Arthur Brooks

There's a little part of the limbic system called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex that is really, really active when you experience social exclusion, when you experience loss.

It was evolved so that you would be averse to sadness.

Sadness is supposed to be really, really painful.

and you don't want it.

So people actually, they don't suffer so much from sadness.

They suffer a lot from fear of sadness.

You know, you're trying to avoid sadness, which is what motivates a lot of our behaviors.

Most of the things, most of the reasons we do what we do is because we're afraid of bad, we're afraid of negative emotions.

But at the same time, most people will talk about the most meaningful periods of their lives were times of the greatest negative emotion in their lives.

Negative emotion brings fear.

Meaning, unless, unless we try to eliminate it, and this is another wrong turn that we've taken, because once again, in our left hemispheric conceit of the complicated world, the singularity is one in which we will have eliminated pain, eliminated sadness, eliminated negative emotionality, eliminated negative experiences.

That's not only impossible, it's actually suboptimal.

It's death for what it means to be fully alive.

We don't want to be, we don't want to suffer, but we must suffer.

And Mother Nature is a wicked tyrant.

She's kept us alive for generation after generation, but animal impulses are not the same thing as moral aspirations.

That's right.

That's right.

It's really interesting.

I mean, I didn't know, you know, when I see a big happiness problem, when I look at the depression explosion, the anxiety explosion, I know that one of the channels of happiness is blocked.