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In pathological extremes, this delusional over-recognition of patterns manifests in disorders like schizophrenia.9
Not-knowing is true knowledge. Presuming to know is a disease. First realize that you are sick; Then you can move toward health. - Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
As a human being, you are embedded in the collective mesh of society. You are not wired to develop impeccably clear views, rational insights, and wisdom. You are built to inherit your views, values, and judgment from your tribe - to flow with the wave of your culture. We want to belong. We want to be accepted, respected, and liked, and this desire bends our beliefs to its will. The problem is that this desire, if unacknowledged and unchecked, can result in delusional decisions and deviation from our values. Some of the most pervasive motivations behind our biases stem not from how we want to
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Spending time alone is not just for introverts; it is one of the least discussed and most essential parts of any healthy life.12 The most important relationship in your life is your relationship with yourself. And like any relationship, it will degrade if you don’t ever dedicate quality time to it.
Your self-limiting beliefs might just be the single largest factor separating the best and worst versions of you.
If you have never engaged in deliberate introspection, self-examination, or philosophical inquiry, it can be said that none of the values with which you identify are actually your own. You initially inherited your moral framework and direction in life from those around you. Humans learn by imitation through childhood, and they do not develop the cognitive capacity to truly question what they have been taught until adolescence.17
Humans tend to anticipate more in the way of enduring satisfaction from the attainment of goals than will in fact transpire. This illusion, and the resulting mind-set of perpetual aspiration, makes sense as a product of natural selection, but it’s not exactly a recipe for lifelong happiness.
Desires are the screams you can't ignore, but values are the whispers it is often hard to notice.26
Although we all look to our emotions to determine desirable goals and evaluations, making decisions with your emotions and without reasoning is known as the affect heuristic, and results in some of the most profound mistakes humans make.
Desires are inherently unsatisfiable, and the Buddha referred to this fact as “dukkha.”
Hedonic adaptation causes us to adapt to present circumstances and continually want more, regardless of how high we climb. In order to attain genuine fulfillment, we have to learn to quit trusting our wants as valid indicators of what will genuinely satisfy us.
It is easy to confuse values and desires, which are both emotional in nature, but desires are the screams you can't ignore, and values are the whispers it is often hard to notice.
A wise and coherent life is the product of a top-down goal strategy in which your decisions are directed toward your ideals.
Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.
Apparently, trying not to feel a certain emotion you were “meant” to feel is like running away from destiny and blinding yourself to all of the valuable lessons in store for you.
Emotions arise from a discrepancy between a desired goal and our perceptions of our current status in relation to it. We suffer when we perceive reality to move away from our desired reality, and we experience positive emotion when reality nears our desired reality.
Of all existing things some are in our power, and others are not in our power. In our power are thought, impulse, will to get and will to avoid, and, in a word, everything which is our own doing.
Depending on whether someone appraises a stimulus as beneficial or detrimental to his personal domain, he experiences a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ reaction.
every time we experience a negative emotion, we are given the gift of reinterpretation, and this reinterpretation is a key leverage point to controlling our emotions.23
My students and I have found that truly happy individuals construe life events and daily situations in ways that seem to maintain their happiness, while unhappy individuals construe experiences in ways that seem to reinforce unhappiness.
We indulge them. We choose to catastrophize because, perverse as it may seem, self-pity gives us a kind of short-term high, even if it habitually locks us into deeper lows. When we allow the mind to get away with thinking distorted and self-critical thoughts, our reward system trains it to do it more.36 In order to choose long-term well-being, we have to resist the urge to indulge in our own pain.
By learning to modulate our desires, we can not only reduce the temptations and increase the fuel propelling us toward our goals, we can eliminate a major source of suffering.
Epicurus, who argued that we need very little to be happy and should strive to reduce our desires as much as possible. He thought we should satisfy our natural and necessary desires like food and water. But we should not strive to satisfy those which are unnatural or unnecessary, like extravagant foods, sex, power, or Instagram followers (his words, not mine).5 It is less extreme than the Buddha’s suggestion, and may strike us as more realistic, and we see this minimalistic approach to desire in countless other thinkers.
Freedom is not achieved by satisfying desire, but by eliminating it. - Epictetus, Discourses
The Stoic notion that we should not desire what we cannot control is also relevant here. Situations we have no control over are obvious examples of times you shouldn't want things to be different because these desires cause unnecessary suffering. We often long for other things which are out of our reach even though they are not, at least at the present moment, within our control. These misplaced longings often result from confusion over how much control we have.6 No adult suffers over the fact that he cannot simply spread his arms and fly, as this is unambiguously out of reach.
So Buddhism’s solution is to eliminate all desire, Epicureanism’s solution is to reduce one’s desires to the absolute essentials, and Stoicism’s solution is not to desire what we can’t control.
Gratitude is likely so effective because it causes people to savor their positive life experiences, reinterpret negative ones, build stronger interpersonal bonds, and avoid constant envy and craving.
The Buddhist belief called anatta, or nonself, states that the concept of the self is entirely an illusion, and that the person you think you are today is a different entity from what you were ten years ago, or even ten seconds ago. You are not a unified ego, but an ongoing and constantly evolving process - an aggregation of uncontrolled perceptions and cognitions. We are not discrete beings detached from all others, but inextricably tied to the collective of all sentient beings.
Much of the pain we experience is caused not by events we wish to avoid, but by the identity we wish to have. The desires which cause us to suffer when we are hit with a painful insult are the desires to be a competent, lovable, and valued individual. But by contemplating nonself, we can down-regulate all identity-based desires by reminding ourselves of the flaws with the entire self-construct when circumstances clash with these desires to be liked or respected.
The other primary tool for altering our emotions is through altering our desires. Because desires cause us pain and frustration when they are not satisfied, every desire we harbor is a potential threat to our contentment and stability.
Desire for the present to be different from the present incites pain, but desire for the future to be different from the present incites action.7
Across cultures, happier people were those who more often experienced emotions they wanted to experience, whether these were pleasant (e.g., love) or unpleasant (e.g., hatred). This pattern applied even to people who wanted to feel less pleasant or more unpleasant emotions than they actually felt. Controlling for differences in experienced and desired emotions left the pattern unchanged. These findings suggest that happiness involves experiencing emotions that feel right, whether they feel good or not.
Greater emotional self-mastery can allow us to ensure we experience the emotions which align with our goals and ideals more and more of the time.
person who can stand her ground while responding to aggressors with compassion, humor, and reasonable consideration will win more battles than one who goes into a rage.
If you are willing to look at another person’s behavior toward you as a reflection of the state of their relationship with themselves rather than a statement about your value as a person, then you will, over a period of time cease to react at all.
Envy is the feeling which results from comparing oneself to another and finding that they have something we want or feel we deserve.
The best counter for envy is to shift your perspective, reminding yourself that you are competing only with yourself.27 If you measure yourself by your unique combination of qualities and strengths instead of a one-dimensional metric, you will rarely come across people worth envying.
If you love a flower, don’t pick it up. Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love. So if you love a flower, let it be. Love is not about possession. Love is about appreciation.
There is no more reliable proof of greatness than to be in a state where nothing can happen to make you disturbed.
all. Highly resilient people are better at coping with stress, have fewer depressive symptoms, live longer, and have greater physical health.53 54 But why don’t we aim higher? If emotional resilience is getting back up after getting knocked down, emotional robustness is not getting knocked down in the first place.
Undesirable emotions are bugs in your software. Each emotional category which causes you to feel or act against your values reveals a vulnerability in your psychological code.
Equanimity is a state of undisturbed tranquility and psychological stability, with equivalent concepts in nearly every practical philosophy and religion
Anger often only punishes the person experiencing it and rarely serves our goals.
Shantideva captures one of the most useful counters to anxiety - program your software to remember the futility of worry as soon as it arises, which will free up your mental bandwidth to focus on the best course of action instead of being paralyzed by panic.
Buddhism reminds people that all things must end, and this understanding can enable us to appreciate the finite amount of time we have with others and celebrate the end rather than repeatedly mourning the tragedy of impermanence. By comprehending the inevitability of death and loss, we can learn to experience grief to the right degree and duration instead of resigning to it.
One counter-algorithm offered by Nate Soares is to stop doing things because you think you “should” and list out the actual reasons and consequences for certain actions.
Equanimity is about feeling the way you feel about your five-years-ago-problems right now, about your current problems.
behavioral algorithm is known as a habit. But this term includes the single actions which appear to be isolated. Ultimately, all actions are habitual in the sense that they are the products of biologically ingrained and algorithmic responses. A bad habit is one which leads us away from our goals; a good habit is one which leads us toward them. The behavioral algorithm causes a specific behavioral output in response to an environmental input.15
In similar fashion, our innate desire for validation is exploited by social media companies who tailor the algorithms of their platforms to get people as hooked as possible.
We are provided with more opportunities for social approval and entertainment than our ancestors ever would have had. Digital votes of approval provide the same type of rewards that real social interaction is meant to provide.23 Though they are ostensibly built to foster connection, these addictions can impede social connection in real life.24
