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Logos01 comments on Be Happier - Less Wrong
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Alright... after reading through much of this, a certain line struck me over and over again.
I have only one question.
Why?
(To clarify: I mean: Why be happy? Why want to be happy? How is it useful? What 'good' is happiness?)
I agree with Will Newsome's comment, especially the second paragraph.
Looking for "happiness" as something distinct from and on top of living the life you truly want is like going to London and looking for "London". A signpost pointing to "London" is only useful when you are far from it.
It's some people's terminal value. It's okay if it's not yours.
Is there a more complicated reason why you feel "fulfilling your potential to impact the world" is important?
Not fulfilling the potential itself, but rather the capacity to do so, (which can only properly be measured by the actualization / acting-upon-of said capacity). As to why -- well, fundamentally it's the notion that maximized instrumentality is the maximally optimal instrumental state. From there the question becomes; "is maximized instrumentality useful?"
That is a "self-proving" terminal value. One need only ask the question to see that it implies its answer. "Is being useful useful?" Well... yes. Whatever it is you want to do or achieve is transparent / irrelevant to this.
Being useful is useful. The "use" of being useful is that it's useful.
These are essentially tautological statements.
So when I ask, "what's the use of being happy" -- saying "It makes you happy" is true (tautologically) but not an expression of utility, whereas having utility is useful because it's useful is also tautologically true but is an expression of utility.
Surely a self-proving value is one where the question "Is X valuable?" is self-proving?
Indeed. Which is why happiness is not a terminal value.
I've read your other responses, and while I don't think my experience will assist you in an attempt to feel the emotion, it may assist in your ability to understand the emotion's desirability.
I find myself more productive when I'm happy; my mind has less cluttered thoughts, due to less anxiety and cognitive duress (I can only best describe this as a state when my subconscious works overtime on thoughts I'm only barely conscious of, and each time I try to deeply contemplate a new thought, somewhere along the halfway point it's unwillingly relegated to my subconscious as something I'm anxious over pops to the top of my mind).
I also notice a correlation between times I am unhappy, and a lowering in my self-confidence. Normally my confidence hovers right below what I would consider 'a level of confidence conducive to hubris', and when happy, it can tend to spill over into this danger zone. When unhappy, my confidence becomes akin to the normative level of confidence I've observed most people whom I've encountered to likely possess. This diminishing of confidence too lessens my productivity, and to reestablish my normative confidence level, I must then end my unhappiness.
Thus, for me, over-abundant happiness can be dangerous, but wading just above the happiness threshold gives me clarity of mind and purposeful focus. Hope this helped elucidate happiness's utility for you.
Cheers!
One fo the many things I dislike about the English language is that it does not readily acknowledge that "happy" is no excluded middle.
I consider my normative state to be just under or around the 'happy' threshold, which I'd consider as between happiness and unhappiness. Happiness essentially equates to a certain chemical balance in the brain, and the same holds true for unhappiness. When the brain releases neurotransmitters equitably, I'd postulate the brain's chemical balance to reflect neutral emotions.
As an aside, I've heard genuinely, innocently laughing releases endorphins just as effectively as exercise; what do you emotively experience when these endorphins release? If you want to hack happiness, exercise or some media you find consistently hilarious might work through pure chemistry.
(Note: I may be mistaken in the neuroscience, though doubt it; I'm working on a piece of paper that declares proficiency in the field.)
Might I recommend following Zaine's description with this paragraph from Luke's How To Be Happy:
IgnoreWe all want to be happy, as apparently you don't, but continue with and happiness is useful for other things, too.2 For example, happiness improves physical health,3 improves creativity,4 and even enables you to make better decisions.5 (It's harder to be rational when you're unhappy.6)
EDIT: note that the formatting is off in copy and paste. Comments do not support subscripts. numbers 2-6 refer to notes in the article
Might be fun?
Sure beats the alternative?
It's compatible with all the good drugs and keeps you off all the bad ones?
Okay. So what?
Does it? Why? What is the alternative? How is 'happy' better?
I can't help but not that this is post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning.
Let's engage in a bit of an exercise. I am a thirty year old man. I have never in my life experienced happiness. I have no prospects of becoming happy. Everyone I have ever seen who was happy seemed, in many fundamental ways, contemptible to me: they were complacent, they were 'satisfied'; they settled and lacked any driving ambition or devotion to achieving the uttermost limits of what they could achieve or become. They did not utilize the maximum of their potential to impact the world, and instead... seem less.
Explain to me why I should want to be like that. What is useful about this? Why is it good?
I am open to total revision of my worldview. I come to this dialogue with a history that I relate only to reveal my preconceptions; that they might be accounted for.
So to hug the hypothesis: "What's so great about being happy?"
Did these people differ in this respect from people who were not happy? And does the post hoc propter hoc thing apply here also?
ETA: If "happiness" is the state of living the life you truly want, then if your wants are small, "happiness" will be easily achieved, but if your wants are large, not so easily. You will therefore observe of people that on average, the greater their ambition, the less their happiness; the greater their happiness, the less their ambition. It would be an error to read the wrong causality into this correlation, and attempt to achieve happiness "by lopping off our desires, ... like cutting off our feet, when we want shoes." (Jonathan Swift)
"Happiness" is neither to be aimed at nor avoided. Doing what you truly want is to be aimed at, and not avoided.
So then you reject altogether the core premise of the article, which also stated; "Actively want to be happier. Motivation and investment matter."
Of course, I can also note that the only way, from my perspective, to guarantee your maximal significance (in terms of material impact upon the world) -- is to always strive for something you don't have; to wish to be more than you are in every possible sense of the word... including the efficacy with which you strive for more.
In other words; to 'condemn' yourself to always be incapable of doing what you "truly want" -- because you will never, ever be good enough at getting better.
What are you doing about it?
That question segfaults in my parser.
I meant, borrowing your words, are you consumed with a driving ambition or devotion to achieving the uttermost limits of what you could achieve or become, utilizing the maximum of your potential to impact the world? Are you always striving for something you don't have; wishing to be more than you are in every possible sense of the word... including the efficacy with which you strive for more?
And if so, what are you doing about it?
Not as much as I should be.
1) Completely overhauling my professional capacity and career-path. In the last two years I've changed tracks to the point where my income has doubled year-over-year from that point, and am set to another 'doubling'.
2) I am systematically seeking out those areas where I am most deficient and am seeking means to bypass, exploit, or otherwise mitigate or account for those deficiencies. I have had setbacks and failures across the board, but I do not allow them to stop me. I have had a total collapse of my professional, personal, social, and romantic lives/livelihoods on more than one occassion, and in each instance I've "dusted myself off and picked back up again" as it were. I'm currently working on how to rebuild my social life (as it is utterly lacking) but I suspect that once my fiscal situation becomes stabilized at the newly higher point I'll have more attentional reserves available to dedicate to this. Another area I am constantly lacking in since my teen years is my physical excellence and dietary habits. I don't have the cognitive/attentional reserves to address the exercise regimen just yet, but that's coming. The diet I also am working on; exposing myself to new foods and food combinations in order to expand my pallatte (as an autist this is an exceptional challenge for me in ways that are non-obvious.)
None of these things are, to be quite frank, particularly pleasant. I typically can't stand people for example; and though I have been told time and again I make an "excellent" host/guest/conversationalist/party-goer... it's physically exhausting to me (this is related to cognitive deficiencies on my part; I am unable to 'filter' out things and must consciously assign attentional levels to all things around me -- try staying perfectly alert in complex settings for, say, an hour or two and you'll get why being around groups of people is exhausting to me.). Despite this I have raised that as a priority on my regimen because being able to cause compliance in people without their perceiving it as duress is useful. This is also why I've been teaching myself how to code; and why I also pay attention to any manner of topics.
I could keep going down the list, but that about summarizes it.
Sounds like the right track.
To answer your earlier question:
Pretty much. I'd rather do what I want than pursue fuzzies. The cake is a lie.
Have you read Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder? It's a non-fiction book recording the story of Dr. Paul Farmer, a tremendously benevolent epidemiologist that shares your worldview, does all he can to medically assist the poor (specifically, the Haitian poor), and still cannot meet the standards he sets himself. However, Kidder's depictions of Farmer's personality portray him as a happy man. Perhaps the book will be of some help, if you indeed have not yet read it.