Naval Ravikant is a modern day philosopher and probably the most respected person in the tech world today.
I've probably revisited his blogpost on 'Happiness' more than a dozen times.
Here are 20 take away's I am regularly pondering on:
1. The big problems are the old ones.
The ones weâve been trying to solve since the beginning:Â How do I stay happy? How do I become healthy? How do I become wealthy? How do I raise the family I want?
2. Health is a state of well-being.
Letâs get to a state of financial health where weâre not fearful day to day. Thatâs where we started, and we spent a lot of time on that. Letâs get to a state of physical health where weâre not suffering from afflictions, disease and addiction. Letâs get to a state of mental health where weâre relatively at peace and quite content with ourselves.
3. Itâs easier to fulfil your material desires than to renounce them.
You can achieve happiness without financial wealth. Most of us recognize youâre not going to buy your way to happiness. But in modern times, you can buy your way out of common causes of unhappiness. Financial wealth can give you freedom and more time. It can give you peace.
4. âEvery time I meet a prostitute, she wants to talk about God. And every time I meet a priest, he wants to talk about sex.â
Whatever you deny yourself will become your new prison.
5. âA sick man only wants one thing, a healthy man wants 10,000Â things."
Physical health is the foundation of everything. If you donïżœïżœïżœt have your physical health, you have nothing. When youâre sick, your desires run away. Without the ability to get up and function, you canât turn into the desiring machine that you are. When youâre sick, your desires run away.
6. Happiness is more like poetry than algorithms.
I might say, âThe way to be happy is X,â and people will respond, âWell, didnât you say happiness is a cause of misery?â This is not mathematics. You canât link algorithms together. It's is more like poetry. If you read 50 poems by the same poet and try to map them out analytically and map words from one poem to another and see if it makes sense, youâll miss the point. Donât fixate on the words. Donât even fixate on the sentences. Ponder the overall thought process and message.
7. Happiness Is a Skill You Can Develop
Youâre not stuck at your current level of happiness. The first step to increasing your level of happiness is realizing you can. This is where a lot of people get tripped up. For the vast majority of people, some of their happinessâprobably a lot more than they thinkâis in their control. This step is not easy. You might be stuck on this for a long time. Many people believe that happiness cannot be developed or changed, so they devalue it. They say, âWell, I donât want to be happy.â
8. Desireâs a contract you make to be unhappy until you get what you want.
Happiness is returning to a state where nothing is missing. You become disturbed because you want something. Then you work really hard to get it and are miserable in the meantime. Finally, when you get it, you revert to the state you were in before you had it. Itâs not like you achieve some peak level of bliss that you stay on forever.
9. Being Unhappy Is Extremely Inefficient.
Besides âIâm too smart for it,â another objection is, âI donât want it to lower my productivity. I donât want to have less desire or less work ethic.â Fact check on that is: True. The happier and more peaceful you are, the less likely you are to run out and change the world. At the same time, being unhappy is very inefficient. A peaceful person doesnât have extraneous thoughts going through their head. If youâre a driven, unhappy person, your mind will be on 24/7.
10. A peaceful mind makes better decisions.
When I got happier in my own life, I became much more effectiveâeven though I donât work as hard as I used to. Iâm able to form relationships with people who I would have kept at a distance earlier in my life, for whatever preconceived notions I held.
I make decisions much more clearly now, because I can see the long-term outcomes. I cut straight to the chase and donât try and negotiate an extra 20% here or thereâbecause I know thatâs going to make me unhappy in the long-term, make the other person unhappy, and make the deal less stable.
Iâve become more productive even though I donât work as hard, because I make better decisions.
11. Ask yourself: Would you rather be the best in the world by working the hardest for it or by working the least for it, because you worked the most intelligently?
12. Pursuing pleasure for its own sake creates addiction
Addictions let you engage in fake play and fake work. Before, you had to go socialize with friends; now, you can just get drunk with a bunch of strangers. Before, you had to go find a mate, create children and raise a family; now, you can just watch a lot of porn. Before, you had to hunt and climb trees to get fruit for a little bit of natural sweetness; now, you can buy all the gelato you want.
The modern struggle is standing up to these weaponized addictions. They give you small doses of pleasure, but they also desensitize you and expose you to the misery of their absence.
13. Addiction enables artificial relationships and activities
If you drink alcohol or take some kind of drug regularly, try the following thought experiment. What events do you most look forward to? Iâll bet theyâre the ones where you get to drink or do drugs. You look forward to dinnertime, an upcoming party or bar-hopping with friends. To see how artificial it is, resolve to abstain from drinking or doing drugs the next time you go out. Now ask yourself how much youâre looking forward to that event. Youâll find: not at all.
14. Finding Peace from Mind
The mind should be a servant, not a master. Letâs talk about peace, and then weâll talk about truth and how they relate to happiness. When I say you want to be happy, what Iâm actually saying is you want to find peace. We say peace of mind, but what we really want is peace from mind.
15. The mind goes quiet during the moments of greatest pleasure
During your moments of greatest pleasureâwhether youâre doing a drug, having an orgasm, finding your edge kite-surfing, laughing with a friend or looking at an incredible sunsetâyour mind goes quiet. It calms down, and that voice in your head goes silent. You achieve a sense of awe, which you might also call beauty, bliss or joy. We all seek this. We all chase it. Deep down, what weâre actually looking for is peace from mind.
16. Our environment rewards pessimism and paranoia
Modern societyâs a lot safer and more peaceful. It still makes sense to be careful, maintain some paranoia and occasionally to get angryâbut not as much as weâre hardwired to do. Itâs okay to dial it down. The threat level is not as high as our genes think. If you were walking through the woods 1,000 years ago and heard something rustling in the bushes, youâd be right to be paranoid. Letâs say nine out of 10 times itâs a rabbit in the bushes, and one out of 10 times itâs a tiger. The optimist would catch a rabbit nine out of 10 times and get eaten by a tiger the 10th. The pessimist survives every time. Our evolved nature rewards pessimism. But we live in much safer times, so we must find ways past that and work towards peace.
17. âPeace is happiness at rest; happiness is peace in motion.â
18. Wise people are quiet
âThe closer you are to the truth, the more silent you become inside.â We intuitively know this. When someone is blabbing too much or being the court jester, you know theyâre not at peace. You know Robin Williams was not peaceful inside. We expect a wise person like a Lao Tzu or Socrates to be quietânot because theyâre trying to look wise, but because theyâre internally quiet. We understand that peace and wisdom go together. Kapil Gupta, whoâs written far more on this topic than I have, said, âWisdom begets stoicism. Stoicism does not beget wisdom.â As you become wise, you naturally become stoic. You donât become wise by being stoic. Thatâs reversing the cart and horse.
19. What society wants for you isnât whatâs good for you
Whatâs considered to be true is fought over. Individuals search for truth but groups search for consensusâand society is the largest group. So the biggest problem we run into is this: What society wants for you is not always whatâs good for you. Even smart people go along with societyâs lies. Hereâs a simple example: âMoney wonât make you happyâ is a social truth, but itâs not an individual truth. Look at all the individuals trying to make money. They know money can remove a lot of sources of unhappiness and get them to a point where happiness is under their control. It becomes their choice, as opposed to being inflicted upon them by external forces.
20. The Path to Peace Is Truth
When self-improvement fails, work on discovering the truth. The search for peace is really the search for truth. Try to see the advantage of understanding things by discovering the truth rather than by practice. When you discover the truth, bad habits can disappear. Letâs say Iâm trying to quit smoking. There are techniques I can try, but theyâre always painful and difficult. Often, a moment will come when I see myself in a new way that allows the habit to disappear by itself. I get a diagnosis of lung cancer and understand Iâm going to die, or I see a friend get in trouble with similar bad habits. When I see something clearly enough and understand it, the bad habit can dissolve by itself.
If we want peace, we have to give up on self-conflict. We even have to give up on self-improvement, because self-improvement is just a dressed up form of self-conflict. Instead, we need to use our natural curiosity to understand things better. Through understanding, we will naturally improve ourselves.
Once we truly understand the effects of unhealthy food on our bodiesâwhen we see the extra weight weâre carrying, or we track the glucose spike and crash after eating too much sugar, or we see how caffeine hops us up and then crashes usâwe automatically change for the better.
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Follow @naval for all his insights on modern day philosophy.
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