Quotes from Paul Bloom

Emily Esfahani Smith talks about the American Freshman Survey, which found that in the late 1960s, 86 percent of respondents claimed that "developing a meaningful life philosophy" was "essential" or "very important," while in the 2000s, the proportion dropped to 40 percent. She is disappointed in this; she sees it as a bad sign.

Flow is wonderful, then, but it's difficult to find—sandwiched between boredom and anxiety, hard to get started, hard to sustain.

It turns out that pursuing extrinsic goals related to praise and reward—looking attractive, making money, and building up social status—makes you less happy and less fulfilled, and is linked with more depression, anxiety, and mental illness.

Only 13 percent said they were engaged, 63 percent said that they were disengaged, and 24 percent saw themselves as actively disengaged. Put simply, many people think their jobs suck. There are all sorts of reasons why this is so. Many jobs have degrading conditions, perceived unfairness, and lack of autonomy.

Some people engage in meaningful pursuits, and this, I argue, makes their lives better. But people don't have to think about meaning for this to work. People who mountain-climb, for instance, might have an entirely mistaken theory of what climbing does for them, just as someone who exercises might have an entirely wrong theory of the benefits of exercise.

Money does make you happy; it's the trying to make money that makes you sad. The trick is to get money in the course of other, meaningful, pursuits

Most relevant for the purposes here, one lucky accident of this feature of memory is that pain-then-pleasure is recalled as better than pleasure-then-pain. Because of this, even if the amount of pain, taken in isolation, is the same as the amount of pleasure, if the pain comes first, the distortions of memory decrease the pain and increase the pleasure, improving the whole experience.

Zadie Smith: "It hurts just as much as it is worth.

The duration of felt experience—our feeling of right now—is between two and three seconds, about how long it takes Paul McCartney to sing the words "Hey Jude." Everything before this is memory; everything after is anticipation. So what about a life dedicated entirely to improving this moving window of two to three seconds?

Here's how to freak out a baby: sit across from the baby, engage with him or her, and then suddenly become still. If this goes on for more than a few seconds, with you looking all corpselike, the baby will become upset.

Jeanne Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi wrote, "What constitutes a good life? . . . Flow research has yielded one answer, providing an understanding of experiences during which individuals are fully involved in the present moment. Viewed through the experiential lens of flow, a good life is one that is characterized by complete absorption in what one does" (italics theirs). But this is actually a poor answer to the question of what constitutes a good life. Flow can be trivial.

Stories can elicit compassion on a case-by-case basis, but they can also lead us to question our moral principles and our habits of behavior. As the psychologist Steven Pinker puts it, "Exposure to worlds that can be seen only through the eyes of a foreigner, an explorer, or a historian can turn an unquestioned norm ('That's the way it's done') into an explicit observation ('That's what our tribe happens to do now').

Kahneman: Altogether, I don't think that people maximize happiness in that sense. And that's one of the reasons that I actually left the field of happiness, in that I was very interested in maximizing experience, but this doesn't seem to be what people want to do. They actually want to maximize their satisfaction with themselves and with their lives. And that leads in completely different directions than the maximization of happiness.

Natural selection may be selfish (in a metaphorical sense), but if so, it's selfish about genes, not individuals. The story goes that J. B. S. Haldane was asked if he would give his life to save his brother and he said he wouldn't, but he would happily do so for two brothers or eight cousins. Only a biologist would say something like that, but Haldane was nicely expressing how evolution works.

chosen suffering can generate and enhance pleasure, and that it is an essential part of meaningful activities and a meaningful life. And it's often the right thing to do. I'll repeat the quote from Zadie Smith: "It hurts just as much as it is worth." Sometimes pain is a proper acknowledgment of value.

Let's go back to the question of what people want and consider an answer that, whatever else one might say about it, is at least pretty clear. It's pleasure. The Greek term for pleasure is h?don?, which is why those who argue for the centrality of pleasure are called hedonists.

One of the benefits of certain activities is the respect and admiration you get from others. This relates to difficulty and risk and ability in an obvious way. If climbing Everest were pleasant and easy, nobody would be impressed that you did it.

The literary critic Helen Vendler writes that "treating fictions as moral pep-pills or moral emetics is repugnant to anyone who realizes the complex psychological and moral motives of a work of art.

While writing this book, I discovered that there is a field of study called "disaster theory." A lot of the work in this area explores self-interested motivations. In the United States, for instance, presidents are more likely to declare national disasters during election years, and battleground states get more donations than others; money allocated to address disasters is used as an inducement and a reward.

ANOTHER MOTIVATION FOR activities such as mountain climbing is curiosity about one's own capacities.

there are many things about yourself you just can't learn while sitting on your bum. Everyday life offers few opportunities to check out your capacity for bravery in the face of death or your tolerance for extreme physical challenges. If you want to know this about yourself, to test your mettle, activities such as mountain climbing seem like just the thing.

The impossibility of failure is one of the weaknesses of daydreaming.

I believe this in part because of Paul Rozin's discoveries that people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. As Tamar Gendler points out, the mind works on two tracks. We know, consciously, that the bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty, and yet we can't help blurring the imagined and reality; our minds scream, "Dangerous object! Stay away!

Or consider child beggars in the developing world. The sight of an emaciated child is shocking to a well-fed Westerner, and it's hard for a good person to resist helping out. And yet the act of doing so ends up supporting criminal organizations that enslave and often maim tens of thousands of children. By giving, you make the world worse. Actions that appear to help individuals in the short term can have terrible consequences for many more.