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Luke_Grecki comments on Humans are not automatically strategic - Less Wrong
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Likewise. I somewhat envy those who can form or decide "doing (or achieving) X will make me happy", and it really turns out to be true (whether it's an accurate or merely self-fulfilling prophecy doesn't matter too much).
I've considered whether this sort of confusion (about what goals will give lasting happiness in their pursuit or accomplishment) might have a solution in caring less about some things (to lessen constraints until there's a reachable solution).
For example, I like to do things that give me evidence that I'm unusually talented. Perhaps if I gave up that reward, I would find myself doing things that are more pleasurable or valuable.
I definitely don't think scorched earth Buddhist "don't care about anything" is a good move for me. I'm trying to give up just what seems optional and harmful (while expecting sometimes to find that I can't and so shouldn't try to, even though a hyper-rational person would be able to).
Don't ask what will make you happy, ask what future conditions you would prefer to experience, and what self-descriptions you would prefer to judge yourself as having.
Why? Because our brains aren't evolved to optimize happiness, they're evolved to steer the world to more-preferred states, and to optimize our expectations of others' perception of us. So if you start from those points, your inquiry (and subsequent optimizations) will benefit from hardware assistance.
(Whereas, if you try to optimize "what will make me happy", your brain will get confused, and/or try to optimize what things, socially speaking are "supposed to" make you happy, i.e. what your brain expects would cause your peers/tribe members to judge you as being happy.)
Have you written elsewhere in more detail about this? I'm particularly interested in any tips you have on using our social expectation machinery successfully.
Well, I did a multi-part video series/audio CD on this topic a couple months ago (called, "The Secrets of 'Meaning' and 'Purpose'"); my comment above was more or less an attempt to summarize one of its key ideas in a couple of sentences. I've also written about it in my newsletter before, but none of these materials are publicly available at the moment, even for sale.
(I keep meaning to put them up for sale but I'm usually too busy getting my current month CD, newsletter, and workshop put together to spend much time on trying to get more business. Probably I should think more strategically and move "posting on LW" a bit lower on my priorities... ;-) )
Think character/identity-priming. What "kind of person" do you want to be, in the sense of "the kind of person who would X"... where X is whatever you would like to motivate yourself to be/do. What kind of person do you want to see yourself as? Be sure to see it from the outside, as if it were someone else.
Experiments show that "kind-of-personness" priming has a big effect on people's decisions; when our identity is primed as belonging to a particular group, we automatically behave more like a stereotype of that group. So, pick what group(s) you want to prime yourself as a member of, and go for it. ;-)