People shout at each other and send insults and do nasty things by text message, even though they know this is not the most effective way to communicate—and they are capable of better communication.

If you take that into account, and the overwhelming tidal wave of evidence that people are constantly behaving against their own best interests, then you have to let go of the idea that we’re actually motivated to succeed—that our baseline functioning and setting is designed for well-being.

No. We’re clearly programmed for something else.

If you observe the patterns, while being detached and keeping your biases to the minimum, you would start by thinking:

“I don’t know why they do anything. I’m gonna try and figure it out from their behavior. I’m a behaviorist. I’m gonna work backwards from their behavior and figure out their motives. And I’m not starting with any assumption about what their motives are—or should be.”

If you did that consistently, you would see—okay, well, they’re clearly not trying to have a good life. We can rule that one out right out of the gate.

So what are they doing?
What is the process here?
What—what’s—what’s the motivation?

You’ll see one thing more clearly than anything else. It’s very simple:

People repeat themselves.

That’s it.

That’s what you’re seeing all the time—somebody doing what they’ve always done. Somebody going through cycles.

Patterns.

Repeated from start to finish—and then starting over again.

Over and over again.

To dive deeper into this topic, check out the original video here: