Bears resemblance to: Ureshiku Naritai; A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations In Favor of Niceness

In this comment, I mentioned that I can like people on purpose.  At the behest of the recipients of my presentation on how to do so, I've written up in post form my tips on the subject.  I have not included, and will not include, any specific real-life examples (everything below is made up), because I am concerned that people who I like on purpose will be upset to find that this is the case, in spite of the fact that the liking (once generated) is entirely sincere.  If anyone would find more concreteness helpful, I'm willing to come up with brief fictional stories to cover this gap.

It is useful to like people.  For one thing, if you have to be around them, liking them makes this far more pleasant.  For another, well, they can often tell, and if they know you to like them this will often be instrumentally useful to you.  As such, it's very handy to be able to like someone you want to like deliberately when it doesn't happen by itself.  There are three basic components to liking someone on purpose.  First, reduce salience of the disliked traits by separating, recasting, and downplaying them; second, increase salience of positive traits by identifying, investigating, and admiring them; and third, behave in such a way as to reap consistency effects.

1. Reduce salience of disliked traits.

Identify the traits you don't like about the person - this might be a handful of irksome habits or a list as long as your arm of deep character flaws, but make sure you know what they are.  Notice that however immense a set of characteristics you generate, it's not the entire person.  ("Everything!!!!" is not an acceptable entry in this step.)  No person can be fully described by a list of things you have noticed about them.  Note, accordingly, that you dislike these things about the person; but that this does not logically entail disliking the person.  Put the list in a "box" - separate from how you will eventually evaluate the person.

When you hear a hypothesis that is completely new to you, and seems important enough that you want to dismiss it with "but somebody would have noticed!", beware this temptation.  If you're hearing it, somebody noticed.

Disclaimer: I do not believe in anything I would expect anyone here to call a "conspiracy theory" or similar.  I am not trying to "soften you up" for a future surprise with this post.

1. Wednesday

Suppose: Wednesday gets to be about eighteen, and goes on a trip to visit her Auntie Alicorn, who has hitherto refrained from bringing up religion around her out of respect for her parents¹.  During the visit, Sunday rolls around, and Wednesday observes that Alicorn is (a) wearing pants, not a skirt or a dress - unsuitable church attire! and (b) does not appear to be making any move to go to church at all, while (c) not being sick or otherwise having a very good excuse to skip church.  Wednesday inquires as to why this is so, fearing she'll find that beloved Auntie has been excommunicated or something (gasp!  horror!).

Auntie Alicorn says, "Well, I never told you this because your parents asked me not to when you were a child, but I suppose now it's time you knew.  I'm an atheist, and I don't believe God exists, so I don't generally go to church."

And Wednesday says, "Don't be silly.  If God didn't exist, don't you think somebody would have noticed?"

This is a supplement to the luminosity sequence.  In this comment, I mentioned that I have raised my happiness set point (among other things), and this declaration was met with some interest.  Some of the details are lost to memory, but below, I reconstruct for your analysis what I can of the process.  It contains lots of gooey self-disclosure; skip if that's not your thing.

In summary: I decided that I had to and wanted to become happier; I re-labeled my moods and approached their management accordingly; and I consistently treated my mood maintenance and its support behaviors (including discovering new techniques) as immensely important.  The steps in more detail:

1.  I came to understand the necessity of becoming happier.  Being unhappy was not just unpleasant.  It was dangerous: I had a history of suicidal ideation.  This hadn't resulted in actual attempts at killing myself, largely because I attached hopes for improvement to concrete external milestones (various academic progressions) and therefore imagined myself a magical healing when I got the next diploma (the next one, the next one.)  Once I noticed I was doing that, it was unsustainable.  If I wanted to live, I had to find a safe emotional place on which to stand.  It had to be my top priority.  This required several sub-projects:

Sequence index: Living Luminously
Previously in sequence: Lights, Camera, Action
Next in sequence: Highlights and Shadows

Inspecting thoughts is easier and more accurate if they aren't in your head.  Look at them in another form from the outside, like they belonged to someone else.

You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the fourth story from Seven Shiny Stories.

One problem with introspection is that the conclusions you draw about your thoughts are themselves thoughts.  Thoughts, of course, can change or disappear before you can extract information about yourself from them.  If a flash of unreasonable anger crosses my mind, this might stick around long enough to make me lash out, but then vanish before I discover how unreasonable it was.  If thoughts weren't slippery like this, luminosity wouldn't be much of a project.  So of course, if you're serious about luminosity, you need a way to pin down your thoughts into a concrete format that will hold still.

You have to pry your thoughts out of your brain.

Writing is the obvious way to do this - for me, anyway.  You don't have to publicize what you extract, so it doesn't have to be aesthetic or skillful, just serviceable for your own reference.  The key is to get it down in a form that you can look at without having to continue to introspect.  Whether this means sketching or scribing or singing, dump your brain out into the environment and have a peek.  It's easy to fool yourself into thinking that a given idea makes sense; it's harder to fool someone else.  Writing down an idea automatically engages the mechanisms we use to communicate to others, helping you hold your self-analysis to a higher standard.

Sequence index: Living Luminously
Previously in sequence: Let There Be Light
Next in sequence: Lights, Camera, Action!

Affect, behavior, and circumstance interact with each other.  These interactions constitute informative patterns that you should identify and use in your luminosity project.

You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the second story from Seven Shiny Stories.

The single most effective thing you can do when seeking luminosity is to learn to correlate your ABC's, collecting data about how three interrelated items interact and appear together or separately.

A stands for "affect".  Affect is how you feel and what's on your mind.  It can be far more complicated than "enh, I'm fine" or "today I'm sad".  You have room for plenty of simultaneous emotions, and different ones can be directed at different things - being on a generally even keel about two different things isn't the same as being nervous about one and cheerful about the other, and neither state is the same as being entirely focused on one subject that thrills you to pieces.  If you're nervous about your performance evaluation but tickled pink that you just bought a shiny new consumer good and looking forward to visiting your cousin next week yet irritated that you just stubbed your toe, all while being amused by the funny song on the radio, that's this.  For the sake of the alphabet, I'm lumping in less emotionally laden cognition here, too - what thoughts occur to you, what chains of reasoning you follow, what parts of the environment catch your attention.

B stands for "behavior".  Behavior here means what you actually do.  Include as a dramatically lower-weighted category those things that you fully intended to do, and actually moved to do, but were then prevented from without from doing, or changed your mind about due to new, unanticipated information.  This is critical.  Fleeting designs and intentions cross our minds continually, and if you don't firmly and definitively place your evidential weight on the things that ultimately result in action, you will get subconsciously cherry-picked subsets of those incomplete plan-wisps.  This is particularly problematic because weaker intentions will be dissuaded by minor environmental complications at a much higher rate.  Don't worry overmuch about "real" plans that this filtering process discards.  You're trying to know yourself in toto, not yourself at your best time-slices when you valiantly meant to do good thing X and were buffetted by circumstance: if those dismissed real plans represent typical dispositions you have, then they'll have their share of the cohort of actual behavior.  Trust the law of averages.

C stands for "circumstance".  This is what's going on around you (what time is it?  what's going on in your life now and recently and in the near future - major events, minor upheavals, plans for later, what people say to you?  where are you: is it warm, cold, bright, dim, windy, calm, quiet, noisy, aromatic, odorless, featureless, busy, colorful, drab, natural, artificial, pretty, ugly, spacious, cozy, damp, dry, deserted, crowded, formal, informal, familiar, new, cluttered, or tidy?).  It also covers what you're doing and things inside you that are generally conceptualized as merely physical (are you exhausted, jetlagged, drugged, thirsty, hungry, sore, ill, drunk, energetic, itchy, limber, wired, shivering?  are you draped over a recliner, hiding in a cellar, hangliding or dancing or hiking or drumming or hoeing or diving?)  Circumstances are a bit easier to observe than affect and behavior.  If you have trouble telling where you are and what you're up to, your first priority shouldn't be luminosity.  And while we often have some trouble distinguishing between various physical ailments, there are strong pressures on our species to be able to tell when we're hungry or in pain.  Don't neglect circumstance when performing correlative exercises just because it doesn't seem as "the contents of your skull"-y.  SAD should be evidence enough that our environments can profoundly influence our feelings.  And wouldn't it be weird, after all, if you felt and acted just the same while ballroom dancing, and while setting the timer on your microwave oven to reheat soup, and while crouching on the floor after having been taken hostage at the bank?