I don’t buy the sunset vs. vomit example. Problem is that the prospect of the “equal happiness” drug can’t recalibrate my priors on which will make me more happy—so when I still answer in the affirmative that I prefer the sunset even w/ the drug, this answer is still driven by what I expect to be the more enjoyable experience. You’d have to condition me with at least a few ecstatic vomit experiences (and maybe a few disgusting sunset experiences) for me to really “get” the prospect of the drug.
A subtle point here is that anticipatory happiness (and affect more generally) guides decision-making. When I’m planning what to do next, I’m using my memory of previous affect to weigh the expected value of competing options. This also helps explain why it’s easy for ppl to confabulate their want for happiness—they are in fact using it as a cue for what they want, and don’t notice that it’s just a proxy.
Fair point, but I would quibble with the term “anticipated happiness.” If I’m right about happiness, then it cannot really be anticipated. Its job is to recalibrate us when things go above and beyond what we anticipated. To anticipate happiness is to lower its likelihood of occurring. I think a better way of getting what you’re talking about is just “expected value.” When we expect things to be really valuable, we’re really energized and focused and ready to go get them. But what has value is not happiness itself, but things in the world like, say, beauty. The point of the thought experiment is to show that what has value to us is independent of the happiness it elicits. Though I take the point that these thought experiments prove very little. The only reason I engage in them is because people seem to be persuaded that they want to be happy on the basis of such thought experiments. So I figured I might as well play their game.
“If I’m right about happiness, then it cannot really be anticipated.”
Hmm. I’m confident we can and do anticipate affect.
Why can’t the output of the recalibration function (which I buy) then be used as the input for the expected value function? More strongly, how could it *not* be?
If I ask you what drink you want from the bar or what movie you prefer to watch, you’ll draw on your previous experience of various alternatives, and use how those experiences felt (affect) to adjudicate between them. You might even say “anything but vodka, it’s gross” or “I really enjoyed Tarantino’s last film, so let’s see his new one.” These utterances suggest prior valence is being used to predict future valence.
We don’t intuitively think or speak in terms of value computations, though I do think that’s what affect is indexing and cueing to us in these cases.
I love the happiness = sacred value idea btw. The examples are sobering. It’s like some kind of incantation, where uttering the right words transmogrifies all kinds of ruthless behavior into butterflies and rainbows.
It seems there is a non-predictive aspect of happiness (i.e. detached from reward-prediction error). The aspect of happiness you refer to is accurate from a dopaminergic lens, but I'd propound the dopaminergic aspect isn’t the sole one. E.g., I go to spend time with my family, expecting a few banal conversations and a card game, and lo, my prediction is spot on (as the scenario recurs, so I accurately know what it will be like in most cases), yet I feel happy with them (more an oxytocinergic aspect of happiness). Another example is petting my dog; I expect nothing but the dog to be a dog, yet it does confer "happiness" nonetheless. According to hedonic psychology research, relationships are among the life variables with the greatest effect on happiness, yet they do not confer prediction error-based happiness. Thoughts?
Thanks, Nicolas. This is a great point--and one I probably should have addressed in the piece. I think what's going on is that we predict experiences at multiple levels of granularity, and when we say "this is going to be good," what we mean is "this is going to be good at a macro-level of granularity." So when I say "the new John Wick movie is going to be good," what I mean is that the overall quality of the film is going to be high. And when I say "the new John Wick movie was exactly as good as I expected," what I mean is "the overall quality was about what I expected." But that doesn't mean I had zero prediction errors while watching the film. Obviously I had tons of prediction errors while watching the film because I had never seen it before. So I probably felt tons of happiness while watching the film despite it being, at the macro-level (and in hindsight) about as good as I expected. Of course, if I watched the movie 100 times, and got to the point where I could perfectly predict every moment and line of dialogue, then it would no longer make me happy. It would be extremely boring. So happiness is still about prediction errors, but the errors can happen at different levels of granularity. To bring it back to your dog example, the macro-level prediction "dogs are great" may be correct, but there are likely many prediction errors about *that particular dog* (the texture of its fur, its level of cuddliness) at the micro level, and those micro-level prediction errors may still make you feel happy. As for the psychological literature on the correlation between good relationships and happiness, I think that is largely dependent on circular measures of happiness that ask participants if they're generally getting what they want in life. Yes, we want good relationships, and having good relationships is going to be correlated with answers to questions like "are you satisfied with your life?" But that doesn't mean we want happiness per se. It means we want good relationships.
"So happiness is still about prediction errors, but the errors can happen at different levels of granularity."
To clarify, are you suggesting that it is micro-level prediction errors that confer the positive affect of "happiness," even in seemingly simple and straightforward occurrences, e.g. petting my dog? It doesn’t seem to me as though I make prediction errors; to my knowledge it's just release of certain "bonding" neurochemicals (i.e. oxytocin, endorphin) upon contact (physical and eye) with my dog, which doesn’t prima facie indicate to me "prediction error" and to my knowledge doesn’t require prediction error but rather meeting certain conditions (i.e. eye/physical contact with the dog). Dopaminergic prediction error is far more straightforward to me as an aspect of "happiness." To be fair, I'm only somewhat familiar with the concept, so I may well be missing something here.
I'm saying positive prediction errors in general, at both the micro and macro levels, correspond to the thing we call "happiness" or "pleasure." If the errors are happening at both levels--e.g., we're discovering how great dogs in general are, as well as how great this particular dog is--then the happiness will be particularly intense (e.g., the happiness of playing with a dog as a child). I suspect this is part of why happiness declines with age. Our higher-level prediction errors are the ones that decline first (because they're the easiest to fix), reducing overall happiness intensity, followed by lower and lower-level prediction errors as we gain more and more life experience. The prediction errors never get to zero because the world is unpredictable, but they gradually decline in frequency and intensity.
There's an interesting recent deep dive into the data surrounding pleasure as happiness with its rapid adaption compared to fulfillment (as communicated from oxytocin bonding chemicals) from Simone and Malcolm Collins:
Really great piece as usual. I guess that your happiness idea is harder to sell, as the belief that we want to be happy is perhaps more sincerely held. I might recognise that I’m not as nice a person as I like to think I am (as we probably often have this sneaking suspicion), but I might find it harder to believe that I don’t want to feel good.
I find all these ideas so interesting and fascinating, but I still get uneasy about the idea (and as you say in the piece, it’s a sticking point for a lot of people) that our motives aren’t very edifying. No problem, of course, in seeing all this in people I disagree with or find annoying. It’s not that hard to see it in myself, but I just don’t like seeing it in people I like and care about. I find that a way around this sticking point for me is to think of the conscious parts of our brains that really believe the BS (I believe in justice etc) as quite earnest and innocent, but that there are underlying, crafty evolutionary forces tricking the innocent, conscious bits. This allows me to think fondly of the sweet, if rather deluded, conscious parts. I wondered if you think that’s just a totally simplistic way of framing what’s really going on?
Hmm, I do see that way of thinking a lot when I bring up these ideas. People really want to maintain that the conscious parts of us are pure and well-intentioned: it’s just that those ugly unconscious parts are maybe sometimes getting in the way. I think it’s a way to separate the “true self” from the parts of us we don’t like. I doubt there’s such a thing as a “true self,” but if we can’t help but think in such terms, and if we have to put the “true self” sticker somewhere, I suppose we might as well stick it on the nicest-looking part of us. I think this is a cope, at the end of the day, but it’s a cope I can respect. And it may be useful. I suspect there is a correlation between being a shitty person and having one’s darker motives be more conscious and on the surface. I know some people will openly agree with items on
surveys like “I’m better than everyone else” or “I don’t care about others’ pain,” so maybe there’s variation in how conscious this stuff is, and maybe that correlation tracks how good a person you are. Nobody’s a perfect person, but some are better than others, and maybe we use the relative level conscious ugliness as a cue to someone’s character.
“The pursuit of happiness is one of the cornerstones of western culture. It is so thoroughly enmeshed with our social, economic, and political lives it is hard, if not impossible, to extricate ourselves from it. But I think we should extricate ourselves from it, no matter how difficult and counterintuitive it might be, because it’s bullshit.”
I’m not sure then what we’re extricating ourselves towards if everything else (beauty, virtue, the well-being of others, a more accurate view of reality, a healthy physical and mental state, the mitigation of luck in our society…) is also all bullshit in the service of status.
Brilliant essay. The first "Happiness is bullshit" essay shattered my worldview, but in a good way, and this one might be even better.
I did think of one possible contradiction in these essays. You said that happiness is caused by a prediction error - if things turn out better than expected we feel happy. You also said meditation made you happy. However, I'm sure you had meditated many times before and knew what to expect from your practice, so why did it make you happy?
Thanks, good point. My working theory is that meditation doesn’t activate happiness per se; rather, it mimics the properties of happiness, such that it feels very similar to it, but isn’t quite the same thing. A heightened state of mindfulness is a kind of counterfeit happiness without the reinforcing properties. If it had the reinforcing properties of happiness, people would get addicted to meditation, but that didn’t happen with me and it doesn’t seem to happen in general. I’m not aware of any meditation addicts. Why is mindfulness similar to happiness? Because when you’re happy you slow down and pay attention to the thing that’s making you happy—you savor it. Often (though not always) that savoring happens alongside relaxation, because the prediction error means you no longer need to be as vigilant or as nervous as you thought you needed to be. So meditation mimics the savoring and the relaxation parts of happiness, without actually reinforcing or recalibrating you in any way. That’s my best guess of what’s going on.
Thank you for the explanation, that seems plausible. I had an experience which mirrored your meditation practice. I tried keeping a gratitude journal for a while. Every morning I would write down something that went well the previous day, and I would also write down 5 things I was grateful for in life in general. It worked great. Throughout my day I found myself noticing good things so I could write them down in the gratitude journal, and it made me feel good.
However, I didn't stick with it. I haven't had a gratitude journal in a long time and have no intention of starting it back up. It just seemed so dorky. Honestly I'm embarrassed to mentioned it here. Plus I'm always busy and it took too much time. The fact that people rarely do things like meditate and keep gratitude journals is good support for the theory that happiness is bullshit.
This one is a bit of a bummer: "From an evolutionary perspective, such goals would include rearing offspring to maturity, becoming a valued member of our community, ascending a social hierarchy, or outcompeting rival groups for power and resources. "
If a human is rather certain none of these things will be in their future, it would suggest psychic distress is going to be everpresent.
Becoming excellent at meditating seems to be a possible solution: learn to focus attention on bits of beauty in the here and now and acquire exceptional mental self awareness and self control to defuse all distracting emotions, pangs, and impulsive desires.
Interestingly, contrary to popular belief, Epicurus was not about loads of hedonism in the conventional sense, but about disengaging from society's status games and seeking joy in the peace of mind of simplicity and minimalism, and this lifestyle required just as much, if not more, mental fortitude than Stoicism.
Yes if these long-term goals aren’t in the cards, then beauty is a good fallback, as there is an unprecedented abundance of it in the modern world. And if being an alpha isn’t in the cards, being content as a beta or gamma or ally of either is an underrated virtue in our competitive culture.
You're equally giving of bummers together with encouragement that one is on the right path :)
The comprehensive abandonment of the working class by the intelligentsia in favor of entirely performative symbolic virtue so swampy in signifiers that functionally exploitative luxury beliefs have become academia's alpha tokens presents an open lane to pursue a vision of workers' allied intelligentsia equally hostile to the Authoritarianism dominant in the Left as espoused by, e.g. Kimberlee Crenshaw and dominant in the New Right as espoused by, e.g. Curtis Yarvin. With the dissolution of meritocracy and economic mobility, "No Gods, No Masters" becomes the most salient corrective virtue.
This, to me, is basically a definition of a great post. It takes something that most of us would never even consider questioning, pokes at it from multiple different angles and proceeds to dismantle the concept completely. After reading this, it is almost hard to remember how pursuing happiness once seemed like a fairly reasonable idea.
I have written a short piece in which I consider that it is not happiness that we seek, but simply for things to be interesting. I do not actually think that this is 'the' meaning of life, but it might at least offer an alternative to replace the happiness with, since you have pretty much done away with that naive notion entirely.
Joking aside, very well put and stretched my brain, which I enjoyed - which made me feel happy (heehee) ... bahh I cant respond without making a joke about happiness ... I shall just say:
I thoughtism Budhism and 'forgeting your problems and making yourself happy with meditating' was bullshit,but i loved nonzero and i trust you so i will give robert's book a chance to change my mind. How long did it take you to meditate efficiently enough to the point you could control your emotions btw
I'd say it took me a good six months to get to the point where I could reliably deliver ease, peace, calmness, and good vibes through meditation. Fwiw, I agree with you that "making yourself happy with meditating" is bullshit, but I think there are other benefits of meditation beyond happiness, like gaining insight into how your mind works and getting better at regulating your attention. For me personally, meditation was driven primarily by curiosity, but once I satisfied my curiosity, I got bored of meditation and only do it occasionally now.
On 'Happiness'....."For any reasonably educated, reasonably sane, citizen of any Western nation – anyone with even the most basic grasp of history and flimsiest awareness of what are currently the worst places on earth – it would be curmudgeonly not to recognise that life for us is pretty good and has been for a good long time. The more reflective might ponder whether the quantity of human happiness does actually expand to fit the quantity of propitious circumstance or whether happiness is more in the way of a self-levelling constant." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
One can conceive of Jungian shadow integration as acknowledging ones unflattering desires arising from evopsych-illuminated pursuits.
I actually use this for therapy: I ask myself or my friend "what is the monkey inside the brain trying to communicate with this distress?" which can lead to, for example, "ok, there there monkey, it's OK, we're not in the jungle anymore, you're not in grave danger to be cast away to fend for yourself"
I agree it does not make sense to pursue happiness per se, but I'm sure glad that I feel happy when those prediction errors click . Still, enshrining the pursuit of happiness in a foundational document makes sense, if only to allow us the freedom to not have some other vested interest pursuits chain us down.. For my take on the predictive processinginterpretation of happiness / mood , check out my post "Deep down, mood is not about feeling". Thanks for writing about this!
Ehhhh…. A lot or what you say seems true, but it seems too convenient. It is a grand narrative, capable of explaining *all* human behavior. Every potential caveat? Actually, no, here is how it fits in the theory!
I don’t think evolution has selected for perfectly calibrated humans oriented only towards status. If status seeking is frowned upon, then evolution will select for those who *genuinely aren’t seeking status!*
Anyway, thanks for the read. I can’t sign on to it, but I can sign on to 50% of it 😂
wonderful insights ! I would want to ask you if companionship or friendship is bullshit. My counterintuition says so but I am not sure. To be with friends is also the most common answer to the question what makes you happy
I suspect a lot of what goes on between friends—and a lot of what friends talk about—is bullshit (shooting the shit, as they say), but I don’t think friendship itself is bullshit. I think we evolved to genuinely want and maintain friendships.
I don’t buy the sunset vs. vomit example. Problem is that the prospect of the “equal happiness” drug can’t recalibrate my priors on which will make me more happy—so when I still answer in the affirmative that I prefer the sunset even w/ the drug, this answer is still driven by what I expect to be the more enjoyable experience. You’d have to condition me with at least a few ecstatic vomit experiences (and maybe a few disgusting sunset experiences) for me to really “get” the prospect of the drug.
A subtle point here is that anticipatory happiness (and affect more generally) guides decision-making. When I’m planning what to do next, I’m using my memory of previous affect to weigh the expected value of competing options. This also helps explain why it’s easy for ppl to confabulate their want for happiness—they are in fact using it as a cue for what they want, and don’t notice that it’s just a proxy.
Fair point, but I would quibble with the term “anticipated happiness.” If I’m right about happiness, then it cannot really be anticipated. Its job is to recalibrate us when things go above and beyond what we anticipated. To anticipate happiness is to lower its likelihood of occurring. I think a better way of getting what you’re talking about is just “expected value.” When we expect things to be really valuable, we’re really energized and focused and ready to go get them. But what has value is not happiness itself, but things in the world like, say, beauty. The point of the thought experiment is to show that what has value to us is independent of the happiness it elicits. Though I take the point that these thought experiments prove very little. The only reason I engage in them is because people seem to be persuaded that they want to be happy on the basis of such thought experiments. So I figured I might as well play their game.
“If I’m right about happiness, then it cannot really be anticipated.”
Hmm. I’m confident we can and do anticipate affect.
Why can’t the output of the recalibration function (which I buy) then be used as the input for the expected value function? More strongly, how could it *not* be?
If I ask you what drink you want from the bar or what movie you prefer to watch, you’ll draw on your previous experience of various alternatives, and use how those experiences felt (affect) to adjudicate between them. You might even say “anything but vodka, it’s gross” or “I really enjoyed Tarantino’s last film, so let’s see his new one.” These utterances suggest prior valence is being used to predict future valence.
We don’t intuitively think or speak in terms of value computations, though I do think that’s what affect is indexing and cueing to us in these cases.
Yes agreed, but it's valence--not happiness--that we're predicting. Happiness is when we underestimate the valence.
I see the distinction now. That makes sense.
I love the happiness = sacred value idea btw. The examples are sobering. It’s like some kind of incantation, where uttering the right words transmogrifies all kinds of ruthless behavior into butterflies and rainbows.
This is so good. Evolutionary thinking continues to surprise me with unexpected insights.
It seems there is a non-predictive aspect of happiness (i.e. detached from reward-prediction error). The aspect of happiness you refer to is accurate from a dopaminergic lens, but I'd propound the dopaminergic aspect isn’t the sole one. E.g., I go to spend time with my family, expecting a few banal conversations and a card game, and lo, my prediction is spot on (as the scenario recurs, so I accurately know what it will be like in most cases), yet I feel happy with them (more an oxytocinergic aspect of happiness). Another example is petting my dog; I expect nothing but the dog to be a dog, yet it does confer "happiness" nonetheless. According to hedonic psychology research, relationships are among the life variables with the greatest effect on happiness, yet they do not confer prediction error-based happiness. Thoughts?
Thanks, Nicolas. This is a great point--and one I probably should have addressed in the piece. I think what's going on is that we predict experiences at multiple levels of granularity, and when we say "this is going to be good," what we mean is "this is going to be good at a macro-level of granularity." So when I say "the new John Wick movie is going to be good," what I mean is that the overall quality of the film is going to be high. And when I say "the new John Wick movie was exactly as good as I expected," what I mean is "the overall quality was about what I expected." But that doesn't mean I had zero prediction errors while watching the film. Obviously I had tons of prediction errors while watching the film because I had never seen it before. So I probably felt tons of happiness while watching the film despite it being, at the macro-level (and in hindsight) about as good as I expected. Of course, if I watched the movie 100 times, and got to the point where I could perfectly predict every moment and line of dialogue, then it would no longer make me happy. It would be extremely boring. So happiness is still about prediction errors, but the errors can happen at different levels of granularity. To bring it back to your dog example, the macro-level prediction "dogs are great" may be correct, but there are likely many prediction errors about *that particular dog* (the texture of its fur, its level of cuddliness) at the micro level, and those micro-level prediction errors may still make you feel happy. As for the psychological literature on the correlation between good relationships and happiness, I think that is largely dependent on circular measures of happiness that ask participants if they're generally getting what they want in life. Yes, we want good relationships, and having good relationships is going to be correlated with answers to questions like "are you satisfied with your life?" But that doesn't mean we want happiness per se. It means we want good relationships.
"So happiness is still about prediction errors, but the errors can happen at different levels of granularity."
To clarify, are you suggesting that it is micro-level prediction errors that confer the positive affect of "happiness," even in seemingly simple and straightforward occurrences, e.g. petting my dog? It doesn’t seem to me as though I make prediction errors; to my knowledge it's just release of certain "bonding" neurochemicals (i.e. oxytocin, endorphin) upon contact (physical and eye) with my dog, which doesn’t prima facie indicate to me "prediction error" and to my knowledge doesn’t require prediction error but rather meeting certain conditions (i.e. eye/physical contact with the dog). Dopaminergic prediction error is far more straightforward to me as an aspect of "happiness." To be fair, I'm only somewhat familiar with the concept, so I may well be missing something here.
I'm saying positive prediction errors in general, at both the micro and macro levels, correspond to the thing we call "happiness" or "pleasure." If the errors are happening at both levels--e.g., we're discovering how great dogs in general are, as well as how great this particular dog is--then the happiness will be particularly intense (e.g., the happiness of playing with a dog as a child). I suspect this is part of why happiness declines with age. Our higher-level prediction errors are the ones that decline first (because they're the easiest to fix), reducing overall happiness intensity, followed by lower and lower-level prediction errors as we gain more and more life experience. The prediction errors never get to zero because the world is unpredictable, but they gradually decline in frequency and intensity.
I see what you're saying. Thanks for the replies and the articles.
There's an interesting recent deep dive into the data surrounding pleasure as happiness with its rapid adaption compared to fulfillment (as communicated from oxytocin bonding chemicals) from Simone and Malcolm Collins:
https://basedcamppodcast.substack.com/p/overcoming-the-genetics-of-happiness
Only now seeing this, many thanks for the resource; I will check it out.
Really great piece as usual. I guess that your happiness idea is harder to sell, as the belief that we want to be happy is perhaps more sincerely held. I might recognise that I’m not as nice a person as I like to think I am (as we probably often have this sneaking suspicion), but I might find it harder to believe that I don’t want to feel good.
I find all these ideas so interesting and fascinating, but I still get uneasy about the idea (and as you say in the piece, it’s a sticking point for a lot of people) that our motives aren’t very edifying. No problem, of course, in seeing all this in people I disagree with or find annoying. It’s not that hard to see it in myself, but I just don’t like seeing it in people I like and care about. I find that a way around this sticking point for me is to think of the conscious parts of our brains that really believe the BS (I believe in justice etc) as quite earnest and innocent, but that there are underlying, crafty evolutionary forces tricking the innocent, conscious bits. This allows me to think fondly of the sweet, if rather deluded, conscious parts. I wondered if you think that’s just a totally simplistic way of framing what’s really going on?
Hmm, I do see that way of thinking a lot when I bring up these ideas. People really want to maintain that the conscious parts of us are pure and well-intentioned: it’s just that those ugly unconscious parts are maybe sometimes getting in the way. I think it’s a way to separate the “true self” from the parts of us we don’t like. I doubt there’s such a thing as a “true self,” but if we can’t help but think in such terms, and if we have to put the “true self” sticker somewhere, I suppose we might as well stick it on the nicest-looking part of us. I think this is a cope, at the end of the day, but it’s a cope I can respect. And it may be useful. I suspect there is a correlation between being a shitty person and having one’s darker motives be more conscious and on the surface. I know some people will openly agree with items on
surveys like “I’m better than everyone else” or “I don’t care about others’ pain,” so maybe there’s variation in how conscious this stuff is, and maybe that correlation tracks how good a person you are. Nobody’s a perfect person, but some are better than others, and maybe we use the relative level conscious ugliness as a cue to someone’s character.
Thanks for the reply, David. Makes sense. OK - I'll keep my nice, comforting cope.
“The pursuit of happiness is one of the cornerstones of western culture. It is so thoroughly enmeshed with our social, economic, and political lives it is hard, if not impossible, to extricate ourselves from it. But I think we should extricate ourselves from it, no matter how difficult and counterintuitive it might be, because it’s bullshit.”
I’m not sure then what we’re extricating ourselves towards if everything else (beauty, virtue, the well-being of others, a more accurate view of reality, a healthy physical and mental state, the mitigation of luck in our society…) is also all bullshit in the service of status.
Yea it probably is at the end of the day, but at least we can be honest about it.
Will sit with that even if it only makes me bored and relaxed.
Absolutely awesome, thank you!
Brilliant essay. The first "Happiness is bullshit" essay shattered my worldview, but in a good way, and this one might be even better.
I did think of one possible contradiction in these essays. You said that happiness is caused by a prediction error - if things turn out better than expected we feel happy. You also said meditation made you happy. However, I'm sure you had meditated many times before and knew what to expect from your practice, so why did it make you happy?
Thanks, good point. My working theory is that meditation doesn’t activate happiness per se; rather, it mimics the properties of happiness, such that it feels very similar to it, but isn’t quite the same thing. A heightened state of mindfulness is a kind of counterfeit happiness without the reinforcing properties. If it had the reinforcing properties of happiness, people would get addicted to meditation, but that didn’t happen with me and it doesn’t seem to happen in general. I’m not aware of any meditation addicts. Why is mindfulness similar to happiness? Because when you’re happy you slow down and pay attention to the thing that’s making you happy—you savor it. Often (though not always) that savoring happens alongside relaxation, because the prediction error means you no longer need to be as vigilant or as nervous as you thought you needed to be. So meditation mimics the savoring and the relaxation parts of happiness, without actually reinforcing or recalibrating you in any way. That’s my best guess of what’s going on.
Thank you for the explanation, that seems plausible. I had an experience which mirrored your meditation practice. I tried keeping a gratitude journal for a while. Every morning I would write down something that went well the previous day, and I would also write down 5 things I was grateful for in life in general. It worked great. Throughout my day I found myself noticing good things so I could write them down in the gratitude journal, and it made me feel good.
However, I didn't stick with it. I haven't had a gratitude journal in a long time and have no intention of starting it back up. It just seemed so dorky. Honestly I'm embarrassed to mentioned it here. Plus I'm always busy and it took too much time. The fact that people rarely do things like meditate and keep gratitude journals is good support for the theory that happiness is bullshit.
Insightful nuance indeed
This one is a bit of a bummer: "From an evolutionary perspective, such goals would include rearing offspring to maturity, becoming a valued member of our community, ascending a social hierarchy, or outcompeting rival groups for power and resources. "
If a human is rather certain none of these things will be in their future, it would suggest psychic distress is going to be everpresent.
Becoming excellent at meditating seems to be a possible solution: learn to focus attention on bits of beauty in the here and now and acquire exceptional mental self awareness and self control to defuse all distracting emotions, pangs, and impulsive desires.
Interestingly, contrary to popular belief, Epicurus was not about loads of hedonism in the conventional sense, but about disengaging from society's status games and seeking joy in the peace of mind of simplicity and minimalism, and this lifestyle required just as much, if not more, mental fortitude than Stoicism.
Yes if these long-term goals aren’t in the cards, then beauty is a good fallback, as there is an unprecedented abundance of it in the modern world. And if being an alpha isn’t in the cards, being content as a beta or gamma or ally of either is an underrated virtue in our competitive culture.
You're equally giving of bummers together with encouragement that one is on the right path :)
The comprehensive abandonment of the working class by the intelligentsia in favor of entirely performative symbolic virtue so swampy in signifiers that functionally exploitative luxury beliefs have become academia's alpha tokens presents an open lane to pursue a vision of workers' allied intelligentsia equally hostile to the Authoritarianism dominant in the Left as espoused by, e.g. Kimberlee Crenshaw and dominant in the New Right as espoused by, e.g. Curtis Yarvin. With the dissolution of meritocracy and economic mobility, "No Gods, No Masters" becomes the most salient corrective virtue.
https://philomaticalgorhythms.substack.com/p/philosophical-and-ideological-foundations
This, to me, is basically a definition of a great post. It takes something that most of us would never even consider questioning, pokes at it from multiple different angles and proceeds to dismantle the concept completely. After reading this, it is almost hard to remember how pursuing happiness once seemed like a fairly reasonable idea.
I have written a short piece in which I consider that it is not happiness that we seek, but simply for things to be interesting. I do not actually think that this is 'the' meaning of life, but it might at least offer an alternative to replace the happiness with, since you have pretty much done away with that naive notion entirely.
https://obliquelyspeaking.substack.com/p/the-meaning-of-life
I agree ! ... Are you happy now? Teehee teehee
Joking aside, very well put and stretched my brain, which I enjoyed - which made me feel happy (heehee) ... bahh I cant respond without making a joke about happiness ... I shall just say:
Thank you
I thoughtism Budhism and 'forgeting your problems and making yourself happy with meditating' was bullshit,but i loved nonzero and i trust you so i will give robert's book a chance to change my mind. How long did it take you to meditate efficiently enough to the point you could control your emotions btw
I'd say it took me a good six months to get to the point where I could reliably deliver ease, peace, calmness, and good vibes through meditation. Fwiw, I agree with you that "making yourself happy with meditating" is bullshit, but I think there are other benefits of meditation beyond happiness, like gaining insight into how your mind works and getting better at regulating your attention. For me personally, meditation was driven primarily by curiosity, but once I satisfied my curiosity, I got bored of meditation and only do it occasionally now.
On 'Happiness'....."For any reasonably educated, reasonably sane, citizen of any Western nation – anyone with even the most basic grasp of history and flimsiest awareness of what are currently the worst places on earth – it would be curmudgeonly not to recognise that life for us is pretty good and has been for a good long time. The more reflective might ponder whether the quantity of human happiness does actually expand to fit the quantity of propitious circumstance or whether happiness is more in the way of a self-levelling constant." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
One can conceive of Jungian shadow integration as acknowledging ones unflattering desires arising from evopsych-illuminated pursuits.
I actually use this for therapy: I ask myself or my friend "what is the monkey inside the brain trying to communicate with this distress?" which can lead to, for example, "ok, there there monkey, it's OK, we're not in the jungle anymore, you're not in grave danger to be cast away to fend for yourself"
I agree it does not make sense to pursue happiness per se, but I'm sure glad that I feel happy when those prediction errors click . Still, enshrining the pursuit of happiness in a foundational document makes sense, if only to allow us the freedom to not have some other vested interest pursuits chain us down.. For my take on the predictive processinginterpretation of happiness / mood , check out my post "Deep down, mood is not about feeling". Thanks for writing about this!
Ehhhh…. A lot or what you say seems true, but it seems too convenient. It is a grand narrative, capable of explaining *all* human behavior. Every potential caveat? Actually, no, here is how it fits in the theory!
I don’t think evolution has selected for perfectly calibrated humans oriented only towards status. If status seeking is frowned upon, then evolution will select for those who *genuinely aren’t seeking status!*
Anyway, thanks for the read. I can’t sign on to it, but I can sign on to 50% of it 😂
Edit: I am not sure how to make italics
wonderful insights ! I would want to ask you if companionship or friendship is bullshit. My counterintuition says so but I am not sure. To be with friends is also the most common answer to the question what makes you happy
I suspect a lot of what goes on between friends—and a lot of what friends talk about—is bullshit (shooting the shit, as they say), but I don’t think friendship itself is bullshit. I think we evolved to genuinely want and maintain friendships.