Episode 41 - Everything's Amazing, Nobody's Happy

Darron and Jeff talk about the seemingly ubiquitous and pervasive dissatisfaction with modern life that they experience day to day, and try to identify some possible root causes for the collective ennui. They discuss their failed attempt to record an episode about this topic and the emotional difficulty of winter time, the relationship between true lack of material hardship and serious life risk and overall happiness, how modern technological changes mess with our biology, how a cultural and economic focus on individuals and maximizing our preferences makes us less able to deal with situations where we are unable to maximize these preferences and more prone to negativity bias, and how the greatly expanded and almost infinite comparison set of things and experiences we are exposed to through the internet and social media impacts our relative happiness.

Notes:

• 3:33 - Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aaronson

• 4:51 - See the entry for “Seasonal Affective Disorder” from John Hopkins Medicine

• 6:38 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 25 - “Living the Dream” from 2022

• 8:14 - See the “Hygiene hypothesis” Wikipedia entry

• 13:42 - See ideas related to the pace of major cultural and technological shifts popularized in Future Shock by Alvin Toffler (1970)

• 15:50 - See “Calorie-free sweeteners can disrupt the brain’s appetite signals” from USC’s Keck School of Medicine (2025)

• 22:30 - See “The semi-satisfied life” from Aeon about Arthur Schopenhauer’s thoughts on happiness

• 24:59 - Watch the classic Simpson’s clip “You could flash fry a buffalo in 40 seconds”

• 29:30 - See the “Habituation” Wikipedia entry

• 28:40 - See “AI and the Human Condition” from the Stratechery Substack, which contains the Louis C.K. clip “Everything is Amazing…and Nobody is Happy”

Episode 40 - Beautiful Confusion

Darron and Jeff explore feelings of confusion and the limits of Cognitivism. They talk about the contradictory nature of knowing and thinking versus feeling, how our understanding and our actions are bounded by our biological nature, the purpose of Cognitivism, the dissonance that comes from interacting with others due to our anecdotal perceptions of the world, the difficulty of constructing meaning in an ultimately meaningless universe, their differing interpretations of Absurdism, and finally Darron begins working on reconceptualizing a framework for personal meaning based around uncertainty and the unlikely probabilistic nature of our existence as individual entities experiencing the universe.

Notes:

• 4:37 - See more on Daniel Kahneman, “The Father of Behavioral Science,” at The Decision Lab

• 6:31 - Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

• 6:44 - In his book, The Happiness Hypothesis, psychologist Jonathan Haidt characterizes the human mind as a partnership between separate but connected entities using the metaphor of the rider and the elephant - the rider represents all that is conscious and is the director of actions and executor of thought and long term goals, while the elephant represents all that is automatic, and often acts independently of conscious thought.

• 8:10 - Listen to Beautiful Illusions Episode 12 - A New Enlightenment: The Age of Cognitivism from March, 2021

• 9:19 - Philosophize This!

• 17:19 - The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

• 21:43 - Listen to Mindscape Episode 340 - Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on What Matters and Why It Matters

• 28:40 - See “Each Shuffle of a Deck of Cards is Probably Unique in History”