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And then act despite it.
The most precious and important things in life are, by definition, nontransactional.
they are essentially saying, “Show me the rules of the game I have to play, and I’ll play it,” not realizing that it’s the very fact that they think there are rules to happiness that is preventing them from being happy.21
Honesty is therefore an end, not a means to some other end.
The difference between a child, an adolescent, and an adult is not how old they are or what they do, but why they do something.
Adolescents need to be shown that bargaining is a never-ending treadmill,
It’s difficult to act unconditionally.
When you attempt to barter for happiness, you destroy happiness. When you try to enforce freedom, you negate freedom. When you try to create equality, you undermine equality.
In all the universe, there is only one thing that, from what we can tell, is completely scarce and unique: consciousness.
“Act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”35
To transcend the transactional realm of hope, one must act unconditionally.
unlike other moral systems or codes, the Formula of Humanity does not rely on hope.
he decided that the only logical way to improve the world is through improving ourselves—by growing up and becoming more virtuous—by making the simple decision, in each moment, to treat ourselves and others as ends, and never merely as means.
Don’t hope for a better life. Simply be a better life.
The Formula of Humanity has a ripple effect: your improved ability to be honest with yourself will increase how honest you are with others, and your honesty with others will influence them to be more honest with themselves, which will help them to grow and mature.
Political extremists, because they are intractable and impossible to bargain with, are, by definition, childish.
The most dangerous extremists know how to dress up their childish values in the language of transaction or universal principle.
that the maturity of our culture is deteriorating.
no longer right versus left, but the impulsive childish values of the right and left versus the compromising adolescent/adult values of both the right and left. It’s no longer a debate of communism versus capitalism or freedom versus equality but, rather, of maturity versus immaturity, of means versus ends.
The Blue Dot Effect suggests that, essentially, the more we look for threats, the more we will see them, regardless of how safe or comfortable our environment actually is.
The better things get, the more we perceive threats where there are none, and the more upset we become. And it is at the heart of the paradox of progress.
“A man should look for what is, and not what he thinks should be.”
Well, I am that asshole, because it is a bad idea.
Because you can’t get rid of pain—pain is the universal constant of the human condition.
This is because pain is the experience of life itself.
not only is there no escaping the experience of pain, but pain is the experience.
And by pursuing happiness, you paradoxically make it less attainable.
Living well does not mean avoiding suffering; it means suffering for the right reasons.
Our tolerance for pain, as a culture, is diminishing rapidly. And not only is this diminishment failing to bring us more happiness, but it’s generating greater amounts of emotional fragility, which is why everything appears to be so fucked.
People always lament that they’re “not good” at meditation. There is no getting good. That’s the whole point. You are supposed to suck at it. Just accept the suckage. Embrace the suckage. Love the suckage.
Meditation is, at its core, a practice of antifragility: training your mind to observe and sustain the never-ending ebb and flow of pain and not to let the “self” get sucked away by its riptide.
That while pain is inevitable, suffering is always a choice. That there is always a separation between what we experience and how we interpret that experience.
The problem arises when the adolescent feels that he got a bad bargain, when the pain exceeds his expectations and the rewards don’t live up to the hype.
Death is psychologically necessary because it creates stakes in life. There is something to lose. You don’t know what something is worth until you experience the potential to lose it. You don’t know what you’re willing to struggle for, what you’re willing to give up or sacrifice. Pain is the currency of our values. Without the pain of loss (or potential loss), it becomes impossible to determine the value of anything at all.
The pursuit of happiness is, then, an avoidance of growth, an avoidance of maturity, an avoidance of virtue.
they believe that growth has liberated us from suffering, rather than merely transmuting that suffering from a physical form to a psychological form.28
In fact, you could define “wealth” in terms of how desirable your pain is.29
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with diversions; we all need them from time to time. The problem is when they begin to dominate our lives and wrest control away from our will.
One of the reasons for this is that true innovation is risky, difficult, and often unrewarding. Many of the most important innovations in history left their inventors broke and destitute.5 If someone is going to start a company and take a risk, going the diversion route is a safer bet. As a result, we’ve built a culture in which most technological “innovation” is merely figuring out how to scale diversions in new, more efficient (and more intrusive) ways.
Then, the internet happened.
The internet is a bona fide innovation. All else being equal, it fundamentally makes our lives better. Much better. The problem is . . . well, the problem is us.
They forgot that the world doesn’t run on information. People don’t make decisions based on truth or facts. They don’t spend their money based on data. They don’t connect with each other because of some higher philosophical truth. The world runs on feelings.
The internet, in the end, was not designed to give us what we need. Instead, it gives people what they want. And if you’ve learned anything about human psychology in this book, you already know that this is much more dangerous than it sounds.
And it is true. Technology gives people what they want faster and more efficiently than ever before. And while we all love to dogpile on the corporate overlords for their ethical faceplants, we forget that they’re merely fulfilling the market’s desires. They’re supplying our demands. And if we got rid of Facebook or BP or whatever-giant-corporation-is-considered-evil-when-you-read-this, another would pop up to take its place. So, maybe the problem isn’t just a bunch of greedy executives tapping cigars and petting evil cats while laughing hysterically at how much money they’re making. Maybe
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And why did it all happen? You should know by now: they were just giving the people what they wanted!
The first is that we become increasingly fragile.
The second thing that happens is that we become prone to a series of low-level addictive behaviors—compulsively
Third thing: an inability to identify, tolerate, and seek out negative emotions is its own kind of confinement.
Fourth—because, fuck it, I’m on a roll: the paradox of choice.
This is the problem with exalting freedom over human consciousness. More stuff doesn’t make us freer, it imprisons us with anxiety over whether we chose or did the best thing.
