Doctor Mike

And the ones who don't do well, not just my students, but strivers in general,

the ultra successful people, they, they're looking for happiness as a result of worldly success.

And that's a mistake.

Yeah, well, the general reaction is, let me try, right?

And there's something to that, to be sure.

There's this assumption that if you have more resources, because mother nature endows you with this tendency to want resources,

We want resources because mother nature wants us to be able to pass on our genes and not starve, survive another season.

But mother nature doesn't care about our happiness.

We have this kind of cross circuit in our happiness.

We have these animal impulses and we think if we meet all these animal impulses, then the thing that we really want, which is happiness, will actually come to us.

That's not right.

What will come to us is indeed more mating partners and more stuff and more hierarchy, more place in the hierarchy.

But we won't actually get happier.

And so the result is that we assume that we just needed more.

That's called the hedonic treadmill, the more, more, more.

You homeostatically go back to your emotional baseline very quickly.

And that is to say you're happy because something good happens to you in worldly terms.

But your emotions don't exist to give you a permanent good day.

They're an alarm system to tell you that certain things are happening around you.

And they set.