To Be Happy, Hide From the Spotlight
“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his new podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.
Humans have a bad habit of wanting things that are terrible for us. An abundance of refined sugar rots our teeth and blows out our insulin system. Avoiding exercise can weaken our bones and make us depressed.
Seeking ruinous things might seem like a failure of natural laws; however, evolution can explain a lot of our counterproductive behavior. We are wired to relax and seek tasty things, , because until relatively recently, humans were more likely to survive and pass on their genes if they got calories and were . In most of the world today, this is
