Morgan Housel

like very few times in life are you happy for more than a couple minutes at a time but what you want that is like a durable emotion is being content just saying like i'm good i'm good with this i don't want anything more i interviewed dr anna lemke and she's like the the uh the scientist who's most uh renowned for talking about and writing about dopamine

Yeah.

It's more, more, more, more.

It's huge.

And that's actually a good realization to be like, a lot of this is not something that you can solve on a spreadsheet.

It's not something you can solve with a formula.

It's chemicals in your brain.

And obviously some people are going to be more susceptible to that than others.

I think my grandmother-in-law just had, for whatever it was, was wired differently than most people.

Part of that was like she was a product of the Great Depression.

She grew up during the Great Depression, which probably like lowered her expectations.

She never had social media and whatnot.

But of course, I think some people are wired differently than others for a level of contentment.

But I think just there's a big thing in psychiatry where diagnosing a mental illness is sometimes more important than the treatment.

If you just get a diagnosis of like, oh, you're ADHD, whatever it is, just knowing, just like the fact that you can stop questioning, why am I having these thoughts?

You can understand why you have those thoughts is more important than the treatment sometimes.

And I think that's true here.

If you, it's easier said than done to completely control your desires.

But just knowing why you're doing it and realizing that it's probably not going to give you the happiness that you want, that it's just like any addiction, that the more you chase it, the further away it's going to get can go a big ways.

And so for me, myself, there's all the time.