In his book, Outlive, Peter Attia avoids discussing the trendy “wonder drugs” that excited influencers are claiming can add years to your life. Instead, he focuses way more on identifying the bad things that are most likely to kill you — then thinking about simple, boring behaviours that can reduce these risks.
This is not the best way to sell millions of books. So much more tempting to lure people in with the thought of a couple of simple, secret hacks that will immediately extend their lifespan.
But Peter avoids the tempting and easy path because what he has to share instead is simply so important.
As he points out (in just one example), a bad diet will cause you severe harm — so removing the bad elements is one of the most important things you can do. But once you’ve achieved a decent diet, then you can make any number of (expensive and time-consuming) improvements and it will have only a minimal impact on your longevity.
The same principle applies much more widely across most every area of our life and happiness. Once you reach a baseline, then there’s very little benefit to adding more good stuff. But anything “below the line” that’s bad drags your whole happiness down.
The secret to so much of our happiness is to stop obsessing around adding in more good things. And to concentrate instead on removing the bad. But that’s tough — it requires a deliberate effort.
More of the good is easy to measure. So it’s easy to see that your efforts are working. And there are plenty of milestones to celebrate.
Less of the bad is tough to grasp in most circumstances.
Sure, if terrible things are happening all the time then it’s easy to see and celebrate progress.
But that’s not how things are for most of us in most of our lives…
The bad things happen occasionally and unexpectedly. We see them as occasional one-off unfortunate events and we tend to view them as inevitable. Preordained. Not something we can control.
Every day when your house doesn’t burn down is a solid success. But do you ever register this as a positive? If you’re like most people, the thought never crosses your mind. But when something good happens you sure as hell notice.
We never get to see the stuff that doesn’t happen. So, realistically, if you carefully rearrange your life to reduce the chance that bad things happen then you won’t actually notice any difference. Success looks like a calm space of nothing. Whereas, if you aim to increase the good stuff, then success is cheering crowds and triumphant processions as you hit your target.
If some cosmic statistician could zoom out, crunch the data, and take a big view they would see unequivocally that your life is better when you focus relentlessly on removing the bad stuff. But for you — inside the jar, peering out — it feels totally the other way around.
So we need a whole mind shift in order to help us focus on the things that really matter.
You’ve got to make the effort to see how things could be totally different. To think about what might not be there.
It’s easy (and the default human condition) to take what’s here as a given — and ask what can we add to it to improve things. Or just possibly think about how we might move the existing furniture around into a better configuration. [There’s always the hope that one tiny change will leave you feeling marvellous.]
But it’s a much less obvious and more radical approach to think about cutting back. Removal rather than addition. Prevention rather than cure.
And it’s hardly a sexy path to tread. You’ll most likely end up with a list of boring things that, if done right, will have no discernable impact on your daily life.
But that’s where you need to put your focus if you want to live long and be happy.