If you pay attention to how harmful gurus behave, you’ll start to notice patterns that come up again and again.

Here’s my speculative attempt at categorizing harmful gurus based on their personalities, motivations, and persuasive styles (but not mental health conditions). Of course, not all harmful gurus are equally harmful (I’ll give a mix of very harmful and less harmful examples). My hope is that these categories may help you spot these patterns more easily:

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Type 1: Sociopathic Gurus – they strategically mix lies with truth to get your trust, promote a specific world view, and (eventually) extract value from you. Those who fail to spot their lies learn to trust them and may even see them as brave truth tellers. They lie to you knowingly and without remorse for personal gain.

Strategies they often rely on:

• Cherry picking: using selective (non-representative) examples that suggest the narrative they want you to believe.

• Paltering: making a series of true statements that purposely lead you to come to a false conclusion.

• Lie laundering: inserting key lies among a series of true statements so that the lies go unnoticed and they appear credible.

• Fabrication: they’re willing to completely make up things that very few people would ever blatantly lie about (such as inventing an experience they had with a specific person), leaving trusting people to assume they must be telling the truth.

Famous example:

Larry Ray

“Ray started a sex cult in which he presented himself to students as a former US Marine with training in psychological operations, as well as past work with the Central Intelligence Agency.[24] At first Ray ingratiated himself with his daughter’s friends, cooking dinners and ordering in delivery, and presenting himself as a father figure.”

A psychological examiner’s notes from the time said that Ray was “able to manipulate and control almost any situation in which he finds himself, including a psychological interview with a forensic examiner, no matter how experienced that examiner may be. Mr. Ray is very good at what he does … [He] can be utterly charming, and one can be disarmed by his childlike simplicity and smile. But Mr. Ray is no child; he is a calculating, manipulative and hostile man.”

(source of these quotes: Wikipedia)

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Type 2: Narcissistic Gurus – they’re delusionally convinced of the vast superiority of their ideas and qualities, and do whatever they can to get others to pay attention to and admire them. People end up entranced by their charisma, grandiose vision, and (apparent) confidence. Their huge (but fragile) ego makes it hard for them to learn from (and likely to lash out in response to) valid criticism.

Strategies they often rely on:

• Self-aggrandizement: they tell you how impressive they are or how impressive their ideas are, and some find this convincing.

• Endorsement: they get others to talk up their brilliance and accomplishments, making their claims seem more believable (which are also sometimes mutual exchanges where they talk each other up).

• Obfuscation: using obscure words, ambiguous, smart-seeming remarks, and technical phrases that are hard to understand to seem brilliant and to deflect from having to actually defend their ideas from head-on critiques.

Famous example:

Benny Hinn (prosperity gospel preacher)

Quotes:

“Where in the Bible does it say I have to drive a Honda?”

“When you don’t give money, it shows that you have the devil’s nature”

“The Bible warns us clearly that we must not attack men of God no matter how sinful they may have become or wicked in our eyes.”

“Sow a big seed.  When you confess it, you are activating the supernatural forces of God”

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Type 3: Apophenic Gurus – they read signals into noise, often in paranoid ways. Even though their theories are usually wrong, they are often interesting, novel, or surprising, which gets people to pay attention and leaves some people captivated. They see tenuous connections as deeply meaningful and are rarely persuaded by logical critiques. Some of them tip into genuine psychotic detachment from reality.

Strategies they often rely on:

• Mystery: they present their ideas as involving a deep understanding of hidden relationships or secret knowledge, and leave the impression that if you just spend enough time consuming their content, you’ll come to grasp these important truths that few understand.

• Web of connections: they talk about a wide range of unrelated ideas and events in rapid succession and treat these as deeply connected, making it difficult to pin down their points and giving them an easy escape valve (by diverting to tangential topics they claim are related) when their perspectives are challenged.

• Just asking questions: they’ll point to things that seem weird or surprising or that aren’t well understood, and imply they have deep significance and support their worldview, even though their proper interpretation is unclear.

• Yes And-ing: incorporating other popular false theories and appealing world-views (such as perspectives of other gurus) into their network of ideas, making them even more appealing, fascinating and familiar seeming.

Famous example:

David Icke (conspiracy theorist)

Quotes:

“The opening and closing ceremonies of the London Olympics are mass satanic rituals disguised as a celebration of Britain and sport. Their medium is the language of symbolism.”

“I once had an extraordinary experience with former prime minister Ted Heath. Both of his eyes, including the whites, turned jet black, and I seemed to be looking into two black holes.”

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Type 4: Traumatized Gurus – due to being ostracized by a group or very painful life experiences, they’ve come to demonize a group of people or a set of ideas as the source of society’s ills. They’re on a mission to get others to demonize the same group or ideas. Their own pain and fear leads to black and white thinking and blocks their empathy.

Strategies they often rely on:

• Nutpicking: focusing on the most extreme (nutty) perspectives and people related to whatever it is they demonize to make it seem insane and dangerous.

• Catastrophizing on a slippery slope: claiming that some genuine problems related to a group or set of ideas are going to lead to a sequence of events with a cataclysmic or frightening outcome, causing their audience to fear that group or those ideas.

• Motte and bailey-ing: flip-flopping between reasonable criticisms and extreme conclusions based on those criticisms (which may depend on how emotionally disregulated they are at that moment, or what audience they are talking to), such that when their extreme conclusions are changed, they can easily retreat to “I was just saying that [reasonable criticism].”

Famous example:

Brigitte Gabriel

Her home was destroyed by Muslim militants when she was 10 years old, and she suffered injuries from shrapnel.

Quotes:

“The difference, my friends, between Israel and the Arab world is the difference between civilization and barbarism. It’s the difference between good and evil.. this is what we’re witnessing in the Arabic world, They have no soul, they are dead set on killing and destruction.”

“Every practicing Muslim is a radical Muslim.” (according to the NYT).

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Note that here with this terminology I am not talking about diagnosing mental disorders – I’m talking about how these gurus think, their motivations, and their persuasive styles.

What’s the key difference between these categories? I’d say it’s that they all mislead their audiences, but for different reasons, based on different motivations, and with different levels of self-awareness.

Sociopathic Gurus often mislead on purpose, knowingly, to gain something.

Narcissistic Gurus often mislead due to their egos, and an inflated sense of their own importance and the superiority of their ideas.

Apophenic Gurus often mislead due to seeing false connections, and due to jumping to paranoid conclusions.

And Traumatized Gurus often mislead due to the way their beliefs were shaped by pain or fear, which has caused them to oversimplify, mischaracterize and demonize a particular group or set of ideas.

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Of course, not all gurus can be classified in these ways – some are idiosyncratic.

And, in practice, many gurus combine multiple elements from the above categories, especially the most harmful gurus – for instance, I think that Sociopathic + Narcissistic, and Narcissistic + Apophenic are common combinations among cult leaders in particular. Perhaps having multiple of these tendencies rather than just one (or even having all of these tendencies, though likely to different degrees) is common among the most popular such gurus.

The reason I’m proposing these categories, despite their porousness, is that I think they are useful for thinking about different personalities and tactics common among gurus.

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Here are some examples of what I think are mixed type harmful gurus and how I’d classify them using this framework based on what I know about them (of course, it’s hard to be certain of their true traits beyond their public portrayal of their traits):

• Andrew Tate: Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru – “Andrew Tate once called his sexually explicit webcam business a ‘total scam’ and boasted on his website that he lured women in by getting them to fall in love with him.  The 36-year-old influencer also boasted on a podcast that he broke a woman’s jaw in a bar fight and ‘got away with it.'” (NBC)

• Alex Jones (radio host): Narcissistic + Apophenic Guru – “We had floods in Texas like fifteen years ago, killed thirty-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force.” and “The reason there’s so many gay people now is because it’s a chemical warfare operation, and I have the government documents where they said they’re going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don’t have children”.

• Elliot Rodger (mass murderer, became influential post-death): Traumatized + Narcissistic Guru – “All I have ever wanted was to love women, but their behavior has only earned my hatred. I want to have sex with them, and make them feel good, but they would be disgusted at the prospect. They have no sexual attraction towards me. It is such an injustice…Why do they have a perverted sexual attraction for the most brutish of men instead of gentlemen of intelligence? I concluded that women are flawed.”

• L. Ron Hubbard: Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru – “All women shall succumb to my charms! All mankind shall grovel at my feet and not know why!” (part of his “self-hypnosis”)

• Marshall Applewhite (Heaven’s Gate cult leader): Narcissistic + Apophenic Guru

• Charles Manson (Manson Family cult leader): Sociopathic + Apophenic Guru – “Total paranoia is just total awareness.” and ” I decide who does what and where they do it at. What am I gonna run around like some teeny bopper somewhere for someone elses money? I make the money man; I roll the nickels. The game is mine. I deal the cards.”

• Warren Jeffs (FLDS polygamous offshoot of Mormonism): Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru

• Keith Raniere (NXIVM cult leader): Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru

This piece was first written on March 4, 2026, and first appeared on my website on March 30, 2026.

I’d be interested to know: what is missing from my new list of causes of bad things and potential types of solutions? Thanks to those of you who commented on my prior version!

Causes of bad things in the world:

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1) EXTERNAL CAUSES

1i) Nature or evolution (e.g., malaria, cancer) -> Potential solutions: technological development, such as medical cures

1ii) Bad luck (e.g., landslides, earthquakes, droughts) -> charity, government programs providing social safety nets

1iii) Scarcity (e.g., insufficient food or water in an area) -> migration away from high scarcity areas, technological development to increase food production

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2) FAILINGS OF HUMAN NATURE

2i) Highly selfish actions by non-evil people (e.g., some of the crimes that are committed, some of the manipulation that occurs) -> cultural norms discouraging selfishness, cultural norms to punish those taking highly selfish actions

2ii) Harmful actions taken in highly emotional, confused, or desperate mental states (e.g., crimes of passion, harmful, desperate reactions out of fear, harm caused during extreme mental illness) -> widely available and effective mental health treatment, widespread education/training related to mental health and emotional regulation

2iii) Well-intentioned ideologues who are convinced that their simple but wrong model of the world is the absolute truth (e.g., some of the genocides and wars, many harmful yet well-intentioned policies) -> rationality education/training, a robust culture of respectful disagreement and debate

2iv) Cognitive biases leading to actions with severe negative consequences (e.g., greatly misjudging whether a project will bring enough benefit to be worth the cost, excessive fear towards or devaluing of ‘othered’ outsiders leading to mistreatment or harm to outsiders, lack of preparation for likely occurrences that are not salient) -> rationality education/training, careful design of systems to counteract biases, strong moral norms of respect towards all, moral circle expansion

2v) Retaliation or revenge (e.g., cycles of retribution) -> a culture of forgiveness, effective dispute resolution methods and institutions, reliable enforcement of laws

2vi) Evil people acting alone (e.g., serial murder, child abuse) -> effective police forces, high crime clearance rates, enforcement of laws, scientific investigation into the root causes of evil

2vii) Evil people who rally supporters (e.g., some genocides and wars, some extractive government policies) -> strong norms around truth telling and social punishment for lying, a robust culture of respectful disagreement and debate, a culture of empathy toward and acceptance of those who are different than you, a well-educated and informed citizenry, scientific investigation into the root causes of evil, a strong constitution, a strong independent judiciary, strong norms around maintaining freedom and independence of thought

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3) CHALLENGES OF COORDINATION AND INFORMATION

3i) Negative-sum competition (e.g., fighting over food when there isn’t enough to go around) -> technological innovation to increase abundance, thoroughly enforced laws forbidding negative-sum behaviors

3ii) Unintended side effects of actions that are not innately unethical (e.g., addiction caused by the invention of social media, new promising-seeming medical treatments that turn out to have horrendous side effects) -> a robust and low-transaction cost systems for those who were harmed to be compensated by those who caused the harm, hard to undermine enforced regulation requiring organizations to ameliorate harms once they have been identified

3iii) Collective action problems and negative externalities caused by individually reasonable behavior (e.g., pollution, climate change, overuse of resources) -> methods for assigning prices to negative externalities so that someone bears the cost, regulation to limit negative externalities

3iv) Prisoner’s dilemmas and difficulties of pre-commitment and coordination (e.g., arms races, such as with nuclear weapons) -> technology to facilitate coordination and simultaneous action, public projects by governments and private donors

What other broad causes of bad things or potential types of solutions am I missing?

This piece was first written on November 2, 2025, and first appeared on my website on November 17, 2025.

One way to cut through the noise is to look at the commonalities between the advice that many different highly successful people give (i.e., take the “intersection”), letting the noise and contradictions drop away. If many of them provide the same advice, we can be at least somewhat more confident that it generalizes. Having said that, we should nevertheless remain mindful of selection effects (affecting who we hear advice from), including survivorship bias.

With that in mind, here’s my attempt to “intersect” the repeated advice I’ve read or heard from many different highly successful people who come from a wide range of fields and life circumstances. I expand on each piece of advice by listing common themes I’ve heard around that advice (that I also largely agree with), and then I give a relevant quote.

Ten Repeated Pieces of Advice From Highly Successful People

1. You won’t automatically be happy when you reach your goals.

Achieving goals breeds new ones.

A terrible situation creates misery, but a good situation doesn’t imply you’ll be happy. Happiness takes inner work, and it benefits a lot from gratitude for whatever it is you already have. The good life is a journey, not a destination.

Quote: “Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn, or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.” – Denis Waitley

2. High levels of accomplishment almost always require hard work over a long time. “Overnight successes” are rare and are often misidentified. If you look closely, usually, the person was practicing for 5-20 years before they were an “overnight success.”

Always be looking for how you can do your work better, and focus on improving in those areas. Compounding improvement over a long period is how people become great at things.

Quote: “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” – Thomas Jefferson

3. Life is unpredictable. When young, people usually don’t know what they’re going to “do with their life.” That’s fine!

Life takes crazy, unexpected twists and turns. Plans are great, but you should expect to modify them. Be adaptable and on the lookout for great, unexpected opportunities.

Quote: “Sometimes, when you go looking for what you want, you run right into what you need.” – Wally Lamb

4. Don’t let fear stop you. Attempting hard things will bring stress, fear, and anxiety. 

If you avoid what you fear (more than is warranted by the level of danger), your potential will be curtailed. Learn to push through your fears to do stressful things that are valuable.

Quote: “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anaïs Nin

5. Choose who you spend time with wisely. Be thoughtful about who you are friends with, whether you spend enough quality time with your loved ones, etc.

Spending time with the wrong people will waste time or even sap potential. Make enough time for the people that matter most to you.

Quote: “You Are The Average Of The Five People You Spend The Most Time With” – Jim Rohn

6. Learn to say no. People will ask you many things from you. If you always say “yes,” it will drain energy & focus.

Say “yes” to your loved ones and to requests that are aligned with your deepest values. For others, consider if you realistically have the bandwidth to handle the request without taking away from your most important priorities. If not, give an authentic “no.”

When you’re starting out, it makes sense to say “yes” to more things. The more successful you become, the better you have to get at saying “no” – otherwise, your life will be dictated by other people’s demands.

Make choices based on your own values rather than based on what pleases or impresses others. Be your authentic self.

Quote: “Half of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.” – Josh Billings

7. Take care of your body. Exercise regularly, reduce sugar intake, eat healthy foods that make you feel good, make enough time for sleep, and avoid excessive alcohol/drugs.

Good health has ripple effects and will help you achieve your goals. Your body impacts your mind.

Quote: “The groundwork for all happiness is good health.” – Leigh Hunt

8. Take care of your mind. Meditate regularly (or find another practice that refreshes and resets you). Sleep enough. Seek treatment for mental health challenges.

Get out of relationships where people mistreat you. Have compassion for yourself, and treat yourself with kindness.

Know your limits, and keep stress within those limits. Take some time just to relax and have fun with no obligations. Take vacations.

Quote: “If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.” -Jack Kornfield

9. Expect to fail many times. That’s normal and expected. 

The key is to learn from every failure, pick yourself back up, and keep going. If you’re not willing to fail many times, you aren’t prepared to do hard things.

Quote: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Edison

10. Leverage habits. Figure out what daily pattern works for you. 

Maybe it’s an hour of writing at 6 am, strong tea in the morning, a carefree walk in nature at noon, or jumping jacks in the early afternoon. Experiment to find what works well for you, and stick to it.

Quote: “First, forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not.” – Octavia Butler

This piece was first written on January 26, 2021, and first appeared on this site on October 14, 2022.

When a friend or loved one has something bad happen to them, what should you do to help them feel better? This question can be difficult to answer because it seems that at different times people want different things: empathy, problem-solving, optimism, distraction, and so on. See for instance this study where people give divergent answers about what they want from a friend after something bad happens.

We propose that there are four general states that a person may be in when something bad happens, and that knowing which of these states they are in can help you figure out how you can best comfort them. The key distinctions we draw here are that when something bad happens to you, at first you may not yet comprehend what’s happening, then you may feel bad but not yet want those emotions to go away. After that, you may be ready to start feeling better, and finally, you may want help with problem-solving. Often when you try to comfort somebody and it seems to make things worse, it’s because you are offering assistance that is best given at a different stage. For example, trying to cheer someone up when the person is still in a stage where they do not want to feel better yet or offering advice when they are still too upset to hear it.

Note that we are only considering non-emergency situations here, since emergencies require immediate action. Furthermore, note that while people do not always pass through all of these different states when something bad happens (so they are not really “stages” per se), when they do all occur, they tend to happen in a predictable order.

The Four States of Distress Model

State 1: Shocked or confused (you can help them understand what happened and how they feel about it)

Most common potential emotions: shock, confusion, surprise, fear, dread, denial

Example situation 1: your friend comes home from vacation and finds that their apartment is wrecked.

Example situation 2: your friend who thought their relationship was going great is suddenly dumped by their partner.

Strategies more likely to be helpful: :

• Active listening
• Helping to resolve confusion
• Expression of concern
• Validating their confusion
• Reflecting back to them your understanding of what they have said

Why: when something negative and unexpected occurs, we may need time to understand what actually happened and how we feel about it. A friend can help facilitate that process.

State 2: Feeling bad and not ready to feel better (you can help them express their feelings and feel validated)

Most common potential emotions: intense forms of sadness, depression, anxiety, anger, contempt, guilt, jealousy

Example situation 1: your friend whose home was wrecked is feeling highly anxious about the expensive damages and furiously angry at the person whom they let stay there while they were gone

Example situation 2: your friend who was broken up with yesterday is feeling very sad about the loss of the relationship

Strategies more likely to be helpful:

• Active listening
• Empathy
• Validating their emotions
• Reflecting back to them your understanding of what they have said
• Help them get into a mind set where they are ready to feel better

Why: when we’re feeling strong negative emotions we may actually want to be feeling them. For instance, if someone we love dies, we likely will want to be sad about it for some period of time. Or if we are betrayed, we may well want to stay angry at the person for a while because we feel that anger is deserved.

State 3: Feeling bad but wants to feel better (you can help them feel better)

Most common potential emotions: intense to moderate forms of sadness, depression, anxiety, anger, contempt, guilt, jealousy [same list as State 2]

Example situation 1: your friend whose home was wrecked is still feeling anxious about the cost of replacing their possessions and angry at the person who caused the damage, but they are sick of thinking about it all the time and want to move past it

Example situation 2: your friend who was broken up with still feels very sad about it, but wants to feel better, move on, and focus on the future

Strategies more likely to be helpful (though note that this section is especially person dependent, with different people having different Comfort Languages):

• Optimism, reframing (e.g., seeing it in a less negative light or finding a silver lining)
• Physical comforting (e.g., a hug)
• Validating their emotions
• Distraction (e.g., doing a fun activity)
• Helping them explore and understand their feelings
• Problem-solving (especially if there is a way to quickly fix much of the problem)

Why: after feeling bad for a while, at some point we are likely to get sick of those negative feelings and wish that we could feel better again. At that point a friend can help alleviate those negative feelings.

State 4: Feeling better and wants solutions (you can help them move forward past the problem)

Most common potential emotions: more manageable or minor forms of sadness, depression, anxiety, anger, contempt, guilt, or jealousy

Example situation 1: your friend whose home was wrecked is feeling somewhat less bad about it, but now they want help figuring out how they are going to get their stuff replaced and whether they can get the guest who caused the damage to pay.

Example situation 2: your friend who was broken up with is feeling somewhat less bad about it and wants your help meeting someone new

Strategies more likely to be helpful (though your choice will depend on the person and your relationship to them)::

• Brainstorming solutions
• Problem solving
• Advice
• Volunteering your time to actually help on the solution
• Providing resources to help solve the problem

Why: when we’re feeling intensely bad, it’s often both difficult and unappealing to problem-solve. After we start to feel better, however, we may start to feel motivated to find a way to improve our situation. A friend can be very helpful at this point in helping us think through potential solutions or by volunteering to help directly.

So the next time a friend or loved one has had something bad happen to them, consider applying the The Four States of Distress Model by considering which of the four states they are likely in:

1. Shocked or confused – you can help them figure out what happened and how they they are feeling
2. Feeling bad and not ready to feel better – you can listen empathetically and validate their feelings
3. Feeling bad but wants to feel better – you can help them feel better using their preferred Comfort Language
4. Feeling better and wants solutions – you can help them figure out what to do

You shouldn’t spoil the movie: imagine going to a movie that has a lot of good parts, but you don’t enjoy those good parts because while they’re happening, you keep thinking about the fact that the movie will eventually end. If it doesn’t make sense to do that in a movie, then it makes even less sense to do that in your life. You may find it helpful to simply note when disruptive thoughts about death occur and remind yourself at those times that they are counterproductive if they are distracting you from enjoying “the movie.”

Death doesn’t harm you while living or dead: if a person is alive, then death has not reached them yet, so a person’s death cannot harm that person while they are still living. If a person is dead, then they do not exist, and so can experience no harm. Hence your own death cannot harm you either when you are living or when you are dead. So if death is a harm to you, it is a harm to you during those seconds or minutes when you are transitioning from alive to dead, but at least that period is very short-lived and has not happened yet.

Death is bearable: if it is not death itself that you fear, but rather the suffering that sometimes comes before death, keep in mind that very, very few people commit suicide upon nearing death, suggesting that the suffering that sometimes comes before slow deaths is probably very rarely truly intolerable (unless the barrier to committing suicide is very high).

You are incredibly lucky to exist at all: you may not feel it every day (or even most days), but the fact that you exist is an extremely lucky chance occurrence. Consider, for instance, that male ejaculate contains on average about 280 million sperm, and that if ANY of these had fertilized your mother’s egg other than the one that did, you would not exist right now. And that’s just one of a vast number of coincidences that were required for you to be born.

It could be worse: there are probably quite a few things worse than total oblivion (hell, for instance, or just being tortured for years). To me, this contrast effect (comparing death to even worse things) makes me feel better about death itself since it is merely oblivion and could be worse.

Your impact can live on: the things you choose to do while alive can impact distant generations living long after you are gone, even if you are not a famous scientist or influential politician. For instance, if you have children, then the way you treat them will have effects on how they treat their children and hence how their children treat their own children, etc. (at least, assuming the world doesn’t end before then). Or, if over a span of a number of years you end up giving ten thousand dollars to malaria prevention, it could very well save a person’s life, which could have long-term positive consequences for that person’s parents and spouse and friends and children. More generally, there are ripple effects for many actions that you take, which end up having second-order and third-order consequences that could extend long past your lifespan.

Full acceptance can make it easier: instead of fighting mentally against the reality that you will die, truly accepting that it will happen and then focussing on how to live your life with this constraint can be less upsetting in the long run. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should give in to dying soon: you should still do everything you can to extend your life while fully accepting that it is eventually inevitable.

We’re in this together: remember that everyone who was born more than 125 years ago is now dead, that this is something all humans face, and that (unless some truly remarkable new technology is invented, which I’m hoping for, but which is a long shot) we all share this hardship. Talk to others about how they come to peace with death. Lean on them. You don’t need to go it alone.

You can have one hell of a ride: even though the ride must end, you can make it a damn good one. With hard work and some luck, you can have a truly amazing and meaningful time while you’re here.

Finiteness does not mean meaninglessness: occasionally, people find that the fact that things will end makes everything feel meaningless. But if you believe this is true, that implies that you believe things would only be meaningful if they lasted forever. I don’t know about you, but this intuitively feels false to me. My gut says the opposite is true, at least in the sense that finiteness imbues greater meaning to each minute, making time more precious.

Death is a reminder to deeply savor: because of death, we should make an extra effort to try to savor the taste of every bite of chocolate, the feeling on our skin when we walk outside into nice weather, the coziness of being indoors when it’s raining, the excitement of each deep connection we make with other human beings, the start of our favorite song, the smell of fresh air, and the thrill of grasping a new idea. If you lived forever, you could consume each of these things an infinite number of times, but you only have a finite number of each of them left, so experience them as fully and completely as you can manage.

Death is bad, but you can find peace with it: don’t get me wrong, death is NOT a good thing (except in the rare instances where it cuts a bad existence short). It is undeniably bad because it causes good things (things that we value) to cease. One day of happy, meaningful, altruistic life lived is better than just one hour of it, and one year of it is better still (all else held equal). Even if there are a few problems that death makes simpler, like overcrowding and avoiding the stagnation of ideas, in the absence of death, we could find better solutions for these problems. But even accepting that death is truly bad, it is something we can learn to be at peace with.
Consider returning to the list above when you feel your own mortality weighing on you heavily, and see which of these framings you find most helpful.

Most people underestimate how often they are wrong. Not only is there a common human tendency to overestimate one’s own abilities, but beliefs have the property that they feel right to us when we focus on them. So even if we admit that we likely have a number of false beliefs, it’s easy to go on acting as though each of our individual beliefs is beyond serious doubt. Worse still, we assume that if a belief of ours hasn’t yet been proven wrong, then it’s right (it feels that way, after all) so it seems to us that we have made far fewer errors than we really have.

It’s disturbing to discover we’ve been mistaken about something important – especially when we’ve wasted time or effort because of the belief, or expressed the belief in front of others. So we’re incentivized  to come up with justifications for why we weren’t actually wrong. We try to avoid psychological discomfort, and we try to save face in front of others. But there is a healthier way to think about wrongness: recognizing that we have an error rate.

Since we have to assume that we will be wrong sometimes, we can think of ourselves as having a frequency with which things we claim are actually false (or, if we’re thinking probabilistically, a rate at which we assign high probabilities to false propositions). As was pointed out in the comments below, it may be helpful to think of your error rate as being context specific: we make errors more frequently when discussing philosophy than when remarking on the weather. But if you wanted a single overall rate, you could define it, for example, as the fraction of the last 1000 claims you made that actually were not true (or were not even very nearly true). This rate will be different than, but generally quite predictive of, the fraction of your next 1000 claims that will be wrong.

Our error rate is connected to the chance that any one of our individual beliefs will be wrong, though we obviously should be much more confident in some of our beliefs than others. When evaluating the probability of a particular belief being right, there are a variety of indicators to look at. For example, we should be more skeptical of one of our beliefs if a large percentage of smart people with relevant knowledge dispute it, or if we have a strong incentive (financial or otherwise) to believe it, or if we can’t discuss the belief without feeling emotional.

Once we fully accept the fact that we have an error rate, we can think about wrongness in a new light: we can expect to be wrong with regularity, especially when reasoning about complex subjects. Once we start expecting to be wrong, it is no longer as disturbing to find that we are wrong in a particular case. This merely is a confirmation of our own predictions: we were right that our being wrong is a common occurrence. That way, being wrong doesn’t have to be so frightening. When it happens, it indicates our error rate may be slightly higher than we previously believed, but it is not abnormal.

Estimating our actual error rate is hard, in part because we’re wrong much more often than we notice it. So even in theory it doesn’t work to just count up how many times we’ve discovered being wrong as a fraction of the number of things we’ve claimed were true. But nonetheless, we can benefit psychologically from remembering that we have an error rate, even if we don’t know what that rate is.

If in your experience you’re almost never wrong, that is indicative of a serious problem: it is far more likely that you are wrong fairly regularly (and are simply bad at processing the counter evidence that should make you aware of your wrongness) than it is that you really are wrong so infrequently. Put another way: failure to detect your own wrongness doesn’t imply you’re right, it indicates you’re very likely deceived about your rate of wrongness. Presumably, you’ve noticed that those around you are wrong quite regularly. Do you really think you’re the incredibly rare exception who is pretty much always right?

When you deeply accept the fact that you’re wrong with a certain error rate, it becomes easier to convert fear of being wrong into curiosity about when your wrongness is occurring. Whereas seeking out your thinking failures may have scared you before, it may now seem dangerous to not seek them out: you already know that you’re going to be repeatedly wrong, so the responsible thing is to figure out when that wrongness is occurring.

Yet another advantage of thinking about your error rate is that it naturally leads to thinking about how to reduce this rate. This can be done by learning to rely on more reliable procedures for forming beliefs (something I’ll say much more about later), and using these procedures to check what you previously believed to be true.

Remember: you too have an error rate. You don’t need to fear being wrong. Instead, you should expect it.

The same feeling of anxiety that once may have saved an ancestor from predators, today can lead us to sound nervous while giving a speech or blank out during an exam. Anger, while once useful to one of our ancestors for defending his living space, today could lead to bar fights, broken noses and lawsuits. And jealousy, while it helped the genetic material of our ancestors get passed on through the generations, sometimes in our world leads to unreasonably controlling behavior, arguments and divorce. It is clear that, at times, our emotions can make our lives worse.

We must conclude that some of our emotions are essentially misfirings: outdated reactions that would likely have been useful in a different time and place, but are so no longer. This knowledge can help us gain insight into the way we feel, and may allow us to switch to a more objective perspective during times of high emotion. When you feel nervous raising your hand in class, it isn’t necessarily because there is anything dangerous about doing so. But your brain may associate that situation with some ancestral scenario that could damage your social status enough to affect survival. When you are afraid just before a blind date, there is almost certainly very little at stake even if it goes poorly. But the anxiety systems in your brain may interpret it as an all-important mating opportunity, which could be the difference between your genetic material surviving or dying out. And when you feel angry with someone who accidentally blocked your way as you left the train, there may be a misfiring causing your brain to react as though a rival challenged your social status or an adversary threatened you. Of course, it is hard to know in any particular case whether an evolutionary explanation for an emotional trigger is valid (as opposed to an explanation based on conditioning in our lifetimes), or even what the precise purpose of that trigger would have been. But the point still holds: our emotional systems were not designed for this world of 2011. And they were not engineered to promote our happiness, or other goals, but to promote our survival.

So when you find yourself feeling quite emotional, it may be worth asking, “Is my emotion helpful in this situation? Could this be an emotional misfire?”