The key thing that everybody needs to understand is that mother nature does not care if you're happy. Mother nature wants to make you fit in the reproduction game. The way that you do that is by being successful in money and power, pleasure and admiration of other people. And so we have a process called homeostasis in which our satisfaction drives us to get more stuff but we can't maintain the joy from getting these things more than a minute or a day or a week. That's why we call the hedonic treadmill the treadmill of running and running and running, and out sized people on this.
Arthur C. Brooks used to run a prominent think tank where he was paid handsomely to influence public policy. Did all that success make him happy? Nope. So Arthur quit his job and set out to transform his life. Now he has written a book about what he learned along the way, the #1 New York Times bestseller “From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life.”
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