Cato SASE Platform Security as a Service ($4279) · Snippets

At the same time, there’s a rival set of values,8 which are called extrinsic motives.We all have some motives like that.If you play it for yourself because you love it, then you are being driven to do it by intrinsic values.If you play in a dive bar you hate, just to make enough cash to ensure you don’t get thrown out of your apartment, then you are being driven to do it by extrinsic values.These rival sets of values exist in all of us.Nobody is driven totally by one or the other.Tim began to wonder if looking into this conflict more deeply could reveal something important.So he started to study a group of two hundred people in detail over time.He got them to lay out their goals for the future.And then he got them to keep a detailed mood diary.And how does that compare to achieving intrinsic goals?The results, when he calculated them out,9 were quite startling.They spent a huge amount of energy chasing these goals, but when they fulfilled them, they felt the same as they had at the start.The expensive necklace?They won’t improve your happiness even one inch.But people who achieved their intrinsic goals did become significantly happier, and less depressed and anxious.You could track the movement.Dancing for the sheer joy of it?Helping another person, just because it’s the right thing to do?They do significantly boost your happiness.Our whole culture is set up to get us to think this way.Get the right grades.Rise through the ranks.Display your earnings through clothes and cars.That’s how to make yourself feel good.What Tim had discovered is that the message our culture is telling us about how to have a decent and satisfying life, virtually all the time, is not true.The more this was studied, the clearer it became.Twelve different studies found that the more materialistic and extrinsically motivated you become, the more anxious you will be.Instead, it fills us with toxins.Instead, they fill us with psychological toxins.Junk food is distorting our bodies.Junk values are distorting our minds.When Tim studied this in greater depth, he was able to identify at least four key reasons why junk values are making us feel so bad.The first is that thinking extrinsically poisons your relationships with other people.If you value people for how they look, or how they impress other people, it’s easy to see that you’ll be happy to dump them if someone hotter or more impressive comes along.And at the same time, if all you’re interested in is the surface of another person, it’s easy to see why you’ll be less rewarding to be around, and they’ll be more likely to dump you, too.You will have fewer friends and connections,12 and they won’t last as long.Their second finding relates to another change that happens as you become more driven by junk values.Every day, Tim spends at least half an hour playing the piano and singing, often with his kids.He feels his ego dissolve, and he is purely present in the moment.They’re proof we can maintain the pure intrinsic motivation that a child feels when she is playing.But when Tim studied highly materialistic people, he discovered they experience significantly fewer flow states14 than the rest of us.He seems to have found an explanation.Am I the best piano player in Illinois?Are people going to applaud this performance?Am I going to get paid for this?Suddenly his joy would shrivel up like a salted snail.Instead of his ego dissolving, his ego would be aggravated and jabbed and poked.That is what your head starts to look like when you become more materialistic.If you are doing something not for itself but to achieve an effect, you can’t relax into the pleasure of a moment.You are constantly monitoring yourself.Your ego will shriek like an alarm you can’t shut off.This leads to a third reason why junk values make you feel so bad.There’s always somebody who’s got a nicer house or better clothes or more money. Even if you’re the richest person in the world, how long will that last?Materialism leaves you constantly vulnerable to a world beyond your control.And then, he says, there is a crucial fourth reason.It’s worth pausing on this one, because I think it’s the most important.What you really need are connections.You have to picture all the values that guide why you do things in your life, Tim said, as being like a pie.Each value you have, he explained, is like a slice of that pie.16 So you’ve got your spirituality slice, and your family slice, and your money slice, and your hedonism slice.We’ve all got all the slices. When you become obsessed with materialism and status, that slice gets bigger.And the bigger one slice gets, the smaller other slices have to get. So if you become fixated on getting stuff and a superior status, the parts of the pie that care about tending to your relationships, or finding meaning, or making the world better have to shrink, to make way.It’s one or the other.If my materialistic values are bigger, I’m going to stay and work.For millennia, humans have talked about something called the Golden Rule.It’s the idea that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you.But why would human beings turn, so dramatically, to something that made us less happy and more depressed?Isn’t it implausible that we would do something so irrational?In the later phase of his research, Tim began to dig into the question.Nobody’s values are totally fixed.Your level of junk values, Tim discovered by following people in his studies, can change over your lifetime.What causes the variation?The first group was shown no commercials.The second group was shown two commercials for a particular toy.You have to choose, now, to play with one of these two boys here.Or you can play with a boy who doesn’t have the toy, but who is really nice.If they had seen the commercial for the toy, the kids mostly chose to play with the mean boy with the toy.If they hadn’t seen the commercial, they mostly chose to play with the nice boy who had no toys.Today, every person sees way more advertising messages than that in an average morning.Tim suspected that advertising plays a key role in why we are, every day, choosing a value system that makes us feel worse.Advertising at its best is making people feel that without their product, you’re a loser.People want to be around you.You’ve got enough stuff now.You don’t need any more.Oh, did I mention you have to pay a few bucks?I just want you to be the person you deserve to be.Isn’t that worth a few dollars?This logic radiates out through the culture, and we start to impose it on each other, even when ads aren’t there.It created a marker of status, that we then policed.As adults, we do the same, only in slightly more subtle ways.This system trains us, Tim says, to feel there’s never enough.When you’re focused on money and status and possessions, consumer society is always telling you more, more, more, more.Capitalism is always telling you more, more, more.Your boss is telling you work more, work more, work more.Oh, I got to work more, because my self depends on my status and my achievement.You internalize that.It’s a kind of form of internalized oppression.He believes it also explains why junk values lead to such an increase in anxiety.Does the person love me for who I am, or for my handbag?Am I going to be able to climb the ladder of success? he said.You are hollow, and exist only in other people’s reflections.The way I understand the intrinsic values,24 Tim told me, is that they are a fundamental part of what we are as humans, but they’re fragile.They are puzzled by this, and they often assume it’s because they didn’t buy the right thing.So they work harder, and they buy more goods, display them through their devices, feel the buzz, and then slump back to where they started.They both seem to me to be depressed.They alternate between being blank, or angry, or engaging in compulsive behaviors.This couple has no vocabulary to understand why they feel so bad.They are every advertising slogan made flesh.Like the kids in the sandbox, they have been primed to lunge for objects and ignore the prospect of interaction with the people around them.I saw now they aren’t just suffering from the absence of something, such as meaningful work, or community.When Tim discovered all these facts, it didn’t just guide his scientific work.And then, he says, to make that sustainable, you have to replace them with actions that are going to provide those intrinsic satisfactions, [and] encourage those intrinsic goals.So, with his wife and his two sons, he moved to a farmhouse on ten acres of land in Illinois, where they live with a donkey and a herd of goats.We play a lot of games.We play a lot of music.We have a lot of family conversations. They sing together.Never, he says right away.Don’t you miss this?Oh, what’d you say to them? Tim asked.By living without these polluting values, Tim has, he says, discovered a secret.This way of life is more pleasurable than materialism.It’s more fun to play these games with your kids, he told me.It’s more fun to do the intrinsically motivated stuff than to go to work and do stuff you don’t necessarily want to do.At some level I really believe that most people know that intrinsic values are what’s going to give them a good life, he told me.When you do surveys and ask people what’s most important in life, they almost always name personal growth and relationships as the top two.But I think part of why people are depressed is that our society is not set up in order to help people live lifestyles, have jobs, participate in the economy, [or] participate in their neighborhoods in ways that support their intrinsic values.Tim told me people can apply these insights to their own life, on their own, to some extent.Am I hanging out with the right people, who are going to make me feel loved, as opposed to making me feel like I made it?When I interviewed Tim, I felt he solved a mystery for me.I had been puzzled back in Philadelphia about why Joe didn’t leave the job he hated at the paint company and go become a fisherman in Florida, when he knew life in the Sunshine State would make him so much happier.It seemed like a metaphor for why so many of us stay in situations we know make us miserable.I think I see why now.Joe is constantly bombarded with messages that he shouldn’t do the thing that his heart is telling him would make him feel calm and satisfied.The whole logic of our culture tells him to stay on the consumerist treadmill, to go shopping when he feels lousy, to chase junk values.He has been immersed in those messages since the day he was born.So he has been trained to distrust his own wisest instincts.When I yelled after him Go to Florida! I was yelling into a hurricane of messages, and a whole value system, that is saying the exact opposite.Vincent Felitti’s office,1 some of them found it hard to fit through the door.They didn’t seem to be able to stop themselves.They were assigned here, to his clinic, as their last chance.Nothing they were trying was working, so he was given a blank sheet of paper.Start from scratch, they said.And so the patients began to come.As he tried to scrape away all the assumptions that surround obesity, Vincent learned about a new diet plan based on a maddeningly simple thought.What if these severely overweight people simply stopped eating, and lived off the fat stores they’d built up in their bodies until they were down to a normal weight?In the news, curiously, there had recently been an experiment in which this was tried, eight thousand miles away, for somewhat strange reasons.For years in Northern Ireland,2 if you were put in jail for being part of the Irish Republican Army’s violent campaign to drive the British out of Northern Ireland, you were classed as a political prisoner.You were allowed to wear your own clothes, and you didn’t have to perform the same work as other inmates.The British government decided to shut down that distinction, and they argued that the prisoners were simply common criminals and shouldn’t get this different treatment anymore.So the prisoners decided to protest by going on a hunger strike.They began, slowly, to waste away.So the designers of this new diet proposal looked into the medical evidence about these Northern Ireland hunger strikers to find out what killed them.It turns out that the first problem they faced was a lack of potassium and magnesium.Without them, your heart stops beating properly.Then that doesn’t happen.Then it looks as though you’ll stay alive, Vincent discovered in the medical literature, and healthy, and you’ll lose three hundred pounds a year.3 Then you can start eating again, at a healthy level.All this suggested that in theory, even the most obese person would be down to a normal weight within a manageable time.They were ready to try anything.And as the months passed, Vincent noticed something.The patients were shedding weight.People who had been rendered disabled by constant eating started to see their bodies transform in front of them.Their friends and relatives applauded.People who knew them were amazed.Vincent believed he might have found the solution to extreme overweight.And then something happened that Vincent never expected.Except they didn’t react that way.The people who did best, and lost the most weight,4 were often thrown into a brutal depression, or panic, or rage.Some of them became suicidal.Without their bulk, they felt they couldn’t cope.They felt unbelievably vulnerable.5 They often fled the program, gorged on fast food, and put their weight back on very fast.Vincent was baffled.They were fleeing from a healthy body they now knew they could achieve, toward an unhealthy body they knew would kill them.He genuinely wanted to help them save themselves.