Smart Ass Take:
Great news, everyone: it turns out the reason you’re miserable is that your life is too goddamn easy. Your burrito arrives in twenty minutes. Your questions get answered before you finish typing them. You haven’t been genuinely bored since 2007, which — coincidentally, definitely coincidentally — is exactly when the iPhone showed up and started licking dopamine off our brainstems.
Arthur Brooks walked across Spain until his feet bled and discovered meaning. Meanwhile, you scrolled through TikTok until your thumb cramped and discovered a guy who reviews gas station hot dogs. Both are pilgrimages, technically. The pitch in this article is that suffering is the seasoning that makes life worthwhile. The same neural real estate handling your back pain is also handling your sense of purpose, and that if you Amazon-Prime every inconvenience out of your life you will also, quietly, Amazon-Prime out anything worth feeling.
So by all means, keep optimizing every rough edge out of your day. Just don’t act surprised when the smooth, frictionless, climate-controlled life you built feels like a hotel lobby nobody ever checks into. LIVE a little. Preferably with sore feet.
Article Excerpt:
“Bottom line, if you’re trying to eliminate your unhappiness, you will inadvertently eliminate your happiness.”
Article Summary:
Arthur Brooks — happiness researcher, professor, and the guy who walked the Camino de Santiago at 55 because his career-shaped life had run out of gas — has a new book arguing that we’ve engineered too much discomfort out of our lives, and that the meaning drained out with it.
His evidence: the Monitoring the Future survey has tracked young people since 1975, and since 2008 — right after a certain rectangular distraction machine hit pockets — the share reporting that “life often seems meaningless” has climbed. His theory is that we killed boredom, and boredom turned out to be load-bearing. It’s what tips the brain into “default mode,” the wandering state where problems get solved and meaning gets made. Nobody volunteers to go there, because that’s also where your mother was unkind to you and next week’s doctor visit is sitting.
The case for friction: negative emotions are an alarm system you’d be considerably worse off without, and the human talent for adapting dulls the good things too — move to Southern California and the sun stops registering by March. Brooks says a happy life needs enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning, and not one of them shows up without some struggle attached. Suffering and meaning, he points out, get processed in the same part of the brain.
The four practices: manage pain instead of trying to abolish it; pair discomfort with gratitude until the two wire together; keep a “failure journal” and return a month later to write down what you learned; and when something is grinding you down, go find someone it’s grinding down too, and help them.