Reality Is Broken

launch their own world-changing venture in just ten weeks.

Positive psychologists have found that grappling with the reality of death forces a kind of mental shift that helps us savor the present and focus our attention on the intrinsic goals that matter most to us.

Whether it’s money, grades, promotions, popularity, attention, or just plain material things we want, scientists agree: seeking out external rewards is a sure path to sabotaging our own happiness.

So we have to set other, more concrete goals, and in the pursuit of those goals, we capture happiness as a kind of by-product. He called this approaching happiness “sideways, like a crab.”30 We can’t let it know we’re coming. We just kind of sneak up on it from the side.

For many people, that’s a huge boost in productivity. To make it easy to adopt this habit, life hackers have created desktop and mobile phone applications that buzz alternately every ten and two minutes to keep you on track.

His research suggests that the ability to play complex games together, and to help others learn the rules of a game, represents the essence of what makes us human—something he calls “shared intentionality.”2

That’s why our single most urgent mission in life—the mission of every human being on the planet—is to engage with reality, as fully and as deeply as we can, every waking moment of our lives.

Gobekli Tepe,

We do autotelic work because it engages us completely, and because intense engagement is the most pleasurable, satisfying, and meaningful emotional state we can experience.