Good Feelings Are the Wrong Goal | (#094) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Welcome to the Beyond Success Podcast: Psychology and Philosophy for Achievers on the Inner Life of Success, and I’m your host, David Tian.

So, you’ve done it all right. You booked the silent retreat or the Vipassana retreat, and you sat through every minute of it. You learned to breathe the right way, the deliberate way, in through the nose, hold at the top, out through the mouth slowly. You got into the cold plunge before sunrise, and then you stayed in past the point where your body begged you to quit. You built the morning routine that the experts told you to build and you stuck with it.

You did the work and you got the validation from the others who told you you were doing it correctly, but you still feel hollow, empty, flat. Let’s be honest about what that really means. You bought every intervention anyone sold you as the path to feeling good. Let’s say you bought every single one, and you did them all correctly, the way you do everything that is important to you—correctly—because doing things correctly is what got you to this point, right? [01:02.2]

But the emotions you were hoping for didn’t arrive. That hollowness is still sitting there in the morning in the same chair, waiting for you. So, here’s the question most people in this position never get around to asking, but should—what if the problem isn’t that you haven’t found the right intervention yet? What if there is no next retreat, no better protocol, no missing piece? What if the premise was backwards from the start?

You have been told that the good life is a feeling and that the right method can deliver that feeling. Maybe that whole idea was wrong before you spent $1 on it. By the end of this episode, you’re going to understand why the stack keeps failing you, not why this particular technique failed or that one, but why the entire approach was built to fail a person like you, really, anyone. [01:58.3]

I want to show you what the older traditions, these ancient traditions of wisdom, actually meant when they talked about the good life, because it’s not what you’ve been led to believe. I want to draw a line between two things that have gotten tangled up together—there are the rewards that you’ve been keeping score of, and there are the rewards that were yours potentially the whole time sitting there while you were looking somewhere else. Getting this right, understanding this, is a lot more important than a disappointing morning routine.

You can spend a decade becoming very good at managing your own internal states. You can get genuinely skilled at it actually, better than anyone else you know maybe, and you can arrive in your 50s, 60s, 70s, no closer to a life worth all that managing. That’s the real cost. The stakes here aren’t whether your mornings feel a little better. The stakes are the whole of what you’re building your life toward and the currency that you’re measuring it in. [02:59.3]

You think being good is supposed to pay off somewhere along the way. You absorbed the idea that if you just do the right thing, the world owes you something back, maybe more success, maybe more status, or the partner you want, or the feeling of having won, the feeling of significance, of finally being somebody. You’ve been treating your own virtue like an investment, and you’ve been quietly checking the returns constantly and been disappointed.

I’m not telling you that feelings and emotions don’t matter. Of course, they matter. The problem isn’t that you want to feel good. The problem is that you’re keeping score using the wrong metric. No ethical tradition in the history of the world, not a single one, ever promised you the payout you’ve been deceived into waiting on.

So, where did this score keeping come from, the idea that if you are good, then you should get this payoff in terms of your feelings? It helps us see what the ancient traditions actually believed, because they all assumed the same order of cause and effect, but we modern people have reversed it. [04:04.7]

Okay, the order was this—you live well, and then good feelings follow. The feelings, the emotions are the effect. Living well is the cause. Aristotle, the Stoics, Confucius, the whole long line of them, I’m just raising three examples, they didn’t tell you to chase the feeling. They told you to build the good life, and they treated the good feeling as what shows up when the good life is built correctly. The effect is downstream of the cause. It’s that simple.

Now, look at what the modern wellness industry has been telling you and what they did with that. It kept the effect and threw out the cause. It took the good emotions that used to arrive at the end of a life well-lived and cut it loose from the life entirely, and sold it back to you on its own—calm in a subscription, pleasure on demand, validation by the metric, belonging for the price of admission—each one packaged as a product that you could buy without doing any of the actual living that was supposed to produce it. [05:10.8]

This is the modern inversion. The effect got separated from the proper cause and then got put on a shelf, and then had a price tag attached to it, and then it sells, because buying the effect is so much easier than creating the cause.

Hopefully, this is already landing with you. Maybe you’re the achiever who tried everything on that shelf. You bought the calm and the pleasure, and the validation and the belonging, one product at a time, but you’re still empty or flat. The reason is plain once you see the proper order. You’ve been optimizing the symptom, but ignoring what actually produces it.

You went after the feeling directly, over and over, with maybe better and better methods, and the feeling kept slipping, because it was never the kind of thing that you could buy on its own. It only ever came as an effect, and you’ve been treating it as if it were the cause. If good emotions are the effect and not the cause, then the obvious question is, what the actual cause really is. [06:12.4]

Let’s start with the thinker who gave the Western world its first serious answer, and we’ll start with him because he’s the most generous of the bunch. Aristotle had a word for the good life, eudaimonia. It usually gets translated as something like happiness, but that translation has done a lot of damage, because the moment you hear happiness, you might think of a mood, a pleasure, a good feeling, a state you’re in on a pleasant Tuesday afternoon. But that’s not what Aristotle meant.

Eudaimonia isn’t a mood at all. It’s an activity. It’s the activity of living well carried out across a whole life, the soul working day after day in accordance with what virtue demands. Sit now with how strange that probably sounds to the modern ear. We ask nowadays whether someone is happy, and what we mean is how they feel right now. [07:07.1]

Aristotle would say you can’t answer that by checking a person’s mood. You’d have to observe the whole life. Aristotle has an argument that people call the function argument, like a flute player has a characteristic activity, which in this case is playing the flute, and a good flute player is the one who plays it well. A human being has a characteristic activity, too. According to Aristotle, the good human being is the one who performs that characteristic activity well over a lifetime, not the one who happens to feel good this particular morning.

Pleasure, though, still has a place in this, because Aristotle is no enemy of pleasure. He isn’t the grim type, telling you to grit your teeth through a joyless life of duty. Pleasure just isn’t the main target. For Aristotle, pleasure could complete the activity of living well. It comes along with living well, the way flourishing accompanies health. [08:08.7]

Flourishing doesn’t cause your health. It’s what a healthy thing creates or does, or ensues into. Pleasure is the same. It accompanies the good activity. It crowns it. It comes from the good life, but it doesn’t produce the good life, and you don’t aim at pleasure directly.

Now, on this view, being good and having good emotions mostly line up, so Aristotle’s good person takes pleasure in acting well. He enjoys his own courage. He enjoys his own generosity, his own honesty. There’s no split in him between what he should do and what he wants to do. In fact, Aristotle would say that if you do the right thing while resenting every second of it, you haven’t fully become good. You aren’t yet the kind of person who finds the good enjoyable. You’re dragging yourself toward it, which beats not going at all, but it isn’t the finished state. The finished state delights in the good itself. [09:05.4]

So, the feelings, the emotions, they’re welcome here. Nobody is asking you to give those up, but notice the order. Alright, even for Aristotle, the feeling doesn’t come first. It isn’t what you reach for and it’s never the measure of whether the life was good. The life is the activity over the long term of the span of the lifetime, and then the feeling just rides along with that. It’s a byproduct.

Now, let’s move forward in time from Aristotle to a group who agreed with him about the order, but then pushed it much harder. Okay, these are the Stoics. Some examples are Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. Okay, people hear Stoic, but then picture a man with no feelings, jaw clenched, just enduring. Okay, that’s a caricature, and it gets them actually exactly backwards. [09:55.6]

The Stoics aren’t joyless. They actually have a word for the good emotion that comes from living well, eupatheiai. It’s the set of feelings that come from living well, and the chief feeling here is joy. The sage, the person who has gotten this right, feels joy, real joy flowing straight out of a life lived in accordance with the good. So, the intrinsic good feeling that Aristotle put at the top of the climb is still here. It’s just, it doesn’t disappear. But here’s what does change—the sage doesn’t chase pleasure and the sage doesn’t fear loss.

Okay, watch what happens to everything that you’ve been keeping score of, your health, your reputation, the people you love or care about, or respect or that you want to love you. The Stoics look at all of it and they are indifferent to it. They don’t deem it worthless. They’d rather have that health than lose it. They’d rather keep their friends than bury them. [10:54.8]

They mean indifferent in a very precise sense. There are things you can lose without losing the good life. Your virtue is yours. Your goodness is yours, but everything else is on loan, and the terms of the loan are not up to you. Picture the strange position that this puts the Stoic sage in. He enjoys his health, but he holds it loosely, knowing it can go. He loves the people that he loves, but knows that they’re immortal. He keeps his reputation, but holds it with an open hand. The joy is real, but none of it rests on the scoreboard staying lit. He’s not attached to any of it in that Buddhist sense of attachment.

Now, here’s the test: if your peace depends on the scoreboard reading a certain way, the number, the title, the people still in their seats admiring you, then your peace isn’t actually yours. You’ve handed it to external circumstances, and those external circumstances will do whatever they want with it. [11:56.7]

The market might turn. The diagnosis comes back. That person leaves you, and the piece that you thought you owned walks out the door with them, because it turns out it was never yours to begin with. It was theirs, and you just had it on loan from them, but you had mistaken the loan for the real thing. The Stoic keeps the joy and lets go of the grip, the attachment.

Okay, cross now from the Mediterranean to China several centuries earlier to a teacher who built his whole picture of the good life out of cultivation. Okay, this is Confucius. The word at the center of this is junzi. It gets translated a lot of different ways as the gentleman or the exemplary person, or the person of character. Okay, what matters is what the junzi does.

He works on himself. He orders his own conduct day after day, the way a craftsman works a piece of jade, slowly, gradually, with attention. He gets his relationships right to his parents, his friends, his ruler, the people under his care. The good life for Confucius is this work of cultivation and right relation carried out patiently over a lifetime. [13:06.6]

What about the joy? The joy arrives as the natural accompaniment to the work. It isn’t the target. Okay, so listen to how the Analects opens. The very first lines aren’t a method for producing pleasure. Instead they ask, “Isn’t it a joy to learn and to keep practicing what you’ve learned? Isn’t it a delight when a friend comes from far away?” That’s how the book begins, not with how to feel good, but with the quiet pleasures that come along when a life is being cultivated well. The feeling rides on the activity, ensues from the activity, exactly as Aristotle said, exactly, in fact, as the Stoics said.

There’s one more thing in Confucius, though, and it points toward where we’re going next. The junzi holds firm in adversity. Confucius is clear that hard times don’t excuse you from being good. They’re simply the test of whether you ever were. [14:06.8]

When everything is comfortable, anyone can look like a person of character. Take the comfort away, though, and bring real pressure down on someone, and then you find out what they’re actually made of. The junzi holds firm, but what he called the “small man” falls apart and starts cutting corners.

Confucius even goes further than that, far enough that it should stop you in your tracks. There are things that a person of character will choose over comfort, over safety, over security, over life itself. He says the resolute person will not seek to live at the expense of harming what is good. He’ll give up his life to preserve it.

I’m going to pause here so it sinks in. He says it’s not about feeling good. It’s not about staying comfortable. It’s not even about staying alive. There are things worth more than all of those. [15:00.8]

Sometimes, the real problem isn’t more effort or more motivation. It’s knowing the right direction. A lot of people listening to this podcast are capable and driven. Things still look fine on paper, but life still feels strangely flat. When that happens, more advice usually isn’t the answer. Clarity is.

I’ve put together a short assessment that takes about two minutes. It’s simply a way to see which area deserves your attention most right now, whether that’s relationships, decision-making, or how pressure is being handled day to day. Based on your responses, you’ll be sent a short set of master classes related to that area.

If that sounds useful, you can find it at DTPhD.com/quiz. That’s “dtphd.com/quiz.”

Okay, to see what this looks like in a real life, we need someone who lived it. Okay, this someone is my favorite philosopher of all time. His name is Wang Yangming and he’s one of the most important philosophers China ever produced, but forget his reputation and just listen to what happened to him. [16:07.0]

Around 1506, he’s a mid-ranking official in his mid-30s. The emperor’s court is run by a eunuch named Liu Jin, and Liu Jin runs it the way a corrupt eunuch always runs things. Anyone who speaks up gets jailed or worse, so of course, a group of officials speak up and then they get imprisoned.

Wang Yangming, who could have kept his head down and kept his career, writes a memorial defending them and sends that to the Imperial Court. Okay, he knew what this would cost. That’s the part to hold on to. This wasn’t a man who stumbled into trouble. He saw the bill before he ordered, but he ordered anyway. Then the bill came due. [16:49.9]

Okay, so Liu Jin had him stripped and flogged at court. The record says 40 strokes done in front of his peers, beaten bloody and unconscious, and then imprisoned, and then after that exiled to the far reaches of the empire to a place called Longchang, a malarial outpost out in Guizhou, the far edge of nowhere, really, and he was no longer a governor or a magistrate, but instead was given the post of a lowly postmaster. This is about as low as the system back then went.

On the road there, Liu Jin sent men to kill him, and he barely got away. Picture where this takes him. He arrives with nothing. He built his own shelter. When his servants fall sick in that disease-ridden place, he’s the one nursing them. By every measure that the modern wellness industry sells you, this man’s life is over. He failed. There is no calm here. There’s no pleasure, no comfort, no security, no validation, no status, no scoreboard left to read. They took all of it. [17:54.4]

Now, here’s what he does when he reaches what most people would call rock bottom. It’s there, stripped of everything, that his philosophy finally arrives. He had spent years looking for the good out in the world, the way everyone told him to, hunting for it in things and in books and in rules out there, but in that miserable place, he finally sees it. This is the famous Longchang enlightenment.

The good was never out there to be hunted down. It was already in the human heart, the conscience, the thing in you that knows right from wrong before you’ve had to reason yourself into it. That’s where the good lives, and he spent the rest of his life experiencing this and teaching it.

Okay, so sit with what we’ve covered here. Really, it’s a summary of an incredible time and an incredible life, just a little snippet of it, what he discovered now, rock bottom down there. He wasn’t gritting his teeth or white-knuckling through the misery. He let go of the gains and the losses, the wins and the humiliations, both sides, and he found his peace. [19:06.4]

In under three years, around that period in exile, having lost everything that the modern world thinks is important, he wrote nearly 100 poems about the landscape around him. The man writes 100 poems about how beautiful the mountains are, from the bottom of a pit that his enemies threw him into. Stripped of every external reward, he still had the other kind, the clean conscience, the peace, the joy.

That’s the proof in a single life of the whole thing that I’ve been telling you. The good life isn’t feelingless. It’s full of feeling, just a different kind, the kind that nobody can take from you, because it was never sitting on the scoreboard for them to take. These are the rewards that were, in fact, yours the whole time while you were busy checking the scoreboard for the other ones. [19:55.7]

Now, let me give you a few examples I came up with these just before hitting record. This is not a comprehensive list by any means. Okay, the clean conscience comes first, and it’s worth more than most people realize. Think about what it’s actually worth to lie down at night with nothing to defend or protect, no story that you have to keep straight, no version of events that you’re managing, no part of the day that you’re hoping nobody looks at too closely, no shame you’re hiding.

Most people have no idea how heavy that burden is until they put it down. Why? Because they’ve been carrying it for years or decades, so long that it just feels like the weight of being awake. A clean conscience isn’t like a dramatic feeling. Instead, it’s the absence of a low background dread that you had stopped noticing, and it’s available to anyone willing to actually be good, and it’s not available to anyone who isn’t at any price. [20:53.0]

Okay, then there’s the connection to what you’ve served. When you give yourself to something good, a cause, a person, a piece of work that matters maybe, you stop being a spectator of your own life. There’s a huge difference between being a part of something bigger versus watching it from the stands, and you know that difference in your body.

The man in the stands has opinions, but the man on the field has a stake. He’s connected to the outcome because he put something of himself into it, and that connection is the reward itself, and it’s the one the spectator never gets, no matter how good his seat is.

Compassion is the same. When you feel compassion actually move through you, real deep moving concern for someone who needs it, the kind that makes you do something, that feeling, that emotion, is its own reward, right there in the having of it. It isn’t like a deposit. You’re not putting it in an account to draw on later, expecting the universe to pay you back for being kind. The kindness felt from the inside was already your payment. [22:02.8]

If you’re keeping a ledger, totaling up your good deeds and then waiting for the return, you’ve turned compassion into a mere transaction and lost the very thing that made it worth feeling, and as we’ll see later, you probably didn’t even feel compassion in the first place.

Contribution works the same way. The experience of having added something, having built it, fixed it, carried it, created it, made it better than you found it, that’s a reward in itself, in the doing and having done, but only if you give it as a gift and not an invoice that’s due later.

The moment you hand someone your contribution with a bill staple to it, expecting gratitude, expecting credit, expecting it to come back around, then you have spent the actual reward before you collected it. But given freely, the reward is yours. Given as an invoice, then it’s just another entry on the scoreboard that you’re already losing on. [22:59.7]

Here’s maybe the most important one that ties it all together—love. Love is its own reward. A lot of young people have never actually experienced love. A relationship, the true thing, is a place to give, not a place to get.

I know how weird that must sound to someone who has spent his whole life optimizing, because everything in you wants to ask what it pays. “What do I get out of this?” But the person who walks into love asking that question has already missed the whole point of it and will, unfortunately, never feel the real thing. That person is just standing inside the cathedral asking where the gift shop is.

The one who gives without waiting for a return, without keeping the ledger, without checking what’s coming back to him, he gets the only thing in there actually worth having, and it was never on the scoreboard. It couldn’t be. You cannot get it by getting. You can only have it by giving it away. [23:58.1]

So, it comes down to two currencies. The first is the scoreboard: pleasure, status, validation, the wins that you can point to, the number in the account or your portfolio, the title, the people in their seats applauding you. That’s the currency you’ve probably been keeping score in your whole life.

But every wisdom tradition through the ages and around the world, and we’ve walked through a few of them, agree on this. None of them ever promised it to you for being good. Aristotle didn’t. The Stoics call it being indifferent. Confucius said the person of character holds firm when it’s all taken away and then Wang Yangming lost the whole scoreboard outright, right? He lost the career, the rank, the safety, the security is standing in front of his peers for doing one right thing. [24:45.3]

The second currency is the one that you probably weren’t counting, and probably didn’t even know about. The clean conscience, as an example, the joy that comes from a life lived well, the love that you give away without an invoice. This is what actually comes with living well, but the catch, the part that drives the optimizer crazy, is that you can’t buy it on its own. It only ever shows up as the side effect of the good life. If you take the shortcut and go straight for the feelings, you get nothing, because it was never for sale. [25:19.0]

I know all this because I went looking for that first currency with everything I had. After I left the religion, the faith I was raised in, I went straight into hedonism, which I thought was just the logical outcome of evolutionary psychology. The rule was simple: get all the pleasure I could, as long as I didn’t harm anyone doing it, and my idea of pleasure back then was like an adolescent boy’s, the Playboy lifestyle, the whole thing.

I went after it the way I went after everything else in my life up till then. I went all in, and I got it. Actually, I got more than I bargained for, and I ended up in what I considered to be near the top of it. The first thing waiting at the top, though, wasn’t emptiness. Not yet. It was anxiety. [26:01.5]

Every high came in a little lower than the one before, so I had to keep raising the pace just to feel anything at all, and after a while, the pace itself was the problem. Then the emptiness came later. Once the chasing stopped working, I had optimized my entire life for the feeling. I’d gotten the feeling on demand, more of it than most people ever get, but there was nothing under it, nothing substantial in it, nothing that stayed.

If you stay on that road and you keep score in the wrong currency right up until you die, still waiting on the payout, that’s going to be your life. Picture a decade of this, then two decades of this, doing things partly so you’ll be seen doing them, checking whether the goodness has paid off yet, in status, in affection, in peace, and feeling cheated when it hasn’t. A whole life of presenting a bill that the universe never agreed to pay. [26:53.5]

A person who lives that way never understands that he was owed nothing, and he never once notices that he already had the thing in himself sitting right there in his hands the whole time, but never appreciated it, never experienced it. Instead, he was staring past it at the scoreboard.

Now, take the other road. You stop keeping score. Your attention comes off what being good owes you and settles on the good itself, and the rewards that you’ve written off turn out to have been there the whole time. The clean conscience, the connection, the love you give without needing it to come back. They were actually never missing. You were just facing the wrong way. You were facing the wrong way because you never understood what good meant in the first place.

Think about what you were actually doing. You were being good in order to get paid for it down the road. You did the decent thing, and then you turned, half-consciously, to see what it earned you, the credit, the standing, the affection, the money, the status, the sense that you were finally somebody significant. [27:58.3]

But a good deed done to get paid is not a good deed. It’s just a transaction with a good behavior out front. A person who is kind so that he’ll be admired isn’t kind. He’s just playing a part, and the kindness was just an act. A person who gives, so that he’ll get, isn’t actually generous. He’s investing and calling it generosity.

The wanting to be paid doesn’t sit politely beside the goodness and then leave the goodness intact. Instead, it devours it. It hollows out the good act and leaves the outside of it standing there like a shell, empty like a storefront with nothing behind the glass.

So, when you checked the scoreboard and found nothing substantial on it, you were right, there was nothing. There was never going to be anything there, not because being good doesn’t pay, but because you were never being good. You are performing it and waiting for the bill to clear, but the performance was never the good itself. [28:59.8]

Good is done because it’s good. It’s not a deposit or down payment on respect or love or peace, or a long game where you look like you’re not keeping score while you actually do keep score the whole time. You do the good thing because it’s good. There’s no further reason, and there can’t be one.

This sounds like a trick, but it isn’t. Stop doing good to be paid. If you do that, the rewards no one can take from you will arrive as a side effect on their own. They don’t come as payment. They can only come as what that good life is like lived from the inside.

Wang Yangming had nothing that the world cared about. They flogged him, exiled him, sent men to kill him on the road, took his career in the rank and the safety, security and status, and every face that used to applaud him turned on him. [29:56.2]

He sat in the disease-ridden outpost at that time considered the edge of the empire and wrote the best 100 poems of his life about the mountains, because the good life was never the scoreboard. It was the life. He had a clean conscience and a clear heart in the externally worst place they could send him, but he knew exactly what he had.

So, stop asking what being good will get you. You were never owed a thing, and the asking was the whole mistake. Do the good because it’s good and for no other reason. That isn’t the price you pay for the good life. That is the good life, and the good news is, it was available to you on the worst day you’ve ever had, the same as it was to a beaten man writing the most amazing poems at the edge of the world. [30:53.0]