KPAO by Dave Cortright

Forget FOMO; You need to know about YAAMO

FOMO—fear of missing out—is a real phenomena. But the root of it is essentially a personal insecurity that you are defined by your achievements. It’s a believe that “missing out” on some event will make you "less than" the people who went.

Here’s the stark truth: YAAMO—you are already missing out. There are a nearly limitless number of things you could be doing at any given moment. Most would be considered mundane, and yes some might be amazing, once-in-a-lifetime ones. But regardless, whether or not you attend any given event will ultimately have no lasting impact on your overall life satisfaction.

Because achievement is at most ⅓ of your overall life satisfaction. Much more derives from having strong, healthy emotional relationships with others and feeling like you are an important and respected member of a community. Everything else that you could do in your life pales next to this.

So next time you are worried about missing out on something, I encourage you to refocus your attention on your social and emotional foundation. That is where true fulfillment lies.

The evolutionary purpose of all second-order emotions is to build and strengthen social connections

One of the biggest impediments to our overall social and emotional health is the lack of acceptance of “bad” emotions. Society tells us these emotions are not appropriate to express (and to be fair, there is some truth to that when we are talking about a more public forum), and thus we learn to believe that we must manage our emotions by suppressing the ones we (society by proxy) deem undesirable.

In reality, the healthy way is to manage the expression of your emotions, not the emotions themselves. Accept all emotions as they come up; they provide invaluable information about how you relate to the rest of the world. 

If you're not used to this “radical acceptance” of all your emotions, shifting to that perspective can be tricky. For me, reminding myself of the purpose of emotions helps. Every emotion is there for a reason, and the overarching theme is that they build and strengthen social connections. I know our instinct when confronted with many of these emotions is to withdraw and not share them with others. We all fear social exclusion and such emotional vulnerability exposes us to that risk. But in fact that is exactly what you need to do to process these emotions so you can ultimately let them go. A key it to be discriminating in whom you share your emotions with, and of course how you share them.

Another key point is what I call the “three body solution” (because I'm a physics nerd 🤓). When you (P₁) are feeling a certain way because of the actions of some person (P₂), it’s important to understand that you do not necessarily need to resolve that emotion by interacting with P₂. In some (perhaps even many) cases, the path forward is to share with a trusted friend (P₃). This is precisely why talk therapy works. You learn to open up and share your emotions with another person; and even though it's not the person who triggered the emotion, it still works. In one sense, talk therapy is just healthy emotion processing lessons.

Reasoning your way to happiness with science and logic — resources

I recently gave a talk titled Reasoning your way to happiness with science and logic (which I’ve embedded at the bottom of this post). Executive summary: good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Individual achievement only makes up at most ⅓ of overall happiness.

I included a resources slide at the end, but wanted to put that list hear so it's easier to access, and because I can more easily make changes to it in the future. (I already added one resource that I left off the original list.)

• Triumphs of Experience by George E. Vaillant (or just watch Robert Waldinger’s TED talk)
• The 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People by David Niven
• The Blue Zones series (especially …Happiness) by Dan Buettner
• The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
• Habits of a Happy Brain by Loretta Graziano Breuning
• The Awakened Ape by Jevan Pradas
• The Mindful Geek by Michael Taft
• The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson
• Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker (or just read his blog)
• The Social Conquest of Earth by Edward O. Wilson
• The Selfish Gene, et al. by Richard Dawkins
• The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin
• Social and Emotional Learning from resources such as CASEL or RULER
• The Mask You Live In (movie)
• Room to Breathe (movie)

Reasoning your way to happiness with science and logic from Dave Cortright

Humans are coquivores, and the only remaining extant species

This blog post deserves more in depth research and citations, but there is a lot of evidence supporting the fact that humans (and our extinct predecessors) are not omnivores, herbivores, or carnivores like other mammals, but rather a brand new classification: the coquivore. We cook our food, and as the book Catching Fire opines, it is what allowed us to become human. Cooking unlocks more nutrients from the food, and reduces the amount of work that the body needs to do to process the food. That energy was used to grow our big brains.