Lust, Addiction, and Ambition: Why Your Desires Are Wired to Disappoint You | Joseph Goldstein

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, my fellow suffering beings, how we doing today? I have this memory, and this will be a brief story, but I have this memory from many years ago when I was sitting at dinner with a very smart friend who described his life strategy as accumulating as many pleasurable experiences as possible as a way to avoid looking into the abyss. And that's kind of an extreme articulation of what is, I think, an MO consciously or subconsciously for many of us.

We're all trying to collect as many dopamine hits as possible in in order not to think about the fact that we're all gonna die. But from the Buddhist POV, we're really looking for happiness in the wrong places. While the Buddha was in no way anti-pleasure, he didn't say that, you know, we shouldn't sip lattes or eat pizza or go to parties or anything like that, but he did describe this kind of pleasure as being like licking honey from the edge of a razor. It's dangerous psychologically because while we can derive pleasure from these experiences, they are fleeting and they cannot provide lasting fulfillment.

The good news is that the Buddha recommended a kind of, and you'll hear me use this phrase in this episode, a kind of counterintuitive upgrade, methods for finding happiness in other more reliable sources. Here to do that is my old friend and meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein. He's the author of books such as One Dharma. He's also the co-founder of the legendary retreat center, the Insight Meditation Society. This episode, what you're about to hear, is part of an occasional series we've been running with Joseph where I interview him about the various teaching phrases he uses.

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