The Cancelled Professor: Husbands Are More Dangerous Than You Think! Men Are Hardwired To Cheat! Science Proves Monogamy Isn't Real! - Gad Saad

1. Prioritize Spouse and Profession Choices

Recognize that selecting your spouse and profession are the two most critical decisions for long-term happiness, as they profoundly impact daily well-being and overall life satisfaction.

2. Nurture Social Connections

Prioritize and actively build meaningful social connections, as the quality of your relationships is a crucial predictor of long-term health and happiness, even more so than physical health markers.

3. Cultivate Creative Work

Pursue work that allows you to instantiate your creative impulse, as the act of creation (e.g., writing, art, cooking) is a direct path to purpose, meaning, and occupational happiness.

4. Seek Temporal Freedom in Work

Strive for a profession that offers ’temporal freedom’ and avoids ‘scheduling asphyxia,’ allowing you to control your time and work in a way that aligns with your personal rhythm, contributing to occupational happiness.

5. Lower Expectations of World’s Purity

Internalize that the world is often ‘ugly and messy’ and does not always conform to a ‘purity bubble’ of personal conduct; lowering these expectations can lead to less disappointment and greater happiness.

6. Activate Inner Honey Badger

Cultivate resilience, toughness, and ideological fierceness in defending first principles, like a ‘honey badger,’ to navigate challenges and stand firm in your convictions.

7. Prioritize Truth Over Ideology

Adjudicate scientific findings based on their truth and evidence, not on whether they support or contradict your personal ideology, to avoid being ‘parasitized by bad ideologies.’

8. Embrace Unbiased Research

Do not believe in forbidden knowledge; pursue all research, even on sensitive topics like group or sex differences, as long as it’s conducted in an unbiased manner following the scientific method.

9. Seek Assortative Mating for Long-Term Relationships

For long-term relationship success, prioritize assortative mating, where partners share similar values, goals, and mindsets, as ‘birds of a feather flock together’ more effectively than ‘opposites attract.’

10. Maintain Your Mate Value

Actively work to maintain or improve your mate desirability score over time, as a significant divergence in mate value between partners can put a huge stressor on a relationship and predict divorce.

11. Enhance Your Mate Desirability Score

Improve your mate desirability by working on traits like assertiveness, ambition, and intelligence (e.g., by reading more and expanding vocabulary), and prioritizing physical fitness (e.g., hitting the treadmill), as mating is a compensatory process where strengths can offset weaknesses.

12. Develop Theory of Mind and Self-Awareness

Cultivate self-awareness and ’theory of mind’ – the ability to understand others’ perspectives and read social cues – to engage in meaningful social interactions and avoid being oblivious to others’ discomfort.

13. Practice Social Modulation

Approach social interactions with modulation, understanding when and how to act appropriately (e.g., complimenting someone in the right context and measure) to avoid harassment or social faux pas.

14. Understand Mismatch Hypothesis

Educate yourself on the ‘mismatch hypothesis,’ which explains how behaviors adaptive in ancestral environments can become maladaptive in modern society (e.g., preference for fatty foods), to avoid falling into behavioral traps.

15. Seek Moderation in Behavior

Recognize that many behaviors, including potentially problematic ones like pornography consumption, are not inherently bad but become dysfunctional when they exceed a ‘sweet spot’ of moderation and go to the ‘bad side of the curve.’

16. Recognize Pornography’s Traps

Understand that pornography is an ’exaptation’ that exploits evolved male preferences for visual stimuli and sexual variety, acting as a behavioral trap that can lead to addiction if consumed excessively.

17. Explain, Don’t Justify Behavior

Understand that scientifically explaining the evolutionary roots of a behavior, such as cheating, does not equate to morally justifying or endorsing that behavior.

18. Navigate Darwinian Desires

Recognize that while evolutionary drives exist (e.g., desire for fatty foods or sexual variety), humans also evolved self-control and a moral compass to navigate and regulate these desires for a balanced life.

19. Uphold Laws and Consequences

Understand that breaking laws, even seemingly minor ones, undermines the fundamental principles of cause and effect and predictable societal order, leading to systemic breakdown.

20. Use Data to Solve Problems

When addressing complex social problems like child abuse, identify the biggest predictors through honest scientific study to develop effective intervention strategies.

21. Pursue Truth and Defend Freedom

Devote your life to the pursuit of truth through the scientific method and the defense of freedoms, ensuring no knowledge is off-limits for research or discussion.

22. Trust Science’s Autocorrection

Understand that science is self-correcting; initially unorthodox ideas may face rejection but can eventually become accepted truth through rigorous evidence, so be open to challenging prevailing whims.

23. Understand Behavior’s Four Modules

Analyze human behaviors through four Darwinian modules: survival (e.g., food preferences), reproductive (e.g., sexual signaling), kin selection (investing in relatives), and reciprocal altruism (reciprocity in social bonds).

24. Align Investment with Genetic Relatedness

Recognize that humans, like many animal species, have evolved a calculus to invest more resources (e.g., larger gifts) in individuals with greater genetic relatedness.

25. Acknowledge Biological Influences

Recognize that human behavior, including consumer choices and social interactions, is fundamentally shaped by biological and evolutionary forces like sexual and natural selection.