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.
Agree. The author writes "Our imaginations are flawed and feeble programs built by natural selection to navigate small tribes and small-to-medium-sized objects…"
But then asks the reader to imagine “do you want the thing that makes you happy, or the happiness itself? Of course you want the real thing!" When that seems to be the most straightforward case where our imagination is bound to fail us.
Fair. At best though, you have to concede that imaginary thought experiments are not good evidence one way or the other. Imagination just isn't reliable. Far more reliable is logic (wanting happiness leads to infinite regress), evolutionary theory (happiness makes no sense as an evolved motive), and empirical evidence (e.g. of habituation, declines in happiness over time, the separation between motivation and happiness, the reward prediction error theory of dopamine, etc.).
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.
So a Bayesian prediction at the subconscious level, as opposed to a conscious prediction. I pet a dog and it's a positive experience. Logically, I might expect the next time I pet that dog that it will be the exact same positive experience. But internally, on a subconscious level, I have a calibration set that has only updated so far towards the satisfaction of petting that dog. So when petting the dog a second time replicates precisely the experience I had petting the dog the first time, I feel happiness, even though the experience is exactly as I conciously anticipated. With repeated exposure, the internal calibration will eventually converge upon the true satisfaction level and I will no longer feel the happiness.
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.
Hi David, I commented with some critiques on your original happiness post, and I'm back with some more thoughts. First, I want to say that after some reflection I basically agree with your thesis and it has fundamentally altered my philosophy of life, so thank you for your valuable writing on this topic.
I think the pushback you've received is partially due to your provocative framing of "happiness is bullshit" and "nobody wants to be happy." The idea you're actually arguing is that "happiness is not the sole motivator behind all human behavior," which is much less controversial. But the way you write about it can read like "nobody wants happiness AT ALL," as if this is not even possible. This is trivially false--people can consciously desire the psychological state of happiness, so it is obviously possible (and in fact common) to want happiness.
It's not clear to me what takeaway you want people to get from these posts. It seems like you want people to give up the pursuit of happiness, and pursue the things-in-the-world we "actually" want instead--status, beauty, food, sex, etc. But this doesn't solve the problems that you point out. Whatever you pursue, you will either (a) not achieve it and suffer or (b) achieve it, feel happy for a bit, but then habituate and feel bored/unsatisfied and start pursuing something else. This is why I think the takeaway should actually be the opposite of what you seem to suggest. You can reflect on the nature of desire and happiness, and try to align what you want with what will actually make you happy. This involves things like: cutting your attachments to things that used to make you happy but don't anymore, practicing moderation, seeking novelty, accepting that life is unpredictable/ever-changing and not clinging onto expected outcomes, appreciating the things you already have, realizing that nothing you're pursuing will bring everlasting satisfaction and not falling into the trap of "I'll be happy when I get X," etc.
Some other comments:
You point out that "positive affect" decreases with age, but so does "negative affect," per the study. There's a lot of disagreement over what happiness actually is, but I like the utilitarian framing of "positive affect minus negative affect." A happy life isn't just an abundance of pleasure, but also an absence of suffering. I think this partially explains why life satisfaction increases with age in the study. Because of the negativity bias that humans have, negative emotions are more salient than positive emotions. So I think it's actually better to have fewer extremes of high and low emotions, because the intensity of suffering can greatly outweigh the intensity of pleasure.
You said that when you got good at meditation, you could give yourself all the happiness you wanted, but you didn't want it because you found it boring and unappealing. That sounds to me like you didn't actually get all the happiness you wanted. Being bored is not being happy. It sounds like you habituated the positive effects of meditation, and so you sought out more happiness elsewhere. And are there not Buddhist monks who meditate all day and don't really desire anything else because they find bliss (happiness) in their practice?
Your theory that happiness is fiercely defended because it is a "sacred value" maybe has some truth, but it doesn't fully land with me. I think a lot of people are actually uncomfortable with the idea of happiness being the fundamental value in life. "Hedonism" is a dirty word. People see it as much more noble to pursue some other value like altruism or success or knowledge over happiness. I think the reason that some people are so attached to the idea of happiness is because it's simply true that it's tied to everything we care about.
Thanks, Dan. Just to clarify: I really am claiming that nobody wants to be happy—or at least, not as an end. Yes, people often want happiness as a means to various ends, as I lay out in the post. But they do not want it as an end, because wanting it as an end makes no functional or evolutionary or logical or empirical sense. If you want to persuade me that humans want happiness at all, you’ll have to give me a theory that makes functional, evolutionary, logical, and empirical sense, addressing all the arguments I made in the post. So far I have not encountered such a theory, and no one has tried to address those arguments. The experience of meditating was not boring in the sense of being unpleasant. It was boring in the sense that I wanted to be doing other, more interesting things, even though the experience itself was pleasant. I ultimately think Buddhist monks are playing a status game, albeit one that is cloaked in the sacred value of mindfulness, just as our status games tend to be cloaked in various other sacred values (e.g., happiness, authenticity, knowledge, self-actualization, etc). “Hedonism” can be a negative term if used to describe short-term, impulsive pleasures like gambling or promiscuity or junk food. But happiness in the sense of fulfillment or wellbeing or flourishing or excitement or inner peace or contentedness or self-actualization really is a sacred value in western cultures, I think. There are lots of positive versions of “hedonism” that I’m guessing you subscribe to, judging by the content of your comment. This form is happiness seems to be a sacred value of yours, and that is the best way I have of making sense of what you’re saying. If you can offer a better way of making sense of it, that is more empirically, mechanistically, evolutionarily, and logically plausible (i.e., non-circular, no infinite regresses), I’m all ears.
Humans can want happiness as an end because evolution gave us big powerful brains, so we have the ability to reflect on our experiences and create mental abstractions. I agree with your theory of how happiness functions and its evolutionary origin, but none of that proves that humans are incapable of wanting happiness as an end. I can reflect on the times that I was happy in the past, consider an abstraction of that psychological experience which is divorced from the things that caused it, and pursue that psychological experience as an end in itself. Evolution didn't "want" me to do this, but it did want me to have a powerful brain, and these abilities of self-reflection and abstraction and choosing my goals are a byproduct. This is similar to how evolution doesn't "want" us to binge Netflix, or browse Twitter, or eat ultra-processed foods, but we can end up wanting these things anyway.
Regarding your clarification on the meditation point, I can't speak to your specific experience or motivations, but what you're describing seems totally consistent with the pursuit of happiness. You found meditation pleasant, but you wanted to do more interesting things. I can relate to this--meditation can be pleasant, but it's not as pleasant as spending time with friends, or watching a great movie, or going to a nice restaurant. If I enjoyed meditation more than all of those things, then I would do a lot more meditating. And this is an oversimplification, because there are different flavors of happiness. The calm, peaceful happiness that can be found in meditation is different from the exciting, stimulating happiness that can be found during a night out. Most people want some amount of both, so just because we do other things besides meditating doesn't mean we don't want to be happy.
I think you're right that happiness is a sort of sacred value for me personally. And yes, it's somewhat of a sacred value in western cultures. This portion of my comment was a bit of a nitpick because I don't see it as nearly as much of a sacred value in western cultures compared to success or wealth or virtue or knowledge, so I don't think "being a sacred value in our culture" explains why people are attached to the idea. I feel like my attachment comes from a lot of thought and reflection and it doesn't seem like culture instilled in me that I should pursue happiness over the other values that I mentioned. I may be wrong about this one though.
Good points. The main part I disagree with—and I think this is our crux—is humans’ ability to choose their own end-goals. I don’t think we can choose our own end-goals. I think evolution has already chosen them for us, and the best we can do is choose what we pursue as a means to those ends. I cannot renounce my desire for food or oxygen. I cannot choose to desire injury and humiliation. Natural selection would never favor an organism that could arbitrarily alter the core of its motivational system. Insofar as you want happiness, or any other non-ancestrally-fitness promoting thing, you almost certainly want it as a means to something else—something that would have been ancestrally fitness-promoting. Or at least, that is my very strong prior. As an evolutionary psychologist, the idea of an organism evolving to arbitrarily re-engineer its motivational system, honed over millions of years of natural selection, based on paltry info from an individual lifetime, is an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary evidence. Also this business about our “big brains” explaining our desire for happiness is intolerably handwavey. The vacuous “big brain” idea can explain anything—and therefore explain nothing. I’d like to know what specific brain mechanism you have in mind and how it plausibly could have evolved.
I like your expectation calibration theory and it absolutely fits most of my conversations regarding happiness mostly being related to surprise. However, you take this way too far and I don't buy your conclusion. It makes me wonder if you're just someone who's particularly wired for long-termism and a strong preference for meaning/purpose and goal-achievement over pleasure, and therefore you just can't relate to it much? It's very observable to me that people vary quite a bit on these metrics.
Also, for me, happiness IS indeed my goal. The fact that hedonic adaptation makes it so difficult does not change it as a goal, it's just something I have to take into account and makes achieving the goal more difficult, but certainly not impossible as I'd consider myself much happier than most. I just keep it mind, and EXPECT to hedonically adapt and therefore work around that, but spacing out my pleasures sufficiently so that I don't adapt too quickly, by purposely limiting myself, etc. I keep my expectations purposely low so that I can be pleasantly surprised by things (I realize you would argue that is not something one can consciously decide to do, but to the extent it might be slightly under conscious control, I aim for it). Questions of purpose and meaning are totally un-interesting to me and I don't understand why anyone cares about such things, I just assume life is meaningless and they're just coping or tricked my their genes' agenda. Anyway, just because hedonic adaptation is a thing, and just because pursuing happiness is not entirely straightforward or easy because of these biological traps working against you, certainly does NOT mean that you can't actually want happiness and focus your efforts on maximizing it and making it as likely as possible to occur.
Also, not all pleasures ARE subject to hedonic adaptation in the same way, or on the same time frame. Yes, when you fall in love, you get real happy and then it fades after a year or two and you go back to normal. But looking at or petting my dog is not like that at all. I get just as many "omg you are so cute, your face immediately makes me smile and makes me energetic and excited and start singing songs in joy" songs when I pet my dog and see him smile as I did when I first got him 7 years ago. In fact, I get MORE, because I wasn't yet that bonded with him the first few weeks I had him. Because petting my dog and looking at his cute face and feeling the pleasurable feeling of "omg you are so cute I love you I just want to squeeze you" is NOT an instance of me experiencing something unexpected and getting a happiness reward as a recalibration mechanism. It's me getting a pleasurable happiness reward bc my brain's caretaking/maternal wiring is being triggered and motivating me to care for this vulnerable dependent creature that smiles at me. That doesn't dissipate, bc the dog stays just as vulnerable and dependent as a toddler his whole life, and it isn't countervailes by all the suffering that humans experience when caretaking for their actual children, who in addition to happiness also provide them with a boatload of stress, exhaustion, and misery, especially when they turn into miserable teenagers. The dog looks and acts enough like a human toddler to trigger all the happy, rewarding caretaking feel good chemicals, but with virtually none of the downsides of caretaking a real child bc the dog never grows up, isn't expensive, and doesn't cause any trouble or talk back or cause me to worry about his future prospects in life. The only downside is that in the future, he will die and I will be devastated for approximately two weeks and suffer quite a bit, though that will be temporary bc I will adapt quickly and will be okay after a few weeks and then I can get a new dog and restart the whole process.
Anyway, that likely comes off to you as a potentially disturbing or perverse way of looking at it, but to me it shows that in fact if you want happiness, a dog is an extremely good way to do it, it provides daily regular quite intense happiness, and it doesn't finish or hedonically adapt, nor come with many costs at all. And that is why I consider having a dog way better than having a child, if you're like me and favor happiness over meaning/purpose. Most people prefer to follow the commands of their genes' agenda even when it makes them unhappy, and strongly prefer a child over a dog. I have no interest whatsoever in serving the agenda of my genes at the expense of my subjective experience and enjoyment of life. Anyway, I use this as an example of a simple hack for increasing happiness in a sustainable way, there are plenty of others, so no it is NOT an impossible or illogical goal, it just requires you to understand how your brain works, be honest with yourself, and to actually WANT to be be happy above other competing goals that many people have.
Thanks, Kate. I wouldn’t say I’m unusually high on the desire for long-term goal pursuit / meaning. I wrote a post called “the meaning of life is bullshit,” and I get distracted by short-term enticements as much as anyone else. I didn’t come to this view because I found it easy to relate to. I don’t. I came to this view because I cannot conceive of any remotely plausible alternative. The only alternative is what I call “the goodie theory” of happiness, which makes absolutely no sense to me at all. Maybe you can help me make sense of it? I’m not even sure it’s falsifiable. It’s probably incoherent. I have no idea why or how the brain would work this way. I do not see how the brain working this way can be reconciled with Darwin’s theory of evolution. It’s just terrible science, and at the end of the day, I’m trying to be a good scientist and follow the logic and evidence wherever it leads. And this is where it has led me. Give me a better view, that has more evidence in its favor, that makes more testable predictions, that’s more consistent with everything our best science is telling us, and I will gladly accept it.
"We feel happy when the actual value of an outcome turns out to be greater than its expected value." Then, and correct me if I'm wrong, truth should possess more actual value than things that are not true. Since most people are not immediately aware or are indifferent toward truths, there should also be a higher rate of prediction error associated with it. This means that true or higher degrees of happiness would be associated with truths, ideally, universal truths that contain an even higher degree of value and reinforcement. Does this sound correct? What if the highest truth has no way of predicting its outcome, something unmeasurable, so to speak? In other words, something that is unable to accurately be defined or obtained, which makes it always somewhat unpredictable? Would that exclude it from the prediction error theory?
"I think we should extricate ourselves from it, no matter how difficult and counterintuitive it might be, because it’s bullshit." Does this imply that we should extricate all things that are "bullshit"? It seems that upholding virtues that have been established as being true would be the standardized, esteemed value of the ideal status game. While "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." Then, could this possibly be one of the criteria for elevated status?
It’s not truth per se that makes us happy but unexpected truth. It’s true that the son rose again this morning. But it didn’t make me happy because I was expecting it to. Also, it’s not just unexpected truth per se but unexpected truth about how good something is. If someone punches me in the face, I would be learning a very unexpected truth, but it wouldn’t be a truth that would make me happy. Also, it doesn’t have to be actually true. It just has to be perceived as true. If I think I won the lottery, I will feel very happy, even if I really didn’t and I read the numbers wrong.
I'm sorry. Some of the concepts you put forth are novel to me, quite different from what I have been exposed to in the past. I have tons of questions, but I am still working them out in my head. I see the connection with the good now. Also, maybe I should rephrase the question. The examples you gave are particular events that could be grasped by anyone without any need for much contemplation, and there wouldn't be much indifference or negligence involved. Maybe what I'm trying to say is the "why?" of the event, since scientific truths involve knowing the cause of a matter. Maybe understanding the reason why I was punched in the face, the truth behind the event, would help reinforce the value of how to deal with that situation in the future to avoid the harm or fault that resulted from the event. Truths that do not necessarily involve sense perception, but require reflection and investigation. Please forgive me if I am not clear. All of this is extremely fascinating. I hope to acquire a better grasp of all of this. I'll try to obtain a better grasp of the material before asking further questions.
Yes, the discovery of novel, useful information should make us happy--the feeling of "insight" or "aha." Because we didn't know the information or come to the realization before, the information is by definition unexpected. This should positively reinforce whatever actions led to the discovery and recalibrate our expectations about how much useful information we should expect to find there in the future. So if you gain insights by reading my blog, that will make you feel happy, which should reinforce whatever led you to my blog and increase your expectation that there are useful insights to be gained here.
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:
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
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.
As far as I can tell, I buy pretty much everything you say about habituation, predictive processing, and the underlying Darwinian motivations. I still don't think "you don't actaully want to be happy" is the conclusion that follows though.
I'd like to hear why you think this account is wrong or incomplete:
Happiness (and its neruochemical basis) is the psychological interface evolution has come up with to make us pursue goals that benefited the individual from a Darwinian perspective. Unlike thermostats or bacteria, the space we need to navigate involves complex social dynamics and long-term planning, which makes abstractions like happiness more useful and efficient than the low-level encoding of specific mechanics (e.g., as in thermostats).
Without that psychological interface, you don't have a way of navigating that space. The outside world, including status or kinship, doesn't even exist (for all you care). Happiness is nature's way of making you care about that stuff.
After your internal model is pretty much calibrated to accurately predict the rewards, it means you've habituated. Evolution doesn't want you to be "content" -- contentment is stasis, and stasis is elimination. It wants you to seek more and you start feeling unsatisfied. If gratefulness doesn't come easy (it often doesn't), you go out and seek more. What you seek is still "happiness" though. Your objective function has to involve an internal state -- a representation.
It seems like what you're saying is: we need happiness to be motivated. Without happiness, we wouldn't care about status, helping kin, having sex, etc. So by linking these desirable things to happiness, evolution gets us to care about them. But this runs into the same infinite regress problem. How does evolution get us to care about happiness? How does evolution get us to want happiness? Does it need to give us a second dose of happiness--to reward us for seeking the first dose? And then a third dose to reward us for the second dose, and a fourth for the third, and so on? If evolution already had motivational systems in place or food-seeking, status-seeking, etc. why not just stick with those? If the stimuli are too complicated, why not seek the average of them? Like, the average status I get from this interaction, the average energetic/nutritional intake I get from this meal, etc. Why put the object of desire in one's head, as opposed to out there in the world? Why not create a desire to make sure one's desires are accurately tracking what's in the world, to avoid deception, manipulation, hallucinations, and mistakes?
We need the object of desire in our heads, because we represent everything about the outside world in our heads! Our vision of colors or hearing of sounds also take place in our heads. That's what makes us vulnerable to visual illusions or hallucinations. There's no way to "just directly access whatever is really out there." It has to be a representation. This is illustrated by fact that I can modify (sometimes hack) that internal representation (e.g., via painkillers, drugs) and that influences what I do or do not pursue, even when I hold the external world exactly the same. Ozempic can bind my receptors to make me think I am not hungry, and I won't pursue food even though no food has entered my system. Internal representations are surely imperfect, but that's true about many things that evolution came up with (see autoimmune diseases -- why not accurately track what exactly is an intruder vs part of the body? the answer is because it's hard and evolution is not perfect.)
It doesn't lead to infinite regress, just like a thermostat doesn't. A thermostat doesn't have access to some pure, objective concept of temperature. It represents temperature indirectly—say, through the bending of a bimetallic strip. That bending isn't "temperature" itself, but it systematically correlates with it. When the strip bends far enough (because the room is cold), it closes a circuit and turns on the heat. There's no need for a second mechanism to monitor the first mechanism’s representation, and a third to monitor the second, and so on. One layer of representation and response is enough—so long as it tracks reality well enough to guide adaptive behavior. Likewise, the brain’s internal representation of value—what we call "desire" or "happiness"—need not be perfect or recursive. It just has to be good enough to steer behavior toward fitness-enhancing outcomes. The number of layers could be more than one but doesn't need to be infinite.
Sure, but we represent happiness as being inside our heads, do we not? And we represent the objects of our desire as being out there in the world, do we not? So why aren't the objects of our desire represented as out there in the world? And why do we care about the difference between what's out there in the world and what's merely inside our head? At what point in the representation-response process does happiness come in? Why do we need it? Why can't we just represent the thing in the world and then go out and get it? What is happiness even doing? How would you test your theory?
Why does your brain need to be made aware that there's not enough sugar in your blood for you to feel hungry and seek food? Why doesn't it directly seek the food as an object of desire? Why do I need this feeling of hunger that sometimes lets me down?
Huh? I don't experience anything like "there's not enough sugar in my blood." All I experience is: thoughts of food, attention drawn to food, urges to eat food, and urges to do things that get me food. Aren't all our desires like that? Again, what is happiness even doing?
Surely you feel a feeling that you'd label as “hunger”. Maybe it's a combination of sensations.
If there are two groups of apes -- one group feels hungry when they need nutrition, the other doesn't feel anything. Which one is likelier to survive? The one that doesn't feel hunger will perish not realizing they're running out of fuel. That's what the feeling of hunger serves.
Similarly, if one group feels happy when they provide for their children, climb the tribal status hierarchy, or attract a potential mate, its members are going to do much better evolutionarily than a group that doesn't feel any happiness. That's what happiness is doing.
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.
Agree. The author writes "Our imaginations are flawed and feeble programs built by natural selection to navigate small tribes and small-to-medium-sized objects…"
But then asks the reader to imagine “do you want the thing that makes you happy, or the happiness itself? Of course you want the real thing!" When that seems to be the most straightforward case where our imagination is bound to fail us.
Fair. At best though, you have to concede that imaginary thought experiments are not good evidence one way or the other. Imagination just isn't reliable. Far more reliable is logic (wanting happiness leads to infinite regress), evolutionary theory (happiness makes no sense as an evolved motive), and empirical evidence (e.g. of habituation, declines in happiness over time, the separation between motivation and happiness, the reward prediction error theory of dopamine, etc.).
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.
So a Bayesian prediction at the subconscious level, as opposed to a conscious prediction. I pet a dog and it's a positive experience. Logically, I might expect the next time I pet that dog that it will be the exact same positive experience. But internally, on a subconscious level, I have a calibration set that has only updated so far towards the satisfaction of petting that dog. So when petting the dog a second time replicates precisely the experience I had petting the dog the first time, I feel happiness, even though the experience is exactly as I conciously anticipated. With repeated exposure, the internal calibration will eventually converge upon the true satisfaction level and I will no longer feel the happiness.
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.
This is so good. Evolutionary thinking continues to surprise me with unexpected insights.
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.
Hi David, I commented with some critiques on your original happiness post, and I'm back with some more thoughts. First, I want to say that after some reflection I basically agree with your thesis and it has fundamentally altered my philosophy of life, so thank you for your valuable writing on this topic.
I think the pushback you've received is partially due to your provocative framing of "happiness is bullshit" and "nobody wants to be happy." The idea you're actually arguing is that "happiness is not the sole motivator behind all human behavior," which is much less controversial. But the way you write about it can read like "nobody wants happiness AT ALL," as if this is not even possible. This is trivially false--people can consciously desire the psychological state of happiness, so it is obviously possible (and in fact common) to want happiness.
It's not clear to me what takeaway you want people to get from these posts. It seems like you want people to give up the pursuit of happiness, and pursue the things-in-the-world we "actually" want instead--status, beauty, food, sex, etc. But this doesn't solve the problems that you point out. Whatever you pursue, you will either (a) not achieve it and suffer or (b) achieve it, feel happy for a bit, but then habituate and feel bored/unsatisfied and start pursuing something else. This is why I think the takeaway should actually be the opposite of what you seem to suggest. You can reflect on the nature of desire and happiness, and try to align what you want with what will actually make you happy. This involves things like: cutting your attachments to things that used to make you happy but don't anymore, practicing moderation, seeking novelty, accepting that life is unpredictable/ever-changing and not clinging onto expected outcomes, appreciating the things you already have, realizing that nothing you're pursuing will bring everlasting satisfaction and not falling into the trap of "I'll be happy when I get X," etc.
Some other comments:
You point out that "positive affect" decreases with age, but so does "negative affect," per the study. There's a lot of disagreement over what happiness actually is, but I like the utilitarian framing of "positive affect minus negative affect." A happy life isn't just an abundance of pleasure, but also an absence of suffering. I think this partially explains why life satisfaction increases with age in the study. Because of the negativity bias that humans have, negative emotions are more salient than positive emotions. So I think it's actually better to have fewer extremes of high and low emotions, because the intensity of suffering can greatly outweigh the intensity of pleasure.
You said that when you got good at meditation, you could give yourself all the happiness you wanted, but you didn't want it because you found it boring and unappealing. That sounds to me like you didn't actually get all the happiness you wanted. Being bored is not being happy. It sounds like you habituated the positive effects of meditation, and so you sought out more happiness elsewhere. And are there not Buddhist monks who meditate all day and don't really desire anything else because they find bliss (happiness) in their practice?
Your theory that happiness is fiercely defended because it is a "sacred value" maybe has some truth, but it doesn't fully land with me. I think a lot of people are actually uncomfortable with the idea of happiness being the fundamental value in life. "Hedonism" is a dirty word. People see it as much more noble to pursue some other value like altruism or success or knowledge over happiness. I think the reason that some people are so attached to the idea of happiness is because it's simply true that it's tied to everything we care about.
Thanks, Dan. Just to clarify: I really am claiming that nobody wants to be happy—or at least, not as an end. Yes, people often want happiness as a means to various ends, as I lay out in the post. But they do not want it as an end, because wanting it as an end makes no functional or evolutionary or logical or empirical sense. If you want to persuade me that humans want happiness at all, you’ll have to give me a theory that makes functional, evolutionary, logical, and empirical sense, addressing all the arguments I made in the post. So far I have not encountered such a theory, and no one has tried to address those arguments. The experience of meditating was not boring in the sense of being unpleasant. It was boring in the sense that I wanted to be doing other, more interesting things, even though the experience itself was pleasant. I ultimately think Buddhist monks are playing a status game, albeit one that is cloaked in the sacred value of mindfulness, just as our status games tend to be cloaked in various other sacred values (e.g., happiness, authenticity, knowledge, self-actualization, etc). “Hedonism” can be a negative term if used to describe short-term, impulsive pleasures like gambling or promiscuity or junk food. But happiness in the sense of fulfillment or wellbeing or flourishing or excitement or inner peace or contentedness or self-actualization really is a sacred value in western cultures, I think. There are lots of positive versions of “hedonism” that I’m guessing you subscribe to, judging by the content of your comment. This form is happiness seems to be a sacred value of yours, and that is the best way I have of making sense of what you’re saying. If you can offer a better way of making sense of it, that is more empirically, mechanistically, evolutionarily, and logically plausible (i.e., non-circular, no infinite regresses), I’m all ears.
Humans can want happiness as an end because evolution gave us big powerful brains, so we have the ability to reflect on our experiences and create mental abstractions. I agree with your theory of how happiness functions and its evolutionary origin, but none of that proves that humans are incapable of wanting happiness as an end. I can reflect on the times that I was happy in the past, consider an abstraction of that psychological experience which is divorced from the things that caused it, and pursue that psychological experience as an end in itself. Evolution didn't "want" me to do this, but it did want me to have a powerful brain, and these abilities of self-reflection and abstraction and choosing my goals are a byproduct. This is similar to how evolution doesn't "want" us to binge Netflix, or browse Twitter, or eat ultra-processed foods, but we can end up wanting these things anyway.
Regarding your clarification on the meditation point, I can't speak to your specific experience or motivations, but what you're describing seems totally consistent with the pursuit of happiness. You found meditation pleasant, but you wanted to do more interesting things. I can relate to this--meditation can be pleasant, but it's not as pleasant as spending time with friends, or watching a great movie, or going to a nice restaurant. If I enjoyed meditation more than all of those things, then I would do a lot more meditating. And this is an oversimplification, because there are different flavors of happiness. The calm, peaceful happiness that can be found in meditation is different from the exciting, stimulating happiness that can be found during a night out. Most people want some amount of both, so just because we do other things besides meditating doesn't mean we don't want to be happy.
I think you're right that happiness is a sort of sacred value for me personally. And yes, it's somewhat of a sacred value in western cultures. This portion of my comment was a bit of a nitpick because I don't see it as nearly as much of a sacred value in western cultures compared to success or wealth or virtue or knowledge, so I don't think "being a sacred value in our culture" explains why people are attached to the idea. I feel like my attachment comes from a lot of thought and reflection and it doesn't seem like culture instilled in me that I should pursue happiness over the other values that I mentioned. I may be wrong about this one though.
Good points. The main part I disagree with—and I think this is our crux—is humans’ ability to choose their own end-goals. I don’t think we can choose our own end-goals. I think evolution has already chosen them for us, and the best we can do is choose what we pursue as a means to those ends. I cannot renounce my desire for food or oxygen. I cannot choose to desire injury and humiliation. Natural selection would never favor an organism that could arbitrarily alter the core of its motivational system. Insofar as you want happiness, or any other non-ancestrally-fitness promoting thing, you almost certainly want it as a means to something else—something that would have been ancestrally fitness-promoting. Or at least, that is my very strong prior. As an evolutionary psychologist, the idea of an organism evolving to arbitrarily re-engineer its motivational system, honed over millions of years of natural selection, based on paltry info from an individual lifetime, is an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary evidence. Also this business about our “big brains” explaining our desire for happiness is intolerably handwavey. The vacuous “big brain” idea can explain anything—and therefore explain nothing. I’d like to know what specific brain mechanism you have in mind and how it plausibly could have evolved.
I like your expectation calibration theory and it absolutely fits most of my conversations regarding happiness mostly being related to surprise. However, you take this way too far and I don't buy your conclusion. It makes me wonder if you're just someone who's particularly wired for long-termism and a strong preference for meaning/purpose and goal-achievement over pleasure, and therefore you just can't relate to it much? It's very observable to me that people vary quite a bit on these metrics.
Also, for me, happiness IS indeed my goal. The fact that hedonic adaptation makes it so difficult does not change it as a goal, it's just something I have to take into account and makes achieving the goal more difficult, but certainly not impossible as I'd consider myself much happier than most. I just keep it mind, and EXPECT to hedonically adapt and therefore work around that, but spacing out my pleasures sufficiently so that I don't adapt too quickly, by purposely limiting myself, etc. I keep my expectations purposely low so that I can be pleasantly surprised by things (I realize you would argue that is not something one can consciously decide to do, but to the extent it might be slightly under conscious control, I aim for it). Questions of purpose and meaning are totally un-interesting to me and I don't understand why anyone cares about such things, I just assume life is meaningless and they're just coping or tricked my their genes' agenda. Anyway, just because hedonic adaptation is a thing, and just because pursuing happiness is not entirely straightforward or easy because of these biological traps working against you, certainly does NOT mean that you can't actually want happiness and focus your efforts on maximizing it and making it as likely as possible to occur.
Also, not all pleasures ARE subject to hedonic adaptation in the same way, or on the same time frame. Yes, when you fall in love, you get real happy and then it fades after a year or two and you go back to normal. But looking at or petting my dog is not like that at all. I get just as many "omg you are so cute, your face immediately makes me smile and makes me energetic and excited and start singing songs in joy" songs when I pet my dog and see him smile as I did when I first got him 7 years ago. In fact, I get MORE, because I wasn't yet that bonded with him the first few weeks I had him. Because petting my dog and looking at his cute face and feeling the pleasurable feeling of "omg you are so cute I love you I just want to squeeze you" is NOT an instance of me experiencing something unexpected and getting a happiness reward as a recalibration mechanism. It's me getting a pleasurable happiness reward bc my brain's caretaking/maternal wiring is being triggered and motivating me to care for this vulnerable dependent creature that smiles at me. That doesn't dissipate, bc the dog stays just as vulnerable and dependent as a toddler his whole life, and it isn't countervailes by all the suffering that humans experience when caretaking for their actual children, who in addition to happiness also provide them with a boatload of stress, exhaustion, and misery, especially when they turn into miserable teenagers. The dog looks and acts enough like a human toddler to trigger all the happy, rewarding caretaking feel good chemicals, but with virtually none of the downsides of caretaking a real child bc the dog never grows up, isn't expensive, and doesn't cause any trouble or talk back or cause me to worry about his future prospects in life. The only downside is that in the future, he will die and I will be devastated for approximately two weeks and suffer quite a bit, though that will be temporary bc I will adapt quickly and will be okay after a few weeks and then I can get a new dog and restart the whole process.
Anyway, that likely comes off to you as a potentially disturbing or perverse way of looking at it, but to me it shows that in fact if you want happiness, a dog is an extremely good way to do it, it provides daily regular quite intense happiness, and it doesn't finish or hedonically adapt, nor come with many costs at all. And that is why I consider having a dog way better than having a child, if you're like me and favor happiness over meaning/purpose. Most people prefer to follow the commands of their genes' agenda even when it makes them unhappy, and strongly prefer a child over a dog. I have no interest whatsoever in serving the agenda of my genes at the expense of my subjective experience and enjoyment of life. Anyway, I use this as an example of a simple hack for increasing happiness in a sustainable way, there are plenty of others, so no it is NOT an impossible or illogical goal, it just requires you to understand how your brain works, be honest with yourself, and to actually WANT to be be happy above other competing goals that many people have.
Thanks, Kate. I wouldn’t say I’m unusually high on the desire for long-term goal pursuit / meaning. I wrote a post called “the meaning of life is bullshit,” and I get distracted by short-term enticements as much as anyone else. I didn’t come to this view because I found it easy to relate to. I don’t. I came to this view because I cannot conceive of any remotely plausible alternative. The only alternative is what I call “the goodie theory” of happiness, which makes absolutely no sense to me at all. Maybe you can help me make sense of it? I’m not even sure it’s falsifiable. It’s probably incoherent. I have no idea why or how the brain would work this way. I do not see how the brain working this way can be reconciled with Darwin’s theory of evolution. It’s just terrible science, and at the end of the day, I’m trying to be a good scientist and follow the logic and evidence wherever it leads. And this is where it has led me. Give me a better view, that has more evidence in its favor, that makes more testable predictions, that’s more consistent with everything our best science is telling us, and I will gladly accept it.
"We feel happy when the actual value of an outcome turns out to be greater than its expected value." Then, and correct me if I'm wrong, truth should possess more actual value than things that are not true. Since most people are not immediately aware or are indifferent toward truths, there should also be a higher rate of prediction error associated with it. This means that true or higher degrees of happiness would be associated with truths, ideally, universal truths that contain an even higher degree of value and reinforcement. Does this sound correct? What if the highest truth has no way of predicting its outcome, something unmeasurable, so to speak? In other words, something that is unable to accurately be defined or obtained, which makes it always somewhat unpredictable? Would that exclude it from the prediction error theory?
"I think we should extricate ourselves from it, no matter how difficult and counterintuitive it might be, because it’s bullshit." Does this imply that we should extricate all things that are "bullshit"? It seems that upholding virtues that have been established as being true would be the standardized, esteemed value of the ideal status game. While "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." Then, could this possibly be one of the criteria for elevated status?
It’s not truth per se that makes us happy but unexpected truth. It’s true that the son rose again this morning. But it didn’t make me happy because I was expecting it to. Also, it’s not just unexpected truth per se but unexpected truth about how good something is. If someone punches me in the face, I would be learning a very unexpected truth, but it wouldn’t be a truth that would make me happy. Also, it doesn’t have to be actually true. It just has to be perceived as true. If I think I won the lottery, I will feel very happy, even if I really didn’t and I read the numbers wrong.
I'm sorry. Some of the concepts you put forth are novel to me, quite different from what I have been exposed to in the past. I have tons of questions, but I am still working them out in my head. I see the connection with the good now. Also, maybe I should rephrase the question. The examples you gave are particular events that could be grasped by anyone without any need for much contemplation, and there wouldn't be much indifference or negligence involved. Maybe what I'm trying to say is the "why?" of the event, since scientific truths involve knowing the cause of a matter. Maybe understanding the reason why I was punched in the face, the truth behind the event, would help reinforce the value of how to deal with that situation in the future to avoid the harm or fault that resulted from the event. Truths that do not necessarily involve sense perception, but require reflection and investigation. Please forgive me if I am not clear. All of this is extremely fascinating. I hope to acquire a better grasp of all of this. I'll try to obtain a better grasp of the material before asking further questions.
Yes, the discovery of novel, useful information should make us happy--the feeling of "insight" or "aha." Because we didn't know the information or come to the realization before, the information is by definition unexpected. This should positively reinforce whatever actions led to the discovery and recalibrate our expectations about how much useful information we should expect to find there in the future. So if you gain insights by reading my blog, that will make you feel happy, which should reinforce whatever led you to my blog and increase your expectation that there are useful insights to be gained here.
The blog is indeed very insightful. Thank you for the awesome work.
Great content, btw. I also really like the stuff about paradoxes.
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
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
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.
As far as I can tell, I buy pretty much everything you say about habituation, predictive processing, and the underlying Darwinian motivations. I still don't think "you don't actaully want to be happy" is the conclusion that follows though.
I'd like to hear why you think this account is wrong or incomplete:
Happiness (and its neruochemical basis) is the psychological interface evolution has come up with to make us pursue goals that benefited the individual from a Darwinian perspective. Unlike thermostats or bacteria, the space we need to navigate involves complex social dynamics and long-term planning, which makes abstractions like happiness more useful and efficient than the low-level encoding of specific mechanics (e.g., as in thermostats).
Without that psychological interface, you don't have a way of navigating that space. The outside world, including status or kinship, doesn't even exist (for all you care). Happiness is nature's way of making you care about that stuff.
After your internal model is pretty much calibrated to accurately predict the rewards, it means you've habituated. Evolution doesn't want you to be "content" -- contentment is stasis, and stasis is elimination. It wants you to seek more and you start feeling unsatisfied. If gratefulness doesn't come easy (it often doesn't), you go out and seek more. What you seek is still "happiness" though. Your objective function has to involve an internal state -- a representation.
It seems like what you're saying is: we need happiness to be motivated. Without happiness, we wouldn't care about status, helping kin, having sex, etc. So by linking these desirable things to happiness, evolution gets us to care about them. But this runs into the same infinite regress problem. How does evolution get us to care about happiness? How does evolution get us to want happiness? Does it need to give us a second dose of happiness--to reward us for seeking the first dose? And then a third dose to reward us for the second dose, and a fourth for the third, and so on? If evolution already had motivational systems in place or food-seeking, status-seeking, etc. why not just stick with those? If the stimuli are too complicated, why not seek the average of them? Like, the average status I get from this interaction, the average energetic/nutritional intake I get from this meal, etc. Why put the object of desire in one's head, as opposed to out there in the world? Why not create a desire to make sure one's desires are accurately tracking what's in the world, to avoid deception, manipulation, hallucinations, and mistakes?
We need the object of desire in our heads, because we represent everything about the outside world in our heads! Our vision of colors or hearing of sounds also take place in our heads. That's what makes us vulnerable to visual illusions or hallucinations. There's no way to "just directly access whatever is really out there." It has to be a representation. This is illustrated by fact that I can modify (sometimes hack) that internal representation (e.g., via painkillers, drugs) and that influences what I do or do not pursue, even when I hold the external world exactly the same. Ozempic can bind my receptors to make me think I am not hungry, and I won't pursue food even though no food has entered my system. Internal representations are surely imperfect, but that's true about many things that evolution came up with (see autoimmune diseases -- why not accurately track what exactly is an intruder vs part of the body? the answer is because it's hard and evolution is not perfect.)
It doesn't lead to infinite regress, just like a thermostat doesn't. A thermostat doesn't have access to some pure, objective concept of temperature. It represents temperature indirectly—say, through the bending of a bimetallic strip. That bending isn't "temperature" itself, but it systematically correlates with it. When the strip bends far enough (because the room is cold), it closes a circuit and turns on the heat. There's no need for a second mechanism to monitor the first mechanism’s representation, and a third to monitor the second, and so on. One layer of representation and response is enough—so long as it tracks reality well enough to guide adaptive behavior. Likewise, the brain’s internal representation of value—what we call "desire" or "happiness"—need not be perfect or recursive. It just has to be good enough to steer behavior toward fitness-enhancing outcomes. The number of layers could be more than one but doesn't need to be infinite.
Sure, but we represent happiness as being inside our heads, do we not? And we represent the objects of our desire as being out there in the world, do we not? So why aren't the objects of our desire represented as out there in the world? And why do we care about the difference between what's out there in the world and what's merely inside our head? At what point in the representation-response process does happiness come in? Why do we need it? Why can't we just represent the thing in the world and then go out and get it? What is happiness even doing? How would you test your theory?
Why does your brain need to be made aware that there's not enough sugar in your blood for you to feel hungry and seek food? Why doesn't it directly seek the food as an object of desire? Why do I need this feeling of hunger that sometimes lets me down?
Huh? I don't experience anything like "there's not enough sugar in my blood." All I experience is: thoughts of food, attention drawn to food, urges to eat food, and urges to do things that get me food. Aren't all our desires like that? Again, what is happiness even doing?
Surely you feel a feeling that you'd label as “hunger”. Maybe it's a combination of sensations.
If there are two groups of apes -- one group feels hungry when they need nutrition, the other doesn't feel anything. Which one is likelier to survive? The one that doesn't feel hunger will perish not realizing they're running out of fuel. That's what the feeling of hunger serves.
Similarly, if one group feels happy when they provide for their children, climb the tribal status hierarchy, or attract a potential mate, its members are going to do much better evolutionarily than a group that doesn't feel any happiness. That's what happiness is doing.