ourselves.
Moral gaps are where our values are born.
It’s our natural psychological inclination to equalize across moral gaps, to reciprocate actions: positive for positive; negative for negative.
Or, if you’re more mature, you communicate your disappointment to her.
If your country elects a bozo whom you can’t stand, you will feel a disconnect with your nation and government and even other citizens.
