Everything Is F*cked(69)
15. The “willpower as a muscle” theory of willpower, also known as “ego depletion,” is in hot water in the academic world at the moment. A number of large studies have failed to replicate ego depletion. Some meta-analyses have found significant results for it while others have not.
16. Damasio, Descartes’ Error, pp. 128–30.
17. Kahneman, Thinking: Fast and Slow, p. 31.
18. Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 2–5. Haidt says he got the elephant metaphor from the Buddha.
19. This silly Clown Car analogy actually works well for describing how toxic relationships between selfish narcissists form. Anyone who is psychologically healthy, whose mind is not a Clown Car, will be able to hear a Clown Car coming from a mile away and avoid contact with it as much as possible. But if you are a Clown Car yourself, your circus music will prevent you from hearing the circus music of other Clown Cars. They will look and sound normal to you, and you will engage with them, thinking that all the healthy Consciousness Cars are boring and uninteresting, thus entering toxic relationship after toxic relationship.
20. Some scholars believe that Plato wrote The Republic as a response to the political turbulence and violence that had recently erupted in Athens. See The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. xi.
21. Christendom borrowed a lot of its moral philosophy from Plato and, unlike many ancient philosophers such as Epicurus and Lucretius, preserved his works. According to Stephen Greenblatt, in The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012), early Christians held on to the ideas of Plato and Aristotle because the two believed in a soul that was separate from the body. This idea of a separate soul gibed with Christian belief in an afterlife. It’s also the idea that spawned the Classic Assumption.
22. Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, pp. 4–18. The comment about chopping off someone’s nuts is my own flourish, of course.
23. Ibid., pp. 482–88.
24. The oft-repeated motto of Woodstock and much of the free-love movement of the 1960s was “If it feels good, do it!” This sentiment is the basis for a lot of New Age and countercultural movements today.
25. An excellent example of this self-indulgence in the name of spirituality is depicted in the Netflix original documentary Wild Wild Country (2018), about the spiritual guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (aka Osho) and his followers.
26. The best analysis I’ve seen of this tendency among twentieth-century spiritual movements to mistake indulging one’s emotions for some greater spiritual awakening came from the brilliant author Ken Wilber. He called it the Pre/Trans Fallacy and argued that because emotions are pre-rational, and spiritual awakenings are post-rational, people often mistake one for the other—because they’re both nonrational. See Ken Wilber, Eye to Eye: The Quest for a New Paradigm (Boston, MA: Shambhala, Inc., 1983), pp. 180–221.
27. A. Aldao, S. Nolen-Hoeksema, and S. Schweizer, “Emotion-Regulation Strategies Across Psychopathology: A Meta-analytic Review,” Clinical Psychology Review 30 (2010): 217–37.
28. Olga M. Slavin-Spenny, Jay L. Cohen, Lindsay M. Oberleitner, and Mark A. Lumley, “The Effects of Different Methods of Emotional Disclosure: Differentiating Post-traumatic Growth from Stress Symptoms,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 67, no. 10 (2011): 993–1007.
29. This technique is known as the Premack principle, after psychologist David Premack, to describe the use of preferred behaviors as rewards. See Jon E. Roeckelein, Dictionary of Theories, Laws, and Concepts in Psychology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 384.
30. For more about “starting small” with behavioral changes, see “The Do Something Principle,” from my previous book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life (New York: HarperOne, 2016), pp. 158–63.
31. One way to think about “guardrails” for your Consciousness Car is to develop implementation intentions, little if/then habits that can unconsciously direct your behavior. See P. M. Gollwitzer and V. Brandstaetter, “Implementation Intentions and Effective Goal Pursuit,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73 (1997): 186–99.
32. Damasio, Descartes’ Error, pp. 173–200.
33. In philosophy, this is known as Hume’s guillotine: you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” You cannot derive values from facts. You cannot derive Feeling Brain knowledge from Thinking Brain knowledge. Hume’s guillotine has had philosophers and scientists spinning in circles for centuries now. Some thinkers such as Sam Harris try to rebut it by pointing out that you can have factual knowledge about values—e.g., if a hundred people believe suffering is wrong, then there is factual evidence of their physical brain state about their beliefs about suffering being wrong. But the decision to take that physical representation as a serious proxy for philosophical value, is itself a value that cannot be factually proven. Thus, the circle continues.
Chapter 3: Newton’s Laws of Emotion
1. Some of the biographical portions of this chapter are fictionalized.
2. Newton actually wrote this in a journal as a teen. See James Gleick, Isaac Newton (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), p. 13.
3. Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely, “Dishonesty in Everyday Life and Its Policy Implications,” Journal of Public Policy and Marketing 25, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 117–26.