It’s hard to worry too much when someone else’s existence depends on you. It’s incredibly hard, but like most things that are incredibly hard that’s where the contentment is found.
That's a pretty universal ingredient in any roadmap to happiness, isn't it? I mean that's basically the Christmas Spirit right there.
Since my son was born earlier this year (first kid), I certainly see how he can effortlessly make me happy in a way I found hard to achieve earlier.
While I handled most of my depression-like issues before (mostly anxiety), he seems to have a great impact on making me feel fully recovered, motivated and wanting things from life again.
On the other hand, you are basically forced to deal with it instead of running away, can’t leave the kiddo alone.
- Yes, bcz this reptile models is not accurate. It's at best an outdated but very intriguing analogy (which I agree can be misleading) but not here.
- No bcz a bit irrelevant to the our argument above. You may refer to [this paper](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK234157/) quoting:
> "The preponderance of the cerebral cortex (which, with its supporting structures, makes up approximately 80 percent of the brain's total volume) is actually a recent development in the course of evolution. The cortex contains the physical structures responsible for most of what we call ''brainwork": cognition, mental imagery, the highly sophisticated processing of visual information, and the ability to produce and understand language. But underneath this layer reside many other specialized structures that are essential for movement, consciousness, sexuality, the action of our five senses, and more—all equally valuable to human existence. Indeed, in strictly biological terms, these structures can claim priority over the cerebral cortex. In the growth of the individual embryo, as well as in evolutionary history, the brain develops roughly from the base of the skull up and outward. The human brain actually has its beginnings, in the four-week-old embryo, as a simple series of bulges at one end of the neural tube."
Despite what that paper says, the lizard analogy goes to this, and I agree it's loose, outdated and misleading one but doesn't change the argument we're discussing here.
I don't think the author of the quote would agree that giving up and doing exactly what the system was designed to force you to do is the best solution.
I've read the accounts of near death experiences in The Tibetan Book of Living & Dying, and I recall many people being exceedingly euphoric, as if they have been freed of the grasping and attachments of life, like a river joining back to the sea if you will.
Temporarily we wear this meat-suit and then rejoin the spirit world / etheric world, and many people call this 'heaven' or other words. Imagine being permanently on MDMA or something.
It's even worse than that. From an evolutionary point of view happiness is a dead end. There is no reason to evolve if you are happy.
“Evolution as such is not a process to be glorified: It is blind, driven by chance and not by insight. It is merciless and sacrifices individuals. It invented the reward system in the brain; it invented positive and negative feelings to motivate our behavior; it placed us on a hedonic treadmill that constantly forces us to try to be as happy as possible—to feel good—without ever reaching a stable state. But as we can now clearly see, this process has not optimized our brains and minds toward happiness as such. Biological Ego Machines such as Homo sapiens are efficient and elegant, but many empirical data point to the fact that happiness was never an end in itself.”
— “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self“, Thomas Metzinger