Nobody optimizes happiness
dynomight.net
dynomight.net
> Like—say your startup goes public and you become a billionaire. What now? What will you buy, where will you live, what will you eat for lunch?
First of all, the everybody/nobody in this article is scoped to the author's circle/bubble.
IME, a lot of founder types are pretty happy just working and not doing much else. After their company IPOs, they will probably just start another company. They aren't necessarily working to retire.
Having enough money that you don't have to work is never a bad thing, IMO. I have a chunk of money right now from selling some stock, not enough to retire (with my lifestyle), but enough for now. Boredom is a lot easier to solve than not having enough money. (I have kids, and lots of code I want to write; I'll always be busy, and if I'm bored it's because the things I'm busy doing are boring.) I'm sure it's fair to say that retiring takes some adjustment. You can take some time to get in touch with yourself. You can work if you want. You have a lot more options.
The reason people don't focus on their happiness IME is they weren't brought up to. I was brought up to go to school every day, do my homework, and achieve. Not to prioritize myself and building a fun, joyful, fulfilling life for myself. It's a matter of culture. And there are also stages of life where it makes sense to focus on one's career.
I think you hit the nail on the head but then reached an odd conclusion. The reason most people don’t prioritise their happiness is because they can’t afford to. Many people on this forum (myself, and by the sounds of things, you too) are massively financially privileged. Many of my friends are too, but many are also very much not. One of my best friends is staying in a relationship she’s unhappy in, because she can’t afford rent otherwise. It’s a shocking reminder for me how lucky I am.
Including me. I have a good salary and savings and I keep saying to myself that there's nothing preventing me from having a cozy little life and stop worrying. And yet for years I kept pushing in my career in a way that didn't really make me happy, and I still struggle to let go.
Giving up something at which one is obviously good, for which one is recognized, and which could be the core, or if not the core, a substantial part of one's identity, is challenging. One would have to create another identity, be comfortable saying "I'm not working" when others might think there is something fishy going on, whispering to each other "I don't know what's the matter with her, she doesn't seem to work."
Not getting money when there is money to be had is seen as a serious sin in certain societies in which sweat, pain, and labor are seen as virtuous and relaxing, and doing something for the sake of doing it is the occupation of the lazy and of those with noble origins.
My solution has been to have no external identity, in the sense that what I am is what I can do, but not what I do. For some people I am a sportsperson, for others an aspiring writer, for another group a software engineer. To myself, I am just myself.
You have an external identity by virtue of other's witnessing you. They think something, whether or not you choose to recognize it or manage it or 'internalize it'.
And I'm not sure I'd buy that you have no internal identity unless you are completely in the present moment 100% of the time (which is un-human). Perhaps it's that you have a relationship with yourself that is quite settled - you accept all the parts of yourself and are largely unswayed by what other's think. That sounds like a zen place to be, but also unrealistic. I may go through periods where I'm fully myself without influence, but clearly I have a history which has made me.
And it's not all unwise to have an identity which is affected by what others project. Seems important to learn how to be part of a functioning society.
As for me, I wrote elsewhere in this thread about it feeling like a sacrifice I'm making for future me. I don't know that all this hard work and reaching for career heights will matter in the end.. but I'm not more confident in a different strategy (else I would do that). So I justify my immediate misery for a chance to benefit the future.
We can of course pick apart and find fault in the emphasis being on the future, or why I this strategy.. but no path is without faults.
I was a professional sportsman for years, and that was the way many people saw me. When I stopped, I no longer played that sport, without torment or suffering: when I decided to move on, I didn't need others to move with me. If I had to wait for others, I would have had a "crisis of identityt". When I stopped being an academic researcher, I moved on quickly. In a week, I saw myself as a software engineer; if other people with whom I had a personal or professional relationship continued to see me as a scientist (and a "failed" scientist at that point), that didn't affect me.
I don't have a Zen attitude or life. I feel as joyful, angry or bored, depending on my internal state, as anyone else. But I've never, as far as I can remember, had an identity crisis that wouldn't allow me to pursue other paths without being particularly concerned about how others identify me. And I see it is as a strength. I had been concerned with "identity", each move would have been ten times more painful than it was.
It's not that I don't care how others see me -- I dress very fancy for a reason. It's that it is my life.
If you do what do you do because you think that it will be better for you in the end, you don't have identity problems, you followed a rational path.
Picture two hamsters. Each knows they ate recently, but it's been a while. Is their owner coming back to feed them soon? They don't know, in a constant state of uncertainty.
One hamster realizes that running on the wheel and being very loud sometimes causes them to get fed. They don't know it will help, but it might. So this hamster spends all their time on the wheel.
The other hamster relaxes, enjoying life and trusting in what life will provide.
--
Personally, I think happiness vs. work is just a tale which people like to convey as a binary choice. Neither is better than the other, because in reality it's not a binary choice but a gradient of luck. The impact of the choice isn't what matters, it's personal perspective of best outcome that matters.
Both hamsters are in a cage (job to live), and yes - when one is more noisy, runs more, etc. (works real hard) the owner notices it more frequently and gives it food, treats, etc. (better pay)
The question is, which hamster has a better life?
neither of them, because they're both dependant on someone else to give them food
The analogy is comforting. But maybe something more realistic would be like this:
--
Picture two hamsters. One works constantly to pay off his hamster-mansion, and hamster-sports-car. He can't spend much time with his family. The hamster-kids are at a fancy hamster-school far way.
The other hamsters earns less, but makes time for playing boardgames with the hamper-family. They have a modest hampster-home, and all take a low cost trip to visit their hamster family throughout the year.
This is the salient part of the analogy. I like it a lot.
I don't know that all this hard work and reaching for career heights will matter in the end.. but I'm not more confident in a different strategy (else I would do that). So I justify my immediate misery for a chance to benefit the future.
I think my then problem way too much focus on the future.
Stress is a huge driver of unhappyness in work and there is often so much unnecessary pressure on time and success, it is insane. I often wonder how much more happy AND (as a result) productive people would be if they could actually work as they are meant to be instead of the norm being this stress-driven, restrictive and underpaid treadmill.
Mostly I found that it is not so much about earning more money, but about earning enough money to be able to live a normal, healthy life, that contributes to overall happyness. Anything after that may not actually lead to a happier life, because of the effects of hedonic adaptation mentioned in the article.
- The job should pay enough
- The work environment should be healthy and supportive
Perhaps it's just people who don't enjoy their work, that are projecting themselves onto the working rich. Once you start with a faulty axiom (working intensely isn't fun), you start getting twisted conclusions (oh it must be psychological trauma, or those people just aren't reflective).
The OP seems to know the happiness literature well. He cites the studies showing emotional affect doesn't go up with money, but life satisfaction does. This seems to clearly suggest more money is >= less money. But his conclusion is literally the opposite to fit his essay's narrative: that if you make it rich, you'll just be sad and bored. This is not what empirically happens.
I am earning 10 times what I was earning before -- I was living decently earlier anyway -- and my life is considerably better, with broader and deeper horizons, more creative and purposeful. I can travel wherever I want, I can help others when I can, eat the food I want. I don't go on a spending spree, I don't have a big car, fancy watches or other material possessions that can be associated with "having made it." But my life has improved a great deal. And if I had more money, my life would have even greater potential, aspirations and achievements. One might say, "But if a loved one were to die, your money would not help." Perhaps. But how would a lack of money help?
You don't want to be rich, says the rich man who benefits by you being poor.
If I win the lottery tomorrow (IPO or otherwise), I’d probably continue to have a job of some sort. Maybe I would prioritize a different reward than cashflow, but my day to day wouldn’t change much.
Some characters are fine just chilling, some want to do a “job” like working at a hospital.
But none of them have anything near the level of problems of their staff, who need their job to live.
In the context of this discussion chain, like someone wealthy enough not to have to work who won't stop talking about how starvation is not a real problem.
Compare and contrast that with the vast majority of other uses and users of the word, where an attribute that is far from being obviously optimal (e.g. straight and\or white and\or male) is taken as a sign that you have a better life than those of another attribute and - furthermore - that the person with this attribute is fundamentally incapable of imagining the lives of those supposedly deprieved of their invisible privileges.
Perhaps we exist in very different spheres of discussion.
Sounds like you have 'privilege privilege' and you should stand back and let others with lived experience speak their truth about this.
/s (especially about the 'stand back' bit!) but also this is how it's used in the majority of cases that I see :(
Everyone seems to be railing against the shadow of bad use invocation of 'privilege', but there's no actual instances of that happening directly.
Just things that 'people have seen'.
I don't think we can have any further useful dialogue, so I won't respond after this.
And advertising you won't respond is not useful info to me.
[1] https://www.hivelearning.com/site/resource/diversity-inclusi...
[2] https://guides.rider.edu/privilege
[1] :
>>White privilege
>>Gender privilege
>>Heterosexual privilege
[2] :
>>these privileged social identities—of people who have historically occupied positions of dominance over others—include whites, males, heterosexuals
>I'm not watching a youtube video.
They are 4 minutes and 5 minutes, respectively, and contains the same views expressed in [1] and [2] and the vast majority of other uses of the word.
I think that 'privilege' is _sometimes_ used in accusatory bad faith, but I don't think this is the majority.
I think in good faith it's a useful framework.
If I won the lottery, I'd invest it into projects for the good of the general public, and areas that need help.
The, admittedly reductive, viewpoint I take: people who presumably “have it all” because they gained financial freedom are often depressed because they’ve earned a freedom that others told them they wanted.
Many of us are “pipelined”. The course of our lives is not determined by some conscious self-realization, but rather follows a prescribed track. I think (at least American) schooling is largely a failure because it does not teach self reflection. We fail students by failing to even introduce most of them to philosophical thinking. Instead, our schools are focused on teaching the skills required to produce laborers that will ultimately buoy up the economic system.
But the reality is, most people don’t want to be laborers, so when everything is framed like this we equate freedom with freedom from labor. But that isn’t the form of freedom most people really want. People want a more radical freedom grounded in self-fulfillment. All the FIRE folks chase freedom from labor but never spend any time doing philosophical reflection, thus they never realize how they actually want to self-define and shape their lives, thus they face ennui and depression once their grand battle for freedom from labor ends.
In other words, Sartre and De Beauvoir had much to teach us.
It's hard to discover all the world has to offer while still young enough to act upon it.
I don't know as much about other sports but for professional climbing you need to have started before 11 to make a living in the comp circuit.
Negative freedoms are half a deal. All the old philosophers have a lot to teach us. We just don't have time to pay attention to them now.
Maybe Nietzsche said it well:
"Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that"
What did he mean?
> So if we aren't optimizing happiness, why not?
Because "happiness" isn't a thing. It's an idea we have about a thing that most of us are not courageous enough to name, let alone take for ourselves.
One’s happiness is for others to see, so they know what is good for oneself. One should often work to further the happiness of others because this is often in many ways a pretty good proxy for what is to their benefit, but for oneself, one tends to have better access to what is to one’s benefit, and what one wants, than what one would get just by evaluating the impacts on one’s own happiness, instead of what that happiness is a proxy for. (Though possibly one might fool oneself about some things regarding what one wants, and taking into account one’s own happiness may at times help defend against fooling oneself this way?)
That's one of the best definitions of happiness I've heard. Nicely put sir.
Not at all necessary, there is plenty of literature -- and I know such people out there as well -- whose happiness almost doesn't manifest. It's an internal process and you can tell they are happy when you see them (facial expression, look in the eyes, general demeanor) but they in no shape or form try to indicate things are going well for them. Not by saying things on the topic, not by proving it with numbers (e.g. a number of houses/flats they own), and not even by trying to preach their approach to life to other people.
I didn't mean that people are happy when they intend to communicate that things are going well for them, but rather, happiness is that which leads them to unconsciously communicate it. (where by "going well for them" I mean like, "for what they care about". Someone could by in their dying moments, but receive very good news about e.g. their loved ones and their life's work, and be happy.)
I would personally say that most people strive for meaning (as in, living a meaningful life) even if they think they are striving for "happiness", which to me comes off as a very shallow and hedonistic aim.
I may have heard... it was specifically a barb aimed at John Stuart Mill.
Absolutely. And it's a bit of an empty neologism. What I'm getting at is those things we think we've a solid definition of, but are slippery and gets away. The "thing" is the misguided idea that there's a common 'object' there.
Is this the case though? I know it’s not your main point, but it’s a premise that I think should be questioned. I can think of reasons why it probably wouldn’t be true, and I wouldn’t be surprised if data indicates that financial freedom correlates strongly with mental health. And I can think of many reasons why this popular notion (that the wealthy are often unfulfilled and miserable) might persist even if it’s not really true in general.
Hmm, not sure that's valid, any more than it's valid to say that chronic diseases in general are always better than acute ones.
On a personal level I feel the fastest way to feel unhappy is to worry too much about whether I am happy. Trying to design a goals or future state in pursuit of happiness feels like setting myself up for disappointment. All else being equal, having money is better than not having it, being engaged in some mentally challenging "work" is better than being bored, having good family and friend relationships is better than being isolated, but trying to optimize these things with some kind of master plan feels like it induces FOMO and general anxiety about the finite possibilities for one life.
I prefer to go with the flow, stay engaged in whatever I'm doing, and keep my eyes open for opportunities. I'm not sure if this makes me "happy", but I'm sure more content when I'm operating then when I try too hard to size up the big picture.
These are wise words that I needed to hear after a hard day and feeling like I've always been getting the short end of the stick lately. Thank you for writing them.
Some have a whole-life plan, and some are just living day-to-day, but everyone trying to earn "more money" is aiming to be happier.
There are some who aim for happiness only in the short term, too. People call them lazy, or good-for-nothing a lot of the time. They're not trying to make others happy, just themselves. And so far as they can tell, it's working because if they knuckled down and worked hard, they could earn more money... But they'd definitely be less happy in the short term.
There are even some who optimize for other people's happiness. It brings them happiness, too, of course, but probably not as much as it brings others. That's called charity, selflessness, or altruism.
But everyone optimizes for happiness. They just don't always get it.
I currently live in Melbourne. My bubble’s equivalent myth is around being creative. If you don’t make art or get involved in hobbies, why not? What’s gone wrong that makes you so boring? None of my friends here obsess about money, or work harder than they need to at their day jobs. When we socialise we talk about comedy shows we’ve seen and things like that.
There’s hundreds of examples of these cultural beliefs once you start looking. Eg, gender roles, when it’s appropriate to lie, the expected stages of relationships, the importance of money, etc etc. The best way to notice this stuff in ourselves is by travelling. Spending serious time in other countries is good for the soul.
After living in SF and Sydney, Melbourne still feels crazy cheap to me. And property prices are set to drop another 15% over the next 18 months[1].
[1] https://www.news.com.au/finance/real-estate/buying/australia...
I guess for me my anecdote is; I have a wide variety of friends in Melbourne (having grown up there) and every time I go back it feels like a very large % of every conversation turns to property. It’s become some kind of sick national obsession, and it’s a thin proxy for money obsession. Startup/sv talk is at least sometimes interesting in comparison
I’m not friends with a random sample of people in Melbourne. And I bet you aren’t either. Your high school will be skewed based on the ethnicity & socioeconomic status of the area. And they’re all the same age. 36 year olds have different pub conversation topics than 18 year olds or 80 year olds.
People from Sydney (where I grew up) often ask what Melbourne is like. I honestly don’t know what the average person here is like. But I really like the specific people I’ve befriended.
At some point “why do all my friends talk about boring things” should become “why don’t I have more interesting friends?”. And I don’t think Melbourne (or SF) has any shortage of interesting people no matter what you’re interested in. But you do have to put effort in to look.
Making friends as an adult is harder than it was in high school. If you haven’t made that effort in Melbourne, I don’t think to entirely blame Melbourne for your boring friend group.
I guess I read your initial post as some generalization like “sf folk are so money obsessed I moved to Melbourne and they’re all about the arts”. Which i obviously disagree with, but I think now isn’t what you were trying to say so, sorry for that!
The implications of the differences in methodologies is pretty interesting itself.
My household is in higher single digit top percentage range and I'm not even sure whether or not I think moving to the top percent would make me happier.
In the name of science I will be talking with my boss on Monday.
This works for me because at my core, I'm a artistic coder. I love to code for the sake of coding. I find these machines beautiful works of arts, and the way of code speaks to me. So, what am I doing about it? I'm building a cathedral.
I'm taking all experience, all my wisdom, decades of side projects, and I'm building a new platform. The ultimate platform. A glorious platform that I named after a goat which I named after a character from battlestar galatica.
I wrote a bit about this here: https://www.adama-platform.com/2022/07/02/the-path-of-the-mo...
Optimizing for happiness requires discovering a repeatable behavior that sparks joy. For whatever reason, working on a programming language to drive a new type of platform sparks joy.
Sometime, I'll make a game with my platform, but I'm not anxious of even worried. I just show up and polish things here and there. Just today, I spent a few hours ensuring that document events, message handlers, constructor all have access to @context variable. I'm working on this right now, running my test suites with ridiculous code coverage (99%) over thousands of tests.
It's great.
I have no expectation of financial return, and I'm grateful to be retired. I sucked shit through a straw in big tech, and it was worth it to get to this point. Now, I can commune with the machine, and work on my physical health.
Oh, well. For me that's gaming. And to some degree helping others. I also like solving some problems but it's hard to turn it into repeatable behavior that reliably sparks joy.
> The goal of life is cheerfulness (euthymia), which is not the same as pleasure . . . but the state in which the soul continues calmly and stably, disturbed by no fear or superstition or any other emotion
> “True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.”
I forget other people had healthy families until I read something like this!
Being completely serious ( I think)
> There is a premise [...] that happiness is algorithmic, that it can be worked for and earned and achieved as if it were getting accepted to law school [...]. If I achieve X, then I can be happy.
> This premise though, is the problem. Happiness is not a solvable equation. Dissatisfaction and unease are inherent parts of human nature, and, as we'll see, necessary components to creating consistent happiness.
> We are wired to become dissatisfied with whatever we have and satisfied by only what we do not have. This constant dissatisfaction has kept our species fighting and striving, building and conquering. So no - our own pain and misery aren't a bug of human evolution, they're a feature.
> There's no such thing as a life without problems. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.
And maybe the central tenet of the book:
> Happiness comes from solving problems. The keyword here is "solving". If you're avoiding your problems or feel like you don't have any problems, then you're going to make yourself miserable. If you feel like you have problems that you can't solve, you will likewise make yourself miserable.
> To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action; it's an activity, not something that is passively bestowed upon you. It doesn't magically appear when you finally make enough money to add on that extra room to the house. You don't find it waiting for you in a place, an idea, a job - or even a book, for that matter.
Much of the rest of the book goes into depth about choosing what problems you want to have - because you will have problems no matter what, but it's up to you what those are. Both on a factual level ("you won't get a great physique if 'wake up early to go to the gym' is a problem you don't want to have") and on a mindset level ("Dave Mustaine of Megadeth is unhappy about his success because earlier he was kicked out of Metallica, who are now more successful"). In other words, what to "give a fuck" about - and what not to give a fuck about.
Would recommend!
I highly recommend reading the book, as he goes into the key features that get us into the pleasant flow state, so you know what variables to tweak if you can't get there.
I'd buy and eat roughly what I do now, in roughly the same area, but I'd own a small house or townhouse near the park with a nice garden and no mortgage.
> When you wake up, what will your bedroom look like? Who (if anyone) will be in it with you? What clothes will you put on? What will you eat for breakfast? What will the breakfast room look like? What will you do all day? Who will you spend time with? What will you talk about?
My bedroom will look basically the same, but I'll be allowed to fix all the peeling paint and weird broken plaster because I won't be renting. I'll put on clothes that are identical to my current clothes, walk down to the cafe for a coffee and take it into the park, and jump on a zoom/slack call with a friend around 10 or 11am to talk about our project. I know this is what will happen because I work a normal job four days a week and the fifth day already looks like this.
Reading this, I don't understand what the author's talking about. My life's fine, I just want to own a home and work a bit less. Most of the people I know are like this. The grand plans are "get married," "get enough money to support my parents in their retirement," "get enough for a house deposit," or "bring my family over from the old country." Is this a Bay Area rationalist thing where everyone the author knows is trying to cure cancer/study X-risks/align skynet/defeat malaria?
Retirement is a big life transition. Big transitions suck, even if they end up pointing in the direction you'd like.
I optimized for early financial independence. I did lucrative things and made money (with skills I enjoyed using). Then I used the opportunity to do less lucrative, even more interesting/enjoyable things.
I'm a schoolteacher at the moment. Who knows what I'll do next!
Kept accidentally falling into interesting work every couple of years; doing it for awhile, and retiring again. Some of it lucrative, some of it not.
Accidentally started coaching school robotics teams at 38. They did well; role grew in scope. Now I am 43; teaching HS economics, MS robotics/engineering, and a few other random things full time.
Perhaps we should look at our emotions and mental states as food. I remember a GF in high school telling me I shouldn't be happy all the time. That I was missing out on the broader scope of emotions because I was always "happy".
I think that is probably an outward appearance rather than reality. I'm not always happy, and I don't think I'm at my best when I've achieved happiness.
If everyone was always happy, is that the world we want to live in? I'm not suggesting that some people should be happy while others live in sorrow, but there is a reason all of these things exist.
I find meditating on being grateful can often bring great sorrow, which is can be cathartic. It's not happiness, so should I be trying to remove that feeling and replace it with happiness?
Everything in moderation, I suppose that applies to emotions as well.
Over the course of a life, human happiness is primarily dependent on fulfilling the purpose as a replicator, genetically and memetically. We are sculpted in detail by being descended from billions of generations of successful replicators. There is much temporary, but little long term happiness in ignoring those forces.
Having a family, writing a book, creating a piece of art, or a functional invention, or a community. These are means of replication, to be optimized if you wish to increase happiness as a side effect.
In my experience, people who see themselves as part of the pursuit of the purpose of the system are also able to find happiness even if they do not personally replicate in some obvious biological or memetic way.
With a species as complex as humans it becomes much less clear what being an effective replicator entails. Someone like Alexander Fleming (inventor of penecilin) has probably done more to augment human replication than a million typical humans. And of course this effect isn't limited to medical specialists. A more salient example would be any of the creators of or contributors to dating apps.
I think he is up to something here. Some people enjoy (real world) hunts enormously; I don't, being squeamish about blood and death, but an abstract hunt feels captivating to me.
That said, the piece is written in a deliberately black-and-white way. There is a lot to happiness.
For example, I don't have anywhere enough money to retire, but I have enough not to be forced to bow down to any single boss or customer; they know it and treat me respectfully.
Many disregarded, lower income, "lower class" people have as much ability as people paid many times the income, but they have chosen to balance their life differently, often for greater happiness for themselves or others. Those people who have too many dogs, for example.
I'm reminded of xkcd's train full of people all thinking the same thing: "Look at these people. Glassy-eyed automatons going about their daily lives, never stopping to look around and think! I'm the only conscious human in a world of sheep." (https://xkcd.com/610/)
We do not have access to the internal experiences of other people, so we should not presume to judge them.
There's a lot of good stuff in the article, but there's no need to perpetuate this absurd "world of sheep" perspective.
YMMV
I think it is actually a rare thing for a person to have enough awareness and memory to be able to accurately judge how much positive valence emotion they have on average over the period of months. To notice it you have to be present, you have to stop and notice the experience of eating that tasty sandwich or taking that hot bath, or winning that international tournament. And most people, by and large, don't. Especially thinker types like you might find on hacker news.
People do optimize prosperity, and prosperity generally leads to happiness.
It's well correlated up to a certain level of wealth / income, and then only very loosely correlated.
The leveling out is around $75k of annual income. Most of us here have optimized income beyond that point.
With $75k and a family of two kids you are not going to be saving much for retirement, if anything. Medical bills can completely bankrupt you in an instant. You can’t just pick any restaurant you want without doing some research on price first. You can’t afford much of a vacation anywhere either, except perhaps taking the kids to Disneyland once a year.
Here’s the article if anyone is interested on reading further! https://syrusakbary.medium.com/achieve-your-goals-happily-e2...
Interesting adaptive system take. Adapt the model/ego ideal. Random theory as to why people don't do that... if you think the goal is necessary to get the ideal, then changing yourself might make you not want the goal any more. Given the superpower to simply decide to be happy, but risk becoming Diogenes instead of Alexander the Great, who would take it? You'd have to be a-priori happy with missing out on all you presently hold dear [1].
[1] Read "Missing Out" by Adam Phillips for a deep and disturbing account of how powerful that can be,
So the only way to optimize for it is to plan to accomplish the things one likes to do.
Our society is too fixated on being happy. Which is why for example the divorce rate is so high.
Sure there is a baseline of “contentment” when huh become rich.
But if one has money in the bank and nothing to accomplish you’re left with the same unhappiness and lack of purpose - just in a different way.
I’ve never really optimized for happiness. I tend to frame it all in terms of being content. I think that is more sustainable - or at least it is for me.
I don’t have any fancy studies to back this up - just my own life experience.
People seem to think a lot about the lower layers, e.g.:
- I am hungry, what will I eat?
- How are the people that I love doing?
But people seem to spend relatively little effort reasoning about the top. Self-actualization looks different for everyone, and for a particular person it tends to evolve. What would make today a great day for you? What would make the next year great? How do you get there?
Relatively few people seem to reach a durable state of "I am so happy that I desire only to maintain my current happy situation". Perhaps a big component of happiness is the state of working toward (or at least anticipation of reaching) continuously evolving goals.
Or, maybe I have strong "type A" bias and have something to learn from people who do much less.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
For Frankl, meaning came from three possible sources: purposeful work, love, and courage in the face of difficulty.
~ from Viktor Frankl on the Human Search for Meaning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32283033
Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.
~ Viktor Frankl
IIRC (it's a while since I read Frankl) logotherapy starts from a point of utter meaninglessness, in the camps or on the battlefield where people die for no reason. With all the "meaning" stripped away one is free to build ones own.
Frankl gave an enormous gift with that book and his work in clinical practice, up there with Donald Winnicott. Sadly very little makes it into ordinary life, perhaps because the subject matter is too challenging.
It depends on such small things it can change hour by hour and it's entirely based by my perception.
I can't plan if I'll be sick or if my partner will dump me or anything else that may upset me.
Happiness shouldn't be the goal, it should be something we strive for, despite of the negative in our life.
I can try to achieve some form of success (professional, monetary, social) and that will increase the chance that my life won't fall apart.
From experience that's not enough to be happy all the time. I felt the most miserable right after achieving great results and relaxing. Keeping myself busy (with work or family) is what makes it easier to be happy.
I don't think the alternative should be an hedonistic plan on how to be happy (eg. schedule a meditation session everyday or pamper yourself, eat your favourite food, get in bed with tons of people); still aim at greatness, live your life like you wanted it to read it if it was a book - and try to see good in everything to be happen in fortune and misfortune.
Cherry-picking a few people who can never be at peace and using that to peddle the message of "you don't ACTUALLY want to stop working" seems weird as hell.
If I can retire tomorrow -- I am 42 -- my remaining years on this Earth will still not be enough to do all the hobbies and non-work related goals that I have. Even if I live to 85. And I know others like myself as well.
So I don't know, strange article. If I was a conspiracy theorist I'd call it a propaganda in the direction of "keep working, don't think about anything else". I am willing to accept that was not the author's goal but it does come across this way.
There are several nice tidbits though.
Anyhow, I’m fairly certain if whole communities of people FIRE’d together, they’d be much happier than doing it by themselves. The big issue is the social isolation it brings.
Happiness is the coarse measure of your brain/subconscious/whatever estimate of how you're doing at life: are you effectively working at achieving your goals? This is why people reporting being happy when they are focused on doing what they really want to do, and lack of happiness is just a sign that, at some deep level, you do not believe you are trending toward success at your goals.
You might need to fix your goals. You might need to fix your trend. But happiness is more likely to come as a side effect of doing the right thing (in your own estimation!) than as a direct effect of trying to be happy.
— The One Thing
After studying the science of happiness for quite a while, this paragraph resonated a lot with me, summing it all up pretty nicely. Can recommend the whole book!
TBF the article is also looking at people chasing after a dream, so people living average and happy lives might not fit either.
This isn't a reasonable conclusion. It's easy to make someone unhappy by denying them basic human needs: food, comfort, entertainment, security, community. Once those needs are met, it's much less obvious how to get to the next tier.
It's mostly well-accepted that money is correlated with happiness for people in poverty, but the relationship quickly flattens out for folks who are comfortably middle-class. People instinctively know how to get to a certain baseline, once they have the resources to do so. Moving past that is a separate question entirely.
I think people climb the pyramid and eventually find a state of seeking increasingly profound self realizations.
They then optimize for things like fulfillment and a well protected lower pyramid.
Happiness is an emotion, and not one that seems viable to try and maximize for continuously. There are other emotions that are not compatible with happiness, and they are neccesary to achieve a sense of self actualization.
It's called happiness, like happening. If nothing happens or can happen, how can people be happy?
People do optimize happiness by making money, because then, anything can happen. The problem is that they buy products, where things are already done, instead of buying the tools to get it done by themselves, or better, get it done with their friends.
Please let me know what you think. If you don’t agree please explain what I misunderstood.
I still think FIRE is the best path to happiness. Not having financial pressures gives so much freedom Ime. That doesn’t mean people don’t mess it up though.
Struggling productively has its own value. If you "win" and stop, you can easily be inadvertently giving up something important to you.
I keep making my way back to work.
I know in my life, I was likely ‘happier’ when I didn’t have kids… I spent more hours of the day doing things that I wanted to do, and those things made me happy in the moment. Now, with two young kids, I am spending less time doing the things I would choose to spend my time on, and I have fewer moments where I am in the flow and maximally happy.
However, I feel WAY more satisfied with my life now, and feel much more compete and with a clear purpose in my life.
There is a reason why hedonism is often looked down on; if your only motivation is your own happiness, your life will end up lacking.
It's a conscious choice and the tradeoff is a very different life focus. I don't think one or the other purpose is inherently better, just different.
Having two young kids at home for the past two years with full-time jobs and minimal childcare has really stretched things further than I would have expected.
Watching how much the older kid loves going to the library, check out a stack of books, take them to the playground and read them while his sister plays -- while they both exude sheer joy -- has been unforgettably good. It's not all happy times; the kids need a lot of help and they aren't always cooperative. But it's the job I signed up for and it has a uniquely valuable comp structure.
"First, let’s disentangle the difference between feeling sad, empty, and dissatisfied with life, versus wondering that the purpose of life is all about. They are somewhat related in that people who are content with life and the opportunities it offers don’t generally feel bad when thinking about philosophical questions like, what is the meaning of life?"
From: Going Through An Existential Crisis? Some Advice On Happiness From A Few Good Movies https://moviewise.substack.com/p/going-through-an-existentia...
The meaning of life. This type of happiness can't be bought with money. You have to give away money actually to find happiness.
I tend to be on the liberal side politically, and honestly, that’s what it’s mostly about. It’s selfishness masquerading as compassasion.
Most people I know seem to have so many goals and projects that there is no danger of them running out of things to achieve.
George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study
Longitudinal studies on happiness and fulfillment exist, and show that satisfying relationships dominate other factors.
I'll so glad I adopted this mindset before it was too late.
Optimising for happiness is a terrible goal. Particularly for people of a strong materialist bent, because the obvious answer is drugs, but even spiritually it is quite clear that personal happiness isn't something valuable. Major religions tend to optimise for community. The two I know well - Christianity favours forgiveness and a relation between sinner and God, Buddhism optimises for reducing suffering but in the context of a communal setting.
From the extreme materialist position note that happiness has no evolutionary advantages. Power and wealth do, being gregarious does, having lots of partners does. So humans are not going to optimise for happiness. Those that do get bred out of the gene pool. So in practice happiness is only a signpost pointing towards more pressing goals.
I like a feeling of contentment. If I can walk into my living room, sit quietly doing nothing, and feel contented with who I am, my life, etc. then that is enough for me. I don’t always chase after “fun.”
People are very bad at predicting what will make them happy. Much better to see what people who are happy now actually did, rather than imagine what will make you happy.
You have enough money to retire, then what? You go travelling all around the world, then what? So and so forth until reaching a conclusion on how you consciously decide to live your life.
I think Piketty makes a good argument against GDP if you're keen on learning more about the topic.
Everybody optimizes happiness, most of us poorly.
Optimization in the abstract is meaningless.
Item: you are an evolved system. Ergo, "happiness" is a non-specific proxy for your unconscious estimate of the degree of present and future ease and success at living and reproducing.
You are always optimizing for "happiness" by definition, four and a half billion years of evolution has seen to that. You are the direct descendant of untold millions of successful reproducers.
(As an aside, for FIRE folks who find themselves bored or unsatisfied, the blindingly obvious answer is that your unconscious estimate takes into account the conditions of other people around you. Just because things are good for you doesn't mean you're done. "No man is an island." and all that, eh? The solution is equally obvious: help other people, make the world a better place.)
Item: your brain is easily programmed. Due to the ad hoc nature of our upbringings we acquire models of the world that are wildly inconsistent (above the level of basic physical phenomenon.) We are following quasi-random programs. That's the reason why we work so hard and get such poor results: we are using lousy programs.
Fortunately, it's easy to re-program your brain. In fact there are specific algorithms and techniques. I'd like to call attention to the "Core Transformation" technique particularly. ( https://www.coretransformation.org/ I have no affiliation with them BTW) It's an algorithm for "popping the why stack" (cf. "Five Whys" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys ) Without going into a long spiel about it, the basic idea is that behaviors are motivated by a chain of intentions, a series of indirections.
Behavior -> A -> B -> C -> Happiness
The fascinating thing about these "core states" is that they are not dependent on anything else. (The idea that they are is part of the "lousy programming".) They are not contingent. You can access them at any time, in any location or condition.
As you can imagine, going directly for the "core states" rather than through a chain of indirection brings a lot of simplicity and grace to life. Everything else comes together effortlessly, fulfilling the evolutionary mandate of happiness: present and future ease and success at living.
The happiest 10% of people are appreciating nature, or spiritual and trying to glorify God, or on a mission to save the world.
It's like trying really really hard to fall asleep. The act of conscious aiming makes you sad every time things are less than optimal. Happiness itself is also a raw goal: you could be really happy hooked up to heroine, aiming for that gets you to a place that is ironically very depressing.
The struggle is optimizing that activity to deliver happiness in the best way. Your example about heroin is a really good one, because while it's one of the most direct ways to happiness, it does it in the worst way imaginable.
But I don't think it's a catch-22 because people achieve it in vastly different ways. My buddy likes going clubbing on the weekends, it brings him loads of happiness, I personally would not be happy spending time that way. Likewise I love going outdoors and hiking, and I'm pretty sure he would be miserable in my form of "happiness".