This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
How should we live?
What will make us happy?
How can each of us become the person we want to be in our modern world?
There are all kinds of people eager to provide us with answers to these questions.
Mental health gurus, self help authors, social media influencers, even the researchers we feature on the show.
But there is an important mistake we make when we seek out such counselors.
We usually look to sources of wisdom that are around us.
We assume the most valuable answers to our questions must come from people who happen to inhabit the planet at the same time that we do.
But humans have wrestled with the same questions about relationships, purpose and identity for thousands of years.
Wouldnt the wisest people who lived centuries ago have useful things to say about our modern dilemmas?
This week on hidden brain.
And in a companion piece on our subscription feed, hidden brain plus, we explore the insights of five great thinkers from ancient Greece.
Decades of research reveal that our actions don't always match our intentions.
We plan to reach out to a friend who's sick, or we resolve to start a new exercise program.
And then we don't.
Befuddled and surprised, we try again and fall short again.
Psychologists have come up with a number of explanations for this gap between our intentions and our actions and what we can do to close it.
At Yale University, the philosopher Tamar Gendler says questions like this also animated a thinker in ancient Greece.