Summary
- happiness is our natural state. its like sun
- desires are the clouds that cover up that sun.
- but we cant live without desires. we are biological creatures walking on this earth
- and we cant be happy all the time. its not a sustainable state
- what we should aim for is calmness and peace
- peace can be converted to happiness anytime. peace is happiness at rest. happiness is peace at motion
- if you are peaceful and you engage in some activity you will feel happy. but if you set out to be there you wont be happy.
- kids are happy because they don’t have desires. they start to become unhappy mostly around puberty. suppressing desires also makes them unhappy. modern society imprison kids and make them walk through royal pagants where they feel miserable.
- in the past around age 14 kids were fighting battles and having families.
- child is happy through ignorance. they don’t worry about food or shelter
- middle age person is unhappy because he has to worry about future food and everything. there is no safety net
- older person who’s closer to Death goes back to being happy like a child but they do it through wisdom because actually it doesn’t matter i’m just going to die anyway at the end and this all goes to zero so all of these treasures that i was accumulating whether they were mental or emotional or physical they’re all going to disappear anyway
- marriage is a vehicle to have children. no matter who you’re with they could be the most interesting attractive perfect person in the world you’re going to get bored of them after a decade this is human nature especially if you follow this disney romantic philosophy of you have to get everything out of one person that just doesn’t exist we have multiple friends right for our intellectual endeavors so
- ultimately the point of marriage at least the biological point of marriage and historical point of marriage is to have children and what is the point of children well you’re here because your children so it’s a it’s a self-fulfilling tautology but also i think children give you the unique opportunity to genuinely love something more than you love yourself and i think that is really important for being happy because the moment you love something more than you love yourself you’re you’re no longer self-obsessed you’re no longer thinking about yourself all the time and the source of misery is thinking about yourself all the time it’s it’s being overly you know involved itself like people who are depressed they shoot themselves in the head .
- ultimately you have to find something bigger than yourself. it can be kids. it can be spirituality. it can be animals.
- that’s so true my most miserable friends are always always thinking about themselves and the world revolves around them
- and then you also find that people who um who dedicate their life to service are are not depressed at all like you’ll never see someone working in a soup kitchen uh serving homeless people