This is Your Brain on Bullsh*t - David Pinsof - #980

A desire for happiness is not what is driving our behavior. It is a terrible way to predict our behavior. It is a naive way of thinking about human psychology that will lead you into a morass of confusion, contradiction, and infinite regress. Why? Hmm.

Well, uh, I wrote a very long po post on this called Happiness is Bullshit, and then I wrote a sequel to that post called, uh, Happiness Really Is Bullshit. No, I'm just joking, it was Happiness is bullshit revisited. People really get hung up on this. I think it's one of the biggest confusions we have about how the mind works is that we have this really misguided idea that what we're pursuing in life is inside of our heads. That is a really weird and implausible idea from an evolutionary perspective.

That we would be animals that are driven to seek stuff inside of our heads makes no sense. It makes way more sense that we would be driven to seek stuff out there in the world, you know, like food, sex. status, praise, inclusion in groups, all this stuff that would have correlated with biological fitness and ancestral environments, these are the sorts of things that would make sense for a primate like us to want. It makes no sense for us to want something inside of our heads. Now, the common response

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