Intentionally choose activities that involve a degree of suffering, as this voluntary engagement can lead to a more meaningful life and potentially reduce anxiety.
Avoid directly striving for happiness, as this can lead to unhappiness; instead, focus on pursuing a meaningful and good life, allowing happiness to emerge as a natural byproduct.
Establish a large-scale, long-term meaningful pursuit in your life that you believe will matter, as this is a powerful factor in resilience and thriving.
Understand that a truly meaningful life often involves anxiety, difficulty, struggle, and worry; embrace these challenges as integral to significant pursuits like raising children or starting a business.
Strive to understand what’s going on in other people’s minds and their perspectives, as this form of intelligence is crucial for productive conversation, wisdom, and peace.
Prioritize rational compassion—understanding others’ pain and desiring to help—over emotional empathy, which can be exhausting and lead to burnout.
When making moral decisions, use rationality and compassion to guide your actions, rather than relying solely on gut feelings or emotional empathy, which can be biased.
Practice meditation to open yourself to the ‘whole mess’ of your mind, becoming familiar with your thoughts and emotions to develop a ‘positive dispassion’ and avoid being owned by them.
Engage in activities that demand intense focus or physical discomfort, like Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or endurance exercise, to temporarily quiet the ’noisy self’ and its worries.
Engage in mild, controlled forms of pain or discomfort, such as eating spicy foods, watching scary movies, or participating in endurance exercise, to derive pleasure through contrast and control.
Recognize that the brain is a ‘difference engine’ that enjoys contrast; allow for negative experiences to enhance the appreciation and pleasure derived from positive ones.
Engage in challenging activities like sports, arts, or rigorous exercise to cultivate discipline, control, and mastery, which can transfer to other areas of life and foster an appreciation for work and struggle.
Recognize and accept that human motivation is pluralistic, encompassing a wide range of desires from altruistic to self-serving, and avoid shaming yourself for having complex motivations.
Cultivate ‘self-love’ by becoming comfortable with your own flaws and ‘ugliness,’ as this self-acceptance fosters compassion and reduces judgment towards others.
Cultivate an optimal amount of anxiety and rumination to prepare for potential challenges, understanding that while excessive worry is harmful, too little can lead to recklessness.
Indulge in fiction, such as zombie movies or stories of societal collapse, to safely explore and rehearse responses to worst-case scenarios, satisfying a natural human appetite to explore the negative.
Remain open to what others think of you, as external feedback can provide valuable insights into your behavior and performance, helping you to adjust and improve.
Recognize the difference between chosen suffering (which can offer benefits) and unchosen suffering (which is generally detrimental and not to be sought out).
Be mindful not to become so engrossed in consuming stories of suffering for pleasure that you lose sight of the need to actively work towards alleviating real-world unchosen suffering.
Be cautious of engaging in increasingly extreme forms of self-inflicted pain or difficulty purely for social signaling or to ‘one-up’ others, as this can lead to harmful cycles and physical damage.