Welcome to the Happiness Podcast.
I'm Dr.
Robert Puff.
There's something coming,
And it's coming quickly,
Change.
Whether you're 15 or 85,
The one thing you'll notice that has never happened before in history is the rapid acceleration of change that we're experiencing right now because of AI.
And for some people,
It can feel quite overwhelming.
When change happens,
Our first response is often fear.
It's one of the biggest puzzles we have to live with.
We crave for certainty,
But life offers change.
And though AI is clearly changing the way in which our world is rapidly accelerating right now,
Change has been something that all of us have had to deal with our entire lives.
If we decide to get married,
Half of us won't stay married.
Few of us will have jobs that we get after we finish high school or college and keep it until we retire.
Most of us will have many jobs.
And as we age,
All of us face the changing patterns and resilience of our body.
We get older,
Our bodies slow down.
That's change.
And though change has been part of our lives,
Part of history,
The truth is the rapid change that we're seeing right now has never occurred in history before.
So our craving for certainty has left many people with fear.
But we have a choice.
We have two paths that we can go down when the new arrives.
First,
There's a resistance-fear path where we tighten up,
Judge it,
And worry.
And this creates suffering.
The second path is acceptance and curiosity where we open up,
Observe it,
And adapt.
This creates peace.
It's not that change itself hurts us.
It's our resistance to it.
Today,
We're going to learn how to move from fear to curiosity.
Let's start with the metaphor of a new neighbor.
Imagine a new neighbor moves in next door.
We have two choices.
We can lock our doors,
Gossip about them,
And wonder what evil they'll bring to our neighborhood or we can walk over with a pie and say hello.
The first one sounds silly,
But aren't we perhaps doing that right now?
Because we all have a new neighbor right now,
And it's called AI.
Artificial intelligence is the new neighbor for humanity.
It is big,
Powerful,
And unknown.
Very few,
If any of us,
Are going to change how AI is going to make its place in the world.
However,
How we choose to interact with AI does matter.
Because how we treat others,
Even AI,
Affects us.
If we're rude and fearful,
We practice being a rude person.
If we're kind and polite,
Even saying please and thank you to AI,
We practice being a kind person.
This is about keeping our hearts soft no matter what's happening in the world.
There's just so much now we can't control in the world,
But we can 100% control how we choose to react or respond to the events,
To the people,
And even AI in our world.
When we keep our hearts soft,
That's the path to a happy life.
But throughout history,
We've faced changes,
And we've faced them magnificently at times.
Let me use three examples to illustrate what I'm talking about.
Did you happen to see the movie Hidden Figures that was set in the 1960s when IBM computers arrived at Nassau?
The human mathematicians were terrified that the machines would steal their jobs.
But Dorothy Vaughan did not try to sabotage the machines.
She realized the future had arrived,
And so she learned how to program the computer through Fortran and then taught her team.
She moved from competitor to pilot.
She didn't stop the wave,
She learned to surf it.
Or how about the evolution of the impressionistic painters?
When the camera was invented,
Painters panicked.
Paul de la Roche famously declared,
From today,
Painting is dead.
Why would someone paint a portrait if a machine can do it perfectly in a second?
That was based on fear,
But there were others that chose acceptance.
The smartest artists,
Like Monet or Pissarro,
Realized they didn't need to copy reality anymore.
The camera could do the boring work.
They started painting feelings,
Light,
And movement.
The threat actually forced them to evolve.
Acceptance frees us to find a higher purpose.
And then there's the beautiful example of Marie Curie.
The fear was,
She was working with radiation,
An invisible,
Dangerous,
And completely unknown force.
But she chose the path of curiosity.
Instead of running away,
She leaned in to study it.
She wrote this powerful line,
Nothing in life is to be feared,
It is only to be understood.
Now is the time to understand more,
So that we may fear less.
So how do we work towards acceptance and thriving in this new uncertain age that we all are facing?
Everyone has heard of an optimist and a pessimist,
But there's also what's called an agathist.
This is where we believe that all things ultimately tend towards the good,
So that we trust that even this scary change is part of the process.
This is more of a spiritual approach because it is believing there is ultimate purpose and meaning to life,
Which I believe there is.
But even if we don't want to embrace the agathist philosophy of life,
We can use the changes in our world,
Like artificial intelligence right now,
Is our opportunity for our spiritual gym.
After I finish this podcast,
I'm going to go to the gym and lift weights.
I do this in order to keep my body healthy by exposing it to challenges.
So when we think about or get fearful of the changes in our world right now,
Use it as an opportunity to practice radical acceptance.
I'm going to work through this right now so that I can become a stronger person and squash that fear of mine.
Because ultimately,
I don't have to be afraid.
I just have to live well one day at a time.
So how do we practically cultivate and encourage this agathistic and trusting approach to life?
We have to take three very specific steps.
The first one is,
We have to use the pause button.
When we see a scary headline,
Stop.
Take a deep breath and notice the tightness in our chest.
Then next,
We shift to curiosity.
We ask ourselves,
What can I learn from this?
Instead of,
How can I stop this?
This,
To be honest,
Is one of my favorite things to have in our back pocket throughout our lives when facing any form of difficulty is,
What can I learn from this?
When we make mistakes,
When we're facing what seems insurmountable crises,
When we're in emotional trouble and feel like we really messed up,
We ask,
What can I learn from this?
This practice will free us of shame,
Of guilt,
Of fear,
And a plethora of negative,
Self-defeating emotions and thoughts.
We tend to be very hard on ourselves,
And this is a path to soften it.
What can I learn from this?
And then the third thing,
Which will not only benefit us,
But benefit all the other people that we come in contact with in our lives,
Including our new neighbor,
AI,
Is extend grace.
Practice kindness in small ways.
Be polite to technology.
Be patient with the self-checkout machines.
Be kind with the customer service bot.
Practice grace everywhere.
I was recently in Los Angeles and Miami,
And both those cities have these little robots of sorts.
They're just four wheels that go around.
I'm not quite sure what they're doing.
I think some of them are delivering services like food to people.
But I heard that some people are actually abusing them and being cruel to them.
You may be thinking,
It's just a machine,
Dr.
Puff.
What difference does it make?
Even if the machine doesn't feel anything from our unkindness,
We know we're being unkind.
And the one thing I've learned after working with thousands of people for over 30 years is,
Unkindness is the path to unhappiness.
Bullying leads to an unhappy life.
Research consistently shows that many serial killers and violent psychopaths,
Such as Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy,
Did torture animals as children.
This behavior usually stems from a desire to exert power and control over a helpless living thing,
Which later escalates to humans.
Now,
Those little robots in cities may not seem like helpless living things,
But the main reason we don't act cruelly towards others,
Even AI,
Is that it hurts us.
We practice grace everywhere so that our hearts can be happy.
If you're listening to this,
You probably want to have a happy heart.
Grace,
Kindness,
Is one of the key paths to a good heart and a happy life.
We ultimately can't control the future,
But we can control our attitude towards it.
Our world is changing,
And very rapidly now,
But it doesn't have to be fearful.
We can choose curiosity over fear.
There's a door before all of us right now.
We can lock it because we're afraid,
Or we can open it to let fresh air in.
If we decide to choose the latter,
I would suggest repeating this affirmation,
When we face change.
I accept this moment exactly as it is.
I choose curiosity over fear.
Thank you for joining me on the Happiness Podcast.
Until next time,
Accept what is,
Love what is.
