The Resilient Mind - If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy? - Naval Ravikant

Episode Date: March 9, 2026

Naval Ravikant is an entrepreneur and investor whose journey embodies the essence of mental mastery and self-actualization. As the co-founder of AngelList and an early investor in companies like Uber and Twitter, he combines strategic thinking with a deep philosophy on wealth, happiness, and inner peace. Naval’s reflections on self-awareness, decision-making, and mindset have inspired millions to take control of their inner world.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Download_JournalThis episode is brought to in partnership with Motiversity & Chris Williamson.🌍 The Resilient Mind Podcast is a proud member of 1% for the Planet — building resilient minds and a resilient planet. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to, if you're so smart, why aren't you happy with Naval Ravi Kant? Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. Is happiness still more about peace than it is about joy? It's just one of those overloaded words that means different things to different people. So I'm not even sure we're communicating the same language,

but what is happiness? I think it's just basically being okay. with where you are. Not wanting. Not wanting things to be different than the way they are, not having the sense that anything is missing in this moment. Needing something to change, your current positive situation being contingent on an adjustment. On getting something from the outside world. Ironically, I think most people, if you were to ask them when they were happiest for a sustained period of time, not for a brief moment, because pleasure can override happiness and create kind of this illusion of happiness.

But if you ask people when they were happy for a sustained period of time, they were probably doing some variation of nothing. That's interesting. Because in the chase is this sort of lack, this contingency. That's right. But then you get bored. If you just sit around all the time, you get bored. So you want adventure, you want surprise.

Like there's the funny thought experiment of the bliss machine, right? Which is, suppose I could drill a hole in your head and put an electrode in. And they did this with monkeys. and I can put a wire in there and I can stimulate just the right part of your brain and I can put you in bliss and you'll just be in bliss. Would you want that?

Might be nice. For how long? Do it and I'll tell you. Right. So most people will say, well, I don't want that. I want meaning. I don't want just bliss. I want meaning.

And you're like, okay, well, I'll put an electrode in there and I'll give you meaning. How about that? And if you kind of run this thought experiment long enough, I think most people realize actually what I want is I want surprise. I want the world to surprise me and I want to wrestle with it

in ways that are somewhat predictable but somewhat not. And you kind of end up back where you started. So I don't know if necessarily, for some people, pure happiness is the ultimate goal. They want to just be blissfully happy wherever they are, whenever they are.

But I think other people, most people would say, well, I'm here in this world, I'm here in this life. I don't understand it or why, but I want to be, I want to be engaged. I want to be surprised.

I want to do things. I want to accomplish things. I want to want things and then get them, right? That's kind of the whole game that we're all playing here. Surprise is a really interesting. The sort of unpredictability, I think total brosines here, but I'm pretty sure that that's kind of how dopamine works, that things are a bit better than you expected.

That within that, it means that if you, for the perennial insecure overachievers that claw for control, that really want to be able to, the schedule is perfectly done and we know the itinerary, we know where we're going to be at this time. You're in some ways, I guess, reducing down the capacity for surprise because everything has become very contrived, prescribed, done in advance, laid out. Your ability to be surprised actually diminishes. Yeah, if nothing worked out the way you expected, if it was all serendipity and you didn't want that, you would just be a ball of anxiety. On the other hand, if everything worked out as you expected and wanted, you'd be so bored, you might as well be dead.

So there's some, you know, the river of life kind of flows between these two banks and enjoy it. You say thinking about yourself is the source of all unhappiness, but presumably you need to work on yourself and your weaknesses as well. So some degree of reflection is important. And if thinking about yourself is a source of unhappiness, is this a price that you need to pay? I need to sort of reflect inward. I'm going to have to diminish this level of happiness for a little while, and then I can use this new level. I've got my brown belt on and I can go out into the world as a brown belt.

What I'm specifically referring to that is if you're thinking about your personality and your ego and the character of you and you're obsessing over that, that's where a lot of depression and happiness sort of lingers and gets cultivated. So thinking about woe is me, this happened to me, that happened to me. I have this personality. I have this issue. I deserve this. I didn't get that. You're just strengthening a little beast in there that is insatiable. And that's where I think a lot of unhappiness comes from. What's the beast? It's the ego. But that word is so overused that I kind of hate to use the word. But it's a recurrent collection of thoughts that are very self-obsessed and will

never be satisfied. And very concretized as well. So they're not malleable, not particularly flexible. Well, you're just adding to them by thinking about them all the time. You're creating narratives and stories and identities. But that's different from solving personal problems. So if you encounter something, you learn from something, you're reflecting upon the learning, then you can reflect upon it, absorb it, and then just move on. But sitting there saying, I'm Chris, I'm Naval, I deserve this. This happened to me. That person wronged me. This is who I am. This shouldn't have happened. I need to go get revenge on this. I need to fix that or change this. I mean, that I think is where a lot of mental illness. is you know comes from so it depends if you are thinking about something to solve a problem and get it off your chest and get it off your mind if it leaves your mind clearer at the end of it then i think it was worthwhile if it leaves your mind busier at the end of it then you're probably going in the wrong direction is this a justification for detachment uh cultivated ignorance distraction? Detachment is not a goal. Detachment is a byproduct. It's just a byproduct of just

realizing, you know, what matters and what doesn't. And just for one moment on the self thing, I think everybody craves thinking about something more than themselves. If you want to be, you know, happy to some extent, you have to forget about your personal problems. And one way to do that is take on other problems, bigger problems. And that could be a mission. That could be spirituality. That could be spirituality. that could be kids.

It could be caring about the planet, although I think people take that a little far, you know, and then they get kind of oppressive and tyrannical in support of abstract concepts. So these can be taken too far, just like religion, for example, just like... Anything in excess. Anything in excess, right? But generally, the less you think about yourself, the more you can think about a mission or about God or about a child or something like that. So I remember Vinnie Haimath, the founder of Lume, said, I am rich and I have no idea

to do what to do with my life and you replied God, kids on mission, pick at least one. That's right. Preferably all three. It's very liberating. Yeah, thinking, I think overthinking about yourself is probably the, it may not be the cause of depression, but it certainly doesn't help.

Rumination. Yeah, I kind of had a self-induced Stockholm syndrome from this sort of a thing, because I like to think about stuff, and you provide you with an endless number of things to think about. So you're kind of, yeah, you have this, you're the prisoner and the prison guard at the same time. And I had Abigail Shreier on the show.

She wrote this book called Bad Therapy, sort of pushing back against therapy culture specifically for kids, but there was a blast radius that covered pretty much everything, including kind of CBT. I'm like, we're getting perilously close to some really evidence-based stuff here. But the more that I've thought about it and the more that I've looked at the evidence, there is basically a direct correlation between how much you think about yourself and how miserable you are. Therapy is great if it lets you vent and it solves a thing and then X session later's, you're done, you're clear.

But if you're just looping on the same thing forever, then it's actually the opposite. You're bathing in it. You're indulging in it. Yeah. Yeah. How have your become happy techniques developed over time? Yeah, I used to have a lot of them. Now I kind of try not to have any because I think the techniques themselves are kind of a struggle.

It's sort of like bidding for status implies your low status. It reveals that your low status. So someone who's basically trying to show off comes across as low status. The same way someone who's trying to be happy is sort of saying I'm unhappy and creating that frame. So it's better just to not even think in terms of that. position yourself as being in lack in order to attain. Yeah, I don't even think in terms of happiness unhappiness anymore. I just kind of just do my thing. Again, another question that's similar to a bunch of them, do you think you could have got there had you have not done the procedural,

systematic sort of step by step by step, this is what it is and then come out the other side? I don't think there are any formulas. I think it's unique to each person. It's like asking a successful person, how did you become successful? Each one of them will give you a different story. You can't follow anyone else's path. And most of them are even probably telling you some narratized version of it that isn't quite true. I mean, that's something that I continually realize, especially as I get to spend more time around people that are successful, and you hear very important to prioritize work life balance, right? That's one of the most common things that people who have attained success say. That's not my experience. But if you look at, you shouldn't be asking somebody who is successful

what they do to continue their success now. You should be asking them what did they do. to attain their success when they are where you were. And the people who are really extraordinarily successful didn't sit around watching success porn. They just went and did it. They had such an overwhelming desire to be successful at the thing that they were doing that they just went and did that thing. They didn't have time to study and learn and listen,

and they just did it. It's the overwhelming desire that's the most important and the focus that comes from that. that's that tweet of yours that was people who are good at making wealth or people are good at attaining wealth don't need to teach anybody else how to do it yeah you don't need mentors you need action that was one of them another one is you know the people who actually know how to make money you don't need to sell your course on it there is yeah there's lots of variations on it but if you don't another one is like if you don't lie awake at night thinking about it you don't want it badly enough yeah i think you i've heard you talk before about how unclosed loops problems that you're working on can cause you to be sleepless and this

I'm not a good sleeper tell me about that oh I mean my eight sleep hates me it's always telling me I failed it's sleeping again Brian Johnson thinks I'm going to die early he's probably right but I how much do you reckon you sleep a night you got any idea? Oh it's so random some nights I'll sleep eight hours some nights I'll sleep

four hours but it's literally just random are you bothered about that you're trying to optimize you're sleep coach teaching you how to? I don't flog myself over things. If I want to sleep, I'll sleep. If I don't want to sleep, I don't sleep. It's not a, I don't think I'm doing anything right or wrong.

You don't label it, good night, bad night. No, I work out every day because I think it gives me more energy and I've gotten into a good habit with it. Maybe I'll do the same thing with sleep. Maybe I'll develop a good habit, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it. There'll come a point where it's important to me. When it's important to me, I'll just do it. You know, most of, like, for example, you look at people with addictions, right, over

eating or smoking or whatever, they can kind of go through all the different methods, but it's half-hearted. And then one day they're like, oh, shit, I've got lung cancer. My dad is lung cancer, and they drop it immediately. So I think a lot of change is more about desire and understanding than it is about forcing yourself or trying to domesticate yourself. It's efficiency again, I guess, you know, aligning the thing that you want to do with the way that you feel about what it is that you want to do. Yeah, it's not, it's not getting caught up in a, in a half desire or a mematic desire. It's really just being aware of what it is that you actually want at this point in time. And when you want something, then you will act on it with maximal capability. And that's

the time to act on it. In the meantime, just doing it because other people tell you you should do it, or society tells you should do it, or you feel slightly guilty about it, these are, these are half-hearted efforts and half-hearted efforts don't get you there. Talking about risk, something I've been thinking about a lot to do with you. Any moment when you're not having a good time, when you're not really happy, you're not doing anyone any favors. Lots of people have become unusually familiar with suffering silently in that sort of a way. Not having a high bar for your expectation, for quality of life. Yeah, a lot of it is just you're meming your yourself into a bad outcome because you think that somehow suffering is glorious or that it makes

you a better person or, you know, my old quip was, if you're so smart, why aren't you happy? Why can't you figure that one out? The reality is you can be smart and happy. There are plenty of people in human history who are smart and happy. And I think it just starts with saying, yeah, you know what? I'm going to be happy. It was a guy that I met in Thailand a long time ago. And he used to work for Tony Robbins.

You know, he had a great attitude. and we were sitting around and he said, you know, he said, I realized one day that someone out there had to be the happiest person in the world. Like that person just has to exist. He said, why not me? I'll take on that burden. I'll be that guy. And I heard that and I was like, wow, that's pretty good.

That's a good frame. He knew how to reframe things. And so I think a lot of happiness is just a choice in the sense that you may, first you just identify yourself as actually, I'm going to be a person that's going to be happy. I'm going to figure it out. And you just figure it out along the way. You're not going to lose your other predilections. You're not going to lose your ambition or desire for success.

I think a lot of people have this fear that, oh, if I'm happy, then I won't want to be successful. No, you'll just want to do things that are more aligned with the happy version of you, and you'll be successful at those things. And believe me, the happy version is not going to look back at the unhappy version and say, oh, man, that guy was going to be more success. I wish that I was him. You're actually trying to be successful, so you'll be happy. That's the whole point.

You've gotten it backwards. You unlocked one of my trap cards. One of my favorite insights is that we sacrifice the thing we want for the thing that's supposed to get it. So we sacrifice happiness in order to be successful so that when we're finally sufficiently successful, we can actually be happy. And if you have some sort of simultaneous equation, you just sort of stripped success off from both sides. At least in my own life, I have not found there to be a trade-off. If anything, I have found that the happier I get, the more I am going to do the things that I'm good at and aligned with, and that will make me even happier.

And so I actually end up more successful, not less. The aligned with thing is interesting. I'm going to try and put this across as delicately as I can. I would say, from the bit of time that we'd spend together, you have a really interesting trait of holistic selfishness. You're sort of prepared to put yourself first. You seem largely unfazed by saying or doing things that might result in other people, feeling a little bit awkward if it's truthful for you. It's like unapologetically self-prioritizing,

I guess. Yeah, I think everybody is. Maybe unapologetic is the part that's relatively rare, but I think everybody puts themselves first. That's just human nature. You're here because you survive, you're a separate organism. That's interesting. Maybe, but... I know we like to virtue signal and don't pretend we're doing it for each other. How many times does somebody say, yeah, of course, I'd love to come to the wedding. They're like, I don't want to be at the fucking wedding. How many times does someone say, how are you doing? today and they don't tell you how many I don't go to weddings but this is my point so I don't think you're necessarily right with that I think that people do I don't think they put themselves first I

sometimes think that they they compromise what it is that they want in order to appease socially what's in front of them yeah I just view it as you're waste everyone's wasting their time on it don't do something you don't want to do why are you wasting your time there's so little time on this earth life goes fast what are the 4,000 weeks that's your lifespan um and And yes, we hear that, but we don't remember it. But I guess I'm keenly aware of how little time I have, so I'm just not going to waste it. How have you got more comfortable at being the unapologetic self-prioritizer? Yeah, I've gotten utterly more and more ruthless on it.

Mainly it's that I see or hear people's freedom, and then that liberates me further. So I read a blog post by P. Marka, aka Mark Andresen, where he said, don't keep a schedule. and I took that to heart. So I deleted my calendar and I don't keep a schedule. I try to remember it all in my head. If I can't remember it, I'm not going to add it to my schedule. Yeah, exactly. I had to look things up at the last minute.

But ironically, I don't even know if Mark himself follows that, but he made the correct point. I read a little story about Jack Dorsey doing all his business off his iPhone and iPad and not even going into a Mac. And I said, okay, I want to do that. So I'm going to operate through text messaging and I put up my nasty email. Does I feel like more freedom? It does, yeah, because you're on the go.

So I have a nasty email autoresponder that says, I don't check email and don't text me either, right? If you need to find me, you'll find me. Obviously, some of this is a luxury of success. But some of these habits I adopted long before, actually, the hostile email autoresponder started a long time ago. I used to own the domain. I could let it go. Don't do coffee.com. I used to reply from that email, just so people will get the point.

But it's not being rude about it. Now I just ghost, I just disappear. my wife knows not to ever book or schedule me for anything. I'm not expected to go to couples dinners. I'm not expected to go to birthdays. I'm not expect to go to weddings. If somebody tries to rope her into having me show up, she says he makes his own decisions,

you've got to ask him directly. And vice versa. Are you not killing serendipity in a way, that? No, no, I'm freeing up all my time, so my entire life is serendipity. I get to interact with whoever I want, whenever I want, wherever I want. So you'll hear the invite, but make the decision?

Because if there's fewer things in coming, you're assuming that you know what's best for you all the time. I don't commit to anything in the future. So I'll say, okay, if that thing is interesting, I'll see if I can get in that day when I'm in the mood. But there's nothing worse than something coming up that your past self committed you to. Your present self doesn't want to do. God damn it. And then it destroys your entire calendar. It destroys your day because there's like, oh, this one hour slot which is sitting like a turd on my calendar that I have to like schedule my whole day around.

I can't do anything at 20 minutes before or the 20 minutes afterwards. even for phone calls. If someone wants to do a phone call, say, okay, just text me when you're free. I'll text you and I'm free and we'll just do it on the fly. It's a much better way of living than this overly scheduled, you know, Cal.com or ICAL, whatever. The over-scheduled life is not worth living. It's not. I think it's a terrible way to live life. That's not how we evolved. It's not how we grew up. It's not how we were as children, hopefully, unless you have a helicopter parent or a tiger mom. Your natural order is freedom. I had a friend who said to me once, you know, I never want to have to be at a specific place at a specific time.

And I was like, oh my God, that's freedom. When I heard that, that changed my life right there. You still alarm clockless? Yes, I'm alarm clockless. Today I did set my alarm clock just so I wouldn't miss this. But just so you know, I set the alarm clock from 11 a.m. In case I was stricken with a flu and I slept in. I wasn't going to set my alarm clock for 8 a.m. or 9 a.m.

And sure enough, I got up many hours before. that. But it was sort of a backup emergency alarm. In fact, sometimes when I'm something that I need to do, I don't want to look at a calendar. So I'll just set an alarm for it. Just sink a little bit more into that, like kind of like that fuck you energy, that self-prioritizing energy because I think people rationally love the idea of this. I'm going to do what only I want to do, even if they've got the level of freedom. It's not fuck you energy in the sense that I think everyone should live their life that way to the greatest extent possible. Obviously, we have our requirements around work and obligations that are genuinely important to us, but don't fitter away your

life on randomly schedule things and things that aren't important. Don't matter. Events and weddings and, you know, tedious dinners with tedious people that you don't want to go to. To the extent you can bring freedom into your life, optimize for that, you'll actually be more productive. You won't just be happy, you will be more free. You will be more productive because then you can focus on what is in front of you, whatever the biggest problem of that day. When I wake up in the morning, the first four hours are when I have the most energy. And that's when I want to solve all the hard problems. And the next four hours are when I kind of want to, you know, do some more outdoorsy activities or I want to work out or maybe I can, you know, have some meetings, but I'll try to

do those last second based on whatever the day's priorities demand. The last four hours, I kind of want to wind down. I want to hang out with the kids and I want to play games or read a book or something like that. So having that flexibility and freedom is really important. So you can just put whatever is most needed into the slot at that moment. And instead, if I have like a meeting at 2 p.m. And then I have to like get a thing and some emails done. I put that off till 6 p.m. I'm rushing. I'm not going to be productive. I'm not going to be. You're certainly not free. I'm definitely not free. But also another thing that I really believe is that inspiration. is perishable. Act on it immediately. So when you're inspired to do something, do that thing. If

I'm inspired to write a blog post, I want to do it at that moment. If I'm inspired to send a tweet, I want to do it at that moment. If inspired to solve a problem, I do it at that moment. If I'm inspired to read a book, I want to read it right then. If I'm inspired to solve a problem, I'll solve it right there. If I want to learn something, I do it at the moment of curiosity. The moment the curiosity arrives, I go learn that thing immediately. I download the book. I get on Google. I get on chat GPT, whatever. I will figure that thing out on the spot. And that's when the learning happens. It doesn't happen because I've scheduled time, because I've set an hour aside, because when that time arrives, I might be in a different mood. I might just want to do something

different. So I think that spontaneity is really important. You're going to learn best when you're having fun, when you generally are enjoying the process, not when you're forced to sit there and do it. How much do you remember from school? You know, you were forced to learn geography, history, mathematics on this schedule at this time, according to this person. Didn't happen. All the stuff that sticks with you is you learned it when you wanted to, when you genuinely had the disaster. and that freedom, that ability to act on something the moment you want to is so liberating that most of us go through our lives with very, very little tastes of that. If you live your entire life that way, that is a recipe for happiness.

It feels like efficiency that you have the... It's efficient also. You have the inspiration that is going to be the most frictionless time to ever do that particular task. So, oh, I've had the inspiration to do that. I'll put that off until a time when I no longer really want to do it quite so much. And while I do want to do that thing, I'll do something else that I need. needed to do because it's on the schedule. It does not work. Procrastination is because you don't want to do

that thing right now. You want to do something else. Go do that something else. I reject this frame that efficiency and productivity and success are counter to happiness and freedom. They actually go together. How so? The happier you are, the more you can sustain doing something, the more likely you're going to do something that will in turn make you even happier and you'll continue to do it and you'll outwork everybody else. The more free you are, the better you can allocate your time. and the less you're caught up in a web of obligations and commitments, and the more you can focus on the task at hand. How do you shortcut that desire contract?

You could focus, you could decide that I don't want most things. I think we have a lot of unnecessary desires that we just pick up everywhere. We have opinions on everything, judgments and everything. So I think just knowing that those are the source of unhappiness will make you be choosy about your desires. And frankly, if you want to be successful, you have to be choosy about your desires. You have to focus.

You can't be great at everything. You can't be great at everything. You're just going to waste your energy and waste your time. Is fame a worthwhile goal? It gets you invited to better parties. Gets you into better restaurants. Fame. So fame is this funny thing where a lot of people know you, but you don't know them.

And it does get you put on a pedestal. It can get you what you want at a distance. So I wouldn't say it's worthless. Obviously, people want it for a reason. it's high status, so it attracts the opposite sex, especially for men it attracts women. That said, it is high cost. It means you have no privacy. You do have weirdos and lunatics. You do get hit up a lot for weird things. And you're on a stage, so you're forced to perform. So you're forced to be consistent with your past proclamations and actions, and you're going to have haters and all that nonsense.

But the fact that we do it, the fact that we all seem to want it means that it would be disingenuous to say, oh, no, I'm famous, but you don't want to be famous. That said, I think fame like anything else is best produced or pursued as a byproduct of something potentially more worthwhile. Wanting to be famous and craving to be famous and being famous and being famous, these are sort of traps. Fame for fame's sake. Yeah, exactly.

So it's better that it's earned fame. So, for example, earn respect in the tribe is you do things that are good for the tribe, who are the most famous people in human history? there are people who sort of transcended the self, the Buddhas and the Jesuses and the Mohammeds of the world. Who else is famous? The artists are famous. You know, art lasts for a long time.

The scientists are famous. They discover a thing. The conquerors are famous, presumably because they conquered for their tribe. There was someone that they were fighting for. So generally, the higher up you rise by doing things for greater and greater groups of people, even though it may be considered tyrannical or negative, like, you know, Jenghis Khan is famous, but to the Mongols, he was doing good, to the rest of them, not so much. The higher level you're operating at, the more people you're taking care of, the more you sort of earn

respect and fame. And I think those are good reasons to be famous. If fame is empty, if you're famous just because your name showed up in a lot of places or your face showed up in a lot of places, then that's a hollow fame. And I think deep down you will know that. And so it'll be fragile and you'll always be afraid of losing it. And then you'll be forced to perform. So the kind of fame that pure actors and celebrities have, I wouldn't want.

But the kind of fame that's earned because you did something useful, why dodge that? Now, you can't. You mentioned anxiety before. Imagine how effective you'd be if you weren't anxious all the time is one of yours. And anxiety is the emotion du jour of the 21st century. And lots of driven people, very anxious, very paranoid. That's what's caused them to be affected. It pays so much attention, detail-oriented, not letting things.

go, staying up at night, thinking about it, that's the paranoia coming in. What have you come to learn about anxiety and dealing with it? So anxiety and stress are interesting. They're very related. Stress is when, like if you look at an iron beam, when an iron beam is under stress, it's because it's being bent in two different directions at the same time. So when your mind is under stress, it's because it has two conflicting desires at once. So for example, you know, you want to be liked, but you want to do something selfish, and you can't reconcile the two. And so you're under stress. You want to do something for somebody else. You want to do something for yourself, right? These are examples, you don't want to go to work, but you want to make money.

So you're under stress, right? So you have two conflicting desires. And I think one of the ways to get through stress is to acknowledge that, oh, I actually have two conflicting desires. And either I need to resolve it, I need to pick one and then be okay losing the other, or I will decide later, but at least just being aware of why your stress can help alleviate a lot of stress. And then anxiety, I think, is sort of this pervasive, unidentifiable stress where you're just kind of stressed out all the time and you're not even sure why. And you can't even identify the underlying problem. And the reason for that is because you have so many unresolved problems, unresolved stress points that have piled up in your life that you can no longer identify what the problems are. And there's this mountain of garbage in your mind and it's a little bit of it poking out the top like an iceberg. And that's anxiety. But underneath, there's a lot of unresolved things. And so you just need to kind of go through very carefully every time you're anxious. Like, okay, why am I anxious this time?

I don't know why. Oh, well, let me sit here and just think about it. Let me write down what the possible causes could be. Let me meditate on it. Let me journal. Let me talk to a therapist. Let me talk to my friends. Let me just kind of see, like, when does that stress go away?

If you can kind of identify and unravel and resolve these issues, then I think that helps get rid of anxiety. a lot of the anxiety is piled up because we move through life too quickly not observing our own reactions to things. We don't resolve them. So this goes counter to what I was saying earlier about not reflecting too much on things. But you reflect on the problems to observe them and solve them. You don't reflect on them to feel better about yourself. To indulge them.

Well, if you're doing it to just feel better about yourself, that could be strengthening your personality and your ego and could be creating a more fragile personality. You know, one big anxiety resolve for me is just ruminating on death. I think that's a good one. You're going to die. It's all going to zero. You cannot take anything with you. And I know this is trite. And I know we don't spend enough time thinking about the big questions.

We kind of give up on them when we're very, very young. You know, a little child might ask the big questions like, why are we here? What's a meaning of life? What is it all about? You know, is there Santa Claus? Is there God? But then as adults, we're taught not to think about these things. We've given up on them.

but I think the big questions are the big questions for good reasons. And if you can keep the idea in front of you at all times that you're going to die and that everything goes literally to zero, what's sort of stress about? Yeah, for better or worse, life is very short. How should people deal with its briefness? Enjoy it. Make the best of it. It's even briefer than that.

Each moment just disappears. gone. There's only a present moment and it's gone instantly. So if you're not, if you're not there for it, if you're stressed out or you're anxious or you're thinking about something else, you missed it. So any moment, when you're not in that moment, you are dead to that moment. You might as well be dead because your mind is off doing something else or, you know, living in some imagined reality that is just a very poor substitute for the actual reality. So one of my recent realizations was, what is wasted time? What is a waste of time?

So I don't like to waste time, but what is wasted time? And everything is wasted time in a sense because nothing matters in the ultimate. But in each moment the thing matters. In each moment, it's the only thing that matters, actually. What's happening in front of you is literally has all the meaning in the world. And so what matters is just being present for the thing. So if you're doing something that you want to do and you're fully there for it, then it's not wasted time. If you don't want to do it and your mind is

running away from it and you're reacting against it and you're wishing you were somewhere else and you're thinking about some other thing or you're anticipating some future thing or regretting some past thing or being fearful of something, then that's wasted time. That's time that's being wasted when you're not actually present for the reality in front of you. So my definition of wasted time, yes, I do want some material things in life and I, you know, there are things that have more value than others within this life. But this life is very short and bounded. So the true wasted time is a time that you're not present for when you're not there for it, when you're not doing the thing you want to do to the best of a capability such that you're immersed. And if you're

not immersed in this moment, then you're wasting your time. People get worried about dying and no longer being here, but they don't realize that so much of their life has spent not being here in any case. That's right. And I think people crave being here for it. And, and, and, and, and, And when you're here for it, you're actually not thinking about yourself. You are more immersed in the thing, the moment, the task at hand. We don't want peace of mind. We want peace for our mind. That's right.

Yeah, you don't peace. The mind is what it'll eat you alive if you let it. And there's more to you than the mind. How so? Well, I mean, the very, I don't want to disassemble the body, some speak, right? Please, go on. Yeah, at the end of the day, like, everything arises within your consciousness, right? You've got nowhere else to experience it.

Sorry? You've got nowhere else to experience it. And that consciousness is relatively static in a sense that it's been exactly the same for the moment you were born to the moment you die. And everything that you experience from your body, from your mind to the world, to everything is within that consciousness. And that thing, that base layer of being, and this is what the Buddhists will tell you, is the real thing. Everything that comes and goes in the middle, including your mind, including your body is unreal. and trying to find stability in those transient things is your castle that you're building on sand that's going to crumble. Don't partner with cynics and pessimists.

You mentioned there about the people who've got a nightmare going on at home and are trying to fix the world. But a lot of the time that cynicism and pessimism we find in ourselves, we see the world, whether we want to, whether it's because we've imbibed what the news or the negative people around us have said, or it's a bit more kind of endogenous than that. it's just sort of in us. It's the way that we see the world. How can people avoid cynicism and pessimism within themselves? Yeah, cynicism and pessimism is a tough one. We're naturally hardwired for it. Again, I go back to evolution. I'm sorry to keep harping on evolution, but within biology, there's very few good explanatory theories and, you know,

theory of evolution by natural selection is probably the best one. So if you can't explain something about life or psychology or human nature through evolution, then you probably don't have a good theory for it. And I would say that pessimism, is another one that comes out of this, which is in the natural environment, you're hardwired to be pessimistic because let's say that I see something rustling in the woods. And if I move towards it and it turns out to be food and prey,

then good, I get to eat one meal. But if it turns to be a predator, I get eaten, and that's the end of that. So we are hardwired to avoid ruin and, you know, just dying. So we are naturally hardwired to be pessimists. But modern society is very different. Despite whatever problems you may have with modern society, it is far, far safer than living in the jungle and just trying to survive.

And the opportunities and the upside are nonlinear. For example, when you're investing, if you short a stock, the most money you can make is 2x. You just lose, you know, if the stock goes to zero, you double your money. But if the stock is in next Nvidia and it goes 100x or 1,000 X, you make a lot of money. So upside because of leverage is nearly unlimited. Also in modern society, because there's so many different people you can interact with, If you go on a date and it fails, there are infinite more people to go on a date with. In a tribal system, there might have been 20 people, and you can't even get through all of them.

So modern society is far more forgiving of failure, and you just have to sort of neocortically realize and override that. You have to realize that you're much more running a search function to find the thing that'll work. And then that one thing will pay off in massive compounding. Once you find your mate for the rest of your life, you find your wife or your husband, then you can compound it in that relationship. it's okay if you had 50 failed dates in between. The same way, once you find the one business you're meant to plow into and it'll compound returns, it's okay if you had 50 small failed ventures or 50 small failed job interviews. It doesn't, the number of failures doesn't matter.

And so there's no point in being a pessimist. You want to be an optimist, but I would say you want to be skeptical about specific things. Every specific opportunity is probably a fail. But you want to be optimistic in the general. In the general, you want to be like something in here is. going to work out. How do you navigate that tension? I mean, exactly as I said, I'm optimistic in the general that if something fails right now, then this is a little woo-woo, but it wasn't meant to be. It was a learning experience. It was an iteration. As long as I learned something from it,

then it's a win. If I didn't learn from it, then it's a loss. But as long as you're learning and you keep iterating fast and cutting your losses quickly, then when you find the right thing, you have to be optimistic and compound into it. So you don't want to jump into the first thing. You don't want to marry the first person you date necessarily, unless you got very lucky. But you want to investigate and explore very, very quickly until you find the match. And then you have to be willing to go all in. You have to be willing to move your chips at center of the table. So both those approaches are required.

So it's a barbell strategy. It's sort of black or it's white. And most people are sort of stuck in this gray bit. I'm like half in, but I'm kind of don't really know if I am. I also think like labels like pessimists. optimists, cynic, introvert, extrovert. These are very self-limiting. Humans are very dynamic.

There are times when you feel like being introverted. There are times when you feel like being extroverted. There are contexts in which you'll be pessimistic. There are contexts in which you'll be optimistic. Leave all the labels alone. It's better just to look at the problem at hand, look at reality the way it is. Try to take yourself out of the equation in a sense.

Like obviously, you're involved, but motivated reasoning is the worst kind of reasoning. You're not going to find truth through highly motivated reasoning. You have to be objective. An objective means trying to take yourself out of it as much as possible, or at least your personality out of it as much as possible. And so to the extent you run with this thick identity and personality, it's going to cloud your judgment.

It's going to try and lock you into the past. If you say, I'm a depressed and unhappy person, yeah, I'm going to be unhappy. That's a way of locking yourself into your past. Even saying, I have trauma, I have PTSD. Yeah, you feel something. there are memories, there are flashes, there are occasional bad feelings, but don't define yourself by it because then you'll lock it into your identity and you're just going to loop on it. It's better to stay flexible because reality is always changing and you have to be able to adapt

to it. Adaptation is also intelligence. Adaptation is survival. Adaptation is kind of how you're here. You're here because you're an adapter and your ancestors are adapters. So to adapt, you'll see things clearly. And if you're seeing them through your own identity, it's going to cloud your judgment. Thank you for listening. Continue strengthening your mind by subscribing and listening to our other episodes.