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Let me play a recording for you of something that might sound simple, but when I tell you what this is that you're about to hear, you might find extraordinary.
That very poor out of tune singing that you just heard, was every member of the God bless America, on September 12th, 2001, of course, the day after the 9 -11 terrorist attacks.
And why you might find that incredible is because it's almost impossible to imagine Congress doing that today, given how nasty and partisan and spiteful politics has become.
Could you imagine all of them standing up and holding hands and singing together?
It seems almost impossible to imagine that happening today.
I mean, it seems like most of those people can't even stand to be in the same room with each other, let alone stand next to each other singing.
But I actually think that if America faced another existential crisis like 9 -11 was, the same kind of unity would actually come roaring back.
And there's actually a long history of this of sworn enemies putting aside their differences when they are faced with a big, devastating threat.
particularly one that threatens everybody equally at the same time.
There's a very long history of people getting serious when shit gets real.
And so look, if that sounds like wishful thinking to you, if you're like, no, no, no, that was a different era, politicians would not come together in any circumstances today.
Let me propose one kind of oddball reason why.
Part, not all, but part of the reason that today's world is so petty and angry and bickering is because life is pretty good for a lot of people.
Things are pretty good today for a lot of people.
There are no domestic wars.
The unemployment rate is very low.
Household wealth is at an all -time high.
The number of new innovations in technology and medicine are like equal to magic.
It's astounding. And of course, it is far from perfect in the world.
It's pretty bad for many people, and even an optimist today could list hundreds of problems with the world.
If you're a pessimist, you could do much worse than that.
But let me put it this way.
As the world improves and gets better, our threshold for complaining drops.
In the absence of big problems, people just shift their worry to smaller ones.
And in the absence of small problems, they focus on petty or even imaginary ones.
And so part of the reason that politics can be so nasty and immature and spiteful these days, is in part because of the absence of gigantic problems that we are dealing with today.
Most people and definitely society as a whole seems to have a minimum level of stress.
Like, a floor of the amount of stress, a minimum level of stress that they have to maintain at all times.
And they will never be fully at ease in life because after solving every problem, the gaze of their anxiety does shift to the next one.
It doesn't matter how trivial that new problem is relative to previous ones, you just move on to the next thing to worry about.
So free from stressing about where your next meal is gonna come from, people do shift their worries to say politicians being rude and saying the wrong things.
Free it from the trauma of having to deal with war, people stress shifts to say whether somebody's language is offensive or whether the stock market is overvalued.
When one's stress is relieved, you usually don't, therefore, bask in joy, you just move on to the next one.
So think about an imaginary, fictional society that has unlimited wealth and unlimited health and permanent peace, like a perfect utopian society.
Would they be overflowing with joy?
Would they be ridiculously happy?
I think the answer is probably not.
I think their defining characteristic of that society would be how trivial and absurd their grievances would be.
They would be absolutely enraged that their maid, their housekeeper, was 10 minutes late.
They would be losing sleep, stressed out over whether their lawn was green enough.
They would be absolutely despondent that their child did not get into Harvard.
Like, take all the problems away of health and money and all these other things.
Remove those problems completely and people do not necessarily become happy.
They move on to the next worry.
It's always like that throughout society.
I heard a great example of this from the rock climber, Alex holland one of the greatest modern rock climbers.
He's an absolutely incredible person.
This is what he said not too long ago on the high performance podcast.
You know, like when's the last time people faced actual fear, particularly physical danger, like anything where they could actually get heard?
And why should they experience it?
Because I think that if you don't experience real fear from time to you don't experience real danger other things, then your mind just sort of creates fears out of nothing.
I mean, like I see that, like when I travel, like when I'm in airports, I always hear people like stressing the travel experience like, oh, what do we do with security?
What do we do here?
Like what if we miss the flight?
And you're like, chill.
You're like, you know, you're in a climate controlled airport, there's food everywhere, there's abundance all around you.
Like, what if you show up three hours late?
Like who cares? You know like, how could you get so worked up about things that do not matter?
And so I think that the more real experiences you have with real fear of real danger, things like that, the less likely you are to make mountains out of molehills, to worry about the stuff that doesn't matter.
So there again, when life is actually amazing for you, you don't appreciate it, you just move on to the next worry.
Psychologist Nick Haslam once described what he called concept creep.
That is when the definition of a problem expands beyond its original boundaries.
So you define what a problem is and you're like okay that's what it is, but then over time, the boundaries of that definition expand so it looks like the problem is getting bigger.
It often gives the impression that the world is getting worse when actually what has changed is our definition of what counts as a problem.
And this idea of concept creep happens two different ways.
One is when when things that were previously considered normal, become redefined as a risk.
So take a child being bullied, at schooled.
If you went a hundred years ago, people would say, yeah, that's what happens.
That's part of being a kid.
Deal with it. Buck up.
Today, it is an unacceptable risk.
I'm not saying it shouldn't, but the definition has changed over time.
It's the same with maybe mild anxiety being diagnosed as mental illness.
Where again, if you went a hundred years ago, and someone said, I have mild anxiety, people say, welcome to the club.
That's part of how life works.
And today it's a mental illness.
Again, I don't really don't have any view on whether that is right or wrong, but the definition has changed over time.
The other way this happens is less severe instances of a risk are recast as major risks.
So, you could talk to a lot of financial advisors and they would say, look, because you're not saving enough money, you might not be able to retire at age 65.
You might have to delay it until age 67, or maybe even age 70, and that's a big risk.
That too is something that, if you heard me say that 50 years ago, you would say, that's a risk.
Like, retirement, to begin with, is a ridiculous thing we're not even thinking about, and to you, the idea of a risk is having to delay it by 24 months, a completely absurd.
So in each of those cases, the world can get better, but people don't feel it.
They even feel like they are going backwards, because once a problem is solved, it is replaced by a new one.
And usually when you face that new problem, it's with the same level of anxiety and fear and anger that you had for the previous bigger problems.
A few things I keep in mind here.
One is that, I think in many ways, the best definition of progress is when you have knocked out the major issues and are left dealing with lower and less severe ones.
That's the goal in life, is to have to deal with problems that are so trivial because you don't have any big ones left to deal with.
Maybe the gold standard, the dream is that 100 years from now our children, our grandchildren are dealing with the most trivial, ridiculous problems because they have nothing else big to worry about.
They've cured cancer, they have economic prosperity and they're left arguing over whose grass is greener, so to speak.
That's actually a great scenario, isn't it?
One other thing is that stress is an innovator.
Nothing incentivized like worry.
And so we should never want a world where people see everything is perfect.
We want to live in a world where people wake up every day and say, this is bad, we can do better than this, isn't that what we want?
Cause if they didn't, they would wake up and say, there's nothing left to fix, maybe they might be a little bit more content, but that would be the peak of living.
That would be the end of progress.
A third is that people are problem solvers, in their identity, in their core, they need to be solving problems.
And that is a great characteristic, it is the source of all progress.
Right? But when solving problems is core to your identity, you occasionally see trouble where none exists.
It's like the saying, don't ask your barber if you need a haircut.
They're going to say yes.
And don't ask a problem solver if everything is okay.
They're going to say no, they need to be solving something and therefore they will try to find problems even when none might exist.
One other idea is that being angry at the world can be an intoxicating feeling.
because being angry offers a sense of moral superiority.
It makes you feel good.
Because when you accuse others of causing problems, what you are actually implying is that you are better than them.
And so people like that feeling.
They like to be a little righteously indigent and say, look at all those people making problems in the world, they're screwing everything up.
Even when those feelings are genuine, it can feel good because what you're actually saying is, I have a better moral compass than you do or maybe I have better ideas in you too.
That feels great and so in a very strange way but I think a very important way people love being pissed off.
They love being a little bit angry and they love focusing on problems even if they seem trivial relative to previous ones.
And so one other way to maybe sum all of this up is that the The dumber the disagreements are, the better the world actually is.
That's it for this week.
We'll see you again next time.
