Summary of Alex Lickerman's The Undefeated Mind

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Sample Book Insights:

#1 If we’re willing to accept that we don’t have an endowed purpose but rather an evolved function, we can begin from any one of the many desires that populate our daily lives and follow it back through all the desires that lie beneath it to find the answer we seek.

#2 The ultimate end toward which all living organisms aim their activities is survival and reproduction. However, when we evolved the ability to have thoughts and feelings about our thoughts and feelings, we gained the ability to make judgments about our experiences and choose which ones we’d rather have.

#3 We can’t help but want to become happy. We’re incapable of not wanting to become happy. The pursuit of happiness is psychological law we must obey. Even people who appear to want nothing to do with happiness still want to be happy.

#4 It is difficult to be happy because happiness requires the absence of suffering, and we often fail to appreciate these things as separate. We may think that things that bring us joy simultaneously protect us from suffering, but they actually make us more vulnerable to it.