Hi Friends,
And happy Monday!
This week, sharing with you my summary of a long-form essay on happiness 20min by Naval Ravikant, the founder of AngelList, renowned for his exceptional thinking.
I really enjoy his writing because it is fact-based, pragmatic for our time, and insightful. Sharing a few additional thoughts after you have read the summary.
Happiness Without Material Comfort Is Playing on Hard Mode
It’s easier to fulfill your material desires than to renounce them
You can achieve happiness without financial wealth. Most of us recognize you’re not going to buy your way to happiness. But in modern times, you can buy your way out of common causes of unhappiness. Financial wealth can give you freedom and more time. It can give you peace.
Renouncing things is not an easy path to happiness
In olden times, one of the routes to finding peace was becoming a monk. You would renounce things—sex, shelter, money and other material attachments—and go off in the woods. You might find some peace after 30 years, when you’d finally gotten over the fact that you weren’t going to have these things. The truth is, most of them probably never got over it. There are lots of monks out there but there aren’t a lot of enlightened people.
It’s easier to fulfill your material needs than to renounce them
Today it’s actually easier to fulfill your desire for material comfort than it is to renounce it. It’ll take you a lifetime to renounce material comfort, and it still might not work. But you can make be materially successful in less than a lifetime.
Physical health is the foundation of everything. If you don’t have your physical health, you have nothing.
Happiness Is a Skill You Can Develop
You’re not stuck at your current level of happiness
The first step to increasing your level of happiness is realizing you can. This is where a lot of people get tripped up. For the vast majority of people, some of their happiness—probably a lot more than they think—is in their control.
Genetics is important, but it’s only half the picture
Genetics goes a long way in determining strength, athletic performance and intelligence. But your genetic set point is only about half of it.
Desire Is a Contract You Make to Be Unhappy
No single thing will make you happy forever
If obtaining things made us permanently happy, then the cavemen would have been miserable, and we would all be deliriously happy. Yet, net happiness per person is not going up and might even be going down. Modernity probably brings more unhappiness than the past.
Happiness is returning to a state where nothing is missing
Happiness is a process of understanding and self-discovery
If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy?
Don’t get it backwards: You’re not smart because you’re unhappy; you’re unhappy because you’re smart.You can be happy and smart—it’s just going to take more work.
The beauty of being mentally high functioning in our society is that you can trade it for almost anything. If you’re smart, you can figure out how to be healthy within your genetic constraints and how to be wealthy within your environmental constraints.
If you’re smart, you can figure out how to be happy within your biological constraints. But your biological constraints are a lot larger than you might think.
The good news is, smart people are good at figuring out the truth. The more you dig into certain deep truths, the freer and more peaceful you will become. That peace will lead to happiness.
The dynamic range of happiness is quite large
If you’ve ever gotten drunk or achieved an altered state of mind on psychedelic drugs or through meditation, breathing or other hypnotic techniques, you have experienced brief moments of happiness beyond what you feel on a typical day.
Of course, some of this is a fake, pleasure-driven happiness. But there’s truth to it; otherwise, you wouldn’t desire that state.
Achieving these brief states of happiness can show you how dynamic your range is—and that range can be quite large.
How do you nudge yourself in that direction on a perpetual basis, as opposed to visiting it by stunning your mind into submission and silence?
Being Unhappy Is Extremely Inefficient
Unhappy people don’t have good judgment
There’s a tradeoff. If you become the Buddha tomorrow, it’s unlikely you’ll also launch rockets to the moon like Elon Musk. On the other hand, there are plenty of successful, optimistic scientists, innovators and other leaders—especially as they get older. Happy people aren’t always ineffective.
A peaceful mind makes better decisions
True. The happier and more peaceful you are, the less likely you are to run out and change the world. At the same time, being unhappy is very inefficient. A peaceful person doesn’t have extraneous thoughts going through their head. If you’re a driven, unhappy person, your mind will be on 24/7.
I make decisions much more clearly now, because I can see the long-term outcomes.I cut straight to the chase and don’t try and negotiate an extra 20% here or there—because I know that’s going to make me unhappy in the long-term, make the other person unhappy, and make the deal less stable.
I’ve become more productive even though I don’t work as hard, because I make better decisions.
Happy people don’t have to work as hard
The quality of our decisions is paramount in the modern age, because we’re all leveraged. You can be leveraged through code, community, media, capital, labor and other ways. If you’re smart, you leverage every decision you make.
If Warren Buffett makes the right decision 85% of the time and his competitors get it right 70% of the time, Buffett will win everything. That’s a source of his strength: good decision making. He makes one or two decisions a year. Most of the time he’s sitting around reading books, thinking, reading S-1s, playing bridge, traveling and golfing.
The Modern Struggle Is Fighting Weaponized Addiction
Pursuing pleasure for its own sake creates addiction
On some very deep level, all pleasure creates its own offsetting pain and fear of loss.
“Do not seek pleasure for its own sake.” - Miyamoto Musashi
Addictions are fake work and fake play
Addictions let you engage in fake play and fake work. Before, you had to go socialize with friends; now, you can just get drunk with a bunch of strangers. Before, you had to go find a mate, create children and raise a family; now, you can just watch a lot of porn. Before, you had to hunt and climb trees to get fruit for a little bit of natural sweetness; now, you can buy all the gelato you want.
The modern struggle is standing up to these weaponized addictions. They give you small doses of pleasure, but they also desensitize you and expose you to the misery of their absence.
Addiction enables artificial relationships and activities
Breaking addiction requires a new lifestyle
Breaking addiction is very hard, because you have to break the physical addiction and you also have to change your lifestyle. You have to switch to a lifestyle in which you can be happy without that substance.
Addiction holds together fake relationships and fake activities
Stress is an inability to decide what’s important
You want two incompatible things at once. I want to relax, but I need to work. Now I’m under stress.
Peace is happiness at rest; happiness is peace in motion.” Someone who’s peaceful at rest will end up happy when they do an activity. While a happy person sitting idle will be peaceful. The ultimate goal is not happiness, even though we use that term a lot. The goal is peace.
You cannot work toward peace, only understanding
You cannot achieve peace directly or even work toward it. Rather, you can work toward understanding.
“Wisdom begets stoicism. Stoicism does not beget wisdom.” - Kapil Gupta
As you become wise, you naturally become stoic. You don’t become wise by being stoic.
Guilt is society training you to be your own warden
The human happiness baseline being exceptionally elastic is very well-documented. Most events we would find tragic (loss of a close one, handicap, divorce) or blissful (wedding, birth of a child, winning the lottery) have very little long-term influence on happiness in the long-run. Only unemployment - being set aside of society - is not state people recover from.
What I miss from Naval is the evolutionary explanation behind it. We evolved like this for a “reason”. If our happiness was based on reaching a specific absolute level of material comfort, humans would have simply died out. Evolution rewards relative competition for resources, and the way it is materialised is us being programmed to always want more than our immediate social circle. This is why Instagram, Facebook, and even LinkedIn have a negative net effect on happiness in themselves: they extend the scope of stimulus to… the whole human population on Earth. Which means that you can always find more successful than yourself on any given metric, a fortiori since people usually share a beautified version of their life.
The other aspect I really enjoy in Naval’s essay is his definition of pleasure versus happiness. Pleasure being something you get to, lose, and crave. Happiness a continuous process of self-discovery. It resonates with the philosophy of another of my inspirations, Josh Waitzkin, whom I already told you about quite a few times. (I just realised I could write his last name without googling it, which is quite eloquent of the number of time I must have quoted him). This is not Navals’s message but, to me, learning is probably the one thing that brings me to that state of non-craving. Because I haven’t been seeing it as an end in itself for a long time, but a process to be deeply enjoyed. The pleasure of having solved an intellectual challenge is very short-lived. The process of solving it is repeatable at will, and insanely enjoyable if you pay attention to it.
The last thing I want to write about is how it applies to professional life, since this is supposed to be the topic of this newsletter even though it has been erring towards philosophy for the past few weeks. I have found that automating or delegating things that did not make you happy was an efficient way to craft your responsibilities into something that would make you grow. Seeing solving painful tasks as a process to learn how to get rid of them, both for yourself and for your team/organisation as a whole, is a great way to keep your leverage high. Maximizing for happiness instead of pleasure (or non-pain). I think this also converges towards the notion of (being in the) flow, but that will be for another newsletter.
I would really love your input on:
what defines happiness for you
how you channel yourself towards it rather than more immediate pleasures
how you have been shaping your professional scope in a way that it brings you happiness as a process
Please don’t forget to share if you think this type of insights can help others:
Thanks for reading, and have a happy week,
V