Living the best life from history

Recently I started thinking about rules for living the best life. Yeah, this may sound silly. We hear those stories from people in the past or from different religions that give advice on living, what to do and what not to do in life. Most of the time they sound really great and helpful. And of course there is a survivorship bias, and we recall only the best ones while there are many of them that are not applicable in the modern world.

Examples from them:

“Control what you can, release the rest” — Stoics

“The strong one is not the wrestler — he is the one who controls himself in anger” — Bukhari 6114, Muslim 2609

“Do not dwell in the past or dream of the future — concentrate on the present” — commonly attributed to the Buddha, but the actual source is the Bhaddekaratta Sutta, Majjhima Nikaya 131

These are really great quotes, and most people probably come to the same conclusion with experience over years. So why not just learn them and not make silly mistakes going forward, instead of wasting time and getting to the same conclusion?

The problem was survivorship bias. We can’t just read old books to learn those rules, because most of them are not that useful. So I got the idea: what if we collect only ideas that converge across history, religions, modern medicine, neuroplasticity, psychology and etc.? Obviously the chance of survivorship bias will be lower if many different entities came to the same conclusion without knowing each other.

Thanks to Claude, I was able to find those converged ideas faster. Some of them:

Forgive and drop resentment — carrying grievance is described everywhere as drinking poison yourself. Modern data links hostility and rumination to cardiovascular disease and depression.

Give — zakat, tzedakah, dana, Christian charity. Every tradition made generosity mandatory, not optional. Research replicated it: spending on others boosts happiness more than spending on yourself, and givers sit at both the bottom and top of success distributions — strategic givers win.

Practice stillness — Sabbath, meditation, khalwa (retreat), prayer at dawn. Every tradition builds in mandatory silence. The neuroscience version: insight and consolidation happen in the idle brain, which constant stimulation never allows.

It’s just remarkable that we live a long life, do all this modern research, and still come to the same conclusions that were found thousands of years ago. And of course, living only with rules doesn’t guarantee anything and it’s not the only way of living, but I believe they really help in our life.