deepstash
Beta
Jordan Peterson: 'The pursuit of happiness is a pointless goal'
Humans are essentially full of darkness, and that is now visible in social media with the flood of hatred, abuse, and outrage.
156 SAVES
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
13
Key Ideas
An essay exists at multiple levels:
A good essay works at every one of those levels simultaneously.
Writing begins with these 3 steps:
14
Key Ideas
"You could help direct the world, on its careening trajectory, a bit more toward heaven and a bit more away from H..."
"When the internal critic puts you down using comparisons, here’s how it operates: First, it selects a single, arbitrary domain of comparison. Then it acts as if that domain is the only one relevant. Then it contrasts you unfavorably with someone truly stellar, within that domain. It can take that final step even further, using the unbridgeable gap between you and its target of comparison as evidence for the fundamental injustice of life. That way your motivation to do anything at all can be most effectively undermined."
"The first step, perhaps, is to take stock. Who are you? When you buy a house and prepare to live in it, you hire an inspector to list all its faults–as it is, in reality, now, not as you wish it could be. You’ll even pay him for the bad news. You need to know. You need to discover the home’s hidden flaws. You need to know whether they are cosmetic imperfections or structural inadequacies. You need to know because you can’t fix something if you don’t know it’s broken–and you’re broken. You need an inspector. The internal critic–it could play that role, if you could get it on track; if you and it could cooperate."
2
Key Ideas
Peterson suggests human hierarchies aren’t socially created, but are effects of human evolution. His evidence for this is the fact that lobsters also have hierarchies.
Human and lobsters
Serotonin is linked to aggression and is found in the brains of most animals, humans and lobsters include, as expected of creatures with a common ancestor. But serotonin has a completely different effect in arthropods and vertebrates.
In vertebrates lowered levels of serotonin has been shown to lead to increased aggression, the opposite happens on humans.