• Our prospects are better. Few of our potential sources of wisdom are nonsense, and many are entirely true. Yet, because our library is also effectively infinite—no one person can ever read more than a tiny fraction—we face the paradox of abundance:

• I could not say it any more concisely than Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”1 I began to use such quotations to help my students remember the big ideas in psychology, and I began to wonder just how many such ideas there were.

• A more promising hypothesis is that happiness comes from within and cannot be obtained by making the world conform to your desires. This idea was widespread in the ancient world: Buddha in India and the Stoic philosophers in ancient Greece and Rome all counseled people to break their emotional attachments to people and events, which are always unpredictable and uncontrollable, and to cultivate instead an attitude of acceptance.

• But it was during some larger life decisions, about dating, that I really began to grasp the extent of my powerlessness. I would know exactly what I should do, yet, even as I was telling my friends that I would do it, a part of me was dimly aware that I was not going to. Feelings of guilt, lust, or fear were often stronger than reasoning.

• 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

• When St. Paul lamented the battle of flesh versus Spirit, he was surely referring to some of the same divisions and frustrations that Montaigne experienced.

• This finding, that people will readily fabricate reasons to explain their own behavior, is called “confabulation.”

• The forebrain of the earliest mammals developed a new outer shell, which included the hypothalamus (specialized to coordinate basic drives and motivations), the hippocampus (specialized for memory), and the amygdala (specialized for emotional learning and responding). These structures are sometimes referred to as the limbic system (from Latin limbus, “border” or “margin”) because they wrap around the rest of the brain, forming a border.

• This growth of the frontal cortex seems like a promising explanation for the divisions we experience in our minds. Perhaps the frontal cortex is the seat of reason: It is Plato’s charioteer; it is St. Paul’s Spirit. And it has taken over control, though not perfectly, from the more primitive limbic system— Plato’s bad horse, St. Paul’s flesh. We can call this explanation the Promethean script of human evolution, after the character in Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans. In this script, our ancestors were mere animals governed by the primitive emotions and drives of the limbic system until they received the divine gift of reason, installed in the newly expanded neocortex.

• There is, however, a flaw in the Promethean script: It assumes that reason was installed in the frontal cortex but that emotion stayed behind in the limbic system. In fact, the frontal cortex enabled a great expansion of emotionality in humans. The lower third of the prefrontal cortex is called the orbitofrontal cortex because it is the part of the brain just above the eyes (orbit is the Latin term for the eye socket). This region of the cortex has grown especially large in humans and other primates and is one of the most consistently active areas of the brain during emotional reactions.

• The orbitofrontal cortex plays a central role when you size up the reward and punishment possibilities of a situation; the neurons in this part of the cortex fire wildly when there is an immediate possibility of pleasure or pain, loss or gain.

• Automatic processes, on the other hand, have been through thousands of product cycles and are nearly perfect. This difference in maturity between automatic and controlled processes helps explain why we have inexpensive computers that can solve logic, math, and chess problems better than any human beings can (most of us struggle with these tasks), but none of our robots, no matter how costly, can walk through the woods as well as the average six-year-old child (our perceptual and motor systems are superb).

• Evolution never looks ahead. It can’t plan the best way to travel from point A to point B. Instead, small changes to existing forms arise (by genetic mutation), and spread within a population to the extent that they help organisms respond more effectively to current conditions.

• It is no accident that we find the carnal pleasures so rewarding. Our brains, like rat brains, are wired so that food and sex give us little bursts of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that is the brain’s way of making us enjoy the activities that are good for the survival of our genes.25 Plato’s “bad” horse plays an important role in pulling us toward these things, which helped our ancestors survive and succeed in becoming our ancestors.

• The point of these studies is that moral judgment is like aesthetic judgment. When you see a painting, you usually know instantly and automatically whether you like it. If someone asks you to explain your judgment, you confabulate. You don’t really know why you think something is beautiful, but your interpreter module (the rider) is skilled at making up reasons, as Gazzaniga found in his split-brain studies. You search for a plausible reason for liking the painting, and you latch on to the first reason that makes sense (maybe something vague about color, or light, or the reflection of the painter in the clown’s shiny nose). Moral arguments are much the same: Two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other. When you refute a person’s argument, does she generally change her mind and agree with you? Of course not, because the argument you defeated was not the cause of her position; it was made up after the judgment was already made.

• What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind. —BUDDHA2

• Philosophy reminds Boethius that Fortune is fickle, coming and going as she pleases. Boethius took Fortune as his mistress, fully aware of her ways, and she stayed with him for a long time. What right has he now to demand that she be chained to his side?

• She helps him see that adverse fortune is more beneficial than good fortune; the latter only makes men greedy for more, but adversity makes them strong.

• 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.

• “Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”

• 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 discovery of affective priming in the 1980s opened up a world of indirect measurement in psychology. It became possible to bypass the rider and talk directly to the elephant, and what the elephant has to say is sometimes disturbing. For example, what if, instead of flashing subliminal words, we use photographs of black and white faces? Researchers have found that Americans of all ages, classes, and political affiliations react with a flash of negativity to black faces or to other images and words associated with African-American culture.

• (See Steven Pinker12 on how natural selection designs without a designer.)

• 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.”

• Does that sound like progress, or like Pandora’s box? Before you answer that, answer this: Which of these two phrases rings truest to you: “Be all that you can be” or “This above all, to thine own self be true.” Our culture endorses both—relentless self-improvement as well as authenticity—but we often escape the contradiction by framing self-improvement as authenticity. Just as gaining an education means struggling for twelve to twenty years to develop one’s intellectual potential, character development ought to involve a lifelong struggle to develop one’s moral potential. A nine-year-old child does not stay true to herself by keeping the mind and character of a nine-year-old; she works hard to reach her ideal self, pushed and chauffeured by her parents to endless after-school and weekend classes in piano, religion, art, and athletics. As long as change is gradual and a result of the child’s hard work, the child is given the moral credit for the change, and that change is in the service of authenticity. But what if there were a pill that enhanced tennis skills? Or a minor surgical technique for implanting piano virtuosity directly and permanently into the brain? Such a separation of self-improvement from authenticity would make many people recoil in horror.

• I therefore question the widespread view that Prozac and other drugs in its class are overprescribed. It’s easy for those who did well in the cortical lottery to preach about the importance of hard work and the unnaturalness of chemical shortcuts. But for those who, through no fault of their own, ended up on the negative half of the affective style spectrum, Prozac is a way to compensate for the unfairness of the cortical lottery.

• Animals that fly seem to violate the laws of physics, but only until you learn a bit more about physics. Flight evolved independently at least three times in the animal kingdom: in insects, dinosaurs (including modern birds), and mammals (bats). In each case, a physical feature that had potentially aerodynamic properties was already present (for example, scales that lengthened into feathers, which later made gliding possible).

• Here’s where the ancestors of bees, termites, and mole rats took the common mechanism of kin altruism, which makes many species sociable, and parlayed it6 into the foundation of their uncommon ultrasociality: They are all siblings. Those species each evolved a reproduction system in which a single queen produces all the children, and nearly all the children are either sterile (ants) or else their reproductive abilities are suppressed (bees, mole rats); therefore, a hive, nest, or colony of these animals is one big family. If everyone around you is your sibling, and if the survival of your genes depends on the survival of your queen, selfishness becomes genetic suicide.

• The ultrasocial animals evolved into a state of ultrakinship, which led automatically to ultracooperation (as in building and defending a large nest or hive), which allowed the massive division of labor (ants have castes such as soldier, forager, nursery worker, and food storage bag), which created hives overflowing with milk and honey, or whatever other substance they use to store their surplus food. We humans also try to extend the reach of kin altruism by using fictitious kinship names for nonrelatives, as when children are encouraged to call their parents’ friends Uncle Bob and Aunt Sarah. Indeed, the mafia is known as “the family,” and the very idea of a godfather is an attempt to forge a kin-like link with a man who is not true kin.

• Cialdini sees human reciprocity as a similar ethological reflex: a person receives a favor from an acquaintance and wants to repay the favor. The person will even repay an empty favor from a stranger, such as the receipt of a worthless Christmas card.

• Specifically, the tit-for-tat strategy is to be nice on the first round of interaction; but after that, do to your partner whatever your partner did to you on the previous round.10 Tit for tat takes us way beyond kin altruism. It opens the possibility of forming cooperative relationships with strangers.

• But if the response to noncooperation is just noncooperation on the next round, then tit for tat can unite groups of only a few hundred. In a large enough group, a cheating vampire bat can beg a meal from a different successful bat each night and, when they come to him pleading for a return favor, just wrap his wings around his head and pretend to be asleep. What are they going to do to him? Well, if these were people rather than bats, we know what they’d do: They’d beat the hell out of him. Vengeance and gratitude are moral sentiments that amplify and enforce tit for tat.

• Woody Allen once described his brain as his “second favorite organ,” but for all of us it’s by far the most expensive one to run. It accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 20 percent of our energy.

• 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.

• It is easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one’s own faults. One shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the wind, but one conceals one’s own faults as a cunning gambler conceals his dice.

• In these games, which are intended to be simple models of the game of life, no strategy ever beats tit for tat.4

• If life itself is but what you deem it, then why not focus your efforts on persuading others to believe that you are a virtuous and trustworthy cooperator? 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.”

• 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.

• Pronin and Ross trace this resistance to a phenomenon they call “naive realism”: 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.

• The third approach, taken by Christianity, blends monism and dualism in a way that ultimately reconciles the goodness and power of God with the existence of Satan. This argument is so complicated that I cannot understand it. Nor, apparently, can many Christians who, judging by what I hear on gospel radio stations in Virginia, seem to hold a straight Manichaean world view, according to which God and Satan are fighting an eternal war. In fact, despite the diversity of theological arguments made in different religions, concrete representations of Satan, demons, and other evil entities are surprisingly similar across continents and eras.

• A three-thousand-year-old question had been given a complete and compelling psychological explanation the previous year by Roy Baumeister, one of today’s most creative social psychologists.

• Baumeister is an extraordinary social psychologist, in part because in his search for truth he is unconcerned about political correctness.

• But when they achieve success and find only moderate and short-lived pleasure, they ask (as the singer Peggy Lee once did): Is that all there is? They devalue their accomplishments as a striving after wind.

• Because whatever happens, you’re likely to adapt to it, but you don’t realize up front that you will.

• The human mind is extraordinarily sensitive to changes in conditions, but not so sensitive to absolute levels.

• Lottery winners are so often harassed that many have to move, hide, end relationships, and finally turn to each other, forming lottery winner support groups to deal with their new difficulties.

• When we combine the adaptation principle with the discovery that people’s average level of happiness is highly heritable,11 we come to a startling possibility: In the long run, it doesn’t much matter what happens to you. 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.

• If this idea is correct, then we are all stuck on what has been called the “hedonic treadmill.”13 On an exercise treadmill you can increase the speed all you want, but you stay in the same place. In life, you can work as hard as you want, and accumulate all the riches, fruit trees, and concubines you want, but you can’t get ahead. Because you can’t change your “natural and usual state of tranquility,” the riches you accumulate will just raise your expectations and leave you no better off than you were before.

• the same place. In life, you can work as hard as you want, and accumulate all the riches, fruit trees, and

• Happiness comes from within, and it cannot be found by making the world conform to your desires.

• The Stoic philosophers of Ancient Greece, such as Epictetus, taught their followers to focus only on what they could fully control, which meant primarily their own thoughts and reactions. All other events—the gifts and curses of fortune— were externals, and the true Stoic was unaffected by externals.

• People who live in cold climates expect people who live in California to be happier, but they are wrong.23 People believe that attractive people are happier than unattractive people,24 but they, too, are wrong.

• The rich are happier on average than the middle class, but only by a little, and part of this relationship is reverse correlation: Happy people grow rich faster because, as in the marriage market, they are more appealing to others (such as bosses), and also because their frequent positive emotions help them to commit to projects, to work hard, and to invest in their futures.

• H = S + C + V 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.

• Shame. 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.42 People who undergo plastic surgery report (on average) high levels of satisfaction with the process, and they even report increases in the quality of their lives and decreases in psychiatric symptoms (such as depression and anxiety) in the years after the operation. The biggest gains were reported for breast surgery, both enlargement and reduction. I think the way to understand the long-lasting effects of such seemingly shallow changes is to think about the power of shame in everyday life.

• There are many other ways in which you can increase your happiness by getting the conditions of your life right, particularly in relationships, work, and the degree of control you have over stressors. So in the happiness formula, C is real and some externals matter.

• People really enjoy eating, especially in the company of others, and they hate to be interrupted by telephone calls (and perhaps Csikszentmihalyi’s beeps) during meals, or (worst of all) during sex. But you can’t enjoy physical pleasure all day long. By their very nature, food and sex satiate. To continue eating or having sex beyond a certain level of satisfaction can lead to disgust.

• 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.

• People would be happier and healthier if they took longer vacations, even if that meant earning less, yet vacation times are shrinking in the United States, and in Europe as well. People would be happier, and in the long run wealthier, if they bought basic, functional appliances, automobiles, and wristwatches, and invested the money they saved for future consumption; yet, 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.

• 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. Because Americans, at least, gain no prestige from taking the longest vacations or having the shortest commutes, these inconspicuous consumables are not subject to an arms race.

• Now try this one: Would you rather work for a company that gave you two weeks of vacation a year, but other employees were given, on average, only one; or would you prefer a company that gave you four weeks of vacation a year, but other employees were given, on average, six? The great majority of people choose the longer absolute time.56 Time off is inconspicuous consumption, although people can easily turn a vacation into conspicuous consumption by spending vast amounts of money to impress others instead of using the time to rejuvenate themselves.

• Activities connect us to others; objects often separate us.

• 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.

• When I began writing this book, I thought that Buddha would be a strong contender for the “Best Psychologist of the Last Three Thousand Years” award. To me, his diagnosis of the futility of striving felt so right, his promise of tranquility so alluring. But in doing research for the book, I began to think that Buddhism might be based on an overreaction, perhaps even an error.

• Upon discovering that old age, disease, and death are the destiny of all people, the prince cried, “Turn back the chariot! This is no time or place for pleasure excursions. How could an intelligent person pay no heed at a time of disaster, when he knows of his impending destruction?”65 The prince then left his wife, his harem, and, as prophesied, his royal future. He went into the forest and began his journey to enlightenment. After his enlightenment, Buddha66 (the “awakened one”) preached that life is suffering, and that the only way to escape this suffering is by breaking the attachments that bind us to pleasure, achievement, reputation, and life.

• Biswas-Diener concludes that “while the poor of Calcutta do not lead enviable lives, they do lead meaningful lives. They capitalize on the non-material resources available to them and find satisfaction in many areas of their lives.”

• When life is unpredictable and dangerous (as it was for the Stoic philosophers, living under capricious Roman emperors), it might be foolish to seek happiness by controlling one’s external world.

• 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. For the first time in human history, most people (in wealthy countries) will live past the age of seventy and will not see any of their children die before them. Although all of us will get unwanted surprises along the way, we’ll adapt and cope with nearly all of them, and many of us will believe we are better off for having suffered. So to cut off all attachments, to shun the pleasures of sensuality and triumph in an effort to escape the pains of loss and defeat—this now strikes me as an inappropriate response to the inevitable presence of some suffering in every life.

• Happiness comes from within, and happiness comes from without.

• No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility; you must live for your neighbour, if you would live for yourself.

• No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

• Attachment theory begins with the idea that two basic goals guide children’s behavior: safety and exploration. A child who stays safe survives; a child who explores and plays develops the skills and intelligence needed for adult life. (This is why all mammal babies play; and the larger their frontal cortex, the more they need to play).

• Once you think about it, the similarities between romantic relationships and parent-infant relationships are obvious. Lovers in the first rush of love spend endless hours in face-to-face mutual gaze, holding each other, nuzzling and cuddling, kissing, using baby voices, and enjoying the same release of the hormone oxytocin that binds mothers and babies to each other in a kind of addiction. Oxytocin prepares female mammals to give birth (triggering uterine contractions and milk release), but it also affects their brains, fostering nurturant behaviors and reducing feelings of stress when mothers are in contact with their children.

• For adults, the biggest rush of oxytocin—other than giving birth and nursing—comes from sex.28 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.

• Adult love relationships are therefore built out of two ancient and interlocking systems: an attachment system that bonds child to mother and a caregiving system that bonds mother to child.

• First, hormonal changes in the female around the time of ovulation trigger advertisements of her fertility: Female dogs and cats, for example, release pheromones; female chimpanzees and bonobos exhibit enormous red genital swellings. Next, the males become turned on and compete (in some species) to see who gets to mate. The female makes some sort of choice (in most species), which in turn activates her own mating system; and then, some months later, birth activates the caregiving system in the mother and the attachment system in the child. Dad is left out in the cold, where he spends his time sniffing for more pheromones, or scanning for more swellings. Sex is for reproduction; lasting love is for mothers and children.

• 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.

• In humans, however, the rapid rate of embryonic brain growth continues for about two years after birth, followed by a slower but continuous increase in brain weight for another twenty years.

• 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.

• Studies of hunter-gatherer societies show that mothers of young children cannot collect enough calories to keep themselves and their children alive.33 They rely on the large quantity of food as well as the protection provided by males in their peak years of productivity.

• But in the competitive game of evolution, it’s a losing move for a male to provide resources to a child who is not his own. So active fathers, male-female pair-bonds, male sexual jealousy, and big-headed babies all co-evolved— that is, arose gradually but together.

• A man who felt some desire to stay with a woman, guard her fidelity, and contribute to the rearing of their children could produce smarter children than could his less paternal competitors.

• Because men and women in a relationship have many conflicting interests, evolutionary theory does not view love relationships as harmonious partnerships for childrearing;34 but a universal feature of human cultures is that men and women form relationships intended to last for years (marriage) that constrain their sexual behavior in some way and institutionalize their ties to children and to each other.

• True love is passionate love that never fades; if you are in true love, you should marry that person; if love ends, you should leave that person because it was not true love; and if you can find the right person, you will have true love forever. You might not believe this myth yourself, particularly if you are older than thirty; but many young people in Western nations are raised on it, and it acts as an ideal that they unconsciously carry with them even if they scoff at it.

• This is the urge that Plato captured in The Symposium, in which Aristophanes’ toast to love is a myth about its origins. Aristophanes says that people originally had four legs, four arms, and two faces, but one day the gods felt threatened by the power and arrogance of human beings and decided to cut them in half. Ever since that day, people have wandered the world searching for their other halves. (Some people originally had two male faces, some two female, and the rest a male and a female, thereby explaining the diversity of sexual orientation.)

• So if passionate love is a drug—literally a drug—it has to wear off eventually. Nobody can stay high forever (although if you find passionate love in a long-distance relationship, it’s like taking cocaine once a month; the drug can retain its potency because of your suffering between doses). If passionate love is allowed to run its joyous course, there must come a day when it weakens.

• During its weeks or months of madness, lovers can’t help but think about marriage, and often they talk about it, too. Sometimes they even accept Hephaestus’s offer and commit to marriage. This is often a mistake. Nobody can think straight when high on passionate love. The rider is as besotted as the elephant.

• People are not allowed to sign contracts when they are drunk, and I sometimes wish we could prevent people from proposing marriage when they are high on passionate love because once a marriage proposal is accepted, families are notified, and a date is set, it’s very hard to stop the train.

• If you are in passionate love and want to celebrate your passion, read poetry. If your ardor has calmed and you want to understand your evolving relationship, read psychology. But if you have just ended a relationship and would like to believe you are better off without love, read philosophy.

• In the ancient East, the problem with love is obvious: Love is attachment. Attachments, particularly sensual and sexual attachments, must be broken to permit spiritual progress. Buddha said, “So long as lustful desire, however small, of man for women is not controlled, so long the mind of man is not free, but is bound like a calf tied to a cow.”

• “It is the very nature of women to corrupt men here on earth.”

• When a man loves a beautiful body he must learn to love beauty in general, not the beauty of one particular body.

• The essential nature of love as an attachment between two people is rejected; love can be dignified only when it is converted into an appreciation of beauty in general.

• The later Stoics also object to the particularity of love, to the way it places the source of one’s happiness in the hands of another person, whom one cannot fully control.

• When two lie tasting, limb by limb life’s bloom, when flesh gives foretaste of delight, and Venus is ready to sow the female field, they hungrily seize each other, mouth to mouth the spittle flows, they pant, press tooth to lip— vainly, for they can chafe no substance off nor pierce and be gone, one body in the other. For often this seems to be their wish, their goal, so greedily do they cling in passion’s bond.

• Rather, Christian love has focused on two key words: caritas and agape. Caritas (the origin of our word “charity”) is a kind of intense benevolence and good will; agape is a Greek word that refers to a kind of selfless, spiritual love with no sexuality, no clinging to a particular other person.

• Suppose Harlow had raised rhesus monkeys under two conditions. For the first group, each was reared in its own cage, but each day Harlow put in a new but very nurturing adult female monkey as a companion. For the second group, each was reared in a cage with its own mother, and then each day Harlow put in a new and not particularly nice other monkey. The monkeys in the first group got something like caritas—benevolence without particularity—and they would probably emerge emotionally damaged. Without having formed an attachment relationship, they would likely be fearful of new experiences and unable to love or care for other monkeys. The monkeys in the second group would have had something closer to a normal rhesus monkey childhood, and would probably emerge healthy and able to love. Monkeys and people need close and long-lasting attachments to particular others. In chapter 9, I will propose that agape is real, but usually short-lived. It can change lives and enrich lives, but it cannot substitute for the kinds of love based on attachments.

• Love is a kind of insanity, and many people have, while crazed with passion, ruined their lives and those of others. Much of the philosophical opposition to love may therefore be well-intentioned advice by the sages to the young: Shut your ears to the sirens’ deceitful song.

• So the sages’ constant attempts to redefine love as something spiritual and prosocial sound to me like the moralism of parents who, having enjoyed a variety of love affairs when they were young, now try to explain to their daughter why she should save herself for marriage.

• 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.53 It’s not just that extroverts are naturally happier and healthier; when introverts are forced to be more outgoing, they usually enjoy it and find that it boosts their mood.54 Even people who think they don’t want a lot of social contact still benefit from it.

• Seneca was right: “No one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility.”

• When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to poverty, place obstacles in the paths of his deeds, so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent. –MENG TZU,1 CHINA, 3RD CENT. BCE

• “The person who has had more experience of hardships can stand more firmly in the face of problems than the person who has never experienced suffering. From this angle, then, some suffering can be a good lesson for life.”

• 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. If the strong version of the hypothesis is valid, it has profound implications for how we should live our lives and structure our societies. It means that we should take more chances and suffer more defeats.

• Psychologists often approach personality by measuring basic traits such as the “big five”: neuroticism, extroversion, openness to new experiences, agreeableness (warmth/niceness), and conscientiousness.15 These traits are facts about the elephant, about a person’s automatic reactions to various situations. They are fairly similar between identical twins reared apart, indicating that they are influenced in part by genes, although they are also influenced by changes in the conditions of one’s life or the roles one plays, such as becoming a parent.

• We can’t stop ourselves from creating what McAdams describes as an “evolving story that integrates a reconstructed past, perceived present, and anticipated future into a coherent and vitalizing life myth.”

• Most of the life goals that people pursue at the level of “characteristic adaptations” can be sorted—as the psychologist Robert Emmons19 has found—into four categories: work and achievement, relationships and intimacy, religion and spirituality, and generativity (leaving a legacy and contributing something to society).

• Beck’s negative triad: I’m bad, the world is bad, and my future is dark.

• The psychologists Ken Sheldon and Tim Kasser have found that people who are mentally healthy and happy have a higher degree of “vertical coherence” among their goals—that is, higher-level (long term) goals and lower-level (immediate) goals all fit together well so that pursuing one’s short-term goals advances the pursuit of long-term goals.

• 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. Life has a way of making the rich get richer and the happy get happier.

• People who express their emotions, “get it off their chests” or “let off steam,” are healthier.

• When people older than thirty are asked to remember the most important or vivid events of their lives, they are disproportionately likely to recall events that occurred between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five.39 This is the age when a person’s life blooms—first love, college and intellectual growth, living and perhaps traveling independently—and it is the time when young people (at least in Western countries) make many of the choices that will define their lives.

• longitudinal data (collected from the same people over many decades)

• Kids who went through very difficult circumstances usually came out rather well.”

• So adversity may be most beneficial for people in their late teens and into their twenties.

• Elder’s work is full of reminders that the action is in the interactions— that is, the ways that one’s unique personality interacts with details about an event and its social context to produce a particular and often unpredictable outcome.

• We can say, however, that for many people, particularly those who overcame adversity in their twenties, adversity made them stronger, better, and even happier than they would have been without it.

• 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.

• Second, 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). This second balance corresponds roughly to the famous “serenity prayer”: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”47 If you already know this prayer, your rider knows it (explicitly). If you live this prayer, your elephant knows it, too (tacitly), and you are wise.

• 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.

• For adversity to be maximally beneficial, it should happen at the right time (young adulthood), to the right people (those with the social and psychological resources to rise to challenges and find benefits), and to the right degree (not so severe as to cause PTSD).

• Set your heart on doing good. Do it over and over again, and you will be filled with joy. A fool is happy until his mischief turns against him. And a good man may suffer until his goodness flowers.

• In this light, Ben Franklin is supremely admirable. Born in Boston in 1706, he was apprenticed at the age of twelve to his older brother James, who owned a printing shop. After many disputes with (and beatings from) his brother, he yearned for freedom, but James would not release him from the legal contract of his apprenticeship. So at the age of seventeen, Ben broke the law and skipped town. He got on a boat to New York and, failing to find work there, kept on going to Philadelphia. There he found work as an apprentice printer and, through skill and diligence, eventually opened his own print shop and published his own newspaper. He went on to spectacular success in business (Poor Richard’s Almanack—a compendium of sayings and maxims—was a hit in its day); in science (he proved that lightning is electricity, then tamed it by inventing the lightning rod); in politics (he held too many offices to name); and in diplomacy (he persuaded France to join the American colonies’ war against Britain, though France had little to gain from the enterprise). He lived to eighty-four and enjoyed the ride. He took pride in his scientific discoveries and civic creations; he basked in the love and esteem of France as well as of America; and even as an old man he relished the attentions of women.

• He wrote out a list of thirteen virtues, each linked to specific behaviors that he should or should not do. (For example: “Temperance: Eat not to dullness”; “Frugality: Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself”; “Chastity: Rarely use venery but for health or offspring”).

• Cultivating virtue will make you happy. There are plenty of reasons to doubt the virtue hypothesis. Franklin himself admitted that he failed utterly to develop the virtue of humility, yet he reaped great social gains by learning to fake it. Perhaps the virtue hypothesis will turn out to be true only in a cynical, Machiavellian way: Cultivating the appearance of virtue will make you successful, and therefore happy, regardless of your true character.

• The wisdom of Confucius and Buddha, for example, comes down to us as lists of aphorisms so timeless and evocative that people still read them today for pleasure and guidance, refer to them as “worldwide laws of life,”9 and write books about their scientific validity.

• The Western approach to morality got off to a great start; as in other ancient cultures, it focused on virtues. The Old Testament, the New Testament, Homer, and Aesop all show that our founding cultures relied heavily on proverbs, maxims, fables, and role models to illustrate and teach the virtues.

• These two seeds—the quest for parsimony and the worship of reason— lay dormant in the centuries after the fall of Rome, but they sprouted and bloomed in the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.

• Like Plato, Kant believed that human beings have a dual nature: part animal and part rational. The animal part of us follows the laws of nature, just as does a falling rock or a lion killing its prey. There is no morality in nature; there is only causality. But the rational part of us, Kant said, can follow a different kind of law: It can respect rules of conduct, and so people (but not lions) can be judged morally for the degree to which they respect the right rules.

• Despite their many differences, however, the two camps agree in important ways. They both believe in parsimony: Decisions should be based ultimately on one principle only, be it the categorical imperative or the maximization of utility. They both insist that only the rider can make such decisions because moral decision making requires logical reasoning and sometimes even mathematical calculation. They both distrust intuitions and gut feelings, which they see as obstacles to good reasoning. And they both shun the particular in favor of the abstract: You don’t need a rich, thick description of the people involved, or of their beliefs and cultural traditions. You just need a few facts and a ranked list of their likes and dislikes (if you are a utilitarian). It doesn’t matter what country or historical era you are in; it doesn’t matter whether the people involved are your friends, your enemies, or complete strangers. The moral law, like a law of physics, works the same for all people at all times.

• This turn from character ethics to quandary ethics has turned moral education away from virtues and toward moral reasoning.

• I believe that this turn from character to quandary was a profound mistake, for two reasons.

• The second problem with the turn to moral reasoning is that it relies on bad psychology. Many moral education efforts since the 1970s take the rider off of the elephant and train him to solve problems on his own. After being exposed to hours of case studies, classroom discussions about moral dilemmas, and videos about people who faced dilemmas and made the right choices, the child learns how (not what) to think. Then class ends, the rider gets back on the elephant, and nothing changes at recess. 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.

• During my first year of graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, I discovered the weakness of moral reasoning in myself. I read a wonderful book—Practical Ethics—by the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer.16 Singer, a humane consequentialist, shows how we can apply a consistent concern for the welfare of others to resolve many ethical problems of daily life. Singer’s approach to the ethics of killing animals changed forever my thinking about my food choices. Singer proposes and justifies a few guiding principles: First, it is wrong to cause pain and suffering to any sentient creature, therefore current factory farming methods are unethical. Second, it is wrong to take the life of a sentient being that has some sense of identity and attachments, therefore killing animals with large brains and highly developed social lives (such as other primates and most other mammals) is wrong, even if they could be raised in an environment they enjoyed and were then killed painlessly. Singer’s clear and compelling arguments convinced me on the spot, and since that day I have been morally opposed to all forms of factory farming. Morally opposed, but not behaviorally opposed. I love the taste of meat, and the only thing that changed in the first six months after reading Singer is that I thought about my hypocrisy each time I ordered a hamburger.

• I found Singer’s arguments persuasive. But, to paraphrase Medea’s lament (from chapter 1): I saw the right way and approved it, but followed the wrong, until an emotion came along to provide some force.

• In recent years, even psychology has become involved. In 1998, Martin Seligman founded positive psychology when he asserted that psychology had lost its way. Psychology had become obsessed with pathology and the dark side of human nature, blind to all that was good and noble in people.

• Wisdom: Curiosity Love of learning Judgment Ingenuity Emotional intelligence Perspective Courage: Valor Perseverance Integrity Humanity: Kindness Loving Justice: Citizenship Fairness Leadership Temperance: Self-control Prudence Humility Transcendence: Appreciation of beauty and excellence Gratitude Hope Spirituality Forgiveness Humor Zest

• These two processes—kin altruism and reciprocal altruism—do indeed explain nearly all altruism among nonhuman animals, and much of human altruism, too.

• It may sound stuffy and constraining to us now, but that’s the point: Some constraint is good for us; absolute freedom is not.

• Anomie is the condition of a society in which there are no clear rules, norms, or standards of value. In an anomic society, people can do as they please; but without any clear standards or respected social institutions to enforce those standards, it is harder for people to find things they want to do. Anomie breeds feelings of rootlessness and anxiety and leads to an increase in amoral and antisocial behavior.

• The intrinsically moral term “character” fell out of favor and was replaced by the amoral term “personality.”

• I quickly realized that there are two main kinds of diversity—demographic and moral. Demographic diversity is about socio-demographic categories such as race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, age, and handicapped status. Calling for demographic diversity is in large measure calling for justice, for the inclusion of previously excluded groups. Moral diversity, on the other hand, is essentially what Durkheim described as anomie: a lack of consensus on moral norms and values. Once you make this distinction, you see that nobody can coherently even want moral diversity. If you are pro-choice on the issue of abortion, would you prefer that there be a wide variety of opinions and no dominant one? Or would you prefer that everyone agree with you and the laws of the land reflect that agreement? If you prefer diversity on an issue, the issue is not a moral issue for you; it is a matter of personal taste.

• Although I am a political liberal, I believe that conservatives have a better understanding of moral development (although not of moral psychology in general—they are too committed to the myth of pure evil).

• Animals that routinely eat or crawl on corpses, excrement, or garbage piles (rats, maggots, vultures, cockroaches) trigger disgust in us: We won’t eat them, and anything they have touched becomes contaminated.

• Shweder’s research on morality14 in Bhubaneswar and elsewhere shows that when people think about morality, their moral concepts cluster into three groups, which he calls the ethic of autonomy, the ethic of community, and the ethic of divinity.

• Oxytocin causes bonding, not action. Elevation may fill people with feelings of love, trust,30 and openness, making them more receptive to new relationships; yet, given their feelings of relaxation and passivity, they might be less likely to engage in active altruism toward strangers.

• There is no God and no externally given meaning to life, I thought, so from one perspective it really wouldn’t matter if I killed myself tomorrow. Very well, then everything beyond tomorrow is a gift with no strings and no expectations. There is no test to hand in at the end of life, so there is no way to fail. If this really is all there is, why not embrace it, rather than throw it away?

• Modern philosophers specialize in analyzing the meaning of words, but, aside from the existentialists (who caused the problem for me in the first place), they had little to say about the meaning of life. It was only after I entered graduate school in psychology that I realized why modern philosophy seemed sterile: It lacked a deep understanding of human nature. The ancient philosophers were often good psychologists, as I have shown in this book, but when modern philosophy began to devote itself to the study of logic and rationality, it gradually lost interest in psychology and lost touch with the passionate, contextualized nature of human life.

• Aristotle asked about aretē (excellence/virtue) and telos (purpose/goal), and he used the metaphor that people are like archers, who need a clear target at which to aim.

• In the modern world, people can find goals and flow in many settings, but most people find most of their flow at work.16 (I define work broadly to include anyone’s answer to the question “So, what do you do?” “Student” and “full-time parent” are both good answers). Love and work are, for people, obvious analogues to water and sunshine for plants.

• Psychologists have referred to this basic need as a need for competence, industry, or mastery. White called it the “effectance motive,” which he defined as the need or drive to develop competence through interacting with and controlling one’s environment. 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.25 If 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!”

  • Super wichtig!!!

• You might think that blue-collar workers have jobs, managers have careers, and the more respected professionals (doctors, scientists, clergy) have callings. Although there is some truth to that expectation, we can nonetheless paraphrase Marcus Aurelius and say, “Work itself is but what you deem it.”

• 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.’”

• Riding for Katherine had become a source of flow, joy, identity, effectance, and relatedness. It was part of her answer to the question of purpose within life.

• Vital engagement does not reside in the person or in the environment; it exists in the relationship between the two. The web of meaning that engulfed Katherine grew and thickened gradually and organically, over many years. Vital engagement is what I was missing during my senior year of high school. I had love, and I had work (in the form of reasonably challenging high school classes), but my work was not part of a larger project beyond getting into college. In fact, it was precisely when the college project was ending—when I had sent off my college applications and was in limbo, not knowing where I would go next—that I became paralyzed by the Holy Question.

• Csikszentmihalyi teamed up with two other leading psychologists—Howard Gardner at Harvard, and William Damon at Stanford—to study these changes, and to see why some professions seemed healthy while others were growing sick. Picking the fields of genetics and journalism as case studies, they conducted dozens of interviews with people in each field. Their conclusion32 is as profound as it is simple: It’s a matter of alignment. 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. Genetics, for example, is a healthy field because all parties involved respect and reward the very best science.

• Even during war and genocide, when group interests are most compelling, it is the coward who runs and hides, rather than joining his comrades on the front lines, who is most likely to pass on his genes to the next generation. Evolutionary theorists have therefore stood united, since the early 1970s, in their belief that group selection simply did not play a role in shaping human nature.

• 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.

• “I” passes insensibly into a “we,” “my” becomes “our,” and individual fate loses its central importance. … I believe that it is nothing less than the assurance of immortality that makes self-sacrifice at these moments so relatively easy. … I may fall, but I do not die, for that which is real in me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for whom I gave up my life.

• The ancients may have known little about biology, chemistry, and physics, but many were good psychologists.

• The Eastern and Western approaches to life are also said to be opposed: The East stresses acceptance and collectivism; the West encourages striving and individualism. But as we’ve seen, both perspectives are valuable.

• My research3 confirms the common perception that liberals are experts in thinking about issues of victimization, equality, autonomy, and the rights of individuals, particularly those of minorities and nonconformists. Conservatives, on the other hand, are experts in thinking about loyalty to the group, respect for authority and tradition, and sacredness.

• A good place to look for wisdom, therefore, is where you least expect to find it: in the minds of your opponents. You already know the ideas common on your own side. If you can take off the blinders of the myth of pure evil, you might see some good ideas for the first time.