Book Review: The Art of Happiness
The Art of Happiness is a book co-written by American psychiatrist Dr. Cutler and the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso. Published in 1998, the book is an attempt to blend western scientific understanding of the mind with the spiritual wisdom and ancient training of Buddhist practices. Success would mean a book that taught you how to be happy.
This is a terrific idea. All over the world, some human beings are unhappy. If you’re not sure this is true, go walk down your office or knock on a few doors in your neighborhood and ask. Some of us are happy, but many of us just wound up that way by luck or circumstance, or sometimes by specific application of effort to solving our personal problems. Obviously it’s worth someone working really hard to figure out how to become happy and then writing down how to do it in a book sold around the world.
If you were going to have someone write a book like that, who else would you choose? There are many ancient traditions of wisdom, but Buddhism is unusually attentive to the whole suffering and joy thing. We’re not going to ask the Calvinists for lessons on enjoying life. But the stereotype of deep religious wisdom is that it’s wrapped in impossible koans, so a western scientist should be able to put things into simple diagnoses and understandable steps for a western audience.
My copy of the 10th Anniversary Edition has, in the introduction, the following line: “we can train in happiness in much the same way that we train in any other skill.” That’s the premise of the book. How well does it execute on that premise? Better than I’d expected, but not as well as I’d hoped, and best summed up with a line from the regular introduction: “I felt that, using my background in psychiatry, I could codify his views into a set of easy instructions on how to conduct one’s daily life. By the end of our series of meetings I had given up on that idea.”
Not a strong start.
I: The Purpose of Life
Part of the obstacle preventing people from being happy is that most of them don’t even try.
That seems unduly pessimistic, but Dr. Cutler points out that happiness is not usually a therapeutic objective. The alleviation of depression is! Mitigating anxiety is! So are any other number of goals where you’re trying to fix some specific flaw or issue. However, being unhappy is not diagnosable in the DSM-V, with a sort of unstated assumption that once all the flaws and issues are removed, people will inevitably become happy. This doesn’t fit our observations about ourselves or the people around us however. Some people manage to be cheerful in spite of a wealth of setbacks and burdens.
So what does bring happiness, if not an absence of anything wrong with you? The Dalai Lama suggests that you can achieve happiness for a while if you get all the things you want, but that this is fickle and hard to hold on to. If you want a nice car, and you get the car, then you might be happy as long as nothing happens to the car and you can still make the car payment. If you can’t, then you’re no longer happy. If, instead, you learn to be content with whatever you have even if whatever you have is nothing, then it’s not like the bank is going to repossess your nothing for failure to pay your nothing loan.
This felt a bit like assuming that once all the flaws and issues are accepted, then people will inevitably become happy.
Throughout the book, Dr. Cutler brings up numerous examples of people he meets or patients he treats. These examples are illustrative, often brought up to fit the lesson of that subchapter, but I didn’t find the examples convincing. After all, the good doctor gets to pick his examples from a long career of treating patients, showing us the details that fit the lesson he’s trying to teach. They’re good as parables, but this is exactly the kind of thing that the phrase “the plural of anecdote is not data” is meant to address.
This section of the book also points out the distinction between happiness and pleasure. If pleasure is the momentary impulse of joy, the drenching of the mind in happy chemicals because of a sweet snack or an instant of victory over another, then happiness is. . . less well defined, really.
The example given here is of a professional woman torn between doing personally rewarding work in a big city she hates, or doing work that she doesn’t care about in a small town that she loves. After agonizing over the decision, Dr. Cutler asks her if the work she doesn’t care about would bring her happiness, and she decides that no, it wouldn’t, so she stays in the big city. Thus is another victory won by deliberate thinking and asking extremely basic questions.
That last sentence was snark, but underneath the snark I have a lot of respect for Dr. Cutler’s role here. Often it seems to me that people genuinely fail to actually ask themselves the actual question, and that they can make an attempt at answering it only once the question is asked. Too many people simply didn’t think about it, or if they did it was for a minute or two in high school when the guidance counselor asked what they wanted to major in.
His clients are there because something isn’t working, and by bringing up the question of what makes them happy he’s doing a valuable service. One takeaway from reading this book, if you didn’t already do it, is to ask yourself whether what you’re doing will bring you happiness.
Actually, why not make that a takeaway from reading this review? Go take five minutes, I’ll still be here when you get back.
II: Human Warmth and Compassion
A major part of the thesis of the Dalai Lama’s approach seems to be that having compassion for others is one of the best routes to being happy. Unhappily, this is the part of the book that I find I disagree with the most.
To be clear, the Buddhist notion of compassion seems to be a very specific experience. From the descriptions, it’s about empathizing with the people around you, and with People in the abstract. Serving others, putting yourself in their shoes, and generally getting out of your own head are taken as steps along the path to being connected to the great web of humanity and therefore being happy.
Some of this was at the end of Part One, but throughout Part Two I found myself annoyed about two kinds of people Dr. Cutler and the Dalai Lama seemed to fail to empathize with at all.
The first kind of people are the ones the Dalai Lama seems to fail to empathize with. It seems like he has very poor empathy (or at least theory of mind) for anyone who doesn’t have empathy for others. Psychopaths, narcissists, or just folks out on the odd end of the bell curve, if I’m reading this right the Dalai Lama seems to think they would have a lot less joy. The strong form of the book’s statements seems to be that people like that cannot be happy.
While venturing a guess as to what is in another person’s head is always a fraught endeavor, I think I’ve met some people who were extreme outliers in how little they empathized with others, and on the whole I think they weren’t much more or less happy than other people I saw around me. Sometimes this is because these people are successful at obtaining a steady supply of the pleasures of life. Other times this is because feeling the emotions of others sucks.
Let’s go into that in more detail. I’m actually confused what the Dalai Lama is doing when he empathizes with, say, a woman whose only child has recently died. That doesn’t sound like a pleasant place to be in. The woman is clearly not happy. So when you expand your own compassion to cover her, and try to put yourself in her shoes and feel her suffering. . . doesn’t that feel bad? Having a profound sense of connection for the hurting and helpless millions of the world seems like it should really ruin your day. But, no, something about the way he claims to take on the suffering of others voluntarily strips it of the worst of the pain.
The second kind of people are the ones Dr. Cutler lacks compassion for, and that’s anyone who tries to look up any of the studies he references. Seriously, I assumed part of the point of having the Western Man Of Modern Medicine as one of the two co-authors here was that we could properly do a tiny bit of science to the claims of ancient Buddhist tradition, or at least notice which scientific claims backed Buddhism up and which disagreed with Buddhism.
But no, he’ll use a statement like “Over the past two or three decades, there have been literally hundreds of scientific studies indicating that…” or “Confirmed by a number of recent studies…” Sometimes he’ll give the authors of a specific study, but usually he just says the studies exist. That doesn’t count! This is Freshman English Class level stuff! You have to cite a specific study or it doesn’t count!
I also want to call out an interesting anecdote of Dr. Cutler’s. He’s been frustrated and unhappy about something in his own personal life, when a chance conversation with a friend he’s been talking to about all this research he’s done with the Dalai Lama makes him focus on a particular lesson that’s apt to the trouble he’s been having.
“Until that moment, however, somehow it hadn’t occurred to me to apply his ideals fully to my own life, at least not right now—I always had a vague intention of trying to implement his ideas in my life at some point in the future, perhaps when I had more time.”
I completely believe this happened and this is how people work, but I also almost choked with laughter at how on point this is.
C’mon! You sought out the person you thought was the world’s expert on living a good life, arranged to ask them questions about the subject for hours, and it hadn’t occurred to you to apply the ideals to your own life? You just had a vague intention of trying to implement the ideas at some fuzzy future date?
This would be merely funny, and not a stark reminder, if I hadn’t made mistakes that feel that bad myself.
For all my disagreement and humor, this is the part of the book that started to get into more specific techniques. For instance, when you’re trying to connect with someone, start with the things you have in common. You are both human, for instance. You might both be tired, and you can be sure that you both want to be happy and don’t want to suffer. It’s good advice, and while there isn’t as much of it as specific as I’d like, what is there is simple and clearly written. No zen koans about one hand clapping here.
III: Transforming Suffering
The third part of the book is about specific techniques to take a moment of suffering and turn that pain into something else. I found it to be the best part of the book. If this review almost convinces you to read The Art Of Happiness, but you’re maybe not sold on reading an entire book, I suggest you read only part three.
As a rationalist, this was also the part of the book where I most often felt surprised at where Buddhist thought seemed to have arrived at a concept I thought of as a rationalist one. Take the following (somewhat abbreviated) paragraphs.
“Let’s say that someone makes you angry. . . In a lot of cases, it’s not just a matter of getting angry at the time you’re being hurt. You might think about the event later, and every time you think about it you become angry all over again.
Surely the person who caused this anger in you will have a lot of other positive aspects, positive qualities. If you look carefully, you will also find that the act which has made you angry has also given you certain opportunities, something which otherwise would not have been possible, even from your point of view. . .
But what about if you look for the positive angles of a person or event and can’t find any?
Here, I think, we would be dealing with a situation where you might need to make some effort. . . but this perception does not correspond with reality.”
Or in our language, your enemies are not innately evil.
There’s a charming story about being on a long, frustrating plane flight surrounded by obnoxious neighbors who at first glance are entirely awful. Yet, as Dr. Cutler focuses on a neighbor’s fingernail, he finds there isn’t anything really wrong with that fingernail. Well, how about the rest of the finger? No, taken in isolation there isn’t anything bad about the finger. What about the next finger then, or the next one?
Thus does he work through more and more of this person he had been supremely irritated at, decomposing them into smaller segments until he finds the level of resolution at which he can’t find anything wrong with them. This arrangement of a technique description, a parable about what it feels like to use, and an intended result is easy for me to follow, and this one seems to work for me except when I decompose this book looking for citations and then I’m still irritated beyond all reason.
As I am mentioning the parts where it seems like rationality and The Art of Happiness agree however, I just want to point at one more quote.
“For example, reflecting on your suffering can reduce your arrogance, your feeling of conceit. Of course, he laughed heartily, this may not be seen as a practical benefit or be a convincing reason for someone who doesn’t consider arrogance or pride to be a fault.”
Guilty as charged your honor.
IV: Overcoming Obstacles
The first obstacle is our natural inclination to continue with the habits we are accustomed to. Changing those habits is slow but steady work, but once the better habit is in place, all the strength and power of complacency is on your side. That’s why you want to bring about specific changes with focus and deliberation. None of that is surprising to me, but I can imagine someone reading this before hearing the idea from somewhere else and finding it more insightful.
Hidden in this subsection however, there’s another rationalist comparison I want to make. Towards the start of part four, there’s a fragment of poem that resonated with me.
As long as space endures
As long as sentient beings remain
May I too live
To dispel the miseries
I cannot explain without reaching for metaphor and intuition why, but it feels like one half of a pair with
Even if the stars should die in heaven
Our sins can never be undone
No single death will be forgiven
When fades at last the last lit sun.
The bulk of part four is largely focused on anger, hatred, anxiety, and self-doubt. Of these, anger is the one I have the most trouble with, and I found the advice an interesting frame. Instead of getting angry and lashing out (which, yes, I know is unhelpful) the advice is about the strength involved in simply standing firm with where you are. Don’t lunge forward, simply remain patient and restrained.
I do think it’s good advice, but it’s the kind of thing that takes slow, steady practice to get right. I find it too easy to be patient for a little longer than I used to, but not infinitely patient, and I didn’t come away with an idea of how keeping myself planted in my conviction or firm in my resolve changed things enough to get whatever is pissing me off to go the hell away and stop bothering me for one fucking minute. Still, uh, the direction of the advice seems spot on.
V: Closing Reflections on Leading a Spiritual Life
For a book about the head of a religion, there’s surprisingly little about the spiritual aspects of Buddhism. This is to the strength of the book I think. Both Dr. Cutler and the Dalai Lama seem to agree that you don’t have to be a Buddhist to use the techniques found in the book, and neither seems interested in converting the reader to Buddhism. This is the shortest part of the book, and it mostly describes how the Dalai Lama came to these conclusions. It’s fine, and someone who benefits from meditation practices more than I do might enjoy the descriptions of those.
One line I want to pick out and talk about because it caught me by surprise is about prayer.
“I think prayer is, for the most part, a simple daily reminder of your deeply held principles and convictions.”
Despite growing up religious, and even having a habit of daily prayer that persists to this day, I had not thought of prayer this way. For me prayer has always been a conversation, albeit one where my interlocutor doesn’t speak so much as listen well. Having read that line however, it’s changed how I think about these conversations. After having read the book, I’ve been trying to keep more continuity in my prayers. I don’t just talk over the day and what I want from tomorrow, but now I try to recite what I want to be and look at where I’m falling short and where I’m proud of myself for living up to what I hope to be.
Speaking of experimentation, apparently Buddhism is a fairly practical religion. When talking about other faiths, the Dalai Lama says:
“Through this kind of closer contact we can learn about the useful contributions that these religions have made to humanity and find useful aspects of the other traditions that we can learn from. We may even discover methods and techniques that we can adopt in our own practice.”
I got the impression from reading this book that Dr. Cutler wasn’t just learning from the Dalai Lama; that the Dalai Lama was learning from Dr. Cutler. It seemed that the man who held the highest religious office in Buddhism was interested to find out what the western world could tell him about happiness. If I have described more of the Buddhist side of this book, it is largely because of my own frustrations with the science that Dr. Cutler references being so maddeningly under-specified. I’ve seen more citations given out by a Sunday afternoon street parking attendant than I’ve seen in this book.
Overall, I’m glad I read this book. I think it’s a reasonable attempt at laying out a guide for people looking to live happier lives, and while I personally would have preferred more detail and documented steps with numbered lists and indented bullet points, I understand that there are a lot of circumstances that can come up and it would be an endless task to try and give precise instructions for each one.
If I was going to offer some suggestions for improvements, it would be to have a third person in the mix between psychiatrist and monk. Both seem to be capable communicators, but they might have benefited from someone who was a newcomer to both fields to ask them each questions about the underlying mechanisms, trying to lay out the model with all its gears and component building blocks neatly labeled.
Or perhaps that’s a need which I cannot satisfy, whose lack makes me unhappy, and I should learn to be content with the book I have.
Er… is this true? I mean, about the “Buddhism” and “joy” thing. Suffering, sure, Buddhism makes a big deal out of that, apparently. But are Buddhists known for being unusually joyful and happy? Is Buddhism really more joyful? This seems like an at least somewhat questionable assertion.
If I wanted any one major religion’s take on joy, I think I’d pick… Judaism, actually. Jewish holidays certainly seem like some of the most joy-focused of any religion, for example (delicious food is an excellent source of happiness).
Largest world religions by followers: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Folk Religion. I know Christianity decently, and while joy is something you’re sometimes supposed to get out of a life lived in accordance with God it isn’t the point. (There are many Christian variants, I haven’t dug into every interpretation, I think I’m generally right here.) Islam, I thought I read the Quran at one point but admit I can’t remember much of anything. For Hinduism I read the Bhagavad Gita and remember the outline and some choice quotes, I assert that happiness is part of it but mostly in a “be happy filling your pre-destined role” way. Folk Religion is a grab bag of a bunch of different things and I can’t tell why that got lumped under one category.
Sanity check; “happiness” or “happy” shows up 5 times in the Buddhism wikipedia page, 0 times on the Islam wikipedia page, 0 times on the Christianity wikipedia page, 1 time on the Judaism wikipedia page, and 2 times on the Hinduism page (one of those in a footnote.)
I am not Jewish, but the joke I’ve heard from several Jews is that Jewish holidays follow the structure “first they tried to kill us, then we won, let’s eat”? I’m not saying that doesn’t have a happy ending but step one is pretty bad. C’mon, Judaism doesn’t have a monopoly on eating delicious food for holidays!
A helpful analysis.
Of course, but step one is not exactly under one’s control, as a Jew… hardly seems fair to count that against the religion itself!
Matter of taste, I suppose…
Apparently the world’s happiest man is a Buddhist (they studied his brain). Just one data point.
Studies like this one claim that it reduces the negative and increases positive states.
. . . okay, wait, looking at your other comments below in this thread was this supposed to be a joke?
I mean, the bit about the food was mostly intended as humor.
And I wouldn’t really try to figure out how to be happy by looking at what religions say about it. Now, if I were inclined to do so, I’d look at Judaism, like I said—but that’s at least partially a reductio ad absurdum; “which religion is the most joyful” strikes me as a somewhat silly question, and “Judaism” is a somewhat silly answer. It’s… not wrong? (IMO, of course.) But, like… this whole endeavor is just the wrong way of thinking about the matter. (Which is—I’m sorry to say it—perfectly illustrated by your whole “let’s look at the Wikipedia page for each religion and see how many times it mentions ‘happy’ or ‘happiness’” thing. Come on! Obviously that is a nonsensical thing to be doing here! It isn’t even a “quick and dirty approximation” to anything; it’s just noise.)
But the first paragraph—no, that’s a serious question/comment. I really was surprised to read the claim that Buddhism is somehow unusually joyful or unusually “attentive to” joy or can be expected to have better insights about joy, etc. On the contrary, Buddhism strikes me as a religion which is deeply anti-life and pro-death (very “life goals of dead people”). I would not even consider going to such people for insights about joy, of all things. Hence my somewhat incredulous comment.
People have been thinking about the problem for thousands of years, most of the written answers we’ve got come from religion and philosophy. Maybe they’re all terrible answers but virtue of scholarship, sometimes I read a book and check.
I mean, not total nonsense but it isn’t a very detailed way to figure this out, I just couldn’t think of a better way after thinking for sixty seconds that didn’t involve doing some kind of literature review on each of them.
Checking: Have you ever read a book to learn about Buddhism before coming to the conclusion that you wouldn’t consider going to them about it? Talked to a Buddhist for a while? Read a dictionary entry? A book review of some other book?
I’m not particularly disagreeing with your conclusion at the moment, just- dude, I talked to a few Buddhists in passing, they told me a bit about what they believed, I read a book about it, I wrote a review of the book. If it bugs you that I asserted “Buddhism is unusually X” in the preamble to a book review would this go away if I added a citation from the Dalai Lama saying something to this effect, because I still have the book and I’m pretty sure there’s a line in there somewhere. I have watched you assert wilder things with less evidence though so I think this is an isolated demand for pedantry.
Don’t get me wrong—I appreciate the book review!
Yeah, of course. All of the above. (I forget if the book was about Buddhism specifically or comparative religion more generally; it was in college, which was a while ago. The rest, relatively recent. I mean, Buddhism has gotten a lot of coverage here on LW, among other things. Then there’s David Chapman’s writings on Buddhism… it’s not like there’s any shortage of sources!)
I am kind of confused by this reaction. I mean, you said a thing (“Buddhism is unusually attentive to the whole suffering and joy thing”), and as far as I could tell, this was you saying it, not you reporting a claim that was made in the book. (Am I mistaken about this?)
And I am asking: do you actually for real believe this? If so, why do you believe it? I’m not asking for citations, like I’m a reviewer of an academic paper that you submitted. It’s not a criticism that you need to address in order to placate me.
Answers I would expect might include things like:
“Ah, no, this is not my belief, this is a thing the book says.”
“Yep, I think that this is actually true, because [reasons].”
“Eh, I dunno, I guess it’s more like a vague impression, but maybe it’s wrong; I haven’t thought about it too hard… you think I’m wrong about this? Say more?”
“Actually I was being sarcastic. I don’t really think that!”
“Yes I more or less believe this but I can see why many people would take the opposite view, it’s complicated, but anyhow it’s not critical to the review.”
“Of course I believe it, why wouldn’t I? Isn’t it very obviously and uncontroversially true? Why, do you claim otherwise…? On what basis?”
Any of those would make sense as an answer to my question!
Ok, see, this sounds like “actually I was reporting a claim made in the book”, and if that’s the full explanation then, cool, that does in fact answer my question. (Obviously it could instead be that the book claims this but your line about it was still you describing your own independent belief, in which case the question stands.)
You are absolutely, 100%, welcome to question what I believe and why!
Buddhism seems more about the reduction of suffering than the cultivation of happiness and joy. I believe the result of this isn’t happiness, but rather stillness / peace of mind. This state is probably more postive than negative, but it still sounds like the inverse of manic depression, in that I expect both the highs and lows to be relatively close to zero.
I’d describe the opposite of buddhism to be the Dionysian (Nietzsche’s concept of it, at least)
If I had my druthers, I might make it a trio and add Euripedes, one of his contemporaries, or a modern classicist who had deeply studied the Bacchae and the Dionysian cults; someone who understood the dual nature of Dionysus enough to value the ideas of eudaimonia and ecstatic madness while recognizing their dangers if used improperly, as a counterpoint to the Buddhist attention to alleviating suffering over elevating joy. (O/T: Happiness aside, I imagine the Dalai Llama would have a lot to talk about with an expert on another religion whose god repeatedly dies, then returns to the world, in an eternal cycle of renewal, growth, and transformation.)
Nobody would see sad movies if sympathy and empathy were the same thing. Highly sympathetic people avoid those who suffer because they don’t want to experience that. Empathy enables moving towards suffering because compassion is a positive experience.
It sounds like you’ve got the same thing going on that the book is talking about, and I’m either labeling a different thing “compassion” in my head than you and the Dalai Lama are talking about or something else is going on.
I have to say that this is a somewhat odd approach. Now, maybe you didn’t mean it in quite this way, but for the sake of exploring the point, let’s take your suggestion very literally.
What am I doing right now? Reading a Less Wrong post, writing some comments on it.
Will this bring me happiness? Um… probably… not…? (Wouldn’t it be pretty weird if the answer were “yes”? This sort of activity could bring me various things—satisfaction, personal growth, some concrete benefit or the accomplishment of some goals—but happiness? This seems more like a wrong question than anything…)
So… should I… stop reading this post, or… what? (Should I stop reading things on the internet? Should I stop reading things… at all??) Surely not, right? I mean, I don’t only do things because they will bring me happiness! (Does anyone? Does it even make sense to attempt such a policy?)
But if “check if the thing you’re doing will bring you happiness; if not, stop doing it” is not what we’re meant to do with the answer to that question, then—what?
Maybe I’m missing something here, but… actively pursuing “happiness” is already a somewhat weird thing to be doing to begin with; trying to pursue happiness by asking whether the thing that you’re doing will bring you happiness seems like an almost wholesale confusion.
Do you want to be happy?
“No” is an answer. Maybe you want personal growth, maybe you want the accomplishment of some goal, maybe you want a ham sandwich. If you did want to be happy, and commenting on LessWrong posts did not make you happy, then I think you should consider what you’re doing for a couple minutes then go do something else which will make you happier.
Lots of people want to be happy. Uh, citation needed and I don’t have one. I think actively pursuing happiness is a pretty normal thing to do, albeit subject to all the usual mistakes that people usually make in pursuing any of their goals. I am in general a fan of people thinking for a few minutes by the clock about how to get what they want, maybe getting a little strategic about it. If being happy is not the thing you want then I suggest going and doing things that you think will get you what you want.
Right now I’m writing a reply to a LessWrong comment. I don’t particularly expect this to make me happy. Earlier today though, I was playing some Magic: The Gathering with some friends, which did make me happy. I did that that because I was talking to them a week ago and had a thought something like “oh, hanging out with friends usually makes me happy, playing Magic usually makes me happy, I should see if they want to draft sometime” and then we planned a draft and invited people over. It worked pretty well!
Allow me to present the same outline with a few text replacements.
I dunno, that’s how I’ve gotten most of my ham sandwiches. Seems a pretty good general approach.
But… that transformation doesn’t work, at all. Actively pursuing a ham sandwich makes perfect sense. (And if you want a ham sandwich, asking whether what you are doing will in fact get you a ham sandwich is likewise a sensible thing to do.) But actively pursuing happiness, specifically, doesn’t make sense. That’s my point.
I mean, it’s clearly better than the alternative (it’s not like I want to not be happy, much less want to be unhappy), but on the other hand, I don’t “want to be happy” in the same sense that I want most other things.
Wanting to be happy seems like like, say, wanting to get an Olympic gold medal. If you train for the Olympics in some sport, and compete, and win, then you will get a gold medal, and that’s cool. On the other hand, suppose that due to some geopolitical reasons or something, all the other athletes in that sport stay home that year, and you “compete” against nobody, and “win”, and get a gold medal. Did you get what you wanted? Or, how about if you blackmail all the judges with compromising photographs, and they award you a gold medal even though you performed terribly and clearly lost?
Conversely, what if you compete in the Olympics, and win, but your opponent blackmailed the judges, and you don’t get a gold medal, even though you “should”. Is that better or worse than the preceding two scenarios? Seems like… better, no?
Clearly the gold medal wasn’t actually the point… right? But if I ask you “do you want to get an Olympic gold medal”, “no” seems like the wrong answer.
Well, but what about “actively pursuing an Olympic gold medal”? That sort of makes sense, but… not really. “Winning the Olympics (in whatever sport)”, that makes sense. And one does get gold medals for that. But the medal itself is not exactly the point.
I certainly won’t demand a citation for this, but I think that probably a lot more people mistakenly think that they “want to be happy” than actually want to be happy.
Well… it’s hard to know how to take this. Like, what if I said “I think that buying lottery tickets is a pretty normal thing to do, albeit subject to all the usual mistakes that people usually make in figuring out what is likely to benefit them”? There’s a sense in which it’s true, but on the other hand, the second clause negates the first one: buying lottery tickets is one of the “usual mistakes that people usually make” in such matters!
Totally, yes, no argument there.
The ham sandwich replacement works pretty well in my head, I don’t understand the Olympic medal analogy, and the lottery tickets thing is confusing to me. I agree people can be mistaken about what they want (though I don’t default to assuming that) and I’m confused what you think a lot of people actually want and mistake for wanting to be happy? We seem to have some kind of communication problem or alternately pretty different experiences of happiness, and I’m not sure what’s going on here. I’m glad we’re on the same page about thinking by the clock and being strategic at least.
I’m going to try zooming way way out, and dropping any particular technique (mine or from the book.) Can you tell me where in these sequence you start to disagree, or alternately if you agree with all of the below?
Happiness is some kind of state humans can be in, and they can notice when they’re happy or unhappy if they check. (I’m not trying to argue definitions of emotion vs sensation, I’m not trying to split too many hairs between joy vs happiness.)
Happiness is a state humans can prefer to be in. I have no idea what the actual numbers are here and I don’t think it matters for this sequence, if I go up to one human and ask “hey do you want to be happy?” and they think for a minute before honestly and accurately saying “yes” then I think the rest of this sequence works for that one person. (I do think this describes a lot of people though.)
Some kind of repeatable, particular circumstances predictably make a human happier and others unhappier. Put me on a sunny beach with a new book and a lemonade, I’ll be more happy. Hang me upside down by my ankles and dump fire ants down my shorts, I’ll be less happy. (It’s fine if different circumstances make different humans react differently, for instance if I like beaches and Anakin hates sand. It’s also fine if this isn’t 100% certain like if some days I’m not in the mood for a book as long as it’s enough of a pattern to work with.)
People can, through introspection and effort, arrange the world such that they wind up in the happy circumstances more often. This evening I could put lemonade and a book in my backpack and go to the beach, or I could lie facedown on my basement floor, or I could bring some rope and find an anthill. (List not exhaustive.)
Things I am not saying:
People shouldn’t aim for goals other than being happy.
People should optimize for being happy all of the time.
What makes me happy will make you happy or vice versa.
People are always right about what will make them happy.
Each individual step towards being happy will also make someone happy.
Huh. Yeah, this amount of communication failure surprises me. I did expect that you’d disagree with at least some of that, but not that it wouldn’t get across at all…
I disagree with #1, partially disagree with #2 (the first sentence is ok-ish but the given test is basically meaningless and so can’t be the basis for any of this reasoning), basically agree with #3, and agree with what #4 says but almost certainly not with what you mean by it. (I also—obviously—disagree with the notion that these things form some kind of meaningful sequence of specificity or claim strength etc.)
Sure, I didn’t think that you were saying any of those things, so this all makes sense.
Okay, let me try starting from before that point then.
There’s a bunch of things commonly referred to as emotions. Happiness is one. Anger is another. Sadness is a third. This list is not exhaustive but there’s lots of lists of emotions, here’s one.
Have you ever felt any of these, such that you could say “gosh, I’m really angry right now” as a fact about the world?
- wait. You don’t think happiness is a thing that people can notice about themselves, but you do think there’s some kind of circumstance that makes a particular person happy? Like, I could go to the beach, and I would be happy, but I couldn’t notice that fact? I put them in that order because I assumed if you were going to disagree with one of them you’d also disagree with all the ones after, so I’m pretty surprised here.
I do not agree with this.
(But if you consider happiness to be an emotion, then it makes even less sense to optimize for it!)
I think many of the things on that list are not emotions. (I mean, surely “creative” is not an emotion? “Respected”? “Intimate”? “Exposed”? “Sceptical”? “Judgmental”??)
Of course.
You wrote (#1):
I think that thinking of happiness as a “state” is basically a mistake even if there’s some technical sense in which it’s true. I also do not think that people are very good at noticing whether they’re happy or unhappy. I wouldn’t go so far as to say “can’t” but it’s not like checking whether you’re angry (which usually has relatively standard and straightforwardly checkable physiological correlates). I expect that the average person asking “am I happy right now” is more likely than not to get a wrong or nonsensical answer.
You also wrote (#2):
As above, I don’t think that happiness is a “state” in a useful sense of the word, but I do think that humans can (and most, probably, do) prefer to be happy rather than not being happy.
And (#3):
Yep, generally true. One can quibble with this (e.g. the caveats that you give in parentheses), but as a basic pattern it is true.
But:
Ah, but notice the difference: “make a person happier” vs. “make a person happy”. The latter makes sense if happiness is just an emotional state that one can be in. But if that’s not right—if happiness is more like a characteristic of a person’s experience over time, for example—then the latter form doesn’t make much sense anymore. But the former makes sense either way.
Maybe it feels bad for a short while… and for the rest of the day you are happy that you are not her?
While the selfish people spend their days annoyed that all their wishes are not immediately coming true.
Possible but from reading the book I think that interpretation is unlikely to be correct. The authors seemed to think empathy itself brought some joy even in these cases.
This book mystifies happiness, and tries to solve it from within the aspects of human nature which gatekeeps your happiness in order to prevent you from wireheading yourself. That you’re actually under these constraints is merely what your mind wants you to think.
The only thing which prevents you from being happy all the time, is actually that you do not give yourself permission to be happy all the time, which is because you don’t feel like it’s justified. That emotions have to be justified, e.g. that you have to work for happiness as a reward, that you’re only allowed to be happy when you do well or when things are good, is a defensive mechanism of the mind. You can do away with these mechanisms if you want, as long as you can convince your mind that the negative emotion is harming you, or that more positive emotion would aid your chances of survival (you likely enjoy the higher needs like self-expression, but the brain tends to focus on lower needs like security)
This quote is a lot like “You’re not your experiences”, “This too shall pass”, “You’re not the ego”, “Nobody can make you feel bad without your permission”, and this is because they’re all insights into the self, which allows one to remove some of the illusions that the mind places itself under in order to create that punishment/reward loop in which most people live. I think these illusions are the mind making reinforcement learning with the environment possible. Of course, society has already subverted this system, for all the rewards are unhealthy superstimuli like porn, drugs, fats and sugars, ASMR, gambling, reaction videos and so on, so we might as well design a better system before we teach ourselves that inaction is the only good strategy).
The reason that happiness is a skill is because the mind fights back, and because there’s many things to manipulate and many mechanisms to understand. When you try to lucid dream and the dream characters notice what you’re doing, they usually attack you because your mind wants to prevent what you’re doing. These are likely evolved defense mechanisms against wireheading behaviour (perhaps lucid dreaming prevents deep sleep, meaning that people who did it too much didn’t pass on their genes). And when the mind fights back, it’s likely because you know that you’re doing something that you shouldn’t, which means that your mind knows that you’re doing something that you shouldn’t. In other words, it is mostly subjective, and if you change your beliefs about what you’re doing, your mind will change its response to what you’re doing as well.
You don’t need wisdom, you don’t need to understand anything about life, you just need to understand your own brain, how to make agreements with yourself, and how your belief structure relates to your subjective experience of the world.
Compassion does not lead to happiness unless perhaps you’re rewarding yourself for being a compassionate person, but your brain really likes the feeling of fitting into a group, and social relationships are a great source of meaning. It’s seems that the brain uses similar mechanisms to simulate other people as it does to understand itself, meaning that people who experience others at a surface level also tends to experience themselves at a surface level (and vice versa). I can’t explain it nearly as well as this article does, so I highly recommend at least skimming it.
This is basically all you need to know. If you want stronger, broader, more positive valence, you need to become more sensitive, meaning that you need to feel yourself, feel your body, feel other people, feel alive, feel immersed in different contexts, and to have beliefs (conscious or unconscious) which makes this valence more positive than negative (so that your mind doesn’t choose numbness as a defense mechanism against it, harming your efforts to become sensitive).
Another thing I recommend is decreasing the abstract distance of the relation of negative experiences. If you feel bad when you eat meat because you know that farming animals suffer, and because you know that farming animals is necessary in order to produce the meat that you’re eating, and because you dislike the idea of other beings suffering, we could call this a distance of 3-4 steps. The more steps you allow negative things to spread, the less you will enjoy reality, as your mind will fight against them by infusing them with negative valence. The less distance, the more you can enjoy things. The same is true across time—live in the moment and you will likely experience that nothing is wrong, but simulate 2 months of the past and 2 months of possible future consequences of each choice you make, and you will find that most actions will feel bad: “I’m wasting time”, “If I do this good thing, they will just expect more good things of me in the future”, “My current behaviour is not consistent with the other behaviour I’ve shown these exact people, I need to conform to their model of me”, etc.
All of these pain-in-the-ass restrictions aren’t as real as they look. If you feel bad, it’s ultimately because you choose to feel bad, even if your brain coerced you into making that choice. If you want to feel good, just do so.
Edit: I used to be interested in lucid dreaming, so I’d read about it on online forums. Breaking the 4th wall seemed to end badly for the vast majority of people, but there’s some level of “dream characters react how you expect them to react” involved as well. Everything else is just what I learn naturally, or my own original research. I’d also love to read scientific papers about these things if any exist.