Think, Try, Learn: A scientific method for discovering happiness
thinktrylearn.com
thinktrylearn.com
@todayiamme (a fine and apropos, name :-) Thanks for the points. This is a Buddhist approach, right? The idea that attachment leads to suffering is one that's been with me for years; very influential. From the Think, Try, Learn perspective, I talk about attachment to experimental outcomes. If we desire and expect a particular result, we have a binary success metric, which makes the process an unhappy one. If things are going our way, we are unhappy because we are afraid it will change. Likewise, if things are not going like we want, we are sad too. Much better is to participate in unfolding events as a scientist would - by observing fully, which brings you into the moment. And mindfulness is a way to be happy (another time-tested idea).
So in fact I'm trying to create a philosophy that resonates with the rational mind, but ties in classic ideas for how to be fulfilled. This is opposite to the idea that eternal bliss is possible. (In fact I'm an atheist, and religion doesn't make sense to me. Jack describes this well. That's why TTL is athiest compatible)
Your experience of keeping a detailed diary is interesting to me. It seems to me that keeping a general record is periodically valuable, but in my work the recording is specific to experiments. The thought that I mention in my recent slidecast (http://www.slideshare.net/matthewcornell/quantified-selfexpe...) is that observation -> awareness -> change. The self-blame sucks, of course, but ironically, in TTL I argue that you get a "health sense of detachment" by looking at events as information/data, which might help with the negative feelings.
Also, I like your clarification to @DeusExMachina. Well put.
@DeusExMachina: I love your quote:
> "But if you spend enough time growing, looking inside yourself to what is really important to you and learn to enjoy the journey too, you can be happy."
In TTL, the ultimate guarantee of success is that you'll learn something about yourself and grow your character. The process of experimentation will take you in a personal direction you like. Put another way, the focus is on being excellent at discovery, which we all have control over.
Dealing with pain and problems: As you say, they are inevitible, and it's how we cope (with grace, ideally) that defines us. With TTL, my perspective is that those situations are externally-imposed experiments, ones that provide data like such as feelings and pain. Still working this out...
@Jach: Re: brains being a function of ancestral environments - absolutely! I love this quote by Nancy Kress: "A belief in the afterlife [is] probably the single largest aberration of the human mind." (From "Steal across the sky.") In TTL my idea is to manage irrational thinking by modeling it, testing it, and working to make them consistent (AKA "cognitive dissonance," as orangecat points out). In science, throwing out pet theories in is hard, but the truth is ultimately more useful to discoveries. Doesn't work for everyone, though, and may not be as comfortable as other (unprovable) theories.
@todayiamme: re: radical life extension, I'm ready for it now (I'm soon to be 48 YO) but I'm certain it won't be in time. I don't fear death, but I very strongly don't want it. From a time management perspective (my other hat) it can be a real incentive. Just as you point out with the TV watching. (BTW, a "micro" experiment is to go without TV for a week. I guarantee they will have new experiences, even things like being bored, talking more, etc. This is an appropriate setting to have a diary.)
Your quote is poetic, and expresses how I feel too. Thank you for it:
> "I have decided to spend every moment I have loving other people, and making their lives richer. I've decided to make others smile and create beautiful things. I've decided to learn as much as I can about this amazingly beautiful world before I die. I've learnt that happiness is only real when shared. I can do this only if I am at peace and I accept that problems will always exist around me. Fretting about them doesn't solve much, does it?"
The way this fits into TTL is via collaboration with others, from which the best science comes. The idea is to love and help each other with our experiments, and to tune in (i.e., observe) to the great stuff we have going on in our lives right now. After adopting these ideas, I literally see the world differently. I spent 45 minutes one day last winter marvelling at sunlight reflecting off snow crystals. I found that as I focused I could see individual prismatic effects that varied greatly as I moved my head slightly. It occurred to me that this might have been the inspiration for Chrismas tree lights. Just a thought.
@dan00: Re: happiness being a by-product - absolutely! I think of love that way too. Like happiness and humor, you can't force it, you can only make space and invite it in. [insert garden/seed metaphor, etc.] (Actually, forcing humor via "laughter clubs" is a cool idea - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_Yoga)
@funthree: "Think, then try, then learn, then think. Okay. I needed that." I understand that the title seems obvious. Then again, it's a short name that is supposed to capture the spirit of the scientific method - treating everything in life as an experiment. (P.S. It's funny that you mention Captin Obvious. Check out The Personal Productivity Encyclopedia Of Superhero Powers - http://is.gd/ezzfu)
Thanks again, everyone! -- matt
It's ironic because this encourages people to use the scientific method to delude themselves into thinking that eternal bliss is possible. I actually implemented something like this. I used to keep a detailed diary of the things that have happened and I used to analyze the shit out of everything on paper and then I would check the conclusions and do it again, but somehow it never worked. Upon hitting this I would blame myself and everything I've touched for it. Clearly there has to be something wrong with me , but what I failed to realize was that I was fooling myself in the most logical manner possible.
It's amazing how twisted things are.
Although, this concept will help you to evaluate things and get things done. It won't help you to achieve happiness. Nothing can.
While I don't disagree with your message overall, this statement stood out as being quite odd. Why should we have misery and pain?
Needless to say she couldn't find such a place.
The point is that eternal bliss would be such a wonderful thing, but it doesn't exist anymore than perpetual motion does. Let's face it everything alive today on this earth during this very second in which you have read these words will die. I am an atheist to the core and I will remain an atheist to the core. I don't think that there are any angels, or heaven or some kind of hell out there. I know that the only thing out there is emptiness. There is no doubt about it, and that's the beauty of it.
By accepting the fact that nothing truly ever lasts we can prepare ourselves for peace. It's a really twisted concept that I can't explain in words, but whenever you see the truth that happiness is not just another shot away then you don't crave for things. You don't seek to replace the pain with something else. All you do is focus on just being and that opens the doors for everything else. You learn to love and create for the sake of doing just that. You see beyond yourself and you actually care about other people. Most importantly you realize that just like life learning is a process that will never end till the day you die. It's amazing.
I hope that you understand.
If we all were in some sort of utopia, or heaven, we would be dead bored. Life is good because we keep learning and in pain there is much learning which is different from the learning one acquires when not in pain. If there was only one state of being, there would not be many opportunities for growth. In life however there are many states of being between absolute pain and absolute not pain which gives one so much room for growth and learning and also variety for everyone to be unique in their own way.
Once one stops learning however, everything is familiar, and eventually, boring. Which is why the concept of heaven or hell is attractive at first, but only because we are not in heaven or hell. It is like buying those gorgeous trousers you wanted, or car, which eventually becomes just a pair of trousers or just a car. So too with heaven, if it existed, it would be great in the first days or week or month, but in a year you would get dead bored of it and want to move to America again :P
I can imagine a world without pain, and a world without death (at least a world where people live a lot longer than 75 years, I won't argue for some physics that lets us live forever), and if I were a member of that world instead of this one, nothing you two have said would convince me to say "Yeah, pain and death are great, I want some of that. I need some of that!" Similar arguments have also been made for trying Meth and the like, that you just have to experience it! No thanks. I also don't buy the whole "You need pain to experience happiness", but I haven't formulated an eloquent knockdown argument against that yet. While it's true pain and pleasure are related through endorphins, my idea of happiness isn't constant orgasm. I've wondered if these arguments for pain could simply be using an overly broad definition of pain that includes any struggle or conflict, any challenge or exercise... Being for death, especially if you're an atheist, is just ludicrous.
Anyway, I can also imagine being very not-bored in such a different world that knows no pain nor death for very many years, longer than any lifetime any human has yet had. I can imagine that in that world where life is valued oh-so-high, that people are constantly at work to increase it, to let people live even just one more day. I can imagine learning for the sake of learning and creating for the sake of creating, I can imagine doing those things for other ends as well, some selfish, some not.
The brain pattern making up "you" is fairly unique, and it's such a sad shame, a true shame, that so many patterns have already been annihilated even before a mere 75 years have passed. There may be nothing out there that says your matter's state is worth preserving, but there is definitely something in here. In human brains. Unfortunately our brains were built by the ancestral environment, not by any benevolent being, and thus we have certain problems such as this contradiction of sometimes believing death and pain are things acceptable, even good, yet nonetheless having a very strong aversion to death and pain. I think the aversion is the saner part of our minds.
"Death is bad," said Harry, discarding wisdom for the sake of clear communication. "Very bad. Extremely bad. Being scared of death is like being scared of a great big monster with poisonous fangs. It actually makes a great deal of sense, and does not, in fact, indicate that you have a psychological problem."
there's this little thing called cognitive dissonance, or in plainer English, sour grapes. If people were hit on the heads with truncheons once a month, and no one could do anything about it, pretty soon there'd be all sorts of philosophers, pretending to be wise as you put it, who found all sorts of amazing benefits to being hit on the head with a truncheon once a month. Like, it makes you tougher, or it makes you happier on the days when you're not getting hit with a truncheon. But if you went up to someone who wasn't getting hit, and you asked them if they wanted to start, in exchange for those amazing benefits, they'd say no. And if you didn't have to die, if you came from somewhere that no one had ever even heard of death, and I suggested to you that it would be an amazing wonderful great idea for people to get wrinkled and old and eventually cease to exist, why, you'd have me hauled right off to a lunatic asylum!
I firmly believe that radical life extension will be possible, but sooner or later you will have to die be it through freak accident, decay or by choice. You will die. I would love to spend entire lifetimes making things, but I can't and the sooner I realize that the better I can make do with what I have.
I respect Mr. Kurzweil like anything, but going his way is like buying a lottery ticket to fund your startup. You can make rational arguments about it and claim that it is indeed possible, but in all practicality it ain't gonna happen.
This is why I've decided to accept it and move on. I am going to die?
Fine.
I might as well make the most of what I have. You know as this has started to sink in I've realized just how petty most people are. They fight, they scream, they judge, they mock, they kill all in the hope of not seeing the emptiness. We fill ourselves with mindless chatter, some chatter is better than others, hoping to erase the fears, but the truth is that as long as we live in this state of being we are addicts and there is nothing we can do about it. It is only when you come to terms with your monsters can you conquer them.
Right now, my parents are spending time like they do everyday for hours at end watching a really, really bad Indian soap on TV. I can't judge them and neither should you, but can you imagine what a precious chance they have wasted and waste continuously everyday for 3-4 hours? Or, 30 hours+ a week? They spend most of their time afraid of judgement from society and they are too scared to be themselves in front of others. What existence is that?
I wish I could help them, but I can't as I am too small and they have "wisdom of years of experience". You see, if they realized and saw the world for what it was not how they wanted it to be, then they would have opened themselves to peace. They worship invisible beings in the sky in hope of securing favors, instead. I don't want to end up like them.
This is why I would rather stand and face my fears than hide.
I have decided to spend every moment I have loving other people, and making their lives richer. I've decided to make others smile and create beautiful things. I've decided to learn as much as I can about this amazingly beautiful world before I die. I've learnt that happiness is only real when shared. I can do this only if I am at peace and I accept that problems will always exist around me. Fretting about them doesn't solve much, does it?
Sounds just a liiiiiittle to depressing for me. While I admit that your not going to be %100 happy all of the time, do you not find that there are moments when your in bliss?
Also I found that economic concepts do a pretty good job predicting happiness for myself. They're not going to be perfect (obviously), but I would say that I'm reasonable happy with my life using the simple concept of diminishing returns and returns to scale.
Really? I don't agree with this. Reaching happiness is hard, indeed. Impossible? Not at all. Go around and look for happy people, you can find them, in different parts of the world. Personally, now I'm on average happier than I was some years ago.
Happiness is a long journey and one of the first big steps is to realize what really makes you happy. People delude themselves they would be happy in certain situations, but they are usually wrong. This is something that prevents people from being happy.
But if you spend enough time growing, looking inside yourself to what is really important to you and learn to enjoy the journey too, you can be happy. This at least is my experience and I think is enough to refute your final statement. But there are better experiences out there than mine.
Probably some pain and problems will always be part of your life, but unless pain pervades all your life and is just occasional, you can be happy.
> Misery and pain is part and parcel of being alive and that's the way it should be.
Is it not possible that there is happiness, but also misery and pain? I've felt both.
Is happiness "achieved"? Or "encountered"? "momentarily brushed-up against"? "allowed"?
In any case I think an approach like TTL's is worth trying: nowhere do they say "that eternal bliss is possible". It seems they're just trying to help people make things better for themselves.