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You Don't Know What You Want
Petter Johansson
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The meaning machine
The human brain is a “meaning machine,” and it will make sense out of literally anything put in front of it.
Figuring out what we want
Confirmation bias plays a big role in this process: once we make a selection, we’ll do almost anything to rationalize it.
Which is why action will always trump analysis.
Abstract expectations
They are the opposite of the real and actual here-and-now. The problem with them is that when we fail to reach the future we had pictured in our heads, we face feelings of disappointment, inadequacy, and anger.
And then we start to look for help from others on how to asses our lives (mostly from self-help gurus and writers).
Happiness isn’t in achieving fantasies
What will bring us the satisfaction and satiation we crave is, rather, abandoning our fantasies and misconceptions of what will bring us happiness.
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Key Ideas
Paradox of curiosity
Curiosity doesn’t seem to be tied to any specific reward.
It makes sense for organisms to seek food, water, sex, shelter, rest, wealth, or any of the other myriad nourishing and ...
Curiosity and evolution
From an evolutionary perspective, there’s good reason to keep looking, to be curious. Information helps us make better choices and adapt to a changing environment.
Curiosity as a probability algorithm
Scientists who study the mechanics of curiosity are finding that it is, at its core, a kind of probability algorithm—our brain’s continuous calculation of which path or action is likely to gain us the most knowledge in the least amount of time. Like the links on a Wikipedia page, curiosity builds upon itself, every question leading to the next. And as with a journey down the Wikipedia wormhole, where you start dictates where you might end up.
Curiosity it’s less about what you don’t know than about what you already do.
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The new buzzword
The "pursuit of joy" seems to be the new buzzword to counter the fear of missing out phenomenon.
What brings you joy? Joy is pared with cleaning up our cluttered lives: from household clu...
Life clutter builds up
We are constantly invited to do something, think something, experience something or buy something.
For every social event or task we say yes to, we run the risk of overfilling our lives. It may leave us feeling overstretched, overtired and overwhelmed.
Inability to say "no"
There is often an underlying fear that prevents us from saying no. Perhaps we fear that we are not good enough. We find the compulsive "yes" might help us feel better. However, we cannot continue living at this pace.
We need to ask ourselves why we continue to do the very things that make us unhappy. Self-restraint and missing out are vital for our well-being.
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Worrying about what others think
The fact that we’re being judged matters much more than whether those judgments seem fair or well-informed. We also don’t tend...
Being "fairly" judged
It’s impossible to be fairly judged. Nobody will ever understand you perfectly. You will continually be both underestimated and overestimated.
Your own assessment of yourself is hardly the “right” one. We tend to either obsess over our faults or overlook them completely. And with strangers, there’s no hope of anything approaching a fair assessment. They have zero context for what they see in you.
How we judge strangers
Become aware of your own judgments. You’ll discover that they’re almost always categorical (good person or bad person), that they’re provoked by a single behavior, and that you rarely second-guess these judgments.
Notice what it feels like to judge a person, how absolute and uncomplicated it seems, then remember that you’re seeing this person through the keyhole of a single moment in their lives.