Santos: Human Minds Evolved for Survival and Reproduction, Not Happiness
Laurie Santos · Laurie Santos: The Pursuit of Happiness · Jun 14, 2022 · at 16:27
Laurie Santos, a psychology professor at Yale, explains to Shane Parrish why natural selection hardwired human minds to pursue status and material resources rather than emotional well-being.
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“We are products of natural selection, which is a blind process that, you know, if you kind of intentionalize it, it's kind of going for anything that will get you to survive and reproduce into the next generation. So natural selection is like double down on all the resources, all the accolades, all the status, all that stuff, just in case, right? Cause we really want to, you know, make sure our genes get out there. And that's, it doesn't care about you being happy. Like, it really wants you to be a craving, striving, always pushing for more genes in the next generation individual. And so I think we're, you know, we're built with a mind that's not necessarily geared towards making us happy.”
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