THE HAPPINESS HYPOTHESIS by Jonathan Haidt

• To summarize the idea that our emotions, our reactions to events, and some mental illnesses are caused by the mental filters through which we look at the world, I could not say it any more concisely than Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
• The mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. Like a rider on the back of an elephant, the conscious, reasoning part of the mind has only limited control of what the elephant does.
• Reciprocity is the most important tool for getting along with people,
• we are all, by nature, hypocrites, and this is why it is so hard for us to follow the Golden Rule faithfully.
• Recent research shows that there are some things worth striving for; there are external conditions of life that can make you lastingly happier. One of these conditions is relatedness—the bonds we form, and need to form, with others.
• Human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new or complex things in relation to things we already know.
• To understand most important ideas in psychology, you need to understand how the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict.
• The brain started off with just three rooms, or clumps of neurons: a hindbrain (connected to the spinal column), a midbrain, and a forebrain (connected to the sensory organs at the front of the animal). Over time, as more complex bodies and behaviors evolved, the brain kept building out the front, away from the spinal column, expanding the forebrain more than any other part.
• Controlled processing is limited—we can think consciously about one thing at a time only—but automatic processes run in parallel and can handle many tasks at once.
• Controlled processing requires language. You can have bits and pieces of thought through images, but to plan something complex, to weigh the pros and cons of different paths, or to analyze the causes of past successes and failures, you need words.
• One use of language is that it partially freed humans from “stimulus control.”
• An emotionally intelligent person has a skilled rider who knows how to distract and coax the elephant without having to engage in a direct contest of wills.
• Gut feelings, intuitions, and snap judgments happen constantly and automatically
• Events in the world affect us only through our interpretations of them, so if we can control our interpretations, we can control our world.
• When pop psychology programs are successful in helping people, which they sometimes are, they succeed not because of the initial moment of insight but because they find ways to alter people’s behavior over the following months.
• The unsettling implication of Pelham’s work is that the three biggest decisions most of us make—what to do with our lives, where to live, and whom to marry—can all be influenced (even if only slightly) by something as trivial as the sound of a name.
• For most people, the elephant sees too many things as bad and not enough as good.
• Over and over again, psychologists find that the human mind reacts to bad things more quickly, strongly, and persistently than to equivalent good things.
• We can’t just will ourselves to see everything as good because our minds are wired to find and react to threats, violations, and setbacks.
• A person’s average or typical level of happiness is that person’s “affective style.” (“Affect” refers to the felt or experienced part of emotion.) Your affective style reflects the everyday balance of power between your approach system and your withdrawal system, and this balance can be read right from your forehead.
• Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory. Suppose, finally, that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now would you take it? The pill exists. It is meditation.
• There are many kinds of meditation, but they all have in common a conscious attempt to focus attention in a nonanalytical way.
• Meditation done every day for several months can help you reduce substantially the frequency of fearful, negative, and grasping thoughts, thereby improving your affective style.
• we often use reasoning not to find the truth but to invent arguments to support our deep and intuitive beliefs (residing in the elephant).
• Depressed people are caught in a feedback loop in which distorted thoughts cause negative feelings, which then distort thinking further.
• A big part of cognitive therapy is training clients to catch their thoughts, write them down, name the distortions, and then find alternative and more accurate ways of thinking.
• Cognitive therapy works because it teaches the rider how to train the elephant rather than how to defeat it directly in an argument.
• When cognitive therapy is done very well it is as effective as drugs such as Prozac for the treatment of depression,38 and its enormous advantage over Prozac is that when cognitive therapy stops, the benefits usually continue because the elephant has been retrained. Prozac, in contrast, works only for as long as you take it.
• Our culture endorses both—relentless self-improvement as well as authenticity—but we often escape the contradiction by framing self-improvement as authenticity.
• Once you know why change is so hard, you can drop the brute force method and take a more psychologically sophisticated approach to self-improvement.
• Life itself is but what you deem it, and you can—through meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac—redeem yourself.
• Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life.
• Tit for tat appears to be built into human nature as a set of moral emotions that make us want to return favor for favor, insult for insult, tooth for tooth, and eye for eye.
• Gratitude and vengefulness are big steps on the road that led to human ultrasociality, and it’s important to realize that they are two sides of one coin. It would be hard to evolve one without the other. An individual who had gratitude without vengefulness would be an easy mark for exploitation, and a vengeful and ungrateful individual would quickly alienate all potential cooperative partners.
• Robin Dunbar has demonstrated that within a given group of vertebrate species—primates, carnivores, ungulates, birds, reptiles, or fish—the logarithm of the brain size is almost perfectly proportional to the logarithm of the social group size. In other words, all over the animal kingdom, brains grow to manage larger and larger groups. Social animals are smart animals.
• Human beings ought to live in groups of around 150 people, judging from the logarithm of our brain size; and sure enough, studies of hunter-gatherer groups, military units, and city dwellers’ address books suggest that 100 to 150 is the “natural” group size within which people can know just about everyone directly, by name and face, and know how each person is related to everybody else.
• Language allows small groups of people to bond quickly and to learn from each other about the bonds of others.
• Gossip elicits gossip, and it enables us to keep track of everyone’s reputation without having to witness their good and bad deeds personally. Gossip creates a non-zero-sum game because it costs us nothing to give each other information, yet we both benefit by receiving information.
• When people pass along high-quality (“juicy”) gossip, they feel more powerful, they have a better shared sense of what is right and what’s wrong, and they feel more closely connected to their gossip partners.
• Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the value of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.
• People who want something from us try to give us something first,
• Reciprocity works just as well for bargaining.
• Concession leads to concession. In financial bargaining, too, people who stake out an extreme first position and then move toward the middle end up doing better than those who state a more reasonable first position and then hold fast.27 And the extreme offer followed by concession doesn’t just get you a better price, it gets you a happier partner (or victim): She is more likely to honor the agreement because she feels that she had more influence on the outcome. The very process of give and take creates a feeling of partnership, even in the person being taken.
• relationships grow best by balanced give and take, especially of gifts, favors, attention, and self-disclosure.
• Reciprocity is an all-purpose relationship tonic. Used properly, it strengthens, lengthens, and rejuvenates social ties.
• Mimicry is a kind of social glue, a way of saying “We are one.” The unifying pleasures of mimicry are particularly clear in synchronized activities, such as line dances, group cheers, and some religious rituals, in which people try to do the same thing at the same time.
• A theme of the rest of this book is that humans are partially hive creatures, like bees, yet in the modern world we spend nearly all our time outside of the hive.
• Reciprocity, like love, reconnects us with others.
• Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feelings of moral superiority while asking nothing in return.
• One of the most universal pieces of advice from across cultures and eras is that we are all hypocrites, and in our condemnation of others’ hypocrisy we only compound our own.
• In real life, however, you don’t react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management.
• 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.”
• The simplest way to cultivate a reputation for being fair is to really be fair, but life and psychology experiments sometimes force us to choose between appearance and reality.
• From the person who cuts you off on the highway all the way to the Nazis who ran the concentration camps, most people think they are good people and that their actions are motivated by good reasons.
• To be a good lawyer, it often helps to be a good liar.
• When people are given difficult questions to think about—for example, whether the minimum wage should be raised—they generally lean one way or the other right away, and then put a call in to reasoning to see whether support for that position is forthcoming.
• Most people gave no real evidence for their positions, and most made no effort to look for evidence opposing their initial positions.
• David Perkins, a Harvard psychologist who has devoted his career to improving reasoning, found the same thing. He says that thinking generally uses the “makessense” stopping rule. We take a position, look for evidence that supports it, and if we find some evidence—enough so that our position “makes sense”—we stop thinking.
• Over and over again, studies show that people set out on a cognitive mission to bring back reasons to support their preferred belief or action. And because we are usually successful in this mission, we end up with the illusion of objectivity. We really believe that our position is rationally and objectively justified.
• We judge others by their behavior, but we think we have special information about ourselves—we know what we are “really like” inside, so we can easily find ways to explain away our selfish acts and cling to the illusion that we are better than others.
• For many traits, such as leadership, there are so many ways to define it that one is free to pick the criterion that will most flatter oneself.
• Whenever people form cooperative groups, which are usually of mutual benefit, self-serving biases threaten to fill group members with mutual resentment.
• Each of us thinks we see the world directly, as it really is. We further believe that the facts as we see them are there for all to see, therefore others should agree with us. If they don’t agree, it follows either that they have not yet been exposed to the relevant facts or else that they are blinded by their interests and ideologies.
• It just seems plain as day, to the naive realist, that everyone is influenced by ideology and self-interest. Except for me. I see things as they are.
• Good and evil do not exist outside of our beliefs about them.
• When taking the perpetrator’s perspective, he found that people who do things we see as evil, from spousal abuse all the way to genocide, rarely think they are doing anything wrong. They almost always see themselves as responding to attacks and provocations in ways that are justified. They often think that they themselves are victims.
• People usually have reasons for committing violence, and those reasons usually involve retaliation for a perceived injustice, or self-defense. This does not mean that both sides are equally to blame: Perpetrators often grossly overreact and misinterpret (using self-serving biases).
• 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.
• The two biggest causes of evil are two that we think are good, and that we try to encourage in our children: high self-esteem and moral idealism.
• Having high self-esteem doesn’t directly cause violence, but when someone’s high esteem is unrealistic or narcissistic, it is easily threatened by reality; in reaction to those threats, people—particularly young men—often lash out violently.
• Threatened self-esteem accounts for a large portion of violence at the individual level, but to really get a mass atrocity going you need idealism—the belief that your violence is a means to a moral end.
• The major atrocities of the twentieth century were carried out largely either by men who thought they were creating a utopia or else by men who believed they were defending their homeland or tribe from attack.
• Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means.
• If you are fighting for good or for God, what matters is the outcome, not the path.
• People have little respect for rules; we respect the moral principles that underlie most rules. But when a moral mission and legal rules are incompatible, we usually care more about the mission.
• That is, the world we live in is not really one made of rocks, trees, and physical objects; it is a world of insults, opportunities, status symbols, betrayals, saints, and sinners. All of these are human creations which, though real in their own way, are not real in the way that rocks and trees are real.
• Judgmentalism is indeed a disease of the mind: it leads to anger, torment, and conflict. But it is also the mind’s normal condition—the elephant is always evaluating, always saying “Like it” or “Don’t like it.”
• Meditation has been shown to make people calmer, less reactive to the ups and downs and petty provocations of life. Meditation is the Eastern way of training yourself to take things philosophically.
• Finding fault with yourself is also the key to overcoming the hypocrisy and judgmentalism that damage so many valuable relationships. The instant you see some contribution you made to a conflict, your anger softens—maybe just a bit, but enough that you might be able to acknowledge some merit on the other side.
• Happiness can only be found within, by breaking attachments to external things and cultivating an attitude of acceptance.
• Some things are worth striving for, and happiness comes in part from outside of yourself, if you know where to look.
• The pleasure of getting what you want is often fleeting.
• People win at the game of life by achieving high status and a good reputation, cultivating friendships, finding the best mate(s), accumulating resources, and rearing their children to be successful at the same game.
• Set for yourself any goal you want. Most of the pleasure will be had along the way, with every step that takes you closer. The final moment of success is often no more thrilling than the relief of taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike.
• Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them.
• Many people think they would rather be dead than paraplegic. But they are mistaken.
• We are bad at “affective forecasting,” 5 that is, predicting how we’ll feel in the future. We grossly overestimate the intensity and the duration of our emotional reactions.
• The human mind is extraordinarily sensitive to changes in conditions, but not so sensitive to absolute levels.
• People’s judgments about their present state are based on whether it is better or worse than the state to which they have become accustomed.
• Good fortune or bad, you will always return to your happiness setpoint—your brain’s default level of happiness—which was determined largely by your genes.
• Always wanting more than we have, we run and run and run, like hamsters on a wheel.
• The second biggest finding in happiness research, after the strong influence of genes upon a person’s average level of happiness, is that most environmental and demographic factors influence happiness very little.
• A good marriage is one of the life-factors most strongly and consistently associated with happiness.
• People who worry every day about paying for food and shelter report significantly less well-being than those who don’t. But once you are freed from basic needs and have entered the middle class, the relationship between wealth and happiness becomes smaller.
• Wealth itself has only a small direct effect on happiness because it so effectively speeds up the hedonic treadmill.
• Voluntary activities, therefore, offer much greater promise for increasing happiness while avoiding adaptation effects.
• The level of happiness that you actually experience (H) is determined by your biological set point (S) plus the conditions of your life (C) plus the voluntary activities (V) you do.
• It turns out that there really are some external conditions (C) that matter. There are some changes you can make in your life that are not fully subject to the adaptation principle, and that might make you lastingly happier. It may be worth striving to achieve them.
• Noise, especially noise that is variable or intermittent, interferes with concentration and increases stress. It’s worth striving to remove sources of noise in your life.
• It’s worth striving to improve your commute.
• Overall, attractive people are not happier than unattractive ones. Yet, surprisingly, some improvements in a person’s appearance do lead to lasting increases in happiness.
• The condition that is usually said to trump all others in importance is the strength and number of a person’s relationships.
• Good relationships make people happy, and happy people enjoy more and better relationships than unhappy people.
• You never adapt to interpersonal conflict; it damages every day, even days when you don’t see the other person but ruminate about the conflict nonetheless.
• Chasing after wealth and prestige, for example, will usually backfire. People who report the greatest interest in attaining money, fame, or beauty are consistently found to be less happy, and even less healthy, than those who pursue less materialistic goals.
• The keys to flow: There’s a clear challenge that fully engages your attention; you have the skills to meet the challenge; and you get immediate feedback about how you are doing at each step (the progress principle).
• Pleasures should be both savored and varied.
• Variety is the spice of life because it is the natural enemy of adaptation.
• One reason for the widespread philosophical wariness of sensual pleasure is that it gives no lasting benefit. Pleasure feels good in the moment, but sensual memories fade quickly, and the person is no wiser or stronger afterwards. Even worse, pleasure beckons people back for more, away from activities that might be better for them in the long run.
• Choose your own gratifying activities, do them regularly (but not to the point of tedium), and raise your overall level of happiness.
• Americans in particular spend almost everything they have—and sometimes more—on goods for present consumption, often paying a large premium for designer names and superfluous features.
• Conspicuous consumption refers to things that are visible to others and that are taken as markers of a person’s relative success. These goods are subject to a kind of arms race, where their value comes not so much from their objective properties as from the statement they make about their owner.
• Conspicuous consumption is a zero-sum game: Each person’s move up devalues the possessions of others.
• Inconspicuous consumption, on the other hand, refers to goods and activities that are valued for themselves, that are usually consumed more privately, and that are not bought for the purpose of achieving status.
• Most activities that cost more than a hundred dollars are things we do with other people, but expensive material possessions are often purchased in part to impress other people. Activities connect us to others; objects often separate us.
• Stop wasting your money on conspicuous consumption. As a first step, work less, earn less, accumulate less, and “consume” more family time, vacations, and other enjoyable activities.
• The pursuit of luxury goods is a happiness trap; it is a dead end that people race toward in the mistaken belief that it will make them happy.
• The more choices there are, the more you expect to find a perfect fit; yet, at the same time, the larger the array, the less likely it becomes that you picked the best item.
• We value choice and put ourselves in situations of choice, even though choice often undercuts our happiness.
• Maximizers end up making slightly better decisions than satisficers, on average (all that worry and information-gathering does help), but they are less happy with their decisions, and they are more inclined to depression and anxiety.
• Paradoxically, maximizers get less pleasure per dollar they spend.
• Modern life is full of traps. Some of these traps are set by marketers and advertisers who know just what the elephant wants—and it isn’t happiness.
• People living in wealthy democracies can set long-term goals and expect to meet them. We are immunized against disease, sheltered from storms, and insured against fire, theft, and collision.
• 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.
• Happiness comes from within, and happiness comes from without.
• When children are separated from their attachment figures for a long time, as in a hospital stay, they quickly descend into passivity and despair.
• For adults, the biggest rush of oxytocin—other than giving birth and nursing—comes from sex.
• Sexual activity, especially if it includes cuddling, extended touching, and orgasm, turns on many of the same circuits that are used to bond infants and parents.
• Humans are the only creatures on Earth whose young are utterly helpless for years, and heavily dependent on adult care for more than a decade.
• Passionate love is the love you fall into.
• Companionate love grows slowly over the years as lovers apply their attachment and caregiving systems to each other, and as they begin to rely upon, care for, and trust each other.
• Passionate love does not turn into companionate love. Passionate love and companionate love are two separate processes, and they have different time courses. Their diverging paths produce two danger points, two places where many people make grave mistakes.
• Passionate love ignites, it burns, and it can reach its maximum temperature within days. During its weeks or months of madness, lovers can’t help but think about marriage, and often they talk about it, too.
• Nobody can think straight when high on passionate love.
• True love exists, I believe, but it is not—cannot be—passion that lasts forever. True love, the love that undergirds strong marriages, is simply strong companionate love, with some added passion, between two people who are firmly committed to each other.
• The psychological origins of love are in attachment to parents and sexual partners. We do not attach to ourselves; we do not seek security and fulfillment in ourselves.
• passionate love is notorious for making people illogical and irrational, and Western philosophers have long thought that morality is grounded in rationality.
• Love is a kind of insanity, and many people have, while crazed with passion, ruined their lives and those of others.
• Human beings all know that they are going to die, and so human cultures go to great lengths to construct systems of meaning that dignify life and convince people that their lives have more meaning than those of the animals that die all around them.
• Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life (more than does quitting smoking), speeds recovery from surgery, and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders.
• Most psychopaths are not violent (although most serial murderers and serial rapists are psychopaths). They are people, mostly men, who have no moral emotions, no attachment systems, and no concerns for others. Because they feel no shame, embarrassment, or guilt, they find it easy to manipulate people into giving them money, sex, and trust.
• Researchers have studied how people cope with the loss of their strongest attachments: children, spouses or partners, and parents. This large body of research shows that although traumas, crises, and tragedies come in a thousand forms, people benefit from them in three primary ways—the same ones that Greg talked about.
• The first benefit is that rising to a challenge reveals your hidden abilities, and seeing these abilities changes your self-concept. None of us knows what we are really capable of enduring.
• The second class of benefit concerns relationships. Adversity is a filter.
• But adversity doesn’t just separate the fair-weather friends from the true; it strengthens relationships and it opens people’s hearts to one another.
• We often develop love for those we care for, and we usually feel love and gratitude toward those who cared for us in a time of need.
• Trauma changes priorities and philosophies toward the present (“Live each day to the fullest”) and toward other people.
• The adversity hypothesis has a weak and a strong version. In the weak version, adversity can lead to growth, strength, joy, and self-improvement, by the three mechanisms of posttraumatic growth described above.
• The strong version of the hypothesis is more unsettling: It states that people must endure adversity to grow, and that the highest levels of growth and development are only open to those who have faced and overcome great adversity.
• Human beings in every culture are fascinated by stories; we create them wherever we can.
• Although the lowest level of personality is mostly about the elephant, the life story is written primarily by the rider. You create your story in consciousness as you interpret your own behavior, and as you listen to other people’s thoughts about you.
• Although it is generally good for you to pursue goals, not all goals are equal.
• Because human beings were shaped by evolutionary processes to pursue success, not happiness, people enthusiastically pursue goals that will help them win prestige in zero-sum competitions. Success in these competitions feels good but gives no lasting pleasure, and it raises the bar for future success.
• Trauma often shatters belief systems and robs people of their sense of meaning.
• When bad things happen to good people, we have a problem. We know consciously that life is unfair, but unconsciously we see the world through the lens of reciprocity.
• Optimists are, for the most part, people who won the cortical lottery: They have a high happiness setpoint, they habitually look on the bright side, and they easily find silver linings.
• When a crisis strikes, people cope in three primary ways: active coping (taking direct action to fix the problem), reappraisal (doing the work within—getting one’s own thoughts right and looking for silver linings), and avoidance coping (working to blunt one’s emotional reactions by denying or avoiding the events, or by drinking, drugs, and other distractions).
• Major adversity is unlikely to have many—or perhaps any—beneficial effects for children.
• Children should be protected, but not spoiled.
• Events do not have meaning in themselves. Those meanings are derived from the interactions between people, groups, and the experience itself.
• But a common piece of worldly wisdom is that life’s most important lessons cannot be taught directly.
• Knowledge comes in two major forms: explicit and tacit.
• Explicit knowledge is all the facts you know and can consciously report, independent of context.
• But wisdom is based—according to Robert Sternberg, a leading wisdom researcher—on “tacit knowledge.” Tacit knowledge is procedural (it’s “knowing how” rather than “knowing that”), it is acquired without direct help from others, and it is related to goals that a person values.
• wise people are able to balance their own needs, the needs of others, and the needs of people or things beyond the immediate interaction
• Ignorant people see everything in black and white—they rely heavily on the myth of pure evil—and they are strongly influenced by their own self-interest.
• The wise are able to see things from others’ points of view, appreciate shades of gray, and then choose or advise a course of action that works out best for everyone in the long run.
• wise people are able to balance three responses to situations: adaptation (changing the self to fit the environment), shaping (changing the environment), and selection (choosing to move to a new environment).
• Shelter your children when young, but if the sheltering goes on through the child’s teens and twenties, it may keep out wisdom and growth as well as pain.
• Ideas have pedigrees, ideas have baggage.
• Every culture is concerned about the moral development of its children, and in every culture that left us more than a few pages of writing, we find texts that reveal its approach to morality.
• these ancient texts rely heavily on maxims and role models rather than proofs and logic. Maxims are carefully phrased to produce a flash of insight and approval. Role models are presented to elicit admiration and awe.
• A third feature of many ancient texts is that they emphasize practice and habit rather than factual knowledge.
• They all knew that training takes daily practice and a great deal of repetition.
• Moral education must also impart tacit knowledge—skills of social perception and social emotion so finely tuned that one automatically feels the right thing in each situation, knows the right thing to do, and then wants to do it. Morality, for the ancients, was a kind of practical wisdom.
• There is no morality in nature; there is only causality.
• Trying to make children behave ethically by teaching them to reason well is like trying to make a dog happy by wagging its tail. It gets causality backwards.
• Cultures that have shared values and rich traditions invariably generate a framework in which people can value and evaluate each other.
• Most people believe their actions are morally justified.
• Our life is the creation of our minds, and we do much of that creating with metaphor. We see new things in terms of things we already understand: Life is a journey, an argument is a war, the mind is a rider on an elephant. With the wrong metaphor we are deluded; with no metaphor we are blind.
• In all human cultures, the social world has two clear dimensions: a horizontal dimension of closeness or liking, and a vertical one of hierarchy or status.
• My claim is that the human mind perceives a third dimension, a specifically moral dimension that I will call “divinity.” In choosing the label “divinity,” I am not assuming that God exists and is there to be perceived. (I myself am a Jewish atheist.) Rather, my research on the moral emotions has led me to conclude that the human mind simply does perceive divinity and sacredness, whether or not God exists.
• Disgust has its evolutionary origins in helping people decide what to eat.
• The overwhelming evidence is that we are animals, and so a culture that rejects our animality must go to great lengths to hide the evidence.
• Disgust is the guardian of the temple of the body.
• If the human body is a temple that sometimes gets dirty, it makes sense that “cleanliness is next to Godliness.”
• For many people, one of the pleasures of going to church is the experience of collective elevation.
• Something about the vastness and beauty of nature makes the self feel small and insignificant, and anything that shrinks the self creates an opportunity for spiritual experience.
• Drugs that create an altered mental state have an obvious usefulness in marking off sacred experiences from profane, and therefore many drugs, including alcohol and marijuana, play a role in religious rites in some cultures. But there is something special about the phenethylamines—the drug class that includes LSD and psilocybin. Drugs in this class, whether naturally occurring (as in psilocybin, mescaline, or yage) or synthesized by a chemist (LSD, ecstasy, DMT) are unmatched in their ability to induce massive alterations of perception and emotion that sometimes feel, even to secular users, like contact with divinity, and that cause people to feel afterwards that they’ve been transformed.
• Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence.
• Religious experiences are real and common, whether or not God exists, and these experiences often make people feel whole and at peace.
• The self is one of the great paradoxes of human evolution. Like the fire stolen by Prometheus, it made us powerful but exacted a cost.
• Only a few other primates (and perhaps dolphins) can even learn that the image in a mirror belongs to them.
• Only a creature with language ability has the mental apparatus to focus attention on the self, to think about the self’s invisible attributes and long term goals, to create a narrative about that self, and then to react emotionally to thoughts about that narrative.
• The self is the main obstacle to spiritual advancement, in three ways.
• First, the constant stream of trivial concerns and egocentric thoughts keeps people locked in the material and profane world, unable to perceive sacredness and divinity.
• Second, spiritual transformation is essentially the transformation of the self, weakening it, pruning it back—in some sense, killing it—and often the self objects.
• And third, following a spiritual path is invariably hard work, requiring years of meditation, prayer, self-control, and sometimes self-denial. The self does not like to be denied, and it is adept at finding reasons to bend the rules or cheat.
• Many of the key battles in the American culture war are essentially about whether some aspect of life should be structured by the ethic of autonomy or by the ethic of divinity.
• Because the culture war is ideological, both sides use the myth of pure evil. To acknowledge that the other side might be right about anything is an act of treason.
• Proverbs, sayings, and words of wisdom dignify events, so we often use them to mark important transitions in life.
• But people are not computers, and they usually recover on their own from almost anything that happens to them. I think a better metaphor is that people are like plants.
• No man, woman, or child is an island. We are ultrasocial creatures, and we can’t be happy without having friends and secure attachments to other people.
• the overwhelming evidence that people and many other mammals have a basic drive to make things happen.
• Effectance is almost as basic a need as food and water, yet it is not a deficit need, like hunger, that is satisfied and then disappears for a few hours.
• 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.”
• More recent research finds that most people approach their work in one of three ways: as a job, a career, or a calling.
• you see your work as a job, you do it only for the money, you look at the clock frequently while dreaming about the weekend ahead, and you probably pursue hobbies, which satisfy your effectance needs more thoroughly than does your work.
• If you see your work as a career, you have larger goals of advancement, promotion, and prestige. The pursuit of these goals often energizes you, and you sometimes take work home with you because you want to get the job done properly. Yet, at times, you wonder why you work so hard. You might occasionally see your work as a rat race where people are competing for the sake of competing.
• If you see your work as a calling, however, you find your work intrinsically fulfilling—you are not doing it to achieve something else. You see your work as contributing to the greater good or as playing a role in some larger enterprise the worth of which seems obvious to you. You have frequent experiences of flow during the work day, and you neither look forward to “quitting time” nor feel the desire to shout, “Thank God it’s Friday!” You would continue to work, perhaps even without pay, if you suddenly became very wealthy.
• The optimistic conclusion coming out of research in positive psychology is that most people can get more satisfaction from their work. The first step is to know your strengths. Take the strengths test and then choose work that allows you to use your strengths every day, thereby giving yourself at least scattered moments of flow. If you are stuck in a job that doesn’t match your strengths, recast and reframe your job so that it does.
• Work at its best, then, is about connection, engagement, and commitment. As the poet Kahlil Gibran said, “Work is love made visible.”
• Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves. Happiness comes from getting these connections right.
• Getting the right relationship between you and your work is not entirely up to you. Some occupations come ready-made for vital engagement; others make it difficult.
• When doing good (doing high-quality work that produces something of use to others) matches up with doing well (achieving wealth and professional advancement), a field is healthy.
• The word “coherence” literally means holding or sticking together, but it is usually used to refer to a system, an idea, or a worldview whose parts fit together in a consistent and efficient way. Coherent things work well: A coherent worldview can explain almost anything, while an incoherent worldview is hobbled by internal contradictions. A coherent profession, such as genetics, can get on with the business of genetics, while an incoherent profession, like journalism, spends a lot of time on self-analysis and self-criticism.
• People are multilevel systems in another way: We are physical objects (bodies and brains) from which minds somehow emerge; and from our minds, somehow societies and cultures form. To understand ourselves fully we must study all three levels—physical, psychological, and sociocultural.
• 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.
• Morality and religion both occur in some form in all human cultures and are almost always both intertwined with the values, identity, and daily life of the culture. Anyone who wants a full, cross-level account of human nature, and of how human beings find purpose and meaning in their lives, must make that account cohere with what is known about morality and religion.
• All human beings today are the products of the co-evolution of a set of genes (which is almost identical across cultures) and a set of cultural elements (which is diverse across cultures, but still constrained by the capacities and predispositions of the human mind).
• Human nature is a complex mix of preparations for extreme selfishness and extreme altruism. Which side of our nature we express depends on culture and context.
• There is indeed something larger than the self, able to provide people with a sense of purpose they think worth dying for: the group. (Of course, one group’s noble purpose is sometimes another group’s pure evil.)
• We were shaped by individual selection to be selfish creatures who struggle for resources, pleasure, and prestige, and we were shaped by group selection to be hive creatures who long to lose ourselves in something larger.
• We are social creatures who need love and attachments, and we are industrious creatures with needs for effectance, able to enter a state of vital engagement with our work.
• 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.
• The East stresses acceptance and collectivism; the West encourages striving and individualism. But as we’ve seen, both perspectives are valuable.
• Happiness requires changing yourself and changing your world. It requires pursuing your own goals and fitting in with others. Different people at different times in their lives will benefit from drawing more heavily on one approach or the other.