Podcast Episode Details
Back to Podcast Episodes
Overcoming the Genetics of Happiness: The One Thing Antinatalism Got Right
In this thought-provoking discussion, Malcolm and Simone delve into the controversial views of antinatalists like David Benatar and explore why happiness and satisfaction might come from unexpected sources. They debate the role of genetics in happiness, arguing against the pursuit of hedonism and advocating for a life dedicated to meaningful pursuits like religion and family. The pair also cover the impact of relationships, gratitude, and religious practices on life satisfaction, supported by various studies. Join them as they contrast different religious groups' happiness levels, dissect the misconceptions around life satisfaction, and share insights into how to enhance overall well-being.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. It's wonderful to have you here today.
Today, we are going to be talking about the one area, the people who want all humans dead. The antinatalists, David Benatar, that they are right. Which is David Benatar makes this argument. That, well, people can learn to, or come to, he uses like a boiling frog analogy here. Okay. Think that a genuinely terrible life is worth living.
Like, he's like these people who are like starving in Africa. Oh, and who say, but I
Simone Collins: still want to live.
Malcolm Collins: I still wish I was born. And he's like, This is proof that, like, you don't know if your life is any good. Because these people think their lives are good, and clearly, from my privileged perspective their lives are not good.
How dare you want to exist? You're incorrect. What he is missing, and what we will be going over Is these individuals subjective experience of both happiness and life satisfaction is likely higher than or [00:01:00] at least around the same as his own. I'd argue it's probably quite a bit higher than with some of the stats that we're going to go into.
They are experiencing a better life than David Benatar. And this is where we have to talk about hedonism. the way you choose to spend your time and Red Queening. So for people who don't know Red Queening, Red Queening is a scene from Alice in Wonderland where they say, you know, running as fast as I can, but every time they run faster, the Red Queen runs faster.
So it's, it's, if they're not moving at all. And the Red Queen is often used as an analogy was an evolution between predator and prey. Evolution. So the prey will develop some defense against the predator and the predator develops something that gives it an extra edge and then back and forth, back and forth, but it's the same with happiness in your life as you gain more things that give you like subjective experiences of happiness.
You very, very quickly normalized to those things. And as such pursuit of those things is an enormous. It's a waste of [00:02:00] time. Just a complete waste of time. Like, it's one of the reasons why I think a religious life is so much better, or finding something to dedicate yourself to is so much better, and it's one of the reasons why the urban monoculture is so toxic.
Simone Collins: In fact, I would argue that religious life is even a better, an austere religious life is better if you want to maximize hedonism. Because the best way to begin to enjoy things again is to go on a dopamine fast and most hard religions have those where you like have to give, give up dopaminergic, exactly.
And that's, it's after that 30, I think it's a 30 day period. I was listening, I think it was an Andrew. Huberman podcast interview with a woman who's wrote a book. You shouldn't
Malcolm Collins: fast to increase the amount of dopamine. The point being is, I'm just saying,
Simone Collins: look, we respect that people have different objective functions and some people's objective function is just to feel good.
And if you want to be able to feel good, you have to go on dop
Published on 9 months, 2 weeks ago