Happiness

So let's talk about why we're doing this podcast. This really is a discussion of highly practical philosophy. Philosophy, as we normally think of it, is impractical. It's something that's put up on a pedestal. It's something that was written a long time ago in fancy language, very abstract, very obtuse. And perhaps some of it feels like truisms to us, and some of it feels unapproachable. But really, for anyone, if you live long enough, you become a philosopher, because you start trying to solve the big problems in your life. And the big problems are the old ones. They're the ones that we've been trying to solve since the beginning. How do I stay happy? How do I become healthy? How do I become wealthy? How do I raise the family that I want? So what this podcast is about is the practical philosophy that we have confirmed for ourselves and that has worked for us. What one monkey can do, another can. If this person learned something interesting that made them happier, healthier, or wealthier, then I can do it too. That's what we focus on here. It's the practical philosophy of health, wealth, and happiness. It seems to me if you were going to sum it up in one word, it would just be health, financial health, mental health, physical health. Health is just the state of being well. So let us get to the state of health in our finances so we're not fearful day to day. And that's where we started. We spent a lot of time on that. Let's get to the place in physical health where we are not suffering from afflictions, disease, and addictions. And let's get to the state of mental health where we're relatively at peace and quite content with ourselves. Even though you can certainly achieve happiness and mental health without financial health, the truth is in modern society, most of us understand that financial wealth can give us freedom. It can give us time. It can give us peace. you're not going to buy your way to happiness, but you will buy your way out of common causes of unhappiness. In olden times, one of the routes to finding peace was you would become a monk. You would renounce things. You would renounce sex. You would renounce money. You would renounce shelter. You would renounce attachments and you would go off in the woods. And after 30 years, when you'd finally gotten over the fact that you weren't going to have these things, then you might find some peace. And the truth is most of them probably never got over it. Lots of monks out there, not a lot of enlightened people. I think it was Osho. He said, every time I meet a prostitute, she wants to talk about God. And every time I meet a priest, he wants to talk about sex. Whatever it is that you deny yourself will become your new prison. If you have a desire for material comfort, it's actually going to be easier and faster to fulfill it in modern society. If you know what you're doing and are capable, then it will be for you to renounce it. It'll take a lifetime to renounce it and maybe then it won't work, but you can make some money and be materially successful in less than a lifetime. You can get there without it and probably have a more lasting form without it, but that's playing on hard mode. Physical health, of course, is the foundation of everything. If you don't have your physical health, you have nothing. Another great Confucian saying that I liked was that a sick man only wants one thing. A healthy man wants 10,000 things. When you're sick, when you're down, all your other desires run away. Without the ability to get up and function, you can't turn into this desiring machine that you are. Physical health is actually the most important, but I speak the least in that topic because I have the least specific and unique knowledge. I'm not self-actualized in that regard. I'm in okay health, okay shape, and I have an okay diet. I understand a lot of the theory of it, but I would feel fraudulent giving you that theory unless I were a paragon of excellence in that domain. Whereas I think in wealth, I'm much more self-actualized. And on the peace side, I've gone from being a mostly unhappy person to being a very happy person. And that I think was deliberate. It was practiced. It was effort-based. It was through realizations and made progress. So I have a chance to tell you what worked for me. Happiness is an extremely loaded term. It means completely different things to different people. And it's difficult to talk about because everybody has strong preconceived notions of what happiness is and how they would get to it. I'm going to conflate happiness and pleasure and peace and joy and bliss, I'm going to mix them up. I'm not doing so deliberately, but at the same time, this is not math. We cannot clearly bound these words. They mean different things in different contexts to different people. So let's just try and get into the spirit of what I'm saying rather than get hung up on specific words and details. I think that's extremely important. When some people are talking about happiness, they're really talking about pleasure thrills, like I had a really good meal, therefore I'm happy. Other people are talking about a general state of contentment and well-being. Other people are referring to enlightenment like a Buddha would have reached. Many people will take the point of view that there's no such thing as happiness or happiness is counterproductive or misery comes from pursuing happiness. And there's a lot of truth to this and we'll get into it. But at the same time, sometimes I'll say the way to be happy is X and people will say, well, didn't you just say that happiness is a cause of misery? This is not mathematics. You cannot link algorithms together. This is more like poetry. If you read 50 different poems from a poet and then you try to map them out analytically and refer words from one poem to another and see if that made sense, you missed the point. Don't fixate on the words. Don't even fixate on the sentences. Ponder the overall thought process and message. The first step towards increasing the level of happiness in your life is realizing that you can. This is where a lot of people get tripped up. for the vast majority of people, some amount of their happiness, in fact, probably a lot more than they think is in their control. So the first step is not easy, and you might be stuck on this for a long time, and many people are, where they deep down believe that happiness cannot be developed or changed, and so they devalue it. They say, well, I don't want to be happy. Genetics may account for half or more than half of things like strength, athletic performance, and intelligence, but your genetic set point is only about half of it. And happiness or general contentment is much more malleable than the other things. It's very hard for me to change my athletic performance purely through working out. I'm going to be genetically much more limited. But I think in terms of my mood and temperament and my outlook on life, am I a peaceful person or not? How angry do I get? These things are much more malleable. So happiness is a skill like nutrition and fitness. It is a skill that you identify and develop until you get better and better at it and slowly gives you results. It is not something that has God given to you and you're stuck. Although if you start with a high setting, then by all means keep it. It is a skill that can be learned and developed. Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. You start becoming disturbed because you want something and then you work really hard to get that thing and you're miserable in the meantime. And then when you get that thing, you actually revert to the state you were in before you had that thing. It's not like you get to some blissful peak level that you stay on. There's this delusion that there's something out there that will make me happy and fulfilled forever. That is a complete delusion. No one thing seems to do that. We can talk later about enlightenment, and that does seem to head in that direction of a permanent solution, but we're not going to explore that just yet. We're just talking about common sense happiness. There's no single permanent solution to it. Rather, it is a process of understanding. It is a process of self-discovery, is a process of training yourself and seeing certain truths. If obtaining things were to permanently make us happy, then the caveman would have been miserable and we should all be deliriously happy right now. So obviously net happiness per person is not going up. It might even be going down. Modernity probably brings more unhappiness than past times. So happiness is returning to that state where nothing is missing in this moment. A common complaint where I'm from, where I'm surrounded by lots of smart overachievers is that happiness is for stupid people or happiness is for lazy people. A lot of times entrepreneurs will say, I don't wanna be happy because I wanna be successful. If I'm too happy, perhaps I will lose my desire and I will no longer work hard and I will no longer be successful. And like everything else, there is some truth to this. Generally, the more intelligent you are, the more you can see behind the facade of everyday life being easy or safe. You can see all the risks and the downsides and the calamities that await us. You can see the cynicism and the manipulation behind so many things that are portrayed as being good for you or good for society. You naturally become cynical and you signal your intelligence through cynicism. Very smart people will often communicate in purely cynical observations. It's okay to not want to be happy, but we're going to explore together whether you can increase your happiness level without significantly lowering your drive and without significantly lowering your intellect. So let's take the first one, which is, I'm not happy because I'm smart. Partially true. You are unhappy partially because you know too much. You've been exposed to too much. You understand too much. But that doesn't mean that you can't undo it and retain your intelligence. You're not smart because you're unhappy. So don't get it backwards. But yes, you're unhappy because you're smart. It means that it's going to take more work for you to be happy. But the good news is smart people are good at figuring out the truth. And it turns out the more you dig into certain deep truths, the naturally freer and more peaceful you will become. And that peace will itself lead to happiness. If you're so smart, why aren't you happy? I absolutely believe that is true. The beauty in being mentally high functioning in our society is that you can trade it for almost anything. If you're smart, you can figure out how to be healthy within your genetic constraints. If you're smart, you can figure out how to be wealthy within your local environmental constraints. If you're smart, you can figure out how to be happy within your biological constraints. But your biological constraints are a lot larger than you might think. For people who have ever gotten drunk, been on psychedelics, meditated deeply, experienced altered states of mind through breathing and hypnotic techniques, they turn into versions of themselves that are much happier for brief periods of time. Now, some of this is a fake pleasure-driven happiness, of course, but there's some truth to it as well, or you wouldn't desire that state. So in a sense, it can show you the dynamic range that you have as a human. The ability that you have to go into certain states where you're happier is actually quite large. So how do you nudge yourself in that direction on a perpetual basis, as opposed to just visiting there by essentially stunning your mind into submission and silence. Besides, I'm too smart for it. The other objection is I don't want it to lower my productivity. I don't want to have less desire, less work ethic. Fact check on that is true. The more happy you are, the more content and peaceful you are, the less likely you want to run out there and change the world. But at the same time, being unhappy is very inefficient. The peaceful person doesn't have extraneous thoughts going through their head. If you are a driven, unhappy person, your mind will be on 24-7. What are the consequences of this? Your sleep is much worse. You're much more likely to react, to become angry and dig yourself into a hole that you then have to dig yourself out of. Your decisions are going to be emotional and impetuous. You're much more likely to be in the busy trap where you're busy all the time, running from one thing to another because you can't mentally prioritize. You don't have peace of mind so when it comes time to make judgments, you have too many threads going through your head and you don't have time to devote to making those judgments. So there's a trade-off. If you become the Buddha tomorrow, it's unlikely you'll also launch rockets to the moon like Elon Musk. But on the other hand, there are enough successful, optimistic leaders, scientists and innovators, especially as they get older, that you see it's not necessarily the case that happy people have to be ineffective. As I became much happier in my life, I actually became much more effective. I was able to form relationships with people that earlier in my life, I would have kept at a distance, whatever preconceived notion. I can make decisions much more clearly now because of see what the long-term outcome is going to be. And I cut straight to the chase. I don't try and negotiate an extra 20% here or there because I know that that's going to make me unhappy long-term. It's going to make the other person unhappy and it'll make the deal less stable. So I've actually been more productive even though I've worked less hard because I've made better decisions. In the modern age, the quality of the decision you make is everything because we're all leveraged. You can be leveraged through code, community, media, capital, labor, etc. If you're a smart person, every decision you make these days, you're leveraging it in some way. And so the quality of your decision making is more important than anything else. If Warren Buffett makes the right decision 85% of the time and his competitors make it right 65% or 70% of the time, Buffett's going to win everything. That's the source of his strength, good decision making. He makes one decision a year, two at most. Most of the time he's sitting around reading books, thinking hard, reading S1s, playing bridge, traveling, golfing, etc. Obviously hard work is not the solution. Good decision making and high leverage is a solution. Having a peaceful mind, being a happier person, relying less on momentary pleasure and being calmer in general will allow you to have the frame of mind where you make better decisions. and will actually increase your effectiveness. As long as the increase in effectiveness is higher than the reduction in drive, you're well off. Finally, I would say, do you want to be the best in the world by working the hardest? Or do you want to be the best in the world who worked the least for it, right? Who worked the most intelligently for it? If you were an omniscient, omnipotent being, imagine you were the universal God for a moment. Then just by pushing a butterfly in one direction or just by snapping your fingers, you would know exactly how the particles would collide from there on out. That would change everything in the universe. You could get anything done. Omniscience is omnipotence. Knowledge is power. Through pure knowledge, we can achieve happiness and that happiness will actually increase our decision-making capability. It'll give us more time to read. It'll make us more knowledgeable about how we and other people operate. It will make us more effective. It will increase our judgment and it should increase our earnings and the returns that we need to be financially free. In some very deep level, all pleasure creates its own offsetting pain and fear of loss on the other side. I had a tweet recently where it said, in an age of abundance, pursuing pleasure for its own sake creates addiction. I was upgrading an old Miyamoto Musashi line. Do not pursue pleasure for its own sake. Musashi, he was a Japanese swordsman. In his time, when you pursued pleasure, it might mean a very different thing. He didn't have unlimited processed food. He didn't have internet pornography, marijuana or alcohol available on demand. Now that we're in age of abundance, if we pursue pleasurable things directly for their own sake, we land into addiction very easily, which is hard to get out of. I think the modern struggle is really about alone individuals disconnected from their tribe, disconnected from their religions, disconnected from their cultural networks, trying to stand up to all these things that have been weaponized. alcohol, drugs, pornography, processed foods, news media, internet, social media, video games. With these things, you can basically engage in fake play and fake work. Before you would have to go socialize with your friends. Now you just get drunk with a bunch of strangers and it's easy and good. Before you would have had to go find a mate and have sex and create children, raise a family. Now you just watch a lot of porn. Before you might have needed to go climb trees and hunt and get fruit for a little bit of natural sweetness. Now you can just buy all the gelato that you want. The modern struggle not only is trying to stand up to these things that are weaponized, that are giving you small doses of pleasure, but desensitizing you and exposing you to the misery of their loss and their absence. If you drink alcohol or if you take some kind of drug regularly, try the following thought experiment. What events do you most look forward to? I will bet you there are the events where you get to do these things. So if you drink alcohol, you look forward to dinner time or you look forward to that party that's coming up when you get to go out with your friends to the bar. To see how artificial it is, resolve that the next one you go to, you're not going to drink at all or you're not going to do the drug. And now ask yourself, how much am I looking forward to that event? You'll find not at all. This creates a conundrum. If I give up these sources of artificial pleasure that can lead to addiction and desensitize me or just bring misery down on me later by missing them, then I'm miserable because I don't get to socialize with anybody. I don't have fun. I don't go out. Breaking addictions is very hard, not just because you have to break the physical addiction, but because you then also have to change your lifestyle to the lifestyle that you would be happy without that substance. For example, if I want to drink because I get to hang out with friends and be social, and I do that enough, and pretty soon I'm hanging out with a whole bunch of friends that I actually would not hang out with sober. I can't tolerate these people sober. I can't tolerate these topics sober. I can't tolerate these venues sober. I can only do it drunk. Well, if I stop drinking, then what happens? I have to get rid of these friends. I have to get rid of these activities. I have to find brand new activities and brand new friends. This is very hard and very socially unacceptable. these fake relationships and these fake activities were just being held together by the alcohol. I realized a while back that it's actually a problem to really look forward to holidays and to weekends because it indicates two things. One is it takes the joy out of the everyday because now you're living in the future, you're suffering the rest of the time. And second is it means you have accepted a way of life in which most of your time is spent suffering. Let's talk about peace and then we'll talk about truth and how these all relate to happiness. A lot of times what I'm saying, you want to be happy. What I'm actually saying is you want to find peace. We say peace of mind, but what we really want is peace from mind. The moments of greatest pleasure, whether from doing a drug or having an orgasm or you're kite surfing and you find the edge or you're laughing with somebody or you're looking at some incredible sunset, what happens in all of these is the mind goes quiet. The mind calms down. That voice in your head where you're talking to yourself, go silent for a moment, and then you go into a sense of awe or beauty or bliss or joy or pleasure. All of us seek this. All of us chase it. Deep down, what we're actually looking for is peace from our mind. I'm not making the mind out to be an enemy. The mind is a very useful tool, but somewhere along the way, it became an uncontrollable tool. It became a master rather than just a servant. Our mind is evolved to be paranoid, fearful, and angry. We are the most paranoid and angry creatures to ever walk this earth. Human beings are apex predators at the top of the food chain. We killed, subjugated, or domesticated every other species on this planet. And we did it through fear and violence and of course cooperation, but we've killed everything else. We've tamed everything else. We were scared enough to go fight it, kill it, and own it. Nature is brutal. Turn on any nature documentary and you'll see A eats B, B eats C, C eats D, D eats E, and nature is red in tooth and claw. We are derived from violence and blood. Modern society is a lot safer. Yes, it still makes sense to be careful and to be paranoid. It still makes sense occasionally to get angry, but not all the time, not as much as we're hardwired to do. Modern society is safer and more peaceful. So it's okay to dial it down. The threat level is not as high as our genes think it is. If you were walking through the woods a thousand years ago with a friend and you thought you heard a tiger wrestling in the bushes, let's say nine out of 10 times it's a rabbit, one of 10 times it's a tiger. Well, the person who's an optimist catches a rabbit 9 out of 10 times and gets eaten the 10th. The person who's a pessimist stays alive every time. Pessimism is rewarded in our evolved nature, but we live in much safer times. So we have to find ways past that. We have to find ways towards peace. Modern life, on the other hand, is more hectic in other ways. The sources of stress that we have are more chronic. Let's define stress for a moment. Physically, stress is when something wants to be in two places at one time. If I take an iron beam and apply pressure to both ends in different directions, I'm creating stress in the beam because one part wants to be north, the other part wants to be south. I create stress on the beam. In a person, stress is when you can't decide what's important, so then you want two things at once that are mutually incompatible. I want to relax right now, but I need to get some work done. I'm under stress. I need to go to that party, but I also need to go to work. But when you truly give up on something, it's actually no longer stressful. When you accept that something is completely out of your control, there's no point in being stressed about it. So it does imply that you have some level of control over it. The mind is constantly creating stress for you through situations where it's being more paranoid or more angry than is actually warranted for your environment. We want to find peace from mind. We want to have tools that allow us to not turn off the mind, because you can't suppress the mind. If I say to you, don't think of a white elephant, you just thought of a white elephant. So you can't force the mind into anything. but where the mind on its own calms down and naturally goes away. And how do you do that? How do you end up with a more peaceful mind? Because the more peaceful mind automatically creates a happier person. One phrase I liked is that peace is happiness at rest, happiness is peace in motion. A peaceful person doing an activity will end up happy doing that activity. A happy person just sitting there will be peaceful. So the goal actually is not happiness, even though we'll use that term a lot, the goal is actually peace. So the question is, how do you get to peace? The first problem with getting to peace is that no activity will get you to peace because peace is fundamentally inactivity. Peace is the sense that everything is fine. And if everything is fine, you're not making physical activity to change it, so you're physically at peace, and you're not making mental activity to try and change it either because that'll create mental stress because you'll want to mentally be somewhere other than you actually are. So peace itself is not a thing that can be directly achieved. You cannot work towards peace. What you can work towards is understanding. I think this is an old religious saying, but it says the name of God is truth. And what that's basically saying is that when you understand certain things, when you learn certain things, when you're convinced of certain things, and when they become a deep part of you, then you naturally become a more peaceful person. One of the tweets that I put out a while back was, the closer you get to the truth, the more silent you are inside. We intuitively know this. When someone is blabbing too much, that person who talks too much at the party, the court jester, you know they're not at peace inside. You know Robin Williams was not peaceful inside. Whereas with a wise person, if we expect to meet a Lao Tzu, a Socrates, we expect them to be quiet. That is an indication that they are wise. And not quiet because they're trying to look wise, but quiet because they're internally quiet. We understand that peace and wisdom sort of go together. Kapil Gupta, who's written far more on this topic than I have, said, wisdom begets stoicism, stoicism does not beget wisdom. And I thought that was very insightful. And his basic point is that as you become wise, you naturally become stoic. It's not by practicing being stoic that you become wise. That's cart and horse getting reversed. As an aside, I had a tweet the other day that got incredibly misinterpreted. So many people failed that IQ test. They basically said, the smarter you get, the slower you read. All these people got triggered about it, of course, this whole speed reading crowd. A lot of people said, well, Bill Gates reads 150 books per year. And then a bunch of people said, oh, well, I read really slowly, so I must be smart. Actually, no, I said, if A, then B, that does not mean if B, then A. Truth is very fought over. When we say truth, the biggest problem we're going to run into is that what society wants for you is not what's always good for you. society is the largest group and groups search for consensus individuals search for truth it is not acceptable for society to tell you the truth on many things there are many things society throws out all day long that if you're a smart and critical thinking person that you disbelieve but you're forced to go along with it even though deep down you know it's not true money isn't going to make you happy that's a society truth that's not an individual truth look at all the individuals trying to make money deep down they know that yes money will get rid of a lot of sources of unhappiness and at least put it to the point where happiness is then under my control. It's my choice as opposed to being inflicted upon me externally. That is just one of a billion lies society tells you. Another lie society tells you is that you send your kids to school for education. No, they get an hour a day of education. They get indoctrination. They get taught at the speed of the slowest student. They get taught mostly subjects that are irrelevant or obsolete. Education is a combination of a small bit of education, a large dose of socialization, a large dose of compliance training, a massive dose of babysitting, which is helpful for parents who can't take care of the kids at home. Also, it keeps young troublemakers off the streets, especially at the teenage level who might be going out and committing crime and causing problems or getting in trouble. So school does a lot of things, but education is just a very tiny piece of it as all the homeschooling stats clearly show. And even the unschooling stats are starting to show. Society does not just tell you things that are false. it programs you to beat yourself up when you cross one of these boundaries, when you transgress against society's truths. And a classic example of that is guilt. Guilt is society's voice speaking in your head. Guilt is society programming you so effectively that you are your own warden. So truth seeking is a very hard business because you essentially have to, with deep conviction, understand things that you are told are wrong all day long. When we talk about peace and how to get there, what we're really talking about is the search for truth. Try to see the advantage of getting to something by truth rather than by practice. Let's say I'm trying to quit smoking. There are techniques I can try, but they're always painful and difficult. Very often there'll come a moment when I see something a certain way, like I see myself a certain way, or I get diagnosed with lung cancer and I understand that I'm going to die, or I see a friend get in trouble with similar bad habits. When I see something strong enough, when I understand it, then the habit can often disappear by itself. The bad habit can dissolve. That's an extreme example. Much more simply might be, I see some facet of myself that I don't like. I see some facet of somebody else that I then can't unsee and I can no longer be friends with them. Understanding and seeing changes organically in a way that pure practice and technique cannot. When you're practicing how to do something, there's always a gap between you and the thing. There's always a repetition that you have to keep doing. There's always a struggle. There's always conflict. If we want peace, then one of the things we have to give up on is self-conflict. We even have to give up on self-improvement because self-improvement is just a dressed up form of self-conflict. We have to instead use our natural curiosity for everything to understand things better. And then through understanding, we will naturally improve ourselves. Once we truly understand the effects of unhealthy food in our body, when we can see the extra weight we're carrying, when we can track the glucose spike and crash and see how we physically feel worse for having eaten too much sugar, when we see how caffeine hops us up and then crashes us down at the end of the night, then we automatically change for the better. So the path towards peace is truth.