Arthur Brooks

Why don't we naturally do it?

If this were such a great thing, then we'd be savoring everything all the time and life would be sweet, right?

Well, it's hard because we're not evolved to savor anything.

We're evolved to rush through everything and pay attention to the negative.

That's what we're designed to do.

Now, why?

You, as a viewer of the show, you know that I rely a lot on evolutionary, biological, and psychological arguments.

And because they're compelling and because they're ordinarily right.

We have brains that were designed in more or less their current form, something like 250,000 years ago in the late Pleistocene era.

And that was a dangerous time to be Homo sapiens.

You know, you had to pay attention a lot or you were going to be a wild animal's lunch.

There was no law.

Somebody could come and, you know,

take your buffalo jerky and animal skins and you know kill you summarily if you're not paying attention so we have more brain space dedicated to negative emotions and positive emotions that's what gives us what we call the negativity bias in our lives negativity bias means that life isn't that great all the time but it it we're more likely to get to tomorrow we're more likely to survive the night that makes perfect evolutionary sense

that your suspicious nervous inner troglodyte is trying to survive and pass on your genes so you're not a saber-toothed tiger's lunch but that negativity bias is now maladapted it's basically an error that we would do that that we would not savor but rather that we would be suspicious and vigilant and trying to get into the future as quickly as possible as a survival tactic that doesn't actually lead us to happiness one quick note

Mother Nature, who did that, doesn't care if we're happy.

That is an important thing to keep in mind.

Mother Nature wants us to survive and pass on our genes.

But that's why we have a wonderful prefrontal cortex, so that we have decisions.

We can make conscious decisions, not just to live according to our animal impulses, but to live up to our moral aspirations.