I think people can often be unhappy not because they have major problems (like an illness or a divorce), but due to "nonspecific discomfort", which arises from many small reasons. Most of the time it stays below the radar, but there's one particular way it can lead to large harm: you feel a gradual realization, over the course of days or weeks, that your life is missing some important specific thing, and set out to obtain it. In fact the thing is unrelated to the reasons you're unhappy, you just latched onto it randomly; and more often not, it ends up harming you instead of helping.
Here's some examples that made this idea clear in my mind:
- Musicians often talk about "gear acquisition syndrome". Basically you see a shiny new guitar in a storefront, and it starts to occupy your thoughts, giving you an illusion that it will bring you joy. Then you buy it, and no joy results. The truth is you had some other discomfort going on, unrelated to the amount of gear you own, and it coalesced around a random idea: "I want this thing".
- I know a few people who've had plastic surgeries that didn't go well; it gets so bad that their new look literally makes me want to leave the room. But they themselves never seem to notice the problem. It feels like their nonspecific discomfort randomly coalesced around a different idea: "if I change my looks in this way, that will make my life better".
- Copycat suicides. For most people, hearing about a suicide on the news isn't reason enough to push them over the edge. But in society there's always a certain percentage of people whose nonspecific discomfort is so high, that they can latch onto even this idea and imagine it's a solution to some or other imaginary problem.
- Mass movements, and savior complex. Hoffer's book is the best source on this and basically agrees with my experiences: the people joining mass movements often do that because they're unhappy with themselves, and use the movement as a substitute for the things missing from their life.
Now, it's true that my idea is a bit like phlogiston theory: "there's this nebulous thing and it's the reason behind all of life's problems". But I'm not actually proposing to explain all problems, only some. And the easiest way to judge the idea is to try it for yourself, make a measurement of your own "nonspecific discomfort", and recognize which more specific problems and solutions your brain may have made up along the way.
(This is where I part ways with psychoanalysis: nonspecific discomfort doesn't always come from childhood trauma or anything big like that, I think it's usually just a bunch of unpleasant things, not necessarily large things, but piling higher as you get older. You can dig for the deepest reasons but it would be pointless, your mind's just too good at making up more stuff in response to that; and it doesn't help with mitigating the problem, at all.)
So, if we assume for a moment that "nonspecific discomfort" is an actual thing, some kind of generic substance that problems are made of, then what are some ways we could deal with it?
- Physical activity, outdoors, preferably in the sun. In my view this is the clear winner. If you can easily access a basketball hoop, a pool with a diving board, or a place to do pull-ups - then it's a good idea to regularly spend time there! It's amazing how many problems that felt substantial before a workout, become faint shadows afterward.
- Creativity - making music, writing, drawing, what name you. The immediate effect of grabbing a pen and trying to be creative is that it makes you feel good about yourself :-) Then if you're careful to get to a concrete result in the end, something you can look back on and show off to others, that also invests in your happiness for the longer run.
- Socializing, as long as you do it for fun and not for any serious result. I've found that when people like me, and I'm having fun, a lot of problems take the back seat. In many ways, socializing is an art of distracting yourself and others - worth getting good at that.
- Cooking, making or fixing physical things, heck, even cleaning your living space - doing any kind of work with your hands turns out to be surprisingly therapeutic. I've known some people who went too deep, overdoing it, but I still strongly recommend it if done within reason.
That's naturally not an exhaustive list. But maybe to summarize, my main advice is just to recognize nonspecific discomfort, as a thing that can be a problem worth fixing. And recognize that on the margin it might be less useful to chase specific solutions to specific problems; there are things you can do to alleviate discomfort "generically", no matter where it comes from, and these can be a better investment.
To me, it also seems you undervalue introspection. This can be bad because if you think introspection is not useful, you will underuse it.
That might be correct, not because it is impossible for these people to introspect, but because they have not learned it. Most people don't hold off on proposing solutions but I would be surprised if they could not learn to do it.
I am sure I can tell if I am unhappy because of my job or my boss. It is likely I wouldn't have been able to tell a year ago when I thought I was good at introspection while being terrible at it. So terrible, that it is hard to imagine how I could have been worse.
How is that possible? Well, I thought I was good at introspection because I was very good at certain kinds of introspection. E.g. introspecting on how I do analytical reasoning, while I do it. But I was terrible at emotional introspection. I only had the concept of introspection. Now it is clear to me that there are multiple kinds of introspection. I was blind to emotions, without realizing this.
Before I got better at introspection, all of my negative feelings could have been described as nonspecific discomfort. But it was really not nonspecific at all. It was just that I had ignored and suppressed my emotions so much that they got disassociated from their actual causes. So I would feel bad but didn't know why. I basically did exactly what Hazard talks about here. I did this basically for every negative emotion I experienced.
But then I discovered this tek to introspect, and it seems to work quite well. I have applied it maybe 8 times now. Mostly to emotions that at first seem nonspecific. In my experience, most emotions are actually non-specific, even if they are temporally linked very tightly.
E.g. if I experience social rejection, I normally feel good at first but after 15 minutes I start to feel bad. It seems like it should be clear to me that this is because of the social rejection, but it's not. It will seem like the most likely explanation to me, but there will be uncertainty about if this is actually what is going on. This is ridiculous maybe I am especially bad at analyzing emotions without spinning up a conscious expliitit optimization process. But once I use the technique I linked above it becomes very clear why I feel bad. The interesting thing is that once you understand the underlying cause of the nonspecific comfort, it disappears. Without you doing anything.
This makes sort of sense. Once you have truly understood what a specific feeling "wants you to accomplish" there is really no more point in it sticking around. Now that you have understood the feeling you can either optimize for getting what the feeling wants, or you can realize that the feeling doesn't actually make sense in the current situation. Doing the appropriate thing will make the feeling go away. At least that is what happened so far for me.