Arthur Brooks

They're fragile because they don't know actually in which direction that they're going, which means they can't make progress.

Now remember, this whole idea of happiness comes from making progress toward a goal.

There's tons of really interesting examples of this.

The weight loss literature is super interesting in this.

Diets are all effective and they're all catastrophic failures, is what it comes down to.

Effective insofar as that almost any diet will make you lose weight.

But they have between an 80% and 95% failure rate after a year, meaning you gain all the weight back and then some.

It's a weird industry.

It's like a $40 billion industry in the United States that fails.

It's Ouroboros of nutritional advice.

It's craziness.

You know, 9 out of 10 times they fail.

Now, why are they successful?

Because economically, it's because temporarily they make you make progress, right?

But they ultimately fail because once you get to your goal, your goal weight, the reward is never getting to eat what you like ever again for the rest of your life.

Congratulations.

And then you get the arrival fallacy is what it comes down to.

So what you want in life is something where you can just make constant progress.

I want to be a better dad.

I want to be a better person.