You might think you want to be happy. You get out of bed and go to work because it makes you happy. Or maybe your job sucks, and you wish you worked somewhere else—somewhere you’d be happier. Or maybe your job isn’t that important to you, it’s just a way to pay the bills, and the thing that really
This is fascinating and thought-provoking! The recently released World Happiness Report for 2023 measures people's "life satisfaction" (that closely correlates with "happiness"). In light of this, what are your thoughts on countries such as Scotland and those in Scandinavia that aim to prioritize high levels of happiness or life satisfaction as a goal for governance? Is this bullshit as well?
It’s a great question. I think when people are asked on surveys how happy they are (or how satisfied they are), I doubt they are calculating the frequency and intensity of happiness episodes they’ve experienced in the past few years. If they were, I suspect younger people would report way more happiness than older people (as younger people have more uncertainty about the world and more opportunities to be made happy). I suspect what these surveys are actually measuring is how much people are getting what they want, or how high status they feel they are, or whether they’re getting the status they feel they deserve, or how their relationships and jobs are going, or whether they’re healthy, or whether their kids are okay, or something like that. That’s different from “happiness” in the sense I’m defining it, which is what our brain does when things are better than expected. So if a government wants to help people generally get what they want, even if it doesn’t make them “happy” (in the sense I’m defining it), I have no problem with that—and I don’t think it’s necessarily bullshit.
The Scandinavian “happiness” phenomenon is actually a misnomer. I read a great essay by a Norwegian writer about this. “Life satisfaction” is the key phrase - the writer explained that Scandinavians tend to rate higher on life satisfaction because they have the attitude that what you get in life is what you get, and that’s that. There’s less of an attitude of always striving for more. It’s not that they’re super happy because they wanted so much more for themselves and subsequently achieved it; it’s because there’s an attitude of accepting what life brings their way. They don’t feel entitled to more than that. That’s how the writer explained it, anyway.
May 18, 2023·edited May 18, 2023Liked by David Pinsof
Great essay David! Feels like you’re hitting upon themes of the Book of Ecclesiastes. Which teaches that the only sources of Happiness in this world are Friends, Family, Relationships and Food/Drink… and all else is merely what the Hebrews called ‘hevel’ (and what you refer to as bullshit)
If you aren’t familiar with this Wisdom Book of Bible, here’s a 5min cartoon video cliff note
David, glad to have found your stack. You may be well familiar w/ other ancient texts which dovetail themes in your essay.
Heretical Harper’s Songs (Egyptian funeral songs from Hieroglyphs, 1250 BC) likely influenced Ecclesiastes, which questioned the idea of a blissful afterlife and urge people to enjoy life now, before it’s too late
You completely missed the point of the book. Ecclesiastes says that there's no such thing as lasting or "true" happiness because nothing lasts forever. Stuff like Family, Friendships, Relationships, etc can also be sources of misery (the Bible itself is filled with examples) and are just as temporary and vain as literally everything is under the sun according to the book. So it's best to just appreciate what you have and what you can get before its gone.
Ouch! Please consider the possibility that you are confused because you don't understand it, and not because it's nonsense. I'm happy to clarify any points. I can assure you this isn't high school level--I have a PhD in psychology. Check out the footnote for the complete argument.
Maybe if you weren’t so rude, and if you had actually asked a specific question, I might have answered it. Congrats on being intellectually superior. You clearly have no need for an advanced degree—you obviously already know everything. ;)
If this were true [surprising positives], walking around with a negativity bias would result in more often feeling happiness. Empirically, I don't think that is the case. Maybe they are overall less happy, but experience more episodes of happiness a la your proposal? Idk, would need an EMA design.
Interesting point. It might be that negativity bias is more about interpreting/perceiving things as negative than expecting them to be negative. Or maybe they go together: we tend to both expect and interpret/perceive things in the same way. Agreed it would be tricky to assess empirically.
Damn, maybe this is why I’m usually so happy and optimistic! I’m quite skeptical and try to never expect anything of a given situation, but I also place a great amount of value in potential and creation. To use music as an example, it’s an endless source of challenges and labor, but it equally produces an endless source of interpretation and perception. To use mechanical terms to describe it, anyway. Plus it’s just nice to experience, the stuff that is good doesn’t have to get old if you enjoy it for what makes it good.
Yes, music might well be the exception to the rule of happiness being bullshit. I subscribe to the Arthur Schopenhauer school of thought that everything sucks except for music. Part of the answer of why music doesn't suck is that it's designed to be optimally expectation-violating. The point of a great melody is to set you up to expect a note, give you a different note, and then finally give you the note you want when you're least expecting it. The quest for ever more niche and atonal music is the quest for ever more surprising and expectation-violating music. It might actually be analogous to the quest for happiness, insofar as happiness is just the feeling of one's expectations being violated in a positive way. So I might have just proved my own thesis wrong, at least for the case of music.
Oh man that’s funny, I’m not a Schopenhauer-ian at all. I subscribe to a mix of Nietzsche, Marx, and Yusuf Lateef when it comes to a background basis for my aesthetic philosophy, and there’s plenty more names I’m leaving out. Bernstein and Ives are some good American musical influences who also explored aesthetic philosophy, and there’s plenty of modern era musicians who’ve given some great input on the music medium. Taruskin and Babbit come to mind.
I’m also classically trained, and I have a bone to pick with “atonal” music and academic musical niches. For one, atonal is a misnomer. What people really mean is dis-harmonious or nonfunctional harmony, or possibly even aleatoric. And It’s far to common for academic-trained contemporaries to fixate too strongly on their individual aesthetic interests alone, where they forget to contribute to cultivating a larger genre or style that can be popularized in a sense that it’s relatable to an audience who is listening to the music itself. Milton Babbit would be a good read on this further if you’re interested.
Yea, I'm not a huge fan "atonal" music, though I do enjoy it in small bursts for the purpose of catching me off guard. Thanks for the recommendation on Babbit, will check him out.
It's not about expectation violation in general. It's about things being unexpectedly good (e.g. status-boosting, comfort-boosting, etc.). So it doesn't cover things being unexpectedly painful, unexpectedly bright, unexpectedly quiet, etc.
But music is essentially arbitrary, it's not painful or bright or quiet, doesn't inherently signal or carry any status, doesn't provide any intrinsic value, etc. in the way that other things do. It's meaningful because we decided it is, and the expectation violating aspect of it gives it a lot of replay value. It seems to me that if you can decide that an activity is meaningful like we do the music, it could be equally satisfying as music.
If you really subscribe to the idea that everything sucks except music, I would be interested to hear more details about what you think differences music has compared to everything else. Is there a metric we can use to say "is this music?" If everything sucks except music, and something doesn't suck, does that mean it's music?
Amused to notice how happy I feel right now. Because I was anticipating a certain enjoyment of the article after the opening pars. Then the bit I didn't expect - a predictive states theory of well-being mirroring one I offered a while ago (https://www.rarelycertain.com/p/that-feeling-when-you-get-phasic) added a layer of fun. Voilà - under-predicting what I'd get out of this piece made the outcome even better.
I'm not sure what to feel after reading this! Not happy, that's for sure. But I guess that's ok. I think I enjoyed it.
I'm interested in understanding this part more: "I enjoy meditating, but I never want to do it. Doomscrolling upsets me, but I often want to do it." By enjoy, you mean after the fact, right? Do you agree it's also possible to train your brain to want to do things you enjoy, like meditate, and not want to do things that upset you, like doomscroll? I feel like I've managed to do the former with playing sports for exercise, eating healthy, going on adventures with my son, having challenging conversations, reading your posts, etc. And I've managed to weed our most of my desire for some of the latter, like doomscrolling. Isn't this a way to enjoy life more, even if we don't call it "happiness"? Or maybe I'm dumb and deluding myself (which is probably even more effective)?
Thanks for your thoughtful questions, Chris. Yes, we can train our brains to do things we enjoy, like meditating or exercising, and we can train our brains to avoid doing things we dislike, like doomscrolling. BUT, and here’s the weird part, we do not train our brains in this way out of a desire for happiness. The goal is not to maximize happy mental states. If we had that goal, we’d be very motivated to train ourselves, we would be very successful at doing it, and none of us would be on the internet: we’d all be meditating or savoring the moment or counting our blessings instead. When we train ourselves, we do so to satisfy some *other* evolved goal. Maybe we train ourselves to eat healthy and exercise because we want to live longer or be stronger or show off our health and virtue. Maybe we go on adventures with our children or have difficult conversations because we want better relationships with the people we care about. It’s those goals—good relationships, strength, health, etc.—that are driving us, not the desire for happiness. If all we wanted was happiness, we’d have no relationships at all because they’re often filled with stress and heartache and betrayal and grief, and we’d spend all our time meditating in a cave and not talking to anyone. At the end of the day, it’s our evolved goals that are in charge of us. What else would be in charge of us? Some of these evolved goals are in conflict with one another, some of them are more short-term, others are more long-term, but none of them are aimed at happiness. Why would they be aimed at happiness? Evolution does not care about our happiness. Such a happiness-directed goal makes no evolutionary sense. We should try to understand ourselves without appealing to such evolutionarily implausible goals. I think you’ll find that if you leave this happiness-goal out of your psychological explanations, you will gain a lot of insight into yourself and others. Thanks for reading.
Ok, thanks David. I think I get you now. 1) You can only aim toward goals that you're evolutionarily wired to want to go after. 2) Choose goals you enjoy pursuing and having pursued so you don't hate yourself too much. 3) Since happiness, as you define it, is not an evolved want, you can't go after it, but only experience it as a by-product. Like laughter, having happiness the whole time would be hellish, anyway.
Great article and angle on a timeless problem of the human condition. It seems that our narrow perception of the world around us and our distaste of statistics messes up our predictions about what will make us happy and causes our irrational behavior. It’s a problem recorded two millennia ago by the Apostle Paul:
“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.”
I always assumed happiness is the reward we get when we do the right things in an evolutionary sense: When we keep up good relationships, work with meaningful things, have sex often enough, take good care of our children, eat decent food etc. our minds reward us with that feeling called happiness.
For that reason, I totally agree that pursuing happiness is meaningless: It is impossible to get the reward without doing the things that get rewarded (at least without recreational drugs or self-deception). But I think your conclusion is overly negative. Happiness is the reward for living a life approved by one's genes. Not only for things that are surprisingly good for those genes. It is entirely possible to wake up happy every morning, without any positive surprises.
Yea that way of thinking—the idea that we need some “reward” to be motivated to do things—is not the right way of thinking about it IMO. On a mechanistic level, we need no reward. The brain can motivate the body to do things without any reward, just as a thermostat can keep your house at the right temperature without any reward. The reward is theoretically superfluous. It serves no explanatory purpose. Get rid of it. It’s not explaining anything. Happiness is not a reward; it’s a computational system that rewires the brain when it underestimates the value of something. Check out the footnote for more detail on what I mean. We need to get this “reward” metaphor out of our heads—there are no intrinsically feel-good substances in the universe with which to reward us—and we need to think about what the brain is actually doing in mechanistic terms. At least, that’s my perspective as an evolutionary psychologist. It’s certainly counterintuitive, but I think it will result in a lot of insight if taken seriously.
>>This is just another way of saying that we are “positively reinforced”—i.e. the features that were counterfactually unique to the outcome now have a higher expected value than they did before.
What's the difference between "positive reinforcement" and "reward"? To me, the difference is only semantics.
I can say instead that happiness is a positive reinforcement people (and animals) get when they tick a number of boxes that ensured the propagation of their ancestors' genes.
It is possible to think in mechanistic terms and still allow humans to be long-termist. Sustainable happiness occurs when humans feel they are on a sustainable track for the longer term. If we instead feel we are on a bad track, in evolutionary terms, we feel unhappy (are negatively reinforced).
I don't deny the short-term happiness from positive surprises that you write about. I just don't think it is the whole story.
That's fair. I think this is largely semantics. What you are referring to as "being on the right track" is a thing, but I wouldn't call it happiness. I'd maybe call it being motivated, or having something with long-term value to pursue (like raising a family or something). I also think it doesn't make sense to say that we "want" reinforcement, or that it's the thing we're seeking, because it's inherently unexpected (which means we weren't seeking it per se), and because it tends to decline in intensity the more we get what we want (so if anything we're chasing it away more than pursuing it). But these are nitpicks. Thanks for reading, and thanks for your thoughts.
In order to nitpick a little deeper, I think we disagree over the definition of happiness. What you call "happiness" I would call "joy". We feel joy when people laugh more than expected at our joke. Happiness, I think, has a more long-term significance. I mean, people talk about "a happy marriage". Then they don't mean a marriage where you get nice surprises all the time, but a marriage where both parties are happy to wake up in the same home every morning.
(All the above said with the caution that I'm not an English speaker. So you have a certain advantage when it comes to definitions).
I agree that people are not searching thecreward/reinforcement for making the right choices. Instead they are trying to make the right choices! They don't search the happiness from being on the side of the right partner. Instead they search for the right partner. But I would argue that when that partner has been found, the happiness they feel prevent them from leaving or mistreating that partner. You say happiness signals to people to do more of x. I agree, but I also think it signals to people to just stay where they are and keep doing what they are going.
Thanks, Tove. We’re ultimately debating how to use words, but let me just give you a quick pitch about why you should use words the way I’m using them. You define a happy marriage as a marriage you want to stay in. If I ask “why are you staying in the marriage?” you might reply “Because it makes me happy.” But that is totally circular. Wanting to be in the marriage because it makes you happy = wanting to be in the marriage because you want to be in the marriage. The word “happy” is empty. It’s not doing anything. Just talk about how you want to be in the marriage, or how you value the relationship. There’s no need for the word “happiness” here. It’s superfluous. The only case where happiness actually means something, in a noncircular way, is in the case of what you’re calling “joy”. Let’s use the word “happiness” to refer to something that actually means something, that actually picks out something unique in the world, that actually has content. Let’s try to use our words to carve nature at the joints. Anyways, that’s my case. Take it or leave it. Thanks for reading and thanks for your thoughts.
That's philosophy! And it has been since the time of Socrates. Ultimately, philosophy is IS about the definition of words.
>>If I ask “why are you staying in the marriage?” you might reply “Because it makes me happy.”
Hah! Not me. I would give you one hundred explanations: Because we have too many children and my value on the second hand market is low. Because he's the most intelligent person I know and he makes me think better. Because we often laugh together. Because I like the way he looks and feels. Blah blah blah...
"I want to stay because it makes me happy" is indeed circular reasoning. And that circularity catches the meaning of the word happiness: Happiness is what makes people want to stay where they are and keep doing what they are doing.
Just because happiness is a feeling that is quiet and discrete and makes little noise, it doesn't mean the word lacks content. Happiness is the lack of an itch to change things. People in happy marriages are people who don't feel an itch to abolish or fundamentally change their intimate lives. That frees up their time and attention for other causes. And it makes them meaningfully different from people who are perceiving a perpetual itch to get better love and sex.
A lot of your arguments are ironically bullshit and it assumes that we are all the same and want the same things.
"We know that if we savor every moment—every smile, every meal, every ray of sunshine—we will be happy. Yet we savor maybe 1% of our moments."
Speak for yourself. You're assuming that all human beings experience the same rate and amount of happiness and positive experiences as each other.
"We know that if we appreciate what we have, from the roof over our heads to the clothes on our backs, we will be happy. Yet we appreciate maybe 1% of what we have. "
Speak for yourself
"Good news makes us happier than bad news. Yet we consume way more bad news than good news, even though we can’t do anything about the bad news, and even though there is plenty of good news available."
The whole world isn't twitter. Many people avoid the News for this very reason.
"Anger feels bad. Yet when we’re angry with our loved ones, we think about all the times they made us angry, which just makes us angrier. Why don’t we think about all the times they made us happy?"
Again, speak for yourself
"We can delude ourselves into believing pretty much anything: the earth is flat, the world is run by a cabal of satanic pedophiles, etc. Yet we never delude ourselves into believing that everything is perfect and wonderful as it is."
You must have never met an Utopian Conservative before.
"If we were actually pursuing happiness, we’d be very good at it by now, given our many years of practice. Yet studies show that we suck at it. We’re incredibly bad at predicting how happy things will make us or how long our happiness will last."
There are vast bodies of scientific research that could help us stop sucking at happiness, like Positive Psychology, the science of happiness. Yet most people aren’t very interested in this research. It’s kind of boring."
How happy or miserable a person generally is boils down their genetics and has very little to do with their life choices or circumstances. There is no "science" to to being happy beyond that because happiness is just another emotion not an attainable "thing".
"We work too much, and some of us literally work ourselves to death, even though we’re well-aware that this makes us unhappy."
Speak for yourself
"Having a child makes us less happy and more stressed, and we know this, yet we do it anyways, often multiple times."
This WEIRD anti-natalist nonsense has been debunked by biological evidence numerous times. And that study you cited was limited to a small sample of Western people and never considers evidence from Neuroscience or behavior genetics that says otherwise.
"We maintain relationships with assholes, even though it’s clear we’d be happier without those assholes in our lives."
Women generally prefer macho assholes because they get more gratification and emotional fulfillment from being with them (and thus more happiness) since women are naturally attracted to raw masculinity and not soft sensitive beta males.
"We constantly beat ourselves up, but we almost never give ourselves compliments."
Okay. Even if these phenomena aren’t universal, they’re at least true sometimes. Do you have an alternative theory of happiness that can explain them all? One that is more plausible and parsimonious than mine?
“To “want” something is to learn how to get it and take it when it’s available.”
Sorry, but that is a thoroughly novel definition of “want”. The word “want” is routinely used, and has always been used, to refer to aspirations that are not rationally pursued.
Strictly, to “want” something is to not have it, or to not have enough of it. “I want to be in better shape.” “I want to be a better father.” “I want to be rich.” “I want to stop drinking.” Happiness fits this pattern exactly: it’s something we want but are bad at pursuing it, and even at understanding it or predicting what will cause it. How is this any different from “I want to be rich” or “I want to have better habits”?
The thought experiment in which someone loses interest in the "guessing game" after mastering it seems to challenge the premise of the article, though -- they stop playing the game because it's no longer making them happy, rather than because it's no longer improving their social status/access to food/etc. By the same token, would people be as driven to pursue things like sex, food, and social status in the first place if those things didn't make them feel (however temporarily) happy?
Yea this part was insufficiently clear—my bad. The point was not that people lose interest in playing the game after they’ve mastered it. The point was that they no longer need the getting warmers after they’ve mastered it. But they still want to play the game, because they don’t need the getting warmers—or happiness—to motivate them. For the more complete (and complicated) model, check out the footnote.
Even in that model, though (which makes sense to me), it would seem as if someone who continues to play the game is doing so for the sake of a short-term increase in happiness (or decrease in unhappiness), however minute. This kind of behavior (which could also describe habits like complaining about Twitter on Twitter, or neglecting to practice positive psychology, etc.) might sabotage longterm happiness, but it also sabotages fitness — what’s to stop someone on that basis from arguing “fitness is bullshit; your real goal is happiness”?
"it would seem as if someone who continues to play the game is doing so for the sake of a short-term increase in happiness (or decrease in unhappiness), however minute."
Yes it would seem this way, and it often seems this way to me. But we cannot trust these seemings--they're often bullshit. Things often aren't as they seem. This seeming is precisely the thing I'm challenging. We *don't* play the game for happiness, either short-term or long-term; we play the game for the specific things evolution made us want (e.g. dominance in the case of Twitter pile-ons). And we don't *need* happiness to motivate us. Motivation is different from happiness. Happiness is not there to motivate us; it's there to recalibrate us when we're off-target. Besides, I'm not sure what "long-term happiness" even means. If it means "getting what we want" then sure, we want what we want. But if it means "being in a recalibrational state at some point in the future" or "being in a constant state of recalibration" then it is clearly not what we want. And even if we did want it, we couldn't get it, because recalibration requires expectation-violation, and we cannot pursue something if it's never what we expect.
Do we know though that people don’t want to be in a constant state of recalibration? A lot of human behavior after all is prompted by boredom or a baseline dissatisfaction to which people tend to return no matter how much fitness or how many resources they acquire. Even (especially?) millionaires and world-class athletes find themselves bored without a goal to pursue or a challenge to stimulate them. (And by a similar token, it's possible to improve one's overall mood by weaning oneself off of a need for stimulation, for instance by avoiding Twitter or taking up meditation.)
This is fascinating and thought-provoking! The recently released World Happiness Report for 2023 measures people's "life satisfaction" (that closely correlates with "happiness"). In light of this, what are your thoughts on countries such as Scotland and those in Scandinavia that aim to prioritize high levels of happiness or life satisfaction as a goal for governance? Is this bullshit as well?
It’s a great question. I think when people are asked on surveys how happy they are (or how satisfied they are), I doubt they are calculating the frequency and intensity of happiness episodes they’ve experienced in the past few years. If they were, I suspect younger people would report way more happiness than older people (as younger people have more uncertainty about the world and more opportunities to be made happy). I suspect what these surveys are actually measuring is how much people are getting what they want, or how high status they feel they are, or whether they’re getting the status they feel they deserve, or how their relationships and jobs are going, or whether they’re healthy, or whether their kids are okay, or something like that. That’s different from “happiness” in the sense I’m defining it, which is what our brain does when things are better than expected. So if a government wants to help people generally get what they want, even if it doesn’t make them “happy” (in the sense I’m defining it), I have no problem with that—and I don’t think it’s necessarily bullshit.
The Scandinavian “happiness” phenomenon is actually a misnomer. I read a great essay by a Norwegian writer about this. “Life satisfaction” is the key phrase - the writer explained that Scandinavians tend to rate higher on life satisfaction because they have the attitude that what you get in life is what you get, and that’s that. There’s less of an attitude of always striving for more. It’s not that they’re super happy because they wanted so much more for themselves and subsequently achieved it; it’s because there’s an attitude of accepting what life brings their way. They don’t feel entitled to more than that. That’s how the writer explained it, anyway.
Great essay David! Feels like you’re hitting upon themes of the Book of Ecclesiastes. Which teaches that the only sources of Happiness in this world are Friends, Family, Relationships and Food/Drink… and all else is merely what the Hebrews called ‘hevel’ (and what you refer to as bullshit)
If you aren’t familiar with this Wisdom Book of Bible, here’s a 5min cartoon video cliff note
https://bibleproject.com/explore/video/ecclesiastes/?utm_source=web_social_share&medium=shared_video
David, glad to have found your stack. You may be well familiar w/ other ancient texts which dovetail themes in your essay.
Heretical Harper’s Songs (Egyptian funeral songs from Hieroglyphs, 1250 BC) likely influenced Ecclesiastes, which questioned the idea of a blissful afterlife and urge people to enjoy life now, before it’s too late
https://larshaukeland.com/bits-pieces/archeology/ecclesiastes/the-harper-song-from-the-tomb-of-king-intef-ecclesiastes-3/
There is also the Epic of Gilgamesh (Mesopotamia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh
Thanks, Matt! Love these. Great parallels.
You completely missed the point of the book. Ecclesiastes says that there's no such thing as lasting or "true" happiness because nothing lasts forever. Stuff like Family, Friendships, Relationships, etc can also be sources of misery (the Bible itself is filled with examples) and are just as temporary and vain as literally everything is under the sun according to the book. So it's best to just appreciate what you have and what you can get before its gone.
"That’s different from “happiness” in the sense I’m defining it, which is what our brain does when things are better than expected."
I'm sorry... what are you even saying here? lol
TBH, this entire thing comes off like some high school level edgelord nonsense.
Ouch! Please consider the possibility that you are confused because you don't understand it, and not because it's nonsense. I'm happy to clarify any points. I can assure you this isn't high school level--I have a PhD in psychology. Check out the footnote for the complete argument.
"I'm happy to clarify any points"
...and yet, you didn't even answer the question that was asked of you.
Congrats on that degree, tho ;)
Maybe if you weren’t so rude, and if you had actually asked a specific question, I might have answered it. Congrats on being intellectually superior. You clearly have no need for an advanced degree—you obviously already know everything. ;)
lol
Wow didn't expect to see you here. Love your documentary series.
If this were true [surprising positives], walking around with a negativity bias would result in more often feeling happiness. Empirically, I don't think that is the case. Maybe they are overall less happy, but experience more episodes of happiness a la your proposal? Idk, would need an EMA design.
Interesting point. It might be that negativity bias is more about interpreting/perceiving things as negative than expecting them to be negative. Or maybe they go together: we tend to both expect and interpret/perceive things in the same way. Agreed it would be tricky to assess empirically.
Damn, maybe this is why I’m usually so happy and optimistic! I’m quite skeptical and try to never expect anything of a given situation, but I also place a great amount of value in potential and creation. To use music as an example, it’s an endless source of challenges and labor, but it equally produces an endless source of interpretation and perception. To use mechanical terms to describe it, anyway. Plus it’s just nice to experience, the stuff that is good doesn’t have to get old if you enjoy it for what makes it good.
Yes, music might well be the exception to the rule of happiness being bullshit. I subscribe to the Arthur Schopenhauer school of thought that everything sucks except for music. Part of the answer of why music doesn't suck is that it's designed to be optimally expectation-violating. The point of a great melody is to set you up to expect a note, give you a different note, and then finally give you the note you want when you're least expecting it. The quest for ever more niche and atonal music is the quest for ever more surprising and expectation-violating music. It might actually be analogous to the quest for happiness, insofar as happiness is just the feeling of one's expectations being violated in a positive way. So I might have just proved my own thesis wrong, at least for the case of music.
Oh man that’s funny, I’m not a Schopenhauer-ian at all. I subscribe to a mix of Nietzsche, Marx, and Yusuf Lateef when it comes to a background basis for my aesthetic philosophy, and there’s plenty more names I’m leaving out. Bernstein and Ives are some good American musical influences who also explored aesthetic philosophy, and there’s plenty of modern era musicians who’ve given some great input on the music medium. Taruskin and Babbit come to mind.
I’m also classically trained, and I have a bone to pick with “atonal” music and academic musical niches. For one, atonal is a misnomer. What people really mean is dis-harmonious or nonfunctional harmony, or possibly even aleatoric. And It’s far to common for academic-trained contemporaries to fixate too strongly on their individual aesthetic interests alone, where they forget to contribute to cultivating a larger genre or style that can be popularized in a sense that it’s relatable to an audience who is listening to the music itself. Milton Babbit would be a good read on this further if you’re interested.
Yea, I'm not a huge fan "atonal" music, though I do enjoy it in small bursts for the purpose of catching me off guard. Thanks for the recommendation on Babbit, will check him out.
If you believe this to be the case, then I think there must be other things that are optimally expectation-violating.
It's not about expectation violation in general. It's about things being unexpectedly good (e.g. status-boosting, comfort-boosting, etc.). So it doesn't cover things being unexpectedly painful, unexpectedly bright, unexpectedly quiet, etc.
But music is essentially arbitrary, it's not painful or bright or quiet, doesn't inherently signal or carry any status, doesn't provide any intrinsic value, etc. in the way that other things do. It's meaningful because we decided it is, and the expectation violating aspect of it gives it a lot of replay value. It seems to me that if you can decide that an activity is meaningful like we do the music, it could be equally satisfying as music.
If you really subscribe to the idea that everything sucks except music, I would be interested to hear more details about what you think differences music has compared to everything else. Is there a metric we can use to say "is this music?" If everything sucks except music, and something doesn't suck, does that mean it's music?
Amused to notice how happy I feel right now. Because I was anticipating a certain enjoyment of the article after the opening pars. Then the bit I didn't expect - a predictive states theory of well-being mirroring one I offered a while ago (https://www.rarelycertain.com/p/that-feeling-when-you-get-phasic) added a layer of fun. Voilà - under-predicting what I'd get out of this piece made the outcome even better.
I'm not sure what to feel after reading this! Not happy, that's for sure. But I guess that's ok. I think I enjoyed it.
I'm interested in understanding this part more: "I enjoy meditating, but I never want to do it. Doomscrolling upsets me, but I often want to do it." By enjoy, you mean after the fact, right? Do you agree it's also possible to train your brain to want to do things you enjoy, like meditate, and not want to do things that upset you, like doomscroll? I feel like I've managed to do the former with playing sports for exercise, eating healthy, going on adventures with my son, having challenging conversations, reading your posts, etc. And I've managed to weed our most of my desire for some of the latter, like doomscrolling. Isn't this a way to enjoy life more, even if we don't call it "happiness"? Or maybe I'm dumb and deluding myself (which is probably even more effective)?
Thanks for your thoughtful questions, Chris. Yes, we can train our brains to do things we enjoy, like meditating or exercising, and we can train our brains to avoid doing things we dislike, like doomscrolling. BUT, and here’s the weird part, we do not train our brains in this way out of a desire for happiness. The goal is not to maximize happy mental states. If we had that goal, we’d be very motivated to train ourselves, we would be very successful at doing it, and none of us would be on the internet: we’d all be meditating or savoring the moment or counting our blessings instead. When we train ourselves, we do so to satisfy some *other* evolved goal. Maybe we train ourselves to eat healthy and exercise because we want to live longer or be stronger or show off our health and virtue. Maybe we go on adventures with our children or have difficult conversations because we want better relationships with the people we care about. It’s those goals—good relationships, strength, health, etc.—that are driving us, not the desire for happiness. If all we wanted was happiness, we’d have no relationships at all because they’re often filled with stress and heartache and betrayal and grief, and we’d spend all our time meditating in a cave and not talking to anyone. At the end of the day, it’s our evolved goals that are in charge of us. What else would be in charge of us? Some of these evolved goals are in conflict with one another, some of them are more short-term, others are more long-term, but none of them are aimed at happiness. Why would they be aimed at happiness? Evolution does not care about our happiness. Such a happiness-directed goal makes no evolutionary sense. We should try to understand ourselves without appealing to such evolutionarily implausible goals. I think you’ll find that if you leave this happiness-goal out of your psychological explanations, you will gain a lot of insight into yourself and others. Thanks for reading.
Ok, thanks David. I think I get you now. 1) You can only aim toward goals that you're evolutionarily wired to want to go after. 2) Choose goals you enjoy pursuing and having pursued so you don't hate yourself too much. 3) Since happiness, as you define it, is not an evolved want, you can't go after it, but only experience it as a by-product. Like laughter, having happiness the whole time would be hellish, anyway.
Great article and angle on a timeless problem of the human condition. It seems that our narrow perception of the world around us and our distaste of statistics messes up our predictions about what will make us happy and causes our irrational behavior. It’s a problem recorded two millennia ago by the Apostle Paul:
“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.”
Romans 7:15, 19 NIV
I always assumed happiness is the reward we get when we do the right things in an evolutionary sense: When we keep up good relationships, work with meaningful things, have sex often enough, take good care of our children, eat decent food etc. our minds reward us with that feeling called happiness.
For that reason, I totally agree that pursuing happiness is meaningless: It is impossible to get the reward without doing the things that get rewarded (at least without recreational drugs or self-deception). But I think your conclusion is overly negative. Happiness is the reward for living a life approved by one's genes. Not only for things that are surprisingly good for those genes. It is entirely possible to wake up happy every morning, without any positive surprises.
Yea that way of thinking—the idea that we need some “reward” to be motivated to do things—is not the right way of thinking about it IMO. On a mechanistic level, we need no reward. The brain can motivate the body to do things without any reward, just as a thermostat can keep your house at the right temperature without any reward. The reward is theoretically superfluous. It serves no explanatory purpose. Get rid of it. It’s not explaining anything. Happiness is not a reward; it’s a computational system that rewires the brain when it underestimates the value of something. Check out the footnote for more detail on what I mean. We need to get this “reward” metaphor out of our heads—there are no intrinsically feel-good substances in the universe with which to reward us—and we need to think about what the brain is actually doing in mechanistic terms. At least, that’s my perspective as an evolutionary psychologist. It’s certainly counterintuitive, but I think it will result in a lot of insight if taken seriously.
Read it.
>>This is just another way of saying that we are “positively reinforced”—i.e. the features that were counterfactually unique to the outcome now have a higher expected value than they did before.
What's the difference between "positive reinforcement" and "reward"? To me, the difference is only semantics.
I can say instead that happiness is a positive reinforcement people (and animals) get when they tick a number of boxes that ensured the propagation of their ancestors' genes.
It is possible to think in mechanistic terms and still allow humans to be long-termist. Sustainable happiness occurs when humans feel they are on a sustainable track for the longer term. If we instead feel we are on a bad track, in evolutionary terms, we feel unhappy (are negatively reinforced).
I don't deny the short-term happiness from positive surprises that you write about. I just don't think it is the whole story.
That's fair. I think this is largely semantics. What you are referring to as "being on the right track" is a thing, but I wouldn't call it happiness. I'd maybe call it being motivated, or having something with long-term value to pursue (like raising a family or something). I also think it doesn't make sense to say that we "want" reinforcement, or that it's the thing we're seeking, because it's inherently unexpected (which means we weren't seeking it per se), and because it tends to decline in intensity the more we get what we want (so if anything we're chasing it away more than pursuing it). But these are nitpicks. Thanks for reading, and thanks for your thoughts.
In order to nitpick a little deeper, I think we disagree over the definition of happiness. What you call "happiness" I would call "joy". We feel joy when people laugh more than expected at our joke. Happiness, I think, has a more long-term significance. I mean, people talk about "a happy marriage". Then they don't mean a marriage where you get nice surprises all the time, but a marriage where both parties are happy to wake up in the same home every morning.
(All the above said with the caution that I'm not an English speaker. So you have a certain advantage when it comes to definitions).
I agree that people are not searching thecreward/reinforcement for making the right choices. Instead they are trying to make the right choices! They don't search the happiness from being on the side of the right partner. Instead they search for the right partner. But I would argue that when that partner has been found, the happiness they feel prevent them from leaving or mistreating that partner. You say happiness signals to people to do more of x. I agree, but I also think it signals to people to just stay where they are and keep doing what they are going.
Thanks, Tove. We’re ultimately debating how to use words, but let me just give you a quick pitch about why you should use words the way I’m using them. You define a happy marriage as a marriage you want to stay in. If I ask “why are you staying in the marriage?” you might reply “Because it makes me happy.” But that is totally circular. Wanting to be in the marriage because it makes you happy = wanting to be in the marriage because you want to be in the marriage. The word “happy” is empty. It’s not doing anything. Just talk about how you want to be in the marriage, or how you value the relationship. There’s no need for the word “happiness” here. It’s superfluous. The only case where happiness actually means something, in a noncircular way, is in the case of what you’re calling “joy”. Let’s use the word “happiness” to refer to something that actually means something, that actually picks out something unique in the world, that actually has content. Let’s try to use our words to carve nature at the joints. Anyways, that’s my case. Take it or leave it. Thanks for reading and thanks for your thoughts.
>>We’re ultimately debating how to use words
That's philosophy! And it has been since the time of Socrates. Ultimately, philosophy is IS about the definition of words.
>>If I ask “why are you staying in the marriage?” you might reply “Because it makes me happy.”
Hah! Not me. I would give you one hundred explanations: Because we have too many children and my value on the second hand market is low. Because he's the most intelligent person I know and he makes me think better. Because we often laugh together. Because I like the way he looks and feels. Blah blah blah...
"I want to stay because it makes me happy" is indeed circular reasoning. And that circularity catches the meaning of the word happiness: Happiness is what makes people want to stay where they are and keep doing what they are doing.
Just because happiness is a feeling that is quiet and discrete and makes little noise, it doesn't mean the word lacks content. Happiness is the lack of an itch to change things. People in happy marriages are people who don't feel an itch to abolish or fundamentally change their intimate lives. That frees up their time and attention for other causes. And it makes them meaningfully different from people who are perceiving a perpetual itch to get better love and sex.
I will read and savour this a few times.
This is beauty 😘
I knew it all , but man you have put things *CLEARLY*
Thanks! You’re ahead of the curve if you knew it all. This one’s been a hard pill for people to swallow.
Yeah , I read the work of Douglas Kenrick ( The rational animal) and Randy Nesse for my anxiety problem, gained new perspective and yeah was stunned .
A lot of your arguments are ironically bullshit and it assumes that we are all the same and want the same things.
"We know that if we savor every moment—every smile, every meal, every ray of sunshine—we will be happy. Yet we savor maybe 1% of our moments."
Speak for yourself. You're assuming that all human beings experience the same rate and amount of happiness and positive experiences as each other.
"We know that if we appreciate what we have, from the roof over our heads to the clothes on our backs, we will be happy. Yet we appreciate maybe 1% of what we have. "
Speak for yourself
"Good news makes us happier than bad news. Yet we consume way more bad news than good news, even though we can’t do anything about the bad news, and even though there is plenty of good news available."
The whole world isn't twitter. Many people avoid the News for this very reason.
"Anger feels bad. Yet when we’re angry with our loved ones, we think about all the times they made us angry, which just makes us angrier. Why don’t we think about all the times they made us happy?"
Again, speak for yourself
"We can delude ourselves into believing pretty much anything: the earth is flat, the world is run by a cabal of satanic pedophiles, etc. Yet we never delude ourselves into believing that everything is perfect and wonderful as it is."
You must have never met an Utopian Conservative before.
"If we were actually pursuing happiness, we’d be very good at it by now, given our many years of practice. Yet studies show that we suck at it. We’re incredibly bad at predicting how happy things will make us or how long our happiness will last."
There are vast bodies of scientific research that could help us stop sucking at happiness, like Positive Psychology, the science of happiness. Yet most people aren’t very interested in this research. It’s kind of boring."
How happy or miserable a person generally is boils down their genetics and has very little to do with their life choices or circumstances. There is no "science" to to being happy beyond that because happiness is just another emotion not an attainable "thing".
"We work too much, and some of us literally work ourselves to death, even though we’re well-aware that this makes us unhappy."
Speak for yourself
"Having a child makes us less happy and more stressed, and we know this, yet we do it anyways, often multiple times."
This WEIRD anti-natalist nonsense has been debunked by biological evidence numerous times. And that study you cited was limited to a small sample of Western people and never considers evidence from Neuroscience or behavior genetics that says otherwise.
"We maintain relationships with assholes, even though it’s clear we’d be happier without those assholes in our lives."
Women generally prefer macho assholes because they get more gratification and emotional fulfillment from being with them (and thus more happiness) since women are naturally attracted to raw masculinity and not soft sensitive beta males.
"We constantly beat ourselves up, but we almost never give ourselves compliments."
Speak for yourself
Okay. Even if these phenomena aren’t universal, they’re at least true sometimes. Do you have an alternative theory of happiness that can explain them all? One that is more plausible and parsimonious than mine?
“To “want” something is to learn how to get it and take it when it’s available.”
Sorry, but that is a thoroughly novel definition of “want”. The word “want” is routinely used, and has always been used, to refer to aspirations that are not rationally pursued.
Strictly, to “want” something is to not have it, or to not have enough of it. “I want to be in better shape.” “I want to be a better father.” “I want to be rich.” “I want to stop drinking.” Happiness fits this pattern exactly: it’s something we want but are bad at pursuing it, and even at understanding it or predicting what will cause it. How is this any different from “I want to be rich” or “I want to have better habits”?
Does friendship exist? I don't think so.
https://technium.substack.com/p/friendship
If I place in you hand an extra dollar
Won't make you happier and won't make you taller
The thought experiment in which someone loses interest in the "guessing game" after mastering it seems to challenge the premise of the article, though -- they stop playing the game because it's no longer making them happy, rather than because it's no longer improving their social status/access to food/etc. By the same token, would people be as driven to pursue things like sex, food, and social status in the first place if those things didn't make them feel (however temporarily) happy?
Yea this part was insufficiently clear—my bad. The point was not that people lose interest in playing the game after they’ve mastered it. The point was that they no longer need the getting warmers after they’ve mastered it. But they still want to play the game, because they don’t need the getting warmers—or happiness—to motivate them. For the more complete (and complicated) model, check out the footnote.
Even in that model, though (which makes sense to me), it would seem as if someone who continues to play the game is doing so for the sake of a short-term increase in happiness (or decrease in unhappiness), however minute. This kind of behavior (which could also describe habits like complaining about Twitter on Twitter, or neglecting to practice positive psychology, etc.) might sabotage longterm happiness, but it also sabotages fitness — what’s to stop someone on that basis from arguing “fitness is bullshit; your real goal is happiness”?
"it would seem as if someone who continues to play the game is doing so for the sake of a short-term increase in happiness (or decrease in unhappiness), however minute."
Yes it would seem this way, and it often seems this way to me. But we cannot trust these seemings--they're often bullshit. Things often aren't as they seem. This seeming is precisely the thing I'm challenging. We *don't* play the game for happiness, either short-term or long-term; we play the game for the specific things evolution made us want (e.g. dominance in the case of Twitter pile-ons). And we don't *need* happiness to motivate us. Motivation is different from happiness. Happiness is not there to motivate us; it's there to recalibrate us when we're off-target. Besides, I'm not sure what "long-term happiness" even means. If it means "getting what we want" then sure, we want what we want. But if it means "being in a recalibrational state at some point in the future" or "being in a constant state of recalibration" then it is clearly not what we want. And even if we did want it, we couldn't get it, because recalibration requires expectation-violation, and we cannot pursue something if it's never what we expect.
Do we know though that people don’t want to be in a constant state of recalibration? A lot of human behavior after all is prompted by boredom or a baseline dissatisfaction to which people tend to return no matter how much fitness or how many resources they acquire. Even (especially?) millionaires and world-class athletes find themselves bored without a goal to pursue or a challenge to stimulate them. (And by a similar token, it's possible to improve one's overall mood by weaning oneself off of a need for stimulation, for instance by avoiding Twitter or taking up meditation.)
That sunset is based tho.
Sorry, you lost me at "humans aren't animals."