Naval Ravikant: "You're going to die. It's all going to zero. What's there to stress about?"
"Stress is when your mind has two conflicting desires at once. You want to be liked, but you want to do something selfish. You don't want to go to work, but you want to make money. You have two conflicting desires, and that's stress."
Most people use stress and anxiety interchangeably. Naval says they're different things:
"Anxiety is this pervasive, unidentifiable stress where you're stressed out all the time and you're not even sure why. The reason is you have so many unresolved problems that have piled up in your life, you can no longer identify what the problems are. There's this mountain of garbage in your mind. A little bit is poking out the top like an iceberg; that's anxiety. But underneath, there's a lot of unresolved things."
His fix for it is thinking about death:
"One big anxiety resolver for me is just ruminating on death. You're going to die. It's all going to zero. You cannot take anything with you. If you can keep that idea in front of you at all times, what's there to stress about?"
Which raises a question. If nothing matters, isn't all time wasted?
"What is wasted time? Everything is wasted time in a sense because nothing matters in the ultimate. But in each moment, it's the only thing that matters. So if you're doing something you want to do and you're fully there for it it's not wasted time. If your mind is running away, wishing you were somewhere else, anticipating the future, regretting the past, that's wasted time. That's time you're not present for."
And the part most people miss:
"People get worried about dying and no longer being here. But they don't realize that so much of their life is spent not being here in any case."
This lands differently when you’re already past the worrying about paying for your home or taxes or whatever. Naval started poor and has said money removes “money problems” but the “it’s all going to zero so why stress” part still feels like a luxury view once the bills are no longer the hardest thing a person is managing. Presence does help but it doesn’t pay the mortgage or put food on the table. 😉
Translated from Portuguese
You're going to die. Everything goes to zero. Why stress out?
Stress is having two conflicting desires at the same time.
Anxiety is the accumulation of unresolved problems in the mind.
Thinking about death dissolves anxiety: nothing matters in the end.
Wasted time is when the mind is not present in the now.
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