Arthur Brooks

That's what it comes down to.

It denies the primacy of

and respect due to human evolutionary biology, which I know is something you love, right?

Me too, right?

Because it explains so much of the odd behavior that people have.

And so every time that we try to reorder the way that human beings are wired evolutionarily with some utopian idea that we've got this technology, we've got this economic policy, we've got, I've got this new idea for how the genders are gonna behave toward each other.

Yeah, no, no.

From now on, we're no longer going to be like people were 50,000 years ago.

It's going to fail.

It's going to fail.

And you need to go with the current.

You need to actually swim with the current or you're ultimately going to fail is what it turns out.

The doom loop is that I don't want to be bored because I don't like boredom because it's boring.

I distract myself.

When I distract myself, what I do is I become less tolerant of boredom.

My life feels less meaningful because I'm actually illuminating the parts of the brain that are necessary for that.

I'm more at loose ends.

I spend more time online, more time scrolling, more time doing what people do when they're really bored.

And that makes the problem worse, much the same way with drugs and alcohol, you know, and that's how escalation and dependence actually works.

The two biggest predictors of alcoholism are anxiety and boredom.