Ashish Kothari explains how numbing pain with alcohol or media, and prioritizing work over health and meaning, builds long-term unhappiness. The fix: identify harmful mental models and habits, then replace them with healthier ones.
Chapters
Mind your life and notice how you've made unhappiness a habit. What are those things that we are doing in our lives that are creating unhappiness for now or will create unhappiness in the future? So for example, if we use alcohol or movies or whatever else as numbing device as a way to numb ourselves from all the pain at the end of the day, or to reward ourselves for all the things, notice what is the effect of that on our long term health and hence on our long term well being. Noticed. What habits are you picking up from the moment you wake up to how you go through the day? Notice what implicit trade offs you're making in terms of where you spend your time. Maybe you're prioritizing work a lot more versus health or love or meaning. Recognize how over time that's going to result in you being unhappier and lack of satisfaction that will show up for your life. So if we have to change, we have to start by recognizing the fundamental mental model or habit that is at the root of why we are suffering and address that as much as we start to do new things. So this is as much a game of elimination as it's a game of addition.
