A lifelong learner, he attacked the problem as an engineer would: examining all the provable facts and scrupulously applying logic. Not surprisingly, the opposite is also true: Unhappiness happens when your reality does not match your hopes and expectations. I heard this both from Mo and from Aatik: reframe ambition so that its about becoming a better person regardless of how you compare to others. His most recent books are Scary Smart about the future of AI and That Little Voice In Your Head about how to retrain your brain for greater happiness.

One of them is that we associate so strongly with the voice in our head when the reality is that it is just a biological function; it is exactly like your heart pumping blood around your body. Because relativity views time as malleable, Gawdat concludes that it’s incompatible with our rigid conception of time. However, because we think they’re uncommon, we’re unprepared and forced to abdicate control when they happen. The realisation that nothing we could do, including crying in our rooms for the next 17 years, would ever bring him back… we started from there.Or what if you decided to take it off road, where it got stuck because this is not what its meant for.

But here's the tricky bit: it's not the event that makes us unhappy; it's the way we think about it that does.And please also note, these truths are Mo’s truths, the ones that helped him find joy and survive the tragedy of losing Ali.

Your unhappiness at that betrayal might linger forever, waiting to be relived anytime you feel blue or hostile toward your spouse. So you can be upset for the rest of your life, or you can recognize that life is actually hyper-predictable, the train was likely never going to come on time, and if you navigate through a set of tools, the truths, you will send your appointment a text, a message, explaining and not be in a state of unhappiness over your misfortune. Gawdat’s first pillar dovetails with his previous discussion on the misconception of time, where he argued that only the present moment exists.There’s no point in recognizing the beauty of the tiger over the danger that it poses — one is an immediate threat to your survival. So, although birth and death appear to mark the beginning and end of our life, we actually transcend time. Disclaimer: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. You actually have to embody not only the behaviors of happiness, but really the choice of happiness. So think about what event you want to erase, considering all the other twists and turns that came with it.