A Moment of Clarity in the Pursuit of Happiness
jtaby.com
jtaby.com
The typical kid complaint is that someone 'makes fun' of something that they are passionate about and that makes them feel 'bad' (ashamed, angry, annoyed, Etc.) The weird thing is that if you look deeply at the feeling of feeling bad, its feeling bad that you feel good about something that someone else things you should feel bad about. How twisted is that? If you can change 'feeling bad' to feeling empathy for the person who doesn't understand how cool this thing is that you enjoy so much, you both don't lose your happiness, and you have a way to contextualize the other persons opinions that don't put your happiness at risk.
That being said, its never easy. Emotions never are. But I read a great article in Reader's Digest about a guy who was being rushed to the emergency room for a gunshot wound to his shoulder. Along the way a nurse was taking a medical history and she asked 'Allergies?'. His response was "Lead apparently, I got some in my shoulder and it hurts like hell!" Here is a guy going into emergency surgery cracking jokes, he has chosen not to be negative or angry, he has chosen to be happy. That really struck me, I don't think I could be so charitable after being shot.
And then there's clinical depression, where you realise this but the effort to think about trying is enough to make you want to cry.
I don't want to undercut the self-governance model because it can make someone a better person. But it has boundaries.
When your friend not only cannot appreciate your hobby but derides it and doesn't attempt to make up for that, your friend is not a very good person or friend. You may be able to train them into being a slightly better person or friend, but more likely you need better friends.
We should not expect people who have been shot to make jokes or to be happy. We should expect them to save their energy for recovering from their wounds.
Our natural emotional reactions to our circumstances are there to provide a corrective feedback system.
The fact that this type of perspective is still so popular just means that civilization has a long way to go towards making daily life more tolerable for average people.
You have to maintain your well-being in the long term by being friend to good people and, well, not being shot, but in the short-term reinforcing positive thinking might just save you from a worse situation.
(further explanation would involve rambling about the reaction being part of who I am but the embracing making it a bigger part of who I am)
The trick is that there are times when getting shot at is the norm, not the exception, so "healing wounds" or however you might want to call it is not the best decision to take (not even from an utilitarian point of view).
Ok, so now that I know that I suck at metaphors and to put it more directly, all I want to say it's that maybe the last 50-80 years of relative prosperity that the West has experienced were an exception, not the norm, the same as Pax Augusta around the times of the early Roman Empire and Seneca was also an exception of sorts. So, as a guy who grew up in a post-Communist European country in the '90s, with inflation averaging 100% each year for over a decade, and who has seen his parents go from respectable middle class to subsistence agriculture in the same timeframe (and my story is not at all singular in that part of Europe), you cannot just magically hope that things will get better. In most of the cases they go from bad to worse, and in that case you really have to adapt to the new conditions (like making jokes when being shot at), because it doesn't get any better than that.
I guess I would like to believe that things can improve significantly so as to make that type of pragmatic attitude adjustment towards misery less important.
Something is always going to go relatively wrong, so being able to deal with it seems like a good idea.
I for one find serious injuries much easier to cope with when I crack jokes about them. If you're around me when I've hurt myself, I'm not grinning and laughing awkwardly for your benefit.
Everyone is different, but for me it's crack jokes, mock myself, and wear a stupid grin OR let the fear bubbling in my stomach take control. Maybe you feel I should "be human" and "give in", but when I'm half an hour from the nearest ER and on my own, screw that.
Emotions do seem to have a life of their own. They seem like the results of deep and unknown mechanisms that I unfortunately have no control on. The best I can do is know myself better and manage that. For example, stress is an issue, and the only way I seem to be able to decrease my stress is to avoid stressful situations (for example avoiding too much work/responsibilities), instead of being able to deal with them. This means limitations with work load/pressure or certain social situations, where I get exhausted quickly.
That said, I've never studied buddhism or meditation. Could these help me control those deep inner workings?
For example, decide that a venture or relationship is going to turn out a certain way, and you are beginning to form an attachment to that outcome. And you increase the chances you may be disappointed.
But, let things develop into whatever they will develop into and you are open to and can thus recognize many good things.
And you are more likely to experience things (this is called life) instead of fixating on some future dubious outcome, which probably is the best outcome for you anyway. Because you can't imagine the best outcome.
Anyway, I'd check out The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Its a bit too religious for my taste but his insights into how this stuff works and mediation are very useful.
"...when his wife arrived in the emergency room, Reagan remarked to her, 'Honey, I forgot to duck'... While intubated, he scribbled to a nurse, "All in all, I'd rather be in Philadelphia."
The secret service agent who took care of Reagan immediately after he was shot and probably saved his life was a chap called Jerry Parr. Parr was originally inspired to pursue a career in the secret service by watching a film called "The Code of the Secret Service". The secret agent who's the protagonist of that film was played by ... Ronald Reagan.
Csikszentmihalyi is saying that happiness is an inner, private cultivation that is not dependent on outside events.
However, Steve Jobs, one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet (while he was alive), says he has been having his own way every day for 30 years. Jobs literally had the means to do just what he wanted to do each day for many years.
The first idea is about being happy regardless of your circumstances. The second idea is about being happy because you figured out how to get what you want out of other people and insisted on it.
And actually I don't see the other quote as being nearly as closely related as he thinks either. That one sounded like dying people were just admitting that they were depressed and wished they had tried harder to make more friends in their senior years.
What I've heard is that genetic bio- and neuro- chemistry play a significant role in happiness, so you have to realistically incorporate that. However, obviously the core conception of the self's orientation towards the world must be partially learned and so training can affect contentment also.
Studies have also shown that the higher one is on the social ladder, the less stress one experiences. So climbing the social ladder will lead to less stress and therefore greater happiness. And most people would agree that having friends is key to happiness also.
The Steve Jobs quote is probably the most unrelated, you're right. I included it because I felt that it gave a good practical example of what it means to introspect, judge, and measure your own fulfillment. The overarching idea I'm trying to get across is to drop the social pressure to "keep your head down, don't make a lot of noise, and you'll get your paycheck every two weeks".
It was something I saw in a museum in New York state, about 1 hour north of New York City - I cant remember the name of the museum or the artist or the piece.
It was, literally, a matrix, where every point was a day in your life.
The shocking thing about it was that you could see it in its entirety pretty well. To my surprise, it was not a HUGE matrix, but rather a pretty small one - that you could see quite clearly both holistically, and every individual cell.
I tried to reproduce it in this excel spreadsheet. It is very shocking to see your life in such a way. It is scary. There are not that many cells!
Really is amazing to see your life in dots.
A months seems like a perfect unit of time to plan your life in.
Now, I'm a father. My son has an easy life. No real responsibilities. But he has his moments of wanting to express his profound unhappiness with what the day holds for him. So I ask him "Do you want to have a good day, or a bad day?" He tells me he wants to have a good day. I tell him that we have things to do and it may not be what he thinks he wants, but he can choose if he wants to be happy. This works surprising well on a four year old. He is almost seven now and I rarely have to remind him of this choice anymore.
This is beautiful. In a world where everything has to be justified by "the bottom line", it's easy to forget why we're making money.
Along those lines, I also found "The Secret Fears of the Super-Rich" to be very eye-opening. (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-f...)
2. Do whatever you wish to do, every single day, such as spending a year studying philosophy while travelling the world, or deciding to learn salsa for a year and a half.
If I'm bootstrapping a company, for example, I can do it because I want to make a lot of money, or I can do it because I want to support my family. It's just a difference of emphasis really, but an important one.
But I don't believe the answer is to disconnect the inner and outer world and be happy no matter what. The whole point of living is to be a part of things. The right approach is to improve or change your environment until you can live well inside it.
Since we're quoting books, I recently found a passage that says this well. From The Timeless Way of Building by Alexander:
This state cannot be reached merely by inner work.
There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need do only inner work, in order to be alive like this; that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself. This teaching has some value, since it is so easy for a man to imagine that his problems are caused by "others". But it is a one-sided and mistaken view which also maintains the arrogance of the belief that the individual is self-sufficient, and not dependent in any essential way on his surroundings. The fact is, a person is so far formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.
That's how I read the parent article though - not that you should float around in a happy bubble, oblivious to the outer world, but rather that you should 'greet each new day with a smile'; that is, good and bad stuff will happen regardless of what you do, but your reaction to it is what determines how you feel about it. This is not to say that the individual is completely self-sufficient, but rather that one can strive to maintain ones mental balance regardless of what's going on.
What does fit you? I hear many people say a certain level of salary would make them happy. Or that sportscar they always dreamt of. Just 5 more years of climbing the corporate ladder and then it's all wonderful from there. However, when you talk to them 5-10 years later, when some of them achieved those goals, they still do not seem to 'fit'; they have bigger and better goals now. Once they achieve those, they will be truly happy! It's a rat race.
My opinion, and since adopting it I see it everywhere, is that the outer does not change the inner, but rather it is the inner that changes the outer. Take, for example, this part of Jobs' famous Stanford Commencement Address: "[After being fired from Apple] I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me."
Notice what changes first; he did not start working on Pixar and NEXT from his feeling of failure nor from a need to change his environment to get his brainchild back. He changed his inner mental state first to accept reality, figure what is truly important, and follow his heart. The environment changed as a result. Once he saw the pure crushing failure of being fired from his own creation, as an positive opportunity to pursue the things he loved to do, it opened new paths unimagined by his negative self. The inner changed the outer.
Happy, for me, is a deep sense of belonging. It's about acceptance, perspective, creativity and finding interest and passion. The inside and outside will never disconnect; it's life, the one cannot exist without the other.
In grade 5, I realized that life was meaningless and I might as well stop caring and just enjoy myself. So I started a long process of emotional change. The easiest thing to get rid of was my empathy, which I got rid of in grade 6. I can still feel sad or happy for others, but it's by choice. I can easily stop myself from emulating their emotions, and in fact I don't anymore by default. Then there was the huge stress that came up whenever I had to get into a social situation. That took a much longer time to remove. For years I would tell myself "who cares what other people think of me?", and try to get myself to do something which would put me into a social situation, but it had very slow results. It wasn't until secondary 4 that I had (mostly) gotten rid of my shyness. And interestingly enough, the first thing to go was the emotion, and then the physical reaction. At some point in secondary 4, someone insulting me would not make me feel a thing, but it would make my eyes a bit waterry, and it would make me gulp.
Though I am now mostly not emotionally affected by bad situations, I have not been able to get rid of the effects of emotion that come from physical things, like pain or being tired. Being tired just zaps the joy out of me. Perhaps you can learn to withstand pain by trying to replace it by better emotions (for example, by cracking jokes), though I haven't experimented with that.
Csikszentmihalyi must have something important to say.
For one thing, it's naive. Any attempt to assert that "X is entirely my fault" is naive. How can you eliminate the impact of your circumstances? For instance, you're here in 2012, working in San Francisco - one of the most exciting times/places ever.
For another, it's happiness-centric, which is boring. I basically don't trust anyone who says that the point of their life is "happiness." Frankly, the idea creeps me out. Sure, happiness is nice. So are transcendance, admiration, comfort, contentment. I also like nostalgia, gloom, longing, ... Life is not some simple game where you can just declare yourself the winner.
Finally, it's positivity-centric. One of my least favorite things about the ethos of the bay area is its inability to bluntly deal with negative feelings/ideas. Everything's always supposed to be getting better all the time - feeling better, running faster, etc. It's boring and unrealistic.
I worry about what will happen to someone who has this sort of mindset when they are older - when the illusion that they are in control of their happiness begins to fade - what happens when calamity strikes.
The universe is very old and you are a tiny speck in it. Concentrating on yourself in this way is like a dog chasing its own tail.
PS - God, and it's so arrogant. I hate this type of "I've figured it out! Eureka!" post/sentiment/essay. It's like a Buddhist claiming that they've been enlightened. It just smacks of self-aggrandizement and insecurity. Blech.
The point is that you can learn to control your reactions to things, and it's a good thing. I used to be extremely stressed out by any social situation. I eventually stopped being so through lots of practice at controlling myself and telling myself "who cares what other people think of me?". And I'm all the better for it. I also have learned to ignore insults and failure (well, ignore them emotionally, though I still try to analyze them rationally), because they give negative emotions that I don't enjoy. However, I still feel nostalgia when I realize "oh shit, that happened seven years ago?!!", and I still feel a rush of excitement when I succeed at getting everything done in a limited amount of time.
Also, the fact that I'm a tiny speck in the universe is the reason I focus on myself. If nothing really matters, you get to choose what does. And I choose myself.
For a counter to your argument see Viktor Frankl:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning
Is there a body of research that supports your counter-claims? I'd love to read anything you can point me to.
To answer your question by deconstructing it: which one of my claims could possibly be supported by empirical research? The fact that I like gloom, nostalgia, and complex forms of pleasure? Or perhaps the idea that it's extremely hard to disambiguate the contribution of your circumstances to your happiness from your own contribution? Or maybe my own personal observations regarding the bay area?
Seriously, what type of research are you looking for?
"Scientists find that yelsgib likes gloomy feelings."
"Sociologists determine that the bay area concentrates on positive feelings to the exclusion of negative ones."
"Cosmologists determine that we are a very small part of the universe."
Are you actually this obtuse? My good god. I seriously cannot believe your response. It seriously blows my mind. I don't even know why I'm responding. It bothers me that I'm even responding. Are you trolling me?
The first line of your response is that "disagreement males (sic) you question your assumptions and strengthens your understanding of the issue." What assumptions did I make you question? How was your understanding of "the issue" strengthened by my response? Did you say these things because you meant them? Or do you just say whatever pops into your head without regard to whether it makes sense or you actually believe it? Did you even read what I wrote?
Holy christ on a cracker.
"Thanks a lot for your comment, disagreement males you question your assumptions and strengthens your understanding of the issue." - Why would you write this? What is the point of writing this statement? No really, pleeeeeeease, stop working on whatever you are doing, and for your own benefit. Put down Flow. Put down your code. Read this, and figure out really what you mean here. Why would you respond with such a condescending sentence to someone who actually read what you said and wrote very really 'personal' arguments against it?
Is there a body of research that supports your counter-claims? I'd love to read anything you can point me to - Same trick again here, go ahead and read this line again, but there is a part 2 to this task. You now need to go read the commenters post. I feel he makes it very very clear in his words and in his tone that all his objections are his just his own thoughts and opinions on the subject. To be honest, I feel like an idiot explaining this to you, but I feel I need to because if I don't you may ask me if I have any 'evidence' to back up my claims. Honestly, please go read that again and if you can justify why you said those words, please reply with them. Please.
Finally, I'm sorry to say all this, and sorry to repeat some of the commeters criticism, but I was just so irritated reading this. As naive and show offy as your blog post was, the kind of behavior shown in your response is 10000X as intolerable, and is just too common with people with that sense of false intellectualism in Silicon Valley. The arrogance and condescension and just lack of respect youve shown creates dividers in people that don't need to exist, and really just decreases everyone's happiness.
Now, generally speaking, for those of us that are well educated, entirely employable and rather wealthy in monetary terms and generally freedom, then achieving success seems to be up to us. I'd contend that happiness is most easily manifested in societally recognized success (thus, hard work + luck). In other words i'd contend happiness is easily derived for 'being respected'.
If not achieved through work and good fortune, i'd say happiness can still be achieved with constant vigilance against some shitty cultural norms we hold as a society. Frankly, the illusion of control is astounding in wealthy countries, and so is constant marketing, that buying shit will make you happy or attractive, or that some product will give you some idealized life that is paraded in front of you every day on television (or the internet). I'd contend that many people are affected by these fake, shitty messages.
Is it perfectly admirable to try and try and try and fail consistently throughout your life? Absolutely. Why should we look to the successful for advice on happiness? Probably the last place to look, survivorship bias will ruin any results. We can't all be popular published authors or start apple computers. I'm a Dvorak typist (*ducks), so i like to reference August Dvorak on the subject of failure. This guy dedicated his life to improving society, for both regular typists and notably, amputees, yet was stymied at every turn by something as simple as a coordination problem. I think it would be very difficult for someone with a life like his to not be entirely jaded at such unprecedented failure, even when you know what you are doing makes sense.
Can you be jaded and happy? Well, maybe, this would cause a debate on what we mean by 'happiness', which is de facto the entire argument here. I would contend that it's difficult. Would ideas like Csikszentmihalyi's help? Probably, but i'd be very skeptical to look at them as actual solutions. Sometimes people fail, and it's okay to fail if you tried your best, and i don't mean that in the 'keep failing until you (obviously eventually) succeed' way. I mean really fail. Until that is mentally acceptable, which is really freaking hard to maintain in our society, then i think some people are going to be continuously frustrated and perpetually unhappy, and i don't think 'convince yourself to be happy' is an acceptable prescription. Again, while i think it will help, it's a rough world out there, and it's hard to maintain the mental composure suggested here in the face of real tragedy.
I don't have children though, so I can't really empathize on a deep level, I'm just going by intuition.
I was able to pay it all off in about three years after getting out by just sticking with the college lifestyle while I worked.
But this doesn't seem right. Your life is a story and it will have troughs as well as peaks. It's more honest to accept this and learn to experience everything that it offers fully. If somebody you love dies you should feel sad, and maybe you'll cry. There's nothing wrong with this.
I think there is great strength in allowing yourself to be vulnerable and accepting things as they happen. Do whatever you can to make life enjoyable for yourself but you're going to have to give a little!
Some good books that go into depth on this insight: Antonio Damasio's "The Feeling of What Happens, Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness", and Jonathan Haidt's "The Happiness Hypothesis". In a nutshell Damsio gives a framework for what consciousness is, and Haidt gives some insight on how to hack your consciousness to do better at life. (I'm unsure if Damasio is actually considered related to positive psychology ... but it is great background.)
Another resource is to research Viktor Frankl. His story and writings put most any common day issues into stark perspective.
Perhaps we should be thinking more long-term than we are... ;)
This concept reminds me of Feeling Good by Burns. He said that our thoughts control our emotions, and if we control our thoughts, we control our emotions.
I know people who pursue happiness above everything else. They are in debt and in denial. Somebody will come and bail them out, hopefully. Cover your costs first. With the rest of your time, pursue happiness.
Anyway i love this kind of thinking, it really has helped my marriage a lot.
If I could I would purchase a million copies and give them away for free. It's that good.
Thanks
http://itunes.apple.com/us/book/think-and-grow-rich/id412247...
Same author tho.