The Most Surprising Path To Happiness: 5 Secrets From Philosophy
thur Schopenhauer was born in 1788 and died in 1860 and spent the intervening seventy-two years being, by a considerable margin, the most comprehensively, systematically, professionally pessimistic thinker the Western philosophical tradition has ever produced. This is a strong claim. Philosophy is not, historically, a field that self-selects for the chipper. But even in this august company of absolute buzzkills, Schopenhauer is something else. He is the gold standard of philosophical despair. Nobody brings up Schopenhauer unless they want to…
10 minutes
Six Scientific Secrets To A Long, Healthy Life
ing is like being enrolled in a subscription service you never signed up for and every month they remove a feature, add a new bug, and raise the price. It begins with Spontaneous Joint Editorializing (SJE): knees and shoulders begin to offer opinions. But, of course, that’s not the end of it. Not only does hair start falling out but it begins arriving in places you never asked for it, never wanted it, never even knew were zoned for hair.…
9 minutes
4 Secrets to Smarter Thinking
2005, Philip Tetlock did a study, “Expert Political Judgment”, where he basically asked, “Hey, what if we tested whether all these Very Important Experts™ were any good at predicting the future?” Surprise: they weren’t. He collected over 28,000 forecasts made by 284 political analysts, economists, foreign policy bigwigs, and all the usual loud-talking necktie people. What Tetlock found (and I’m condensing 20 years of depressing data here) is that the average talking head was terrible at predicting real-world outcomes.…
9 minutes
This Is The Simplest Way To Make Your Life Awesome
love freedom. And so it is with a heavy heart and a full awareness that I am committing a kind of cultural treason that I report the following: Freedom is ruining everything. Not political freedom. Political freedom is wonderful. I am, and have always been, in favor of people being allowed to say what they think, go where they please, and make their own terrible decisions about diet, recreation, and spouse selection without interference from the government. What I'm…
10 minutes
This Is How To Increase Confidence: 5 Secrets From Research
nfidence, for most of us, is not a steady flame. It’s a tea light in a drafty hallway. You’re feeling good. But then something happens you weren’t prepared for. Or your inner critic begins chattering away. And you make the mistake of listening… Poof. Confidence gone. Your brain starts doing that thing where it narrates your life in real time: You’re standing weird. Your smile is too long. Why are you smiling like that? Stop smiling. Now you’re not smiling…
9 minutes
This Is How To Find Meaning In Life: 6 Secrets From Research
’re constantly told that life is supposed to have Meaning. Capital M, neon-sign-flashing-in-the-dark, meaning. Uh-huh. Sure. That’s the kind of thing people say in interviews with The New Yorker or after running a marathon. But for something so universal, the whole “meaning of life” thing remains disturbingly unresolved. The terms and conditions for existence are the only ones we’d actually read but also the only ones we don’t actually get. You’d think, given how many centuries humans have been at…
10 minutes
This Is How To Find Meaning In Life: 4 Secrets From Philosophy
all have times when we become disillusioned. When we feel unmoored. It can be a midlife crisis, a personal tragedy, or it might appear for no reason at all. What do you do then? At the extreme. When you hit existential rock-bottom and life just doesn’t make sense? Who can help us here? Well, I can think of a guy… Albert Camus (pronounced exactly as it is not spelled) looked like he stepped out of a black-and-white noir film…
10 minutes
New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Secrets That Will Make You Emotionally Intelligent
e problem with emotions is not that we have them, but that they’re allowed to operate unsupervised. You’d think we’d have figured out by now how to not be held hostage by a rogue’s gallery of feelings that behave like the cast of a badly written soap opera trapped inside your skull. Emotions are like a chaotic group chat and you’re just trying to mute it without accidentally blocking your own capacity for joy. But here’s the really annoying thing:…
8 minutes
