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randallsquared comments on Choose To Be Happy - Less Wrong
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This post's basic claims:
If you 'should' feel bad about bad things (e.g. suffering), you 'should' feel bad about them in proportion to their magnitude.
Doing 1 is not a good idea, because a. it's intrinsically bad to feel bad, and b. feeling bad does not help you to fight bad things.
Therefore you should try not to feel bad about bad things, only to alleviate them.
All of which boils down to the proposition "It is instrumentally irrational to feel bad about bad things."
The problem is that 2.b. is blatantly false. Human beings are not capable of completely disconnecting action from emotion. Certainly, if you feel bad enough then due to the way the human brain works it's possible that you will (instrumentally irrationally) lapse into depression, and therefore do less to achieve your goals than if you never felt bad at all. And there are obviously cases in which what you feel emotionally can be overridden by calculation (e.g. trolley problem for many utilitarians). But given that no one performs explicit calculations to determine even most of their actions in more than a few small parts of their life, emotions determine most of our decisions. Do you really believe that someone who felt happy despite knowing about the state of suffering in the world would be more strongly motivated to reduce suffering than someone who felt a great sadness and a burning desire to stop it every time they thought about it? Do you think being happily mortal is the best emotional state for someone crusading to stop death?
If your actual goal is to end suffering -- if your moral system dictates, as most of ours do, that reducing suffering is currently by far the best thing you could do, and you actually want, unlike most of us, to follow your morals to their conclusions -- then you will do your absolute best to make your emotions about suffering dwarf all other emotions, because that is what will make you spend a life reducing suffering, and not any amount of abstract calculation.
On the other hand, if your real goal is to be as happy as you can, this post is great advice. But so is wireheading.
Sadness and burning desire are not in the same bucket. Sadness doesn't make me want to do anything at all. It quickly leads to depression, which is about the most unmotivated it's possible to feel. Certainly when I'm happy, I'm more motivated to do something about saddening things than when I'm actually sad.
Now, anger is an extremely motivating emotion that might work better for these purposes...