The Drive Interview with Peter Attia

It doesn't matter if you can live to a hundred; it doesn't matter if you can delay the onset of heart disease, stroke, cancer, and Alzheimer's disease if you're too miserable to appreciate it or if you're constantly in some sort of tormented state. You might as well be dead.

We suffer more in imagination than in reality

For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so

Distraction is the only thing that consoles us from miseries yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries

There is there is no prison like the one between your ears

The inability to recognize how distracted we are, seems to be one of the greatest drivers of misery

Virtually all negatively valenced emotions are not rooted in the present

The narrow conception of happiness that most of us have by default is something we’re tying to defend against all of the other things in life that are threatening to undermine it. The one obvious point is that it’s not a safe play. It’s perpetually under threat. Any joy you can feel, by virtue of it having arisen, based on some causes and conditions, is going to pass away.

The real practice is to notice as early as possible what's happening and to let go of it. The difference between being angry for 10 minutes and 10 seconds and one second, those factors of 10 are enormous.

Our default mode is to just be lost in thought. We're telling ourselves a story all day long and we're not aware of it.

Many of the things you think you want, you'll find you don't want all that much if you pay attention to what it's actually like to gratify those desires

Nobody wants to suffer. I just think it takes many of us decades to even come to the realization of how much of our suffering is self-imposed.

One thing you discover when you learn to meditate is that negative emotions have a very short half-life

By not lying, you’re closing the door to all kinds of complexity and risk, both impersonally and reputationally

With MDMA, my first experience on ecstasy, I had this epiphany that this is what consciousness was like when it was no longer encumbered by my self-concern

To put dishonesty somewhere on the continuum of violence and only resort to it when things are broken down so much that you're just not dealing with another person as though they're a rational interlocutor... that is massively simplifying of a person's life.