Why can’t we just be happy? Why do things have to be difficult? Why can’t we just enjoy life and feel good all the time? I mean, it’s such a simple question, and I think many people would just say, you know, life sucks, life is difficult, and you can’t enjoy it all the time. […]

Build your life like you’re building a house. I like this metaphor, this way of looking at it. I got inspired by seeing a Youtube series of a guy building a log cabin, mostly by himself, with some help, and he just filmed the process. The log cabin building series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXk8bfcxoc0&list=PL4Mh08dMZMVwB0nhsI6mkfq7kYOb5Tu4T Condensed single-video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_6b_cwuB6A

“Take the edge off.” I like this expression. This idea that you’re just going to reduce the worst of something. You’re not going to fix it. You’re not going to make the bad thing go away. But just- maybe not even significantly reduce it, but just around the edges of it, just take a little

I think one of the biggest objections to being tame, domesticated, is that a tame animal is really either a pet or livestock. I mean, what else? You’re gonna be a pet, like a cat or a dog, or kept in a cage like a bird, or maybe you’re gonna be livestock, like a cow

I think when comparing wild and tame, on the one hand, we can look at we see lions and wolves, and then we compare them to domestic tabbies, chihuahuas, and think, well, it’s a lot more respectable- there’s something more magnificent about a lion or a wolf than there is about a domestic cat or

In the last couple videos, I looked at the idea of human domestication, the idea that modern humans can be considered somehow tame and domesticated compared to our wild ancestors. Now, it’s quite a different way of looking at things than the typical more positive and congratulatory view of evolution: that mainly we became smarter.

So I’ve been talking about human domestication, and how appropriate that it fits in with this one-year anniversary of the Covid lockdowns. It was right around a year ago that suddenly everything changed, the biggest interruption to normal life, in many parts of the world, possibly ever. Any part of the world, with the exception

Last video, I looked at this idea of human domestication, thinking about how we share some of the features of an animal that’s been domesticated when we compare modern civilized life to some kind of wild past. And I wonder how far we can take this analogy. And it seems that it goes a lot

Human domestication. Being civilized: this word that sounds very positive, and in so many ways is. We have this wonderful system that we live within that provides unimagined, unimaginable in earlier times levels of safety, security. A whole framework for living our lives in which we don’t have to worry about basic survival. As long

The Santa Claus disappointment. We’ve all had that moment when we learned, one way or another, that Santa Claus isn’t real. And it was a moment of shock and surprise, and kind of it’s disappointing. It’s like wow, I believed in this magical thing, but actually it was just my parents pretending that there’s this