Natural Law and Happiness: Remove Before You Add

The more you live in line with natural law, the happier you're going to be. Hardly anyone talks about it, because we're surrounded by a different promise: that pleasure will make you happy. That buying stuff will make you happy. A new iPhone, new sneakers, the newest AI model.

Natural law points the other way. Walk more, and you'll be happier. Eat real food, and you'll be happier. Spend time with actual people, and you'll be happier. Fight how you were made (sweets every night, isolation, the phone instead of people) and you'll be unhappier, no matter what you add on top.

That's the whole argument. The rest of this piece is how I'm applying it, and the one-minute review I use to stay honest.

What is natural law?

Natural law is, essentially, how you were created, and the idea that we flourish when we live in line with it. Men and women were created differently, and there's a natural law for human beings first. It has been discussed for well over a thousand years. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote about it at length in the 13th century, and the Church has taught it ever since. In Aquinas's account, our nature inclines us toward a short list of basic goods. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on the natural law tradition names them as "life, procreation, knowledge, society, and reasonable conduct."

My shorthand: go back to the first principles of how you were created, in every area of your life. Sleep. Food. Movement. Relationships. Work. Then ask whether your days are moving toward those things or away from them.

I'll be honest: I haven't read nearly enough of Aquinas yet. What I've noticed is practical. Every area of my life where I moved closer to natural law got better.

Why does fighting natural law make us unhappy?

Because almost everything around us pulls us away from how we were made, and we pay for the distance. Look at a normal day now. Independent, alone, on the phone, eating badly, doing as little as possible, watching the world instead of joining it. We're about as far from natural law as we can be.

Then we look for something to add that fixes it. A drug: GLP-1s right now, and next, probably something an AI designs for your genome. I'm saying the fix usually isn't another addition. It's a reduction.

We live in an addition economy. Add to the house. Add to the body: a tattoo, a piercing, weight. Add followers, friends, content, subscriptions. No wonder people have subscription fatigue.

It wasn't always like this. People built things to last, for the people who came after them. Consumerism as we know it is maybe an 80- or 100-year experiment. Adam Curtis's 2002 BBC series The Century of the Self traces how 20th-century marketing learned to sell to our desires. My read is that the same story runs through every award show, MVP ring and sales contest: it's all about you, you, you.

So the real question isn't what to add. It's which direction you're moving. If it's away from how you were made, you'll keep getting less happy.

How do the layers of a good life build on each other?

I think about life in six layers, and that's the basis of what I'm building. Each layer rests on the ones below it. If a lower layer is a lie, everything above it gets shaky. Here are the four that matter most for this piece, plus the top one.

I'll go through all six in another piece. Here's how the first four connect.

Truth: there is a God, and you are not Him

The base layer is spirituality, and it's the grounding of truth: there is a God, and you are not Him. There is a God, and He came in the flesh, Jesus Christ. If you don't have that grounding first, it's hard to build anything on top of it, because you're living in lowercase-t truth instead of capital-T Truth.

If you believe, at the very least, that something greater than you created you, or is bigger than you, that's a foundation to move on to health. It's humbling. You have to accept that you're not the greatest being there is, even though social media, TV, commercials and maybe your boss keep telling you that you are.

Health: what you consume becomes what you think

What you consume becomes your next thoughts, and your thoughts become your thinking. The social media, the podcasts, the drama, the online content: all of it feeds your ideas or your lack of ideas. Your silence or lack of silence. Whether you review your day or never look at it.

Without that review, you're a rudderless ship. I was one for years. I was told how to think, what to buy, what to consume. I needed to impress people with followers, clothes, status, triathlons.

Then there's the physical side. Sleep first: if you're getting less than seven hours a night, you're going to wake up tired and unhappy. That lines up with the joint consensus statement from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society (2015), which recommends that adults regularly sleep seven or more hours a night. After sleep come what you eat and drink, whether you ever fast, and whether you ever sit in silence and direct your own thoughts.

Relationships: honesty starts underneath

If you aren't truthful about the first two layers, you won't be truthful in your relationships. There are so many superficial friendships out there it's embarrassing. People can't be honest with their friends, or with their own families. They're floating in a sea of lies.

You hear it in dating all the time. He's bringing the bare minimum. Well, what are you bringing to the table? If that's the whole conversation, both people are far from natural law. A relationship isn't a transaction, but both people have to bring something. If one person keeps giving and the other only takes, somebody ends up unhappy.

Labor: build something you could put your name to

Your labor is what you create with the time you have. If the first three layers are in chaos, work becomes just showing up, the bare minimum, living for the weekend so you can consume. This is where I think the deepest unhappiness comes from.

Natural law at work is about creation with a lowercase c. A garden that feeds you. A painting you hang up. A business you're proud of. Content, a blog, the written word. Look up at Michelangelo's work and you're in awe. You're looking at capital-T Truth: something bigger than him, bigger than any of us, something eternal, outside the time and space we live in.

Brian Buffini, the real estate coach in the San Diego area, tells a story I keep coming back to. As I heard it, the men in his family were painters, and the question about every job was: can you put your name to that? In an interview with the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce, he says his family's painting business taught him that referrals came from "doing work at a level that I could put my name to."

That's natural law applied to labor. Your gifts and your time, which are really all you have, put into something good, true and built to last.

What does living against natural law look like?

You'll recognize most of this list:

• Oversleeping, or undersleeping.
• Not exercising, or over-exercising.
• Eating like crap, then looking for a pill instead of a change.
• Being impatient, short with people, driving erratically.
• Forgetting someone's dignity. Every person is a creation with a soul, even when they're sinful, even when you disagree with what they do or say, whether they're homeless or a billionaire.
• Living on the phone. It gives you access to everyone, secretly, all the time: the gossip, the burner account, the comments you'd never make face to face.

Then there are the lines that keep it all in place. "Just have a drink after work, it takes the edge off." "It's just a couple of bets." "It's just a game on Sunday."

Is it just a game? Did you go to church? What did you eat and drink during it? What were you talking about, and how much of it was complaining about the job you're going back to on Monday? Or has the game become the outlet for a life you don't like?

That's the uncomfortable part of natural law. The problem usually isn't the other side, the other sex, the other team, your boss or your parents. They're the symptom. The problem is usually you. Me included.

Why should you remove things before adding new ones?

Because you already know what has to go, and adding is always easier than removing. Video games, smoking, drinking, social media, gambling, drama, whatever yours is. We already know the vices: gluttony, sloth, lust. We don't have to fix the world. We can only fix ourselves.

When we come into alignment with natural law and stop being gluttonous, lustful, slothful and sinful, we move into the virtues: charity, goodness, truth. And the joy doesn't stay with us. We want to share it, to be more charitable and more giving with our time, our money, our encouragement, even the way we move through the world. Earl Nightingale, Og Mandino and Brian Tracy wrote about the subconscious mind. I'd put it more simply: deep down, you already know.

When I started exercising, cutting out crappy food, cutting out distractions, social media and the content I shouldn't have been watching, things showed up that I didn't know I was missing. Great relationships. Great women in my life. A kind of happiness and joy I didn't know existed. I've had a twinkle in my eye for the last 60 days that I hadn't had in a while.

That's the strange part. You fix one area, and areas you didn't even know needed fixing start to change. I've already written about how good habits can hide the one problem you keep avoiding, and about the research on how often people overlook taking something away.

I heard James Clear on a podcast this week talk about deleting social media from his phone, then deleting email from it too, because he knew that if it was there, he'd open it. That's removing the temptation instead of relying on willpower. He also talked about his grandfather's motto, PMA: positive mental attitude. That's where I'm going from now on. No more cynicism.

Jocko Willink's line is that discipline equals freedom. When I'm disciplined at the gym, I'm free to have energy all day. Jordan Peterson wrote a book called 12 Rules for Life and is known for talking about order. Maybe we need more rules for our own lives, too: boundaries for what we will and won't accept.

One more distinction, from reading Atomic Habits for the third or fourth time. I don't love talking about good and bad habits. The way I see it, habits are things that happen to us. Routines are things we do. You have a routine when you wake up, when you get home from work, at lunch, before bed. Some you chose knowingly. Most you didn't. Those are the ones to change.

How do you check whether you're living in line with natural law?

Do a one-minute review every day. Not "how do I feel?" Feelings are fleeting. Ask three questions:

1. What do I need to stop doing?
2. What do I need to start doing?
3. What do I need to continue doing?

Then pick the top one. That's your focus going into the weekend, or for next week. One change, not five.

And instead of sorting your life into good and bad habits, ask: what was I created to do and be? Not to have. Having is the last step, the outcome. Get the first two right and you get what matters most to me, the C word: being content. Content with your relationships, your body, your mindset, your decisions and your discipline. Being content is the most pleasurable feeling in life.

My own review, out loud

Here's mine, so this isn't advice for everyone else.

• Marriage. I say I want to get married, but I'm not going on dates. A month ago I went to a dating event, met a fantastic woman I should have taken out, and didn't even get her number. I'm going back tomorrow. How can I say I want something if I'm lying to myself?
• Business. Business is marketing, then sales. If I'm not doing marketing, how do I expect sales? So I'm putting out videos like the one this article came from.
• Triathlon. I call myself a triathlete. I haven't done a triathlon in years, and I haven't swum in weeks.

Three areas. Pick the top one. Adjust. Get back in line.

Ask an AI what to remove first

You can sharpen this review with ChatGPT or Claude. Tell it the truth about your health, your relationships, your money, your job, your outlook, your cynicism, whatever you're hooked on. Who cares? It's a machine, and God already knows everything about you anyway. Then ask something like this:

I've been reading about natural law in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas and Thomism. Based on what you know about me, what are the five areas of my life that are furthest from natural law? For each one, tell me what to remove before I add anything new.

The last line matters. Don't let it hand you a stack of new routines. Make it tell you what to take away first.

Why I'm building Life OS around subtraction

This has been on my heart because I'm building something around it: Life OS, a life operating system. In every conversation I have about it, I keep raising the standard: a premium product with an elite experience. And I think it can be different for one reason. It goes back to basics. It subtracts.

Deep work instead of distracted work. No music, YouTube or podcasts in the background. Laser focus on the next sprint: build it, finish it, move on. It's about creation, and it's about fun. Natural fun, the smiling, energetic, playful kind.

Expect pushback when you start removing things. A life in order is what Satan hates. It's what chaos people hate: the ones who want everyone else in disarray, as far from natural law as possible. Don't fast. Eat the fries. Overdrink on Friday. I already get comments on my Instagram videos. Wait till I start talking about uninstalling apps and blocking websites. "This guy's no fun." Fine. I think it's time we raise our standards, go back to truth, goodness and beauty, and bring order back into our own lives for the people who come after us. That's how we bring it back into the world.

So what are your three things? And which one comes first?