By Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace
This piece first appeared on ClearerThinking.org on February 28, 2024, was edited on February 29, 2024, and appeared here with minor edits on March 27, 2024.
Does money buy happiness? Intuitively, the answer is yes: common sense tells us that poverty and hardship make people unhappy. We can use money to buy a lot of things that might make us happier – things like a nicer home, fancier vacations, education for our children, or just the oppor...
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health
How great is the U.S., really?
This piece was coauthored with Travis Manuel. This is a cross-post from the Clearer Thinking blog.
According to YouGov polling, 41% of people in the United States think that it is the greatest country in the world. Others see the U.S. as a place full of arrogance, violence, and inequality. So, what's the truth?
The truth is that there isn't a single notion of what makes something the "best." To explore how great (or not) America is, we'll start by looking at the question from mu...
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Think smarter about what’s “good”
Cross-posted on the Clearer Thinking blog. Travis Manuel helped to edit and improve this post.
People like to think of things as "good" or "bad," such as:
Trans fats are bad for you, and broccoli is good for you.
Lethargy is bad, but exercise is good.
Being cowardly is bad, and having courage is good.
A problem with putting something in the "good" bucket of your mind, though, is that this can lead to the belief that the more of it there is, the better.
But most go...
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What Are All the Things That Humans Need?
Below is my attempt to list all human needs ranked according to their typical importance (from most important to least). Thanks for the idea, Maslow!
I'm defining a "need" here as something non-replaceable (i.e., you can't just substitute it for something else), which, if substantially unsatisfied, would inhibit well-being for the vast majority of people.
You might say that you "need an iced tea" on a hot day, but it could be easily replaceable with lemonade or iced coffee, s...
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Intersecting advice from highly successful people
It's popular to read interviews and books with advice from highly successful people. But is their advice good advice? Perhaps it works for their situation, but that doesn't necessarily mean it generalizes to other circumstances. Maybe they are just overfitting to their personal life experience. Perhaps they are attributing too much of their success to the actions they happened to take rather than to factors outside of their control. And what should we make of the fact that advice often contradi...
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The Fourier transform of happiness
H/T to Robert Paul Chase for the title. (For those who don't know, this is a reference to Fourier analysis.)
Your happiness, like the level of the ocean, is caused by a superposition of waves of different frequencies. Each operates on a distinct scale - they sum up to determine your well-being at any given point in life. Each wave tends to oscillate around its mean or neutral point (except for the slowest waves, which take your whole life to unfold). One useful way to think about becoming ha...
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Dealing with damage before it wrecks you
Written: July 5, 2020 | Released: August 6, 2020
Many of the hard-to-replace things in life accumulate damage as time passes. It's critical to learn to detect and improve damage before these things fall apart. This requires a combination of vigilance (noticing the damage before it is really bad or even irreversible) and continually using effective strategies to repair what's broken. A car will accumulate damage over time, but even if you don't take good care of it, you can get a new one even...
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Bias based on facial attractiveness
There's a deeply-rooted, incredibly superficial aspect of human nature that is rarely discussed: our obsession with small variations in bone structure/skin smoothness on a person's face. At extremes, people are desired or shunned due to tiny, otherwise almost meaningless facial details.
In the attached image, there are two non-existent women (generated by a face generation AI set to generate "brown hair white adult female"). If these were real people, they would likely be treated differently...
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What Health Advice Is There a Consensus On?
What recommendations related to diet, nutrition and health seem to be universally agreed on by experts of nearly all stripes and schools of thought?
Given the incredibly high levels of disagreement in these areas, and the poor quality of studies, it often seems like we know almost nothing.
Below is my attempt (via a combination of brainstorming and crowdsourcing) to list what there does seem to be a high rate of consensus on. Please let me know if you notice any mistakes.
Tentative L...
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Changing Your Life Using Habits
One of the most effective ways to get ourselves to regularly do a behavior is to make it automatic through habit formation. Once something has become a habit we no longer have to worry about forgetting to do it, or worry about lacking sufficient motivation. We do the behavior without even trying to do it, without even thinking about it. Habits make behavior effortless.
We can program ourselves with new habits by following a very simple procedure. If you want to regularly do behavior B after s...
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