The Wisdom Wall

“If you use AI as your therapist or your lover or your friend, It will leave you feeling empty, depressed, and anxious. That's the bottom line.”

“So there's five things you can do with money. Okay. This is a very much a Cody Sanchez, uh, part of the conversation, isn't it? Number one, you can buy stuff, right? We've already talked about that. Number two, you can buy experiences. Number three, you can buy time. Number four, you can give it away, and number five,…”

“People get religion all wrong, by the way. They think you have to, especially in the current generation, you have to feel something, and then you'll believe something, and then you'll practice something. That's exactly backwards when it comes to religion. First practice, then believe, and occasionally feel.”

“And fame, by the way, is the worst because fame is the only one of the goals that you can only ever be happy in spite of. And you have to, so most people who get famous, they become less happy because of the fame.”

“The more that you're learning about yourself from therapy, the more likely it is to have a, to have a, a beneficial impact for the long term. When somebody just wants to solve your problems, Or give you hacks. Run the other way. That's just not very helpful. And it's certainly not enduring is how this works.”

“dating is not entertainment. Dating is auditioning. You're auditioning for the role of husband. And that means not very many second dates. Not very many second dates, because you know. Second dates are mostly entertainment.”

“You can compare people in countries over time. That's legit. I do that all the time. If we're looking at happiness trends inside populations, you can look at individuals all day long, but I don't, I don't compare countries. I don't think it's a, I don't think it's, it's a legitimate empirical thing to do.”

“Fame is the only one of those you can only ever be happy in spite of.”

“Debt is terrible for happiness, except for mortgages. Because mortgages actually make a little bit more progress in owning your home than rent.”

“Work-life balance is complete nonsense because it suggests that work is not part of your life. There's a separation between your work and your life. Your work should be part of your life. That should be work-life integration.”

“what I found is that the, the free enterprise system properly understood is an expression of the generosity that we can bring. When we push it to the margins of society, there's no other force that can lift people out of poverty.”

“Virtuous victimhood is the phenomenon in which leaders will, will, will get their prestige from the grievance that they get from particular victimhood status, and that virtuousness will turn into a form of bullying. That's a classic dark triad form of behavior, and we see it again and again and again.”

“We're built for progress. We're not built for arrival. We're built for progress toward goals, right?”

“The first way to actually improve your life is to turn uncertainty into risk. Risk is where you, you, you can describe the possibilities, you can assign probabilities, and so you can manage contingencies.”

“you need to apply that same entrepreneurial mindset that goes from uncertainty to risk to adventure in every part of your life. That's not just your business. That's not just opening laundromats or, you know, running vending machines, the kinds of businesses that people actually wind up loving and that you help people…”

“Suffering equals your pain multiplied by the resistance to the pain.”

“what all very successful, unhappy people have in common, is they, they, they, they will expend their happiness in search of specialness.”

“We have negative emotions because they keep us safe and alive. Fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. These are defense mechanisms. They're signals that something is not right around us, which is why we have negative emotions. And so they're very, very important for our protection. And we need negative experiences because…”

“when you're actually having an argument And your partner says something you don't like, you stop, you think about it, and then you say, is what you're trying to say, and then you paraphrase what your partner's just said, this has, all you've done is given yourself Time to catch up to your own limbic system. You're not…”

“Happiness is a multidimensional phenomenon. That's not a fundamentally, it's a combination. You and I've talked about this in the past, Of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning”

“The problem is that narcissists don't want to change. The problem is not that you can't change them. The problem is that you actually need them to buy into the process. And if they don't, because they don't want to change, you're not going to change them involuntarily. You're just not going to. And so I actually…”

“Get rid of your dark triads, because by the way, they're also unproductive. They're also not good workers, because they're doing things for themselves that are selfish, and nobody wants to work with them, and they're making everybody miserable around them.”

“Happiness is love. So it's almost a, it's almost an identity. It's, it's almost a one-to-one correspondence is what we actually find.”

“This is a mismatch between our biological, our evolutionary environment and our technological environment. We were not built for Twitter. We were built for the Savannah, and our body still acts as if it were, and so all of these threats, the only way you can combat this, number one, is by, by checking out, by saying…”

“there are ways to, to buy happiness. Now to begin with, more money early on, and there's a bunch of studies on this that shows that when you have more money, when you're poor, then, then you, your wellbeing does rise. And the reason is not because of happiness. It's because it lowers unhappiness.”

“when work takes over because it becomes such an obsession, something you're thinking about day and night, it can become really unhealthy because it starts to displace your love relationships. It becomes the relationship per se. So talking about work as a relationship, is what I was talking about. And that's the essence…”

“The currency of your life, of the enterprise of your life, is love and happiness. That's what it is. And if you want to become rich in that, and that's really what matters, you better understand how it works. Furthermore, you can treat it with the same seriousness as I would treat money as an economist.”

“Love isn't a feeling. Love is to will the good of the other with the way that you live your life. It's a decision. It's hard. It's, it's hard edged. It takes an incredible commitment and that's something that any serious person can respond to.”

“When you hate somebody for political or ideological reasons, you become somebody's product. And that's an important thing to keep in mind. Somebody's profiting, and it ain't you. On the contrary, you're gonna get a lot less happy, and you're gonna have fewer friends.”

“in generally speaking, dark triads, they present very favorably. They're very successful in the dating market. For example, they do unbelievably well on the apps. They do really well on early or, you know, The, the first and second dates. They do incredibly well because they're willing to do and say anything for you to…”

“When you look at contempt in your ordinary life and use it as an opportunity to return warmheartedness, you always feel better. You become more Effective. You become more creative. You become more focused.”

“happiness, which is not a feeling. Very important because emotional self-management is critical to, to living a good life. And if you're just hoping for happy feelings, this is not going to lead you to emotional self-management. So, so we start off with a proper definition, which is that it's, it's the, the macro…”

“Then we talk about the dishes in the happiness diet. And those dishes are faith, family, friends, and work.”

“There are, you need useless people in your life. You need real friends who are useless, not just deal friends who are useful.”

“You find that by the way, the happiest couples, they tend to be one introvert and one extrovert.”

“The advice I wind up giving to people is getting up an hour and a half before dawn. It's the Brahma Muhurta, the creator's time. And going outside when it's cool and dark and walking for an hour without your device, and you can hear the crunch of the gravel on the trail beneath your feet, and to be actually alive, and…”

“Your limbic system is fast. Your prefrontal cortex is slow. Let your prefrontal cortex catch up, and you can manage a lot of your negative emotions. Use them in an appropriate way. React the way that you want to. You'll get a lot happier.”