It seems that some activities are predicated on the belief in a later "payoff", while others are not.
It's easy to get confused about payoffs, and to find ourselves trapped (acting as if we are) chasing some payoff, when the supposed payoff can't plausible exist, or at least not in the size or form that we allow ourselves to believe.
For example, beating a video game doesn't provide a large pay-off, at least for me. But it's easy to catch myself acting as though a non-trivial emotional reward is waiting at the end, and to forget that the moment-by-moment experience is the valuable thing.
Bertrand Russell once made a comment about how giving up hope for certain knowledge played a role in overcoming his unhappiness. I wonder how many people here can relate to this. I've often felt an essentially unpleasant compulsion to fully refute some skeptical possibility or resolve some intractable philosophic problem. Realizing that the exact emotional feeling of resolution I was seeking was unobtainable was a tremendous relief to me.
Another class of problems involves taking a genuine payoff and exaggerating its size or extending its domain. It's perfectly reasonable to want to get rich or have success in a competitive career. But it's just not going to have more than a moderate impact on most areas of your emotional life, (relative to having a typical amount of money or success). A good romantic relationship is hugely rewarding, but you can't expect it to fix the whole litany of emotional problems you might have.
I'm listening to some recording of Alan Watts. No rationalist he! But he understands certain quirks in the psychology of people who are searching for spiritual insight: He argues that demanding spiritual practices function as reductio ad absurdumm to get people to accept that this whole "climb and mountain and unlock the door" model of enlightenment is wrong. Likewise, there's a small thread in most moral traditions that says "virtue is actually easier than non-virtue".
Happy New Year, everyone!
In the past few months I've been thinking several thoughts that all seem to point in the same direction:
1) People who live in developed Western countries usually make and spend much more money than people in poorer countries, but aren't that much happier. It feels like we're overpaying for happiness, spending too much money to get a single bit of enjoyment.
2) When you get enjoyment from something, the association between "that thing" and "pleasure" in your mind gets stronger, but at the same time it becomes less sensitive and requires more stimulus. For example if you like sweet food, you can get into a cycle of eating more and more food that's sweeter and sweeter. But the guy next door, who's eating much less and periodically fasting to keep the association fresh, is actually getting more pleasure from food than you are! The same thing happens when you learn to deeply appreciate certain kinds of art, and then notice that the folks who enjoy "low" art are visibly having more fun.
3) People sometimes get unrealistic dreams and endlessly chase them, like trying to "make it big" in writing or sports, because they randomly got rewarded for it at an early age. I wrote a post about that.
I'm not offering any easy answers here. But it seems like too many people get locked in loops where they spend more and more effort to get less and less happiness. The most obvious examples are drug addiction and video gaming, but also "one-itis" in dating, overeating, being a connoisseur of anything, striving for popular success, all these things follow the same pattern. You're just chasing after some Skinner-box thing that you think you "love", but it doesn't love you back.
Sooo... if you like eating, give yourself a break every once in a while? If you like comfort, maybe get a cold shower sometimes? Might be a good idea to make yourself the kind of person that can get happiness cheaply.
Sorry if this post is not up to LW standards, I typed it really quickly as it came to my mind.