# The Happiness Hypothesis
## Metadata
- Author:: [[Jonathan Haidt]]
- Full Title:: The Happiness Hypothesis
- Category: #books
## Highlights
> Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”1 ([Location 116](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=116))
> (Or, as Buddha4 said, “Our life is the creation of our mind.”) ([Location 136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=136))
> If Passion drives, let Reason hold the Reins. —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN1,2 ([Location 182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=182))
> 4 Plato used a similar metaphor in which the self (or soul) is a chariot, and the calm, rational part of the mind holds the reins. Plato’s charioteer had to control two horses: The horse that is on the right, or nobler, side is upright in frame and well jointed, with a high neck and a regal nose; . . . he is a lover of honor with modesty and self-control; companion to true glory, he needs no whip, and is guided by verbal commands alone. The other horse is a crooked great jumble of limbs . . . companion to wild boasts and indecency, he is shaggy around the ears—deaf as a post—and just barely yields to horse-whip and goad combined.5 ([Location 205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=205))
> In Metamorphoses, Medea is torn between her love for Jason and her duty to her father. She laments: I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.7 ([Location 237](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=237))
> Montaigne was most fascinated by the independence of the penis: We are right to note the license and disobedience of this member which thrusts itself forward so inopportunely when we do not want it to, and which so inopportunely lets us down when we most need it. It imperiously contests for authority with our will.8 ([Location 254](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=254))
> 22 that seems to flow on by, following its own rules of association, without any feeling of effort or direction from the self. Bargh contrasts automatic processes with controlled processes, the kind of thinking that takes some effort, ([Location 422](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=422))
> I believe the Scottish philosopher David Hume was closer to the truth than was Plato when he said, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”26 ([Location 475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=475))
> 5 Lady Philosophy reframes change as normal and as the right of Fortune. (“The whole universe is change,” Aurelius had said.) Boethius was fortunate; now he is not. That is no cause for anger. Rather, he should be grateful that he enjoyed Fortune for so long, and he should be calm now that she has left him: “No man can ever be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune.”6 ([Location 614](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=614))
> And she draws Boethius’s imagination far up into the heavens so that he can look down on the Earth and see it as a tiny speck on which even tinier people play out their comical and ultimately insignificant ambitions. She gets him to admit that riches and fame bring anxiety and avarice, not peace and happiness. After being shown these new perspectives and having his old assumptions challenged, Boethius is finally prepared to absorb the greatest lesson of all, the lesson Buddha and Aurelius had taught centuries earlier: “Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”7 When he takes this lesson to heart, Boethius frees himself from his mental prison. He regains his composure, writes a book that has comforted people for centuries, and faces his death with dignity. ([Location 621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=621))
> This principle, called “negativity bias,”13 shows up all over psychology. In marital interactions, it takes at least five good or constructive actions to make up for the damage done by one critical or destructive act.14 ([Location 690](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=690))
> As Ben Franklin said: “We are not so sensible of the greatest Health as of the least Sickness.”17 ([Location 698](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=698))
> When it comes to explaining personality, it’s always true that nature and nurture work together. But it’s also true that nature plays a bigger role than most people realize. Consider the identical twin sisters Daphne and Barbara. Raised outside London, they both left school at the age of fourteen, went to work in local government, met their future husbands at the age of sixteen at local town hall dances, suffered miscarriages at the same time, and then each gave birth to two boys and a girl. They feared many of the same things (blood and heights) and exhibited unusual habits (each drank her coffee cold; each developed the habit of pushing up her nose with the palm of the hand, a gesture they both called “squidging”). None of this may surprise you until you learn that separate families had adopted Daphne and Barbara as infants; neither even knew of the other’s existence until they were reunited at the age of forty. When they finally did meet, they were wearing almost identical clothing.23 ([Location 742](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=742))
> and then each gave birth to two boys and a girl. They feared many of the same things (blood and heights) and exhibited unusual habits (each drank her coffee cold; each developed the habit of pushing up her nose with the palm of the hand, a gesture they both called “squidging”). None of this may surprise you until you learn that separate families had adopted Daphne and Barbara as infants; ([Location 745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=745))
> You can change your affective style too—but again, you can’t do it by sheer force of will. You have to do something that will change your repertoire of available thoughts. Here are three of the best methods for doing so: meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac. All three are effective because they work on the elephant. ([Location 806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=806))
> As Buddha said: “When a man knows the solitude of silence, and feels the joy of quietness, he is then free from fear and sin.”35 ([Location 839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=839))
> with her hypersensitive and overly inhibited personality, and if she had made little progress with psychotherapy, why exactly should she be true to a self she doesn’t want? Why not change herself for the better? When I took Paxil, it changed my affective style for the better. It made me into something I was not, but had long wanted to be: a person who worries less, and who sees the world as being full of possibilities, not threats. Paxil improved the balance between ([Location 952](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=952))
> Your siblings are just as closely related to you (50 percent shared genes) as your children; your nephews and nieces share a quarter of your genes, and your cousins one eighth. In a strictly Darwinian calculation, whatever cost you would bear to save one of your children you should be willing to pay to save two nieces or four cousins.5 ([Location 1025](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1025))
> Thus Niccolo Machiavelli, whose name has become synonymous with the cunning and amoral use of power, wrote five hundred years ago that “the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.”5 ([Location 1267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1267))
> As Robert Wright put it in his masterful book The Moral Animal, “Human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse.”10 ([Location 1307](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1307))
> I balanc’d some time between principle and inclination, till I recollectd that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, “if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” So I din’d upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet.14 ([Location 1354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1354))
> Franklin concluded: “So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” ([Location 1356](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1356))
> When the moral history of the 1990s is written, it might be titled Desperately Seeking Satan. With peace and harmony ascendant, Americans seemed to be searching for substitute villains. We tried drug dealers (but then the crack epidemic waned) and child abductors (who are usually one of the parents). The cultural right vilified homosexuals; the left vilified racists and homophobes. As I thought about these various villains, including the older villains of communism and Satan himself, I realized that most of them share three properties: They are invisible (you can’t identify the evil one from appearance alone); their evil spreads by contagion, making it vital to protect impressionable young people from infection (for example from communist ideas, homosexual teachers, or stereotypes on television); and the villains can be defeated only if we all pull together as a team. It became clear to me that people want to believe they are on a mission from God, or that they are fighting for some more secular good (animals, fetuses, women’s rights), and you can’t have much of a mission without good allies and a good enemy. ([Location 1475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1475))
> The myth of pure evil is the ultimate self-serving bias, the ultimate form of naive realism. And it is the ultimate cause of most long-running cycles of violence because both sides use it to lock themselves into a Manichaean struggle. When George W. Bush said that the 9/11 terrorists did what they did because they “hate our freedom,” he showed a stunning lack of psychological insight. Neither the 9/11 hijackers nor Osama Bin Laden were particularly upset because American women can drive, vote, and wear bikinis. Rather, many Islamic extremists want to kill ([Location 1525](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1525))
> Americans because they are using the Myth of Pure Evil to interpret Arab history and current events. They see America as the Great Satan, the current villain in a long pageant of Western humiliation of Arab nations and peoples. They did what they did as a reaction to America’s actions and impact in the Middle East, as they see it through the distortions of the Myth of Pure Evil. However horrifying it is for terrorists to lump all civilians into the category of “enemy” and then kill them indiscriminately, such actions at least make psychological sense, whereas killing because of a hatred for freedom does not. ([Location 1530](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1530))
> 1 Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well. —EPICTETUS2 ([Location 1624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1624))
> Shakespeare captured it perfectly: “Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.”4 ([Location 1678](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1678))
> Buddha, Epictetus, and many other sages saw the futility of the rat race and urged people to quit. They proposed a particular happiness hypothesis: Happiness comes from within, and it cannot be found by making the world conform to your desires. ([Location 1729](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1729))
> A good marriage is one of the life-factors most strongly and consistently associated with happiness.14 ([Location 1748](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1748))
> (apatheia) advocated by many Greek and Roman philosophers and that of calm nonstriving advocated by Buddha are lives designed to avoid passion, and a life without passion is not a human life. Yes, attachments bring pain, but they also bring our greatest joys, and there is value in the very variation that the philosophers are trying to avoid. I was stunned to hear a philosopher reject so much of ancient ([Location 2078](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=2078))
> The power of love over fear was well expressed in the New Testament: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (I JOHN 4:18). ([Location 2244](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=2244))
> much higher intelligence. However, brain growth faced a literal bottleneck: the birth canal. There were physical limits to how large a head hominid females could give birth to and still have a pelvis that would allow them to walk upright. At least one species of hominid—our ancestor—evolved a novel technique that got around this limitation by sending babies out of the uterus long ([Location 2373](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=2373))
> As a character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit said, “Hell is other people.”57 But so is heaven. ([Location 2598](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=2598))
> Marcel Proust said: We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.45 ([Location 2922](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=2922))
> This simple test, which Kant called the “categorical imperative,” was extraordinarily powerful. ([Location 3092](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=3092))
> Peterson and Seligman suggest that there are twenty-four principle character strengths, each leading to one of the six higher-level virtues.19 You can diagnose yourself by looking at the list below or by taking the strengths test (at www.authentichappiness.org). 1. Wisdom: • Curiosity • Love of learning • Judgment • Ingenuity • Emotional intelligence • Perspective 2. Courage: • Valor • Perseverance • Integrity 3. Humanity: • Kindness • Loving 4. Justice: • Citizenship • Fairness • Leadership 5. Temperance: • Self-control • Prudence • Humility 6. Transcendence: • Appreciation of beauty and excellence • Gratitude • Hope • Spirituality • Forgiveness • Humor • Zest ([Location 3202](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=3202))
> 3. Humanity: • Kindness • Loving 4. Justice: • Citizenship ([Location 3212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=3212))
> Man Ought to Know,19 Sylvanus Stall devoted an entire chapter to “personal purity” in which he noted that ([Location 3615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=3615))
> Maslow’s analysis probably does not shock you. It makes sense as a secular psychological explanation of religion. But what is most surprising in Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences is Maslow’s attack on science for becoming as sterile as organized religion. The historians of science Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park45 later documented this change. ([Location 3876](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=3876))
> His goal was nothing less than the reformation of education and, therefore, of society: “Education must be seen as at least partially an effort to produce the good human being, to foster the good life and the good society.”46 ([Location 3890](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=3890))
- Note: maslow
> For all these reasons, the self is a problem for the ethic of divinity. The big greedy self is like a brick holding down the soul. Only by seeing the self in this way, I believe, can one understand and even respect the moral motivations of those who want to make their society conform more closely to the particular religion they follow. ([Location 3914](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=3914))
> “Whosoever shall not fall by the sword or by famine, shall fall by pestilence so why bother shaving?” (WOODY ALLEN).6 ([Location 4003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4003))
> the closing scene of the movie Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, the answer to the Holy Question is handed to the actor Michael Palin (in drag), who reads it aloud: “Try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try to live in harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”10 ([Location 4038](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4038))
> Rather, White said, effectance is a constant presence in our lives: Dealing with the environment means carrying on a continuing transaction which gradually changes one’s relation to the environment. Because there is no consummatory climax, satisfaction has to be seen as lying in a considerable series of transactions, in a trend of behavior rather than a goal that is achieved.21 The effectance motive helps explain the progress principle: We get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them because, as Shakespeare said, “Joy’s soul lies in the doing.”22 ([Location 4128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4128))
> called it “vital engagement,” which they define as “a relationship to the world that is characterized both by experiences of flow (enjoyed absorption) and by meaning (subjective significance).” 30 Vital engagement is another way of saying that work has become “love made visible”; Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi even describe vital engagement in words that could almost have been taken from a romance novel: “There is a strong felt connection between self and object; a writer is ‘swept away’ by a project, a scientist is ‘mesmerized by the stars.’ The relationship has subjective meaning; work is a ‘calling.’”31 ([Location 4193](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4193))
> Here is one of the most profound ideas to come from the ongoing synthesis: People gain a sense of meaning when their lives cohere across the three levels of their existence.37 ([Location 4260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4260))
> Darwin thought the answer was easy: Altruism evolves for the good of the group: There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good would be victorious over most other tribes, and this would be natural selection.40 ([Location 4315](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4315))
> When McNeill was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1941, basic training required that he march for hundreds of hours on the drill field in close formation with a few dozen other men. At first, McNeill thought the marching was just a way to pass the time because his base had no weapons with which to train. But after a few weeks of training, the marching began to induce in him an altered state of consciousness: Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.60 ([Location 4441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4441))
> What can you do to have a good, happy, fulfilling, and meaningful life? What is the answer to the question of purpose within life? I believe the answer can be found only by understanding the kind of creature that we are, divided in the many ways we are divided. ([Location 4462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4462))
> I don’t believe there is an inspiring answer to the question, “What is the purpose of life?” Yet by drawing on ancient wisdom and modern science, we can find compelling answers to the question of purpose within life. The final version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness comes from between. ([Location 4468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4468))
> Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge. ([Location 4471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4471))
# The Happiness Hypothesis
## Metadata
- Author:: [[Jonathan Haidt]]
- Full Title:: The Happiness Hypothesis
- Category: #books
## Highlights
> Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”1 ([Location 116](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=116))
> (Or, as Buddha4 said, “Our life is the creation of our mind.”) ([Location 136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=136))
> If Passion drives, let Reason hold the Reins. —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN1,2 ([Location 182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=182))
> 4 Plato used a similar metaphor in which the self (or soul) is a chariot, and the calm, rational part of the mind holds the reins. Plato’s charioteer had to control two horses: The horse that is on the right, or nobler, side is upright in frame and well jointed, with a high neck and a regal nose; . . . he is a lover of honor with modesty and self-control; companion to true glory, he needs no whip, and is guided by verbal commands alone. The other horse is a crooked great jumble of limbs . . . companion to wild boasts and indecency, he is shaggy around the ears—deaf as a post—and just barely yields to horse-whip and goad combined.5 ([Location 205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=205))
> In Metamorphoses, Medea is torn between her love for Jason and her duty to her father. She laments: I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.7 ([Location 237](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=237))
> Montaigne was most fascinated by the independence of the penis: We are right to note the license and disobedience of this member which thrusts itself forward so inopportunely when we do not want it to, and which so inopportunely lets us down when we most need it. It imperiously contests for authority with our will.8 ([Location 254](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=254))
> 22 that seems to flow on by, following its own rules of association, without any feeling of effort or direction from the self. Bargh contrasts automatic processes with controlled processes, the kind of thinking that takes some effort, ([Location 422](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=422))
> I believe the Scottish philosopher David Hume was closer to the truth than was Plato when he said, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”26 ([Location 475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=475))
> 5 Lady Philosophy reframes change as normal and as the right of Fortune. (“The whole universe is change,” Aurelius had said.) Boethius was fortunate; now he is not. That is no cause for anger. Rather, he should be grateful that he enjoyed Fortune for so long, and he should be calm now that she has left him: “No man can ever be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune.”6 ([Location 614](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=614))
> And she draws Boethius’s imagination far up into the heavens so that he can look down on the Earth and see it as a tiny speck on which even tinier people play out their comical and ultimately insignificant ambitions. She gets him to admit that riches and fame bring anxiety and avarice, not peace and happiness. After being shown these new perspectives and having his old assumptions challenged, Boethius is finally prepared to absorb the greatest lesson of all, the lesson Buddha and Aurelius had taught centuries earlier: “Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”7 When he takes this lesson to heart, Boethius frees himself from his mental prison. He regains his composure, writes a book that has comforted people for centuries, and faces his death with dignity. ([Location 621](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=621))
> This principle, called “negativity bias,”13 shows up all over psychology. In marital interactions, it takes at least five good or constructive actions to make up for the damage done by one critical or destructive act.14 ([Location 690](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=690))
> As Ben Franklin said: “We are not so sensible of the greatest Health as of the least Sickness.”17 ([Location 698](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=698))
> When it comes to explaining personality, it’s always true that nature and nurture work together. But it’s also true that nature plays a bigger role than most people realize. Consider the identical twin sisters Daphne and Barbara. Raised outside London, they both left school at the age of fourteen, went to work in local government, met their future husbands at the age of sixteen at local town hall dances, suffered miscarriages at the same time, and then each gave birth to two boys and a girl. They feared many of the same things (blood and heights) and exhibited unusual habits (each drank her coffee cold; each developed the habit of pushing up her nose with the palm of the hand, a gesture they both called “squidging”). None of this may surprise you until you learn that separate families had adopted Daphne and Barbara as infants; neither even knew of the other’s existence until they were reunited at the age of forty. When they finally did meet, they were wearing almost identical clothing.23 ([Location 742](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=742))
> and then each gave birth to two boys and a girl. They feared many of the same things (blood and heights) and exhibited unusual habits (each drank her coffee cold; each developed the habit of pushing up her nose with the palm of the hand, a gesture they both called “squidging”). None of this may surprise you until you learn that separate families had adopted Daphne and Barbara as infants; ([Location 745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=745))
> You can change your affective style too—but again, you can’t do it by sheer force of will. You have to do something that will change your repertoire of available thoughts. Here are three of the best methods for doing so: meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac. All three are effective because they work on the elephant. ([Location 806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=806))
> As Buddha said: “When a man knows the solitude of silence, and feels the joy of quietness, he is then free from fear and sin.”35 ([Location 839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=839))
> with her hypersensitive and overly inhibited personality, and if she had made little progress with psychotherapy, why exactly should she be true to a self she doesn’t want? Why not change herself for the better? When I took Paxil, it changed my affective style for the better. It made me into something I was not, but had long wanted to be: a person who worries less, and who sees the world as being full of possibilities, not threats. Paxil improved the balance between ([Location 952](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=952))
> Your siblings are just as closely related to you (50 percent shared genes) as your children; your nephews and nieces share a quarter of your genes, and your cousins one eighth. In a strictly Darwinian calculation, whatever cost you would bear to save one of your children you should be willing to pay to save two nieces or four cousins.5 ([Location 1025](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1025))
> Thus Niccolo Machiavelli, whose name has become synonymous with the cunning and amoral use of power, wrote five hundred years ago that “the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.”5 ([Location 1267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1267))
> As Robert Wright put it in his masterful book The Moral Animal, “Human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse.”10 ([Location 1307](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1307))
> I balanc’d some time between principle and inclination, till I recollectd that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, “if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you.” So I din’d upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet.14 ([Location 1354](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1354))
> Franklin concluded: “So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” ([Location 1356](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1356))
> When the moral history of the 1990s is written, it might be titled Desperately Seeking Satan. With peace and harmony ascendant, Americans seemed to be searching for substitute villains. We tried drug dealers (but then the crack epidemic waned) and child abductors (who are usually one of the parents). The cultural right vilified homosexuals; the left vilified racists and homophobes. As I thought about these various villains, including the older villains of communism and Satan himself, I realized that most of them share three properties: They are invisible (you can’t identify the evil one from appearance alone); their evil spreads by contagion, making it vital to protect impressionable young people from infection (for example from communist ideas, homosexual teachers, or stereotypes on television); and the villains can be defeated only if we all pull together as a team. It became clear to me that people want to believe they are on a mission from God, or that they are fighting for some more secular good (animals, fetuses, women’s rights), and you can’t have much of a mission without good allies and a good enemy. ([Location 1475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1475))
> The myth of pure evil is the ultimate self-serving bias, the ultimate form of naive realism. And it is the ultimate cause of most long-running cycles of violence because both sides use it to lock themselves into a Manichaean struggle. When George W. Bush said that the 9/11 terrorists did what they did because they “hate our freedom,” he showed a stunning lack of psychological insight. Neither the 9/11 hijackers nor Osama Bin Laden were particularly upset because American women can drive, vote, and wear bikinis. Rather, many Islamic extremists want to kill ([Location 1525](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1525))
> Americans because they are using the Myth of Pure Evil to interpret Arab history and current events. They see America as the Great Satan, the current villain in a long pageant of Western humiliation of Arab nations and peoples. They did what they did as a reaction to America’s actions and impact in the Middle East, as they see it through the distortions of the Myth of Pure Evil. However horrifying it is for terrorists to lump all civilians into the category of “enemy” and then kill them indiscriminately, such actions at least make psychological sense, whereas killing because of a hatred for freedom does not. ([Location 1530](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1530))
> 1 Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well. —EPICTETUS2 ([Location 1624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1624))
> Shakespeare captured it perfectly: “Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.”4 ([Location 1678](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1678))
> Buddha, Epictetus, and many other sages saw the futility of the rat race and urged people to quit. They proposed a particular happiness hypothesis: Happiness comes from within, and it cannot be found by making the world conform to your desires. ([Location 1729](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1729))
> A good marriage is one of the life-factors most strongly and consistently associated with happiness.14 ([Location 1748](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=1748))
> (apatheia) advocated by many Greek and Roman philosophers and that of calm nonstriving advocated by Buddha are lives designed to avoid passion, and a life without passion is not a human life. Yes, attachments bring pain, but they also bring our greatest joys, and there is value in the very variation that the philosophers are trying to avoid. I was stunned to hear a philosopher reject so much of ancient ([Location 2078](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=2078))
> The power of love over fear was well expressed in the New Testament: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (I JOHN 4:18). ([Location 2244](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=2244))
> much higher intelligence. However, brain growth faced a literal bottleneck: the birth canal. There were physical limits to how large a head hominid females could give birth to and still have a pelvis that would allow them to walk upright. At least one species of hominid—our ancestor—evolved a novel technique that got around this limitation by sending babies out of the uterus long ([Location 2373](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=2373))
> As a character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit said, “Hell is other people.”57 But so is heaven. ([Location 2598](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=2598))
> Marcel Proust said: We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.45 ([Location 2922](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=2922))
> This simple test, which Kant called the “categorical imperative,” was extraordinarily powerful. ([Location 3092](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=3092))
> Peterson and Seligman suggest that there are twenty-four principle character strengths, each leading to one of the six higher-level virtues.19 You can diagnose yourself by looking at the list below or by taking the strengths test (at www.authentichappiness.org). 1. Wisdom: • Curiosity • Love of learning • Judgment • Ingenuity • Emotional intelligence • Perspective 2. Courage: • Valor • Perseverance • Integrity 3. Humanity: • Kindness • Loving 4. Justice: • Citizenship • Fairness • Leadership 5. Temperance: • Self-control • Prudence • Humility 6. Transcendence: • Appreciation of beauty and excellence • Gratitude • Hope • Spirituality • Forgiveness • Humor • Zest ([Location 3202](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=3202))
> 3. Humanity: • Kindness • Loving 4. Justice: • Citizenship ([Location 3212](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=3212))
> Man Ought to Know,19 Sylvanus Stall devoted an entire chapter to “personal purity” in which he noted that ([Location 3615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=3615))
> Maslow’s analysis probably does not shock you. It makes sense as a secular psychological explanation of religion. But what is most surprising in Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences is Maslow’s attack on science for becoming as sterile as organized religion. The historians of science Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park45 later documented this change. ([Location 3876](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=3876))
> His goal was nothing less than the reformation of education and, therefore, of society: “Education must be seen as at least partially an effort to produce the good human being, to foster the good life and the good society.”46 ([Location 3890](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=3890))
- Note: maslow
> For all these reasons, the self is a problem for the ethic of divinity. The big greedy self is like a brick holding down the soul. Only by seeing the self in this way, I believe, can one understand and even respect the moral motivations of those who want to make their society conform more closely to the particular religion they follow. ([Location 3914](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=3914))
> “Whosoever shall not fall by the sword or by famine, shall fall by pestilence so why bother shaving?” (WOODY ALLEN).6 ([Location 4003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4003))
> the closing scene of the movie Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, the answer to the Holy Question is handed to the actor Michael Palin (in drag), who reads it aloud: “Try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try to live in harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”10 ([Location 4038](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4038))
> Rather, White said, effectance is a constant presence in our lives: Dealing with the environment means carrying on a continuing transaction which gradually changes one’s relation to the environment. Because there is no consummatory climax, satisfaction has to be seen as lying in a considerable series of transactions, in a trend of behavior rather than a goal that is achieved.21 The effectance motive helps explain the progress principle: We get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them because, as Shakespeare said, “Joy’s soul lies in the doing.”22 ([Location 4128](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4128))
> called it “vital engagement,” which they define as “a relationship to the world that is characterized both by experiences of flow (enjoyed absorption) and by meaning (subjective significance).” 30 Vital engagement is another way of saying that work has become “love made visible”; Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi even describe vital engagement in words that could almost have been taken from a romance novel: “There is a strong felt connection between self and object; a writer is ‘swept away’ by a project, a scientist is ‘mesmerized by the stars.’ The relationship has subjective meaning; work is a ‘calling.’”31 ([Location 4193](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4193))
> Here is one of the most profound ideas to come from the ongoing synthesis: People gain a sense of meaning when their lives cohere across the three levels of their existence.37 ([Location 4260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4260))
> Darwin thought the answer was easy: Altruism evolves for the good of the group: There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good would be victorious over most other tribes, and this would be natural selection.40 ([Location 4315](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4315))
> When McNeill was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1941, basic training required that he march for hundreds of hours on the drill field in close formation with a few dozen other men. At first, McNeill thought the marching was just a way to pass the time because his base had no weapons with which to train. But after a few weeks of training, the marching began to induce in him an altered state of consciousness: Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.60 ([Location 4441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4441))
> What can you do to have a good, happy, fulfilling, and meaningful life? What is the answer to the question of purpose within life? I believe the answer can be found only by understanding the kind of creature that we are, divided in the many ways we are divided. ([Location 4462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4462))
> I don’t believe there is an inspiring answer to the question, “What is the purpose of life?” Yet by drawing on ancient wisdom and modern science, we can find compelling answers to the question of purpose within life. The final version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness comes from between. ([Location 4468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4468))
> Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge. ([Location 4471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003E749TE&location=4471))