Something Is Very Wrong With Modern Life

Why Can't Meaning Be Simulated?

Because meaning is fundamentally complex, right-hemispheric experience, but the simulation is always on the wrong side of the brain. Therefore, it would look like it's meaningful, but it isn't.

In the modern world, people are getting what they want but not what they need, and this is something that people need but don't realize they want or don't know how to get.

Are We Just Pursuing Approval?

Everybody pursues goals because human beings only get satisfaction in their life when they're making progress. Satisfaction is the joy of an accomplishment, of making progress toward it through struggle. That's why goals are incredibly important; struggle and pain are, too.

Gold medalist syndrome: Athletes feel depressed after winning that gold medal.

In behavioral science, the "Gold medalist syndrome" is called the arrival fallacy; you want to get there and expect you would feel worthy or special, but you actually won't feel it after you made it.

Arrival fallacy never becomes a popular discussion topic because people don't want to hear it and won't tell their friends about it. Saying to the people who are still climbing, which everybody is, the view from the top of the mountain is not as good as you think it's going to be, feels like you're sucking the gas out of their fuel tank while they're still on their way up.

The desire for something is actually proof of the existence of its object. For instance, proof that water exists is that I feel thirst.

The only thing worse than never having made it is having fallen off.

The Big Questions Everyone Should Be Asking

3 Elements of meaning: Coherence, Purpose, and Significance

Why are things happening the way they are in my life?

Part of meaning is having an answer to that.

Why am I doing what I'm doing?

It's purpose, and purpose and meaning are not the same. Purpose is goals and direction so you can make progress.

If you don't know the reason for it, then you can't make progress because you're just going in circles.

My life matters to someone. What is the significance of my life?

Arthur thinks that real love isn't earned; it's a free gift, it's a grace. Anybody who makes you earn their love doesn't love you.

Specialness & Happiness

Some people are saying, I know what would make me happy, and I'm going to forgo that happiness for what I think is a happiness beyond it, which is specialness. And that will always lead to ruin.

If you believe that love is earned, then you're gonna surround yourself with people who make you earn their love.

A Navy SEAL said: I built myself up like my entire career was made out of being a person who doesn't quit; that caused me to stay in a marriage that was toxic for 10 years longer than I should have done.

Your strengths are your weaknesses, but your weaknesses are your strengths. You will pay in private for what you're applauded for in public, but what you're paying for in private is the source of your strength in public. ⇒ You shouldn't just be thankful for what they're applauding you for in public; on the contrary. You should be down on your knees, thankful for the weaknesses you have as well. That's actually how we ultimately learn to manage ourselves.

The ACE move is being grateful for the wound itself.

How Technology is Rewiring Our Brains

There are many things that we shouldn't try to solve, because we can't; we should live with them, understand them, leave them as permanent mysteries that actually give our life flavor.

How to Escape the Doom Loop

3 common steps for getting out of addictions

1. You got to get pissed. The thing is subjugating you. You feel tired of it. You need the spirit of rebellion.
2. Figure out how to stop. There's tons of science in every area. If you get addicted to it, there's science that tells you how to stop.
3. Learn how to live with yourself again. Because you've been distracting yourself from yourself. If you're addicted to something, it means you didn't like being home in your head.

How Important Is Romantic Love to Meaning?

This is something you will never solve. If we could have solved algorithmically romantic love, we wouldn't still have app developers that were trying to make the ultimate dating app.

The dating apps are fundamentally a left-brain solution to a right-brain problem, even now they're getting better but the approach of it is by figuring out ways to add more human friction to the algorithm as opposed to taking human friction out of the algorithm.

The good way to find your matches on an app

To have some of your matches go to your best friend and have your friend decide which ones you're going to go out with. Since this would add your friend's right brain into the mix which means using the right-brain of your friend to solve your right-brain problem.

If you want to turn on the meaning in your life, go get your heart broken, go take a risk.

That's when you find the meaning of your life, right? Because the time that you ask yourself all those big questions is when you've had your heart broken, that's horrible and hard but that's meaning rich.

Is Suffering the Ultimate Meaning?

Sadness is supposed to be really painful and you don't want it. However, people don't suffer so much from sadness, they suffer a lot from "fear" of sadness or when you're trying to avoid sadness.

Most of the reasons we do most of the things is because the afraid of negative emotions, but at the same time most people will talk about the most meaningful periods of their lives were at times of the greatest negative emotion in their lives.

Strange the things that people want and what they need, and the fact that those two don't cross over all that much.

The Modern Unhappiness Crisis

Enjoyment is not just pleasure, it's pleasure + people + memory. It's a conscious phenomenon.

Satisfaction, which is the achievement of worthwhile goals with struggle.

When a man can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.

And there's another group which suffer the opposite problem which is the Victor Frankl's inverse law.

When a man can't find a deep sense of pleasure, they distract themselves with meaning. If ease, grace, joy, and playfulness don't come easy to you, one solution is to just ignore moment to moment happiness entirely and always pursue hard things. You become a world champion at winning the marshmallow test. You convince yourself that delayed gratification in perpetuity is noble because you struggle to ever feel grateful. The TLDR is you prioritize meaning over happiness because happiness doesn't come easily to you.

Leisure is something you're not being compensated for by the outside world but that's creating value, and that's what will bring you enjoyment. e.g., deepening your spiritual or philosophical life, deepening your relationships, and learning things you don't need to learn.

If you have friends because they're useful, it's a telos, it's kind of a deal friends, but real friends are atelic, they're actually useless.