😎 Don’t give a damn about happiness by @jeroseland on 3Speak
Happiness is the enemy of the future. Happiness is like a mirage in the desert; it eludes your grasp when you most strive for it. And yet, in my first book, I wrote about how… “I’ve found the happi...
Tags: #happiness #podcast #selfhelp #psychology
Happiness is the enemy of the future. Let me explain. Happiness is like a mirage in the desert. It eludes your grasp when you strive for it. The pursuit of happiness. The myopic focus on happiness. The longing for happiness. The shortcuts you take to happiness. The expectations. of happiness, that's the enemy of the future you envision. Here's a wild factoid, an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 books, specifically centered on happiness, joy, positive psychology, were published by traditional... trade houses and university presses worldwide in the past 10 years. And that's just kind of like traditional bigger publishers. That's not even counting all the self-published books out there. And I just checked, there are over 100 podcasts specifically about happiness, probably a lot more than that. And so this... should have you questioning, does all of that media exist because our society has a sufficiency of happiness? Or is this a case of the market trying to work to meet a desperate need? Is this a case of dire deficiency of happiness that's out there? Maybe you clicked on this because you don't really feel happy. And I'm going to hit you with some tough love right out of the gates. Here, if you're not happy, it's probably because you are genetically useless. Yeah, genetically useless. I'll explain, but I don't want to deliver a... overdose of tough love right away so I'm gonna get back around to the genetic angle of happiness I'm Jonathan with Limitless, and this is an upgrade update to one of, I think actually, one of my better articles that I did back in the day, and I recently was going to republish it, and I listened, because I'd made some improvements, I had some things to add to it, some new thoughts on this topic. some new tactics on this topic. And I went to go and republish it, and the audio quality was just craptacular, including not just the audio quality, but also my delivery. My delivery, as the podcaster, it was just substandard. And I'm doing my damnedest to not deliver substandard these days. I'm doing my damnedest to deliver a seraphic. listening experience for you. So I said, you know what, I'm going to re-record this one. And if you appreciate that kind of commitment to quality, that kind of commitment to quality that also comes in combination with some tough love. Yeah, if you're a person that has, that is snobbish, that is a snobbish appreciator of veritas, okay, if you're that kind of person, then hit the subscribe button if you're not subscribed already. And if you are subscribed already and you're feeling even more charitable. Go ahead and leave this like an upvote or a five star, something or other, or a comment on whatever platform you are on, because those algorithmic signals, they let the algorithm know that you appreciate quality. okay, like these algorithms are not quite as dumb as we might think they are. They're actually kind of scary, smart. And so when you upload comment on things that are actual quality, chances are the algorithms going to give you more quality stuff. And also, it's kind of like a good karma thing, where you are... improving the chances of other people being edified by what I have to share here. So, yeah, please, please, please take just that two seconds that it takes to give me that upvote, or that subscribe, or whatever. Okay, with that preamble out of the way, let's dive into this article, why you shouldn't give a damn about happiness, and... In my first book, I wrote about how I found the happiness that I didn't give a damn about. And here, I'm going to break down why not giving a damn. quantitatively and qualitatively. Yeah, this is one of these weird things in life, where if you don't care about it, then you get it. And I'm going to explain why. Let's begin with really important takeaway, something I want you to understand, which is the principle of hedonic. Adaptation. Yeah, that is a fancy phrase that you were just going to be throwing around at the next cocktail party. You attend sounding all kinds of smart, hedonic adaptation. And to illustrate it, I want you to think about going on vacation. I want you to imagine the most awesome vacation. Okay. So, in fact, at this point, if he can even, just close your eyes and listen to my voice and visualize, fantasize, as we go on the most awesome vacation together. So, you fly to some beautiful, exotic place, with resplendent weather. You check into an opulent hotel and settle into a well-appointed room with breathtaking views. You just, you walk into the suite there at a high floor, and those big panoramic glass windows just open up with a vista that takes your breath away. Maybe you're vacationing with your best friends, or your family, your significant other, or you're alone. That might be the way you like to vacation and travel. And no expense is spared doing the most awesome stuff. You take scuba lessons, you go surfing, you go skydiving. jet skiing, you hike serene, mountain trails, you do winter sports if that's what you're into, you rent off-roading vehicles and almost crash them, yeah, all that good stuff. Money is no object. And you meet the coolest, sexiest people, poolside, at your slinky hotel. Your cool new friends invite you to join them for dinner and drinks at the top -rated on TripAdvisor, local bars, and restaurants. You gorge yourself on delicious, fresh. seafood while sipping top-shelf booze and laughing and swapping stories with your new friends. Then you all go out to the most awesome parties or clubs. The music is banging, the people are sexy, and the drinks are strong. Maybe you even do party drugs. You're on vacation. why not the revelry persists until the morning sun peaks over the blue horizon of the sea as you stumble back to your hotel room with a smile on your face and i might add you're having a lot of sex sometimes twice a day either with your significant other, or with some sexy and tan person you've met. It's exciting and sometimes adventure some sex. Perhaps you're having sex in places, the kind of places you usually don't, the kind of places where you could get in trouble for having sex. And, of course, the whole time you're on vacation. You're uploading photos and videos of your awesome vacation on social media. The likes, emoticons, and sometimes jealous comments just flood in with every upload. It's epic. But, as you know, if you've ever gone on an epic vacation, It gets old fast. Even with days filled to the brim, with novelty, debauchery, and adventure, after a week or two, you'll be pretty sick of vacation. Welcome to hedonic adaptation. you've been racing on a hedonic treadmill that's become a hamster wheel going nowhere you could stave off your hedonic adaptation to your glamorous life of fun in the sun by about a week if you abstain from drugs and booze but eventually even sober all these very fun things will just become tiresome. You'll start to yearn for your normal life back home. That's odd, isn't it? And I wrote that I could attest to hedonic vacation fatigue myself. As I wrote this very article... on the final day of a decadent week that my wife and I had spent at the Black Sea, and in the article, I had a bunch of these not so humble bragging photos of my wife and I vacationing, looking very good, yeah. That's what you should expect from biohackers. They should look good at the beach. So we lounged at the beach and swam every day. We read books, ate great food. I did meditation at meditation, sun-gazing and grounding at the beach, at sunrise. Boy, that's an awesome way to wake up. We had... amazing coffee coffee spiked with a bit of bailey's liqueur you know that that little a dollop of bailey's liqueur that's the way to really add just a little bit of extra hedonism to the to the a m right and we banged yes we banged righteously on the beach even beneath the billion twinkling stars we banged there, which was very exciting, but also, also righteous, because I'm a righteous kind of kai, and, um, in reflection, I realize that, uh, Because of the events of 2020, that's when we took that vacation. The summer of 2020, the year of the great pandemic slash plandemic, I realize a lot of people didn't get to take a vacation that very weird year. And in the preceding years, the economy has been pretty awful, so a lot of people haven't gotten a chance to take vacations. And my wife and I... were able to because we live pretty Spartanly. We don't dine out a lot. I spent money on doomsday food prepping. I had actually started doing that. Pre-2020. Yeah, I was a pre-2020 pre-2020 pre-preper, and people, extended family members thought I was a little crazy paranoid, but then, uh, when there was lines in front of the grocery stores, I didn't look quite so paranoid. We would dress up at home for each other and do our date nights at home, and that was a tradition that we started doing during the COVID times, when restaurants were shut down, and, uh, well, we've kept... doing it. That saves a lot of money over date nights out at fancy schmancy restaurants. And I might add that the Black Sea Coast here in Bulgaria, at that time, in September, it's a pretty amazing value. Before I got married, I took a grand total of... two real vacations totaling two weeks in about the past 15 years. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's see, I was an entrepreneur for about 15 years leading up to the time I got married, and about two weeks of actual vacation in that, in that whole time. Now that I married, I've adopted the Southern European lifestyle a bit, and I spend... a few weeks a year on holiday now, on holiday, as the Brits say. After a week, I'm glad to be getting back to my not terribly exciting life back in Sofia. Important point. Hedonic adaptation intervenes not just on vacation as you get sunburnt, but with almost... everything what makes you happy will soon make you bored examples we've all had friends that started dating some sexy exciting cool new person which for the first few months made them very happy but eventually they grew bored with them The red-pill dating gurus like to say something like this. They like to remind us of this. For every beautiful woman that you see or meet, that you might be totally smitten with them, and I guess this applies probably also to men, for every beautiful man that you might see, and be smitten with. Just remember that there is... guys out there singular guy, plural guys, just remember there are people out there that have grown sick and tired of having sex with her or with that person. Yeah, I think that little nugget of cynical wisdom we can generalize, too, uh, either. Sex. Next example. boo's drugs and sex will make you very happy for at a maximum a few hours and then you're not so happy when you come down from the high and have to deal with the consequences of your indulgences eating decadent food will make you feel great for at the very most a few hours but then it does nothing for you. You buy a fancy new electronic toy or gadget, and it makes you happy for, at maximum, a few weeks, and then it's just another thing in your life. For example, you drop hundreds of dollars on the hot news smartphone, and you beam with pride. every time you take it out of your pocket, but after not long, it gets scratched and people no longer ask, is that the new smartphone? That smartphone doesn't quite make you so happy anymore. It's just your smartphone. Final example, you move into a nice new place, or get a new car, and you'll be... very happy living there, or driving it for a few months, but after a year, it's just not so special anymore. The fleeting nature of happiness is my reason for not giving a damn about happiness. You might say, you're describing a bunch of cheap thrills. Of course they don't make you happy. permanently. Yeah, that's something that we hopefully all learned at a young age. But my objection is to making happiness your compass in life. Instead, make meaning your compass. And trust me, you'll be a lot happier in the long term. I'm... and ethical hediness, which means choosing the greater pleasure over the lesser pleasure. It entails passing up on a lot of frequent pleasures. This is why we do our date nights at home instead of going to swanky restaurants weekly. This is why we do 24-hour fasts with some frequency and this has a lot to do with the fact that my sexy wife and I are fit and skinny as you can see from our seaside vacation photos we didn't gain any weight during the COVID lockdowns while a lot of people were getting chubby There was a video that went very viral a while back of Jada Pinkett and Will Smith discussing Jada having an affair with some dumb rapper who is like half her age. In the video, Jada is conspicuously unapologetic, and at one point she says something very telling i just wanted to feel good it had been so long since i felt good normal people will shake their heads in disbelief that someone privileged with incredible wealth and luxury just didn't feel good we also can't say that jada and will pursue meaning in their lives. They've been hugely successful, and have formed a beautiful, albeit rather strange, family. I'll remind you that Jada has been into a bunch of woo-woo, draw happiness from within stuff for decades. According to interviews, she meditates daily in a meditation lounge in their $42 million mansion. I'm sure that their situation was complicated, and we know that these kinds of scandals are often manufactured for perverse reasons. But happiness is clearly... her compass in life and we can see in this example and numerous others how making happiness one's compass poisons meaning and has negative consequences if jada can't afford enough happiness to feel good then that should tell you something about happiness every couple of years we see a case of some high-profile celebrity committing suicide inexplicably these people with fame money and unlimited access to luxuries that we can only dream about just can't take life any more and decide to end it excess happiness and indulging in cheap thrills, seem to rob even a meaningful life of the will to go on. So, what's the solution? Buy a compass. Here's mine. The same compass I've had for 30 years now. I bought it. Back in the day when I was not yet a Boy Scout. but a weebelow. So, buy a compass and leave it somewhere, that you'll see it often. And your compass is a reminder to make meaning your compass in life. I started this podcast by dropping the tough love bomb on you, that... If you're not happy, it very well may be because you are genetically useless. Happiness is a genetic mechanism that our selfish genes have crafted for their own perpetuation. It drives us to reproduce and then eat a lot of food that will result in our demise, so that we can get out of the way of the coming generations. This is the phenoptosis hypothesis. I've got some more content on it, and about how to kind of, like, hack it from an anti-aging angle. But this is a kind of personal growth podcast, so... Perhaps I'll just leave a link in the article if you want to explore that. Back on topic, though, almost every parent agrees that nothing makes them happier than their children. So becoming a parent responsibly is the surest bet for attaining lasting happiness, and you'll note there in the last sentence, importantly, I said the word, becoming apparent responsibly. That means that you do it the right way, you pick a virtuous partner, you practice a bit of intentionality in your sex life so that you're... becoming apparent at not the perfect time, because the perfect time never arises, but at a time that you're somewhat prepared, you do enough personal growth so that you don't have, like, crazy anger problems, or cycles of trauma, blind photocopier of history kind of things, going on that you're passing on toxic things to the next generation. Not perfect, but being good enough. Yeah. doing it responsibly is the surest bet for attaining lasting happiness so these people who stylishly shirk parenthood they are just about guaranteeing themselves an unfulfilling and ultimately lonely life of chasing the mirage of fleeting pleasures. Those people are genetically useless. If you're not reproducing, then your genes see you as genetically useless, and you are going to have a child-shaped happiness whole inside of you that you're going to try to fill with a bunch of silly... things, and there's a million examples of this, but the example of this that comes to mind is there's a podcaster that I've followed on and off, who's another personal growth guru kind of guy, and he doesn't have any kids, he's like in his late 40s, early 50s, and he's kind of committed to no kids for life, and... He recently did a thing where he did a dark retreat, where he subjected himself to this absolutely tortuous experience, where he just sat in a dark room for, I think, 47 days, 48 days, and you just sit in a dark room with no stimulation whatsoever. which, of course, is great for returning your dopamine to its baseline level, but your mind just tortures you for, uh, for weeks in there, um, because you have nothing else to focus on. You can't even read a book, and that's the kind of thing that, uh, well-meaning, uh, personal growth kind of people will get lured into doing, just wasting their time with mental torture, pretending that they're making some personal growth progress. That's the kind of thing you end up doing when you don't have kids. And, yes, I've got a current year update to this article, and I became a father last year. So my son is one. you're old now, and I can totally confirm the thing that you have heard. Nothing makes you happier. Nothing makes you happy in a resounding, deep, profound way than becoming a parent. And in my life, boy, I did a whole lot of self-experimentation with paths to... happiness. So, hedonism, I really had a hedonistic decade. I really had a very fun decade, from about the age of 22 to about 32 years old. Yeah, that was a fun decade, where all the crazy hedonistic things that you can think of, and a couple that you probably can't think of, which I write about in my first book, my memoir. I really did all that stuff and did it fully. Got a bunch of good memories that will bring me smiles and smirks on my deathbed one day. If I do die, I don't know, I'm kind of a transhumanist. Maybe I won't die, but if I do, I'm going to go out with a smile on my face because of some of those memories. And then I pursued much more meaningful paths to happiness, which is... personal development, uh, mindfulness, uh, exercise, different kinds of spiritual practices. Okay, so yeah, I've thoroughly explored, uh, happiness, both in the shallow sense and in the profound sense, and being a father, yeah, that outperforms, that outperforms everything. It's, it's an odd state where, uh, you've never been, uh, more underslept yet more happy being underslept yet very happy at the same time yet it's an odd thing um but that's because you're achieving your genetic purpose and so your genes reward you with just an abundance of very profound happiness. And then that just multiplies over time as you see them grow, and then eventually there's grandchildren. Yeah, it's a lifetime of true happiness that you get in return for that, it's about a half decade of kind of like, hecticness that you have to put up with. When the kids are really young, yeah, you could say it's like, first year is super hectic, and then a half decade of, like, high-level hecticness, and then, you know, once kids are like about 10 years old, they're fairly independent at that point. But, yeah, it's crazy that people look at that deal. Of one year of serious hecticness, one decade of moderate, manageable hecticness that pays off in a lifetime of happiness, that they look at that deal and they say, no, thanks, I'd rather have my computer games porn and cats and sitcoms, or, or dark room retreats where you torture yourself in the dark for 48 days.…