We assume that other people who are happy are in a fundamentally different situation than we are — that they have things we don't have, or they don't have problems that we do. But the research suggests that happy people have essentially found ways to make peace with the same kinds of problems and shortcomings that unhappy people struggle with.
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Nothing makes me so dejected as to have met my friends, for they make me doubt if it is possible to have any friends. I feel what a fool I am.
Henry David Thoreau
Most people think that if they just had more information, they'd make better decisions. But the problem is rarely informational — it's structural. The question isn't 'what do I know?' but 'what am I incentivized to see?'
Charlie Munger — Poor Charlie's Almanack
The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan values and ends is one of the most childish, as it is one of the most universal, of human follies.
Reinhold Niebuhr — Moral Man and Immoral Society