I agree that happiness is the hunt, not the finish line. For a very meta example, I wrote a short book about finding purpose and meaning in life. The process of writing and editing was incredibly fulfilling and changed my life. The publishing day was my 42nd birthday. It was fine, and I felt a sense of accomplishment for a few days or maybe weeks. But the journey towards it was more fulfilling by a factor of 100 at least.
This is a bit about myself, but it's relevant I would say:
I'm a big fan of the quantified self stuff. What is surprising to me is that I don't see very many people tracking the thing that ultimately matters - happiness. I track happiness with hourly prompts to rate my mood. I miss some and there are likely major biases, but I have to imagine this is much better than just reflecting on things. I haven't done much analysis recently, but I did some in the past. I was surprised to find that sleep hours didn't matter as much as I previously thought. In 2022, my 7-day sleep average seemed to matter a bit.
Otherwise, it seems like the big factors are things that are obvious, or at least obvious upon reflection. I was in a relationship that wasn't going well? That's probably why I was miserable. Work was extremely stressful? That's probably why I don't feel so good. I like the idea of stoicism and cognitive behavioral therapy, but I haven't put it into practice so well. It seems like my mood is determined by life circumstances. I'm still trying to investigate more. So, maybe Parrhesia is at least trying to optimize happiness.
I'm interested in financial independence and retire early. I like researching and writing a lot, and I spend my free time doing that sort of thing. At the same time, I really don't enjoy school and it makes me stressed out. My goal is to achieve a point where blog revenue + financial returns = decent income. This partially answers the "what are you going to do?" question. Now my obsession is basically...how likely is success on either of these things? Is this growth going to stay at this rate? Will it grow? At what rate will it grow? Will I be cancelled first? What's the chance of that?
Is happiness even possible to optimize for? Measures of life satisfaction are influenced by social comparison. [Olivos et al. 2021] Not only that, but priming the subject about their current situation can affect this measure. [Schwarz 2010]
So I suppose that given these two findings, being in an environment that tells you that you are better than other people, or that your negative feelings are accounted for by some external factor will increase your reported life satisfaction. This... makes sense. I know that I personally love thinking that "he's so dumb, I'm way smarter," or "if only X I would be happy." If I believe my own delusions (which I sometimes do), I am optimizing for my own happiness in a way.
.
In response to "It's the hunt," agreed. It's interesting to think of goals being of two types. Satiable and insatiable.
A satiable goal is like: "I want shoes"
An insatiable goal is like: "I want to acquire shoes"
I think that satisfaction in general is a byproduct of satisfying a goal. The bigger the goal, the greater the satisfaction. As long as we have insatiable goals, we will never be completely satisfied. (This is like the Buddhist denial of desire you were talking about).
I think a lot of people hold many insatiable goals, the greatest of which being:
Love this! I had a very similar thought process 7 years ago and started meditating.
Averaged 100 minutes/day for the last seven years and I slowly changed from being a basically unhappy and neurotic person to someone who is joyful, social, and happy
It was difficult and painful to do, which is in line w your local optima point, but it is in fact possible!
I think many people are simply not taught to consider your basic question: What am I trying to maximize? I know I wasn't.
In my view, the answer for everyone really in the end is self-evidently Well-being.
I wouldn't trade the results of my meditation practice for one billion dollars. Just purely selfishly it would be a horrible trade. If you think of it like that you can consider meditating for an hour to be "paying" you more than you can earn at any job
I bet there's a lot of weight towards your "It's the hunt" option, to the point that psychologically miscalculating how happy achievements will be may be a feature not a bug. Evolutionarily, the hunt is far more important to encourage than optimizing for the experience after. We see this in mating, seeking calories, planning long term projects, etc.
Consider Luca Dellanna's arguments about Proactive Metrics (short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AErgeP7dEU0). The goal is to give us a functional, useful gradient for decision-making. If we only rely on outcomes, it's too random and too late to change behavior. But if we focus on intermediate inputs (eating vegetables every day, exercising, limiting calories), we can trend towards the outcomes we want (losing weight).
Contrary to earlier studies suggesting that higher income is not associated with more happiness above a certain threshold, a recent (and arguably better) study found that it is, just with diminishing returns: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2016976118
This is the topic of Oliver Burkeman's book, Four Thousand Weeks. Your thoughts overlap with his, and he goes into pretty elaborate and specific detail. It's pretty good for a self-help style book, maybe it's worth reading.
Another, weirder, overlap, might be samzdat's theory-of-everything "The Uruk Machine"(https://samzdat.com/2017/08/28/the-uruk-machine/), especially the later sections on 'The Culture of Narcissism" (https://samzdat.com/2017/08/12/thats-amore/). Much of it is related to thinking about what we think we want, why we we think we want these things, and what we might really want.
Predicting hedonic increases of an Experiential Self seems to be harder/more cognitively distant/less socially reinforced than predicting updates to a Narrative self. Basically, if I go on a luxury cruise, it's easy to imagine the kinds of memories this will generate and bragging rights I'll gain with friends. However, without prior experience, it's hard to predict how much fun the luxury cruise will actually be at the time. Fancy all-you-can-eat meals sound pretty nice, but I also know from experience that stuffing myself with endless pizza ends in regret.
- Recently I started working 80%, 4 days a week instead of 5, since marginal improvement in happiness from having an extra free day worth more to me than having 20% more income.
- I considered FIRE, but at the moment my experience from the job is neutral-to-positive and retiring would mean living on a tighter budget which in itself reduces happiness a little bit.
- Last year I did an informal costs-benefits analysis and started running. It was pretty miserable experience for the first 2 month, but now I'm kinda enjoying it, have more stamina and expect to live longer.
- Me and my partner are hesitant about having kids, because we aren't sure that it will make us happier. (We're still debating it.)
- I didn't accept a job offer in a hedge fund that would substantially increase my income, but required me to move to a city where I didn't enjoy living as much.
Is it possible that most people haven’t thought to take the question “what does it mean to live a good life” seriously?
The existential boredom you are describing here isn’t exactly a new thing. But what’s new is an empire that doesn’t have constant internal messaging about what “living a good life” means, despite being globe spanning.
I agree that happiness is the hunt, not the finish line. For a very meta example, I wrote a short book about finding purpose and meaning in life. The process of writing and editing was incredibly fulfilling and changed my life. The publishing day was my 42nd birthday. It was fine, and I felt a sense of accomplishment for a few days or maybe weeks. But the journey towards it was more fulfilling by a factor of 100 at least.
This is a bit about myself, but it's relevant I would say:
I'm a big fan of the quantified self stuff. What is surprising to me is that I don't see very many people tracking the thing that ultimately matters - happiness. I track happiness with hourly prompts to rate my mood. I miss some and there are likely major biases, but I have to imagine this is much better than just reflecting on things. I haven't done much analysis recently, but I did some in the past. I was surprised to find that sleep hours didn't matter as much as I previously thought. In 2022, my 7-day sleep average seemed to matter a bit.
Otherwise, it seems like the big factors are things that are obvious, or at least obvious upon reflection. I was in a relationship that wasn't going well? That's probably why I was miserable. Work was extremely stressful? That's probably why I don't feel so good. I like the idea of stoicism and cognitive behavioral therapy, but I haven't put it into practice so well. It seems like my mood is determined by life circumstances. I'm still trying to investigate more. So, maybe Parrhesia is at least trying to optimize happiness.
I'm interested in financial independence and retire early. I like researching and writing a lot, and I spend my free time doing that sort of thing. At the same time, I really don't enjoy school and it makes me stressed out. My goal is to achieve a point where blog revenue + financial returns = decent income. This partially answers the "what are you going to do?" question. Now my obsession is basically...how likely is success on either of these things? Is this growth going to stay at this rate? Will it grow? At what rate will it grow? Will I be cancelled first? What's the chance of that?
Is happiness even possible to optimize for? Measures of life satisfaction are influenced by social comparison. [Olivos et al. 2021] Not only that, but priming the subject about their current situation can affect this measure. [Schwarz 2010]
So I suppose that given these two findings, being in an environment that tells you that you are better than other people, or that your negative feelings are accounted for by some external factor will increase your reported life satisfaction. This... makes sense. I know that I personally love thinking that "he's so dumb, I'm way smarter," or "if only X I would be happy." If I believe my own delusions (which I sometimes do), I am optimizing for my own happiness in a way.
.
In response to "It's the hunt," agreed. It's interesting to think of goals being of two types. Satiable and insatiable.
A satiable goal is like: "I want shoes"
An insatiable goal is like: "I want to acquire shoes"
I think that satisfaction in general is a byproduct of satisfying a goal. The bigger the goal, the greater the satisfaction. As long as we have insatiable goals, we will never be completely satisfied. (This is like the Buddhist denial of desire you were talking about).
I think a lot of people hold many insatiable goals, the greatest of which being:
"I want to fulfill my goals."
researchgate.net/publication/339201727_Asymmetric_Social_Comparison_and_Life_Satisfaction_in_Social_Networks
https://dornsife.usc.edu/assets/sites/780/docs/schwarz_feelings-as-information_7jan10.pdf
Love this! I had a very similar thought process 7 years ago and started meditating.
Averaged 100 minutes/day for the last seven years and I slowly changed from being a basically unhappy and neurotic person to someone who is joyful, social, and happy
It was difficult and painful to do, which is in line w your local optima point, but it is in fact possible!
I think many people are simply not taught to consider your basic question: What am I trying to maximize? I know I wasn't.
In my view, the answer for everyone really in the end is self-evidently Well-being.
I wouldn't trade the results of my meditation practice for one billion dollars. Just purely selfishly it would be a horrible trade. If you think of it like that you can consider meditating for an hour to be "paying" you more than you can earn at any job
I bet there's a lot of weight towards your "It's the hunt" option, to the point that psychologically miscalculating how happy achievements will be may be a feature not a bug. Evolutionarily, the hunt is far more important to encourage than optimizing for the experience after. We see this in mating, seeking calories, planning long term projects, etc.
Consider Luca Dellanna's arguments about Proactive Metrics (short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AErgeP7dEU0). The goal is to give us a functional, useful gradient for decision-making. If we only rely on outcomes, it's too random and too late to change behavior. But if we focus on intermediate inputs (eating vegetables every day, exercising, limiting calories), we can trend towards the outcomes we want (losing weight).
This might interest you: https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1475839081418530819
Contrary to earlier studies suggesting that higher income is not associated with more happiness above a certain threshold, a recent (and arguably better) study found that it is, just with diminishing returns: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2016976118
It feels dirty to link to something I wrote, but it it's kinda similar and related to your piece -
https://mindfulmonkey.substack.com/p/the-problem-with-problems
This is the topic of Oliver Burkeman's book, Four Thousand Weeks. Your thoughts overlap with his, and he goes into pretty elaborate and specific detail. It's pretty good for a self-help style book, maybe it's worth reading.
Another, weirder, overlap, might be samzdat's theory-of-everything "The Uruk Machine"(https://samzdat.com/2017/08/28/the-uruk-machine/), especially the later sections on 'The Culture of Narcissism" (https://samzdat.com/2017/08/12/thats-amore/). Much of it is related to thinking about what we think we want, why we we think we want these things, and what we might really want.
I'm reminded of Scott Alexander's article "What Human Experiences are You Missing without Realizing it?": https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/
Predicting hedonic increases of an Experiential Self seems to be harder/more cognitively distant/less socially reinforced than predicting updates to a Narrative self. Basically, if I go on a luxury cruise, it's easy to imagine the kinds of memories this will generate and bragging rights I'll gain with friends. However, without prior experience, it's hard to predict how much fun the luxury cruise will actually be at the time. Fancy all-you-can-eat meals sound pretty nice, but I also know from experience that stuffing myself with endless pizza ends in regret.
The pursuit of optimization is a characteristic of modernity (weaponized by neoliberalism) and modernity has driven us insane.
The zeitgeist of never enough is the land of neurotic hungry ghosts.
I propose that we fundamentally misunderstand what happiness is and means.
Personally, I'm totally optimizing for happiness.
- Recently I started working 80%, 4 days a week instead of 5, since marginal improvement in happiness from having an extra free day worth more to me than having 20% more income.
- I considered FIRE, but at the moment my experience from the job is neutral-to-positive and retiring would mean living on a tighter budget which in itself reduces happiness a little bit.
- Last year I did an informal costs-benefits analysis and started running. It was pretty miserable experience for the first 2 month, but now I'm kinda enjoying it, have more stamina and expect to live longer.
- Me and my partner are hesitant about having kids, because we aren't sure that it will make us happier. (We're still debating it.)
- I didn't accept a job offer in a hedge fund that would substantially increase my income, but required me to move to a city where I didn't enjoy living as much.
Is it possible that most people haven’t thought to take the question “what does it mean to live a good life” seriously?
The existential boredom you are describing here isn’t exactly a new thing. But what’s new is an empire that doesn’t have constant internal messaging about what “living a good life” means, despite being globe spanning.