“He smiled through his greasy glasses with his clear eyes. “Why do we all expect to be happy? We all came out of our mothers crying. Pain is what we do.” It reminded me of a tweet from Alain Botton several years back that sparked a Twitter chat between the two of us: “Happiness is generally impossible for longer than fifteen minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.” Indeed. The great worriers of history were the ones who saw the charging rhinoceros first, had an action plan ready to go should a tiger in camp, fretted that the basket of weeds collected that they may be poisonous. We carry this terror in our genes into our suburban lounge rooms, to our office water coolers, to our IKEA-issue bedrooms. Worry is our default position.” WorryAnxietyDnaHardwiredDefault Position Book:First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety Source: First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety
“If happiness is a hardwired obsession in our brains, one should first and foremost learn to foster an upright quest for unvarnished wellbeing and above all not give in to vain temptations of displaying counterfeit contentment and fake smiling. (Digging for white gold »)” HappinessObsessionContentmentWellbeingCounterfeitBrainsTemptationsHardwiredUnvarnishedFake Smiling Author:Erik Pevernagie
“It’s a cruel fact of war that it takes little more than applying pressure to one finger to end another person’s life. More than that, it’s a cruel fact of life that we are hardwired to follow the crowd in a moment of panic.” LifeWarTruthDeathSadPanicFactEndFirearmsGunsCrowdCruelTriggerShootHardwiredJoe Vagrant Book:Dystopia Boy: The Unauthorized Files Source: Dystopia Boy: The Unauthorized Files