As the Stoics and Buddhists taught long ago, happiness cannot be reached by eliminating all “triggers” from life; rather, happiness comes from learni… - Jonathan Haidt

Nowadays, secular people often see the Enlightenment as a battle between two mortal enemies; on one side was science, with its principal weapon, reason, and on the other side was religion, with its ancient shield of superstition. Reason defeated superstition, light replaced darkness.

We've all heard that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger, but that is a dangerous oversimplification. Many of the things that don't kill you can damage you for life.

When we combine the adaptation principle with the discovery that people’s average level of happiness is highly heritable,11 we come to a startling possibility: In the long run, it doesn’t much matter what happens to you. Good fortune or bad, you will always return to your happiness setpoint — your brain’s default level of happiness — which was determined largely by your genes. In 1759, long before anyone knew about genes, Adam Smith reached the same conclusion: In every permanent situation, where there is no expectation of change, the mind of every man, in a longer or shorter time, returns to its natural and usual state of tranquility. In prosperity, after a certain time, it falls back to that state; in adversity, after a certain time, it rises up to it.12 If this idea is correct, then we are all stuck on what has been called the “hedonic treadmill.”13 On an exercise treadmill you can increase the speed all you want, but you stay in the same place. In life, you can work as hard as you want, and accumulate all the riches, fruit trees, and concubines you want, but you can’t get ahead. Because you can’t change your “natural and usual state of tranquility,” the riches you accumulate will just raise your expectations and leave you no better off than you were before. Yet, not realizing the futility of our efforts, we continue to strive, all the while doing things that help us win at the game of life. Always wanting more than we have, we run and run and run, like hamsters on a wheel.