The More Successful You Are The Longer You'll Live! Will Storr

TL;DR

Status pursuit is a fundamental, often subconscious human drive that directly affects health and longevity: higher status leads to better health outcomes even when controlling for lifestyle and diet. The myth of unlimited self-control (e.g.

Key insights

• 99% of self-help books never mention genes; a huge amount of who we are is determined by genetics and early childhood wiring, and this is not fully fixable.
• The self-esteem movement’s core claim (high self-esteem causes success) is backwards: success causes high self-esteem; correlation was mistaken for causation.
• Perfectionism has increased massively since the 1980s neoliberal revolution and is implicated in suicide, eating disorders, steroid abuse, and self-harm.