My favorite thought from this lecture was the idea that our discounting of future possibilities is adaptive, and a failure to discount unlikely futures could be a cause of anxiety. If all the ways you might die in 30 years was as salient to you as what you are going to eat for breakfast, your mind would never stop worrying.
In times of extreme comfort like ours, it is much easier to highly value and consider the future. This makes it easy to overthink the possible impacts of present actions on the future, and while those impacts are real, they are often so hard to predict over the vast range of possibilities that they are worth discounting and disregarding.
One of the common modern recommendations for worrying less and being happier is to do more hard things and struggle more. Present struggles force you to highly value the present—things that make you struggle are going to make you find the present salient, and figure out how to improve the present quickly. There’s no room to think about the future when doing hard things in the present, so challenging yourself in this way may help us retain our adaptive discounting of future possibilities in our comfortable environment.
This seeking of both truth and relevance together feels so important. I wonder where in modern society we see this the most.
I like the concept in this lecture a lot of bullshitting vs. lying to yourself. Even in a lot of the self-help genre, which seems to be going after a similar goal to Socrates of becoming a good person, there is a lot of bullshit in the form of misguided values (fame, fortune, etc). We have few institutions, structures, or communities that enable people to strive over both truth and relevance.