Benjamins

The second man to ever walk on the moon came home and ended up selling Cadillacs at a dealership in Beverly Hills. Buzz Aldrin was 39 when he stepped onto the moon in 1969. About two years later he was sitting in an Air Force doctor's office in San Antonio, telling someone for the first time that he was depressed. By the end of the '70s he'd been through two divorces and a drinking problem that nearly killed him. If you've ever hit a big goal and felt weirdly flat a week later, you've had a tiny version of what happened to him. And there's a real reason for it. Back in the '90s a neuroscientist named Wolfram Schultz recorded single dopamine neurons in monkeys while giving them juice. When the juice came out of nowhere, the neurons lit up. Then he started flashing a light right before the juice, and pretty quickly the monkeys figured out what the light meant. The neurons started firing at the light instead. The juice itself, the thing they actually wanted, didn't get a spike anymore. And if the light flashed and no juice showed up, the neurons dropped below normal. So your brain cashes in on the dream the moment it starts looking real. By the time you actually get there, it already spent the money, and the only thing left that can still surprise you is losing it. That's the anxiety this guy is talking about, the one about making it and becoming somebody, and every one of us is walking around with that wiring. Jim Carrey learned this the hard way. He was the first actor Hollywood ever paid $20 million for one movie, and in 2005 he told a reporter he wished everybody could get rich and famous and get everything they ever dreamed of, just so they could see it's not the answer. Honestly, the oldest version of this video is in the Bible. Ecclesiastes is written as a king in Jerusalem looking back on his life. He built houses, planted vineyards, dug pools and stacked up silver and gold, and then he called all of it hevel. He uses that word 38 times. It means vapor, like your breath on a cold morning that's gone in a second. Most English Bibles just say "vanity." My favorite part comes in chapter 9. He tells you to eat your bread with joy, and a few verses later he says "whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." The guy who called everything vapor still told you to go all in. Aldrin got sober in 1978 and spent the decades after that trying to get people to Mars, chasing the next big thing without needing it to make him somebody.