Look man, your most treasured values are just… not actually that universal or convergent. I’m not saying that you should downgrade the importance of love to you. I am saying that an awful lot of people seem really desperate to find some story for why their most precious values are the True Convergent Goodness or some such. And love sure is an especially precious value generator for an awful lot of people, so people really want to find some reason why even a person who felt no companionate love would at least want to feel it. Empirically, that is just not what happens.
If I had a button which could magically turn my oxytocin receptors to the usual kind, rather than their current probably-dysfunctional state, I would view that button in basically the same way I view a syringe of heroin. It might be interesting as an experiment, just to see what it’s like. But it sure seems pretty common for heroin to give people a big new source of value to chase, and then their old values get thrown under the bus. And likewise, it sure seems pretty common for oxytocin to give people a great big value to chase (i.e. companionate love), and for their other values to get thrown under the bus.
Relationships are a place where this is relatively easy to see. After all, my path to figuring this all out routed through asking “Why do all these people around me seem happy in relationships which seem pretty darn bad to me? Is there some big source of value which I haven’t seen for some reason?”. I looked around, and saw guys I knew stressed out about earning enough to support their girlfriends who had near-zero income, and also dealing with regular and very unpleasant bouts of PMS plus ongoing background neuroticism the rest of the time, yet apparently these guys were happy with their relationships. I myself had been in a relationship which sure seemed a lot better than most of those, and it still was overall bad. That feeling of deep loving connection, of oxytocin, is apparently good enough to counterbalance all those downsides. And to be clear, I am quite comfortable recognizing that other people have different values than I do, and I’m glad on some level that those other people are pursuing their values successfully. But for myself, I would not hit a button to feel positive about terrible-by-my-current-values relationships, any more than I would shoot heroin to feel positive about other terrible-by-my-current-values situations.
So that’s relationships. But the costs of oxytocin which I consider most important and cruxiest are more speculative than relationships.
Here’s a mental model. Oxytocin has two important things going on, which together make it especially dangerous from my perspective:
Its contribution to one’s values is especially strong—typically the strongest single component, though people do vary a lot.
Deep loving companionship is relatively easy to achieve for a majority of humans.[1]
Put those together, and oxytocin provides a sort of… outlet. It’s a thing that’s sitting on the shelf, easy to reach for, and will make you happy. It’s a much easier way to be happy than, say, achieving some big vision, or growing stronger in some way, or bringing your fantasies into reality. Again, the comparison to heroin is apt: why chase more difficult values, when there are easier and bigger-feeling values sitting right there within reach?
The upshot is that, it seems to me, oxytocin is pretty antithetic to ambition. And not just ambition “at the grand scale”; also smaller-scale ambitions, relevant to the whole range of non-oxytocin-driven values.
And to be clear, I am not saying that those of you with normal oxytocin signalling should turn it off. First, that will just leave you with depression; never having had the thing is importantly different. Second, I do generally like to see people pursuing their own values. I like it relatively better when those values are relatively more aligned with mine, but I still put some weight on people doing their own thing even when I otherwise don’t like it. And third, I am not the sort of person who would try to convince you to pursue values which are not your own (including by self-modifying into someone whose values are not in line with your current values). I might fight you, if your values are sufficiently opposed to mine, but I’m not going to try to convince you that I’m doing you a favor by fighting you. I’m certainly an asshole sometimes, but I at least strive to be an honest asshole.
Yes, I know there is a loneliness epidemic, and I do have some sympathy for those suffering from it. My point is that companionship is not hard for most people to achieve relative to, say, building a successful medium-sized company or advancing the state of knowledge in some research field or winning a local election or whatever medium-sized ambitions one might have.
“But You’d Like To Feel Companionate Love, Right? … Right?”
One of the responses which one will predictably receive when posting something titled “How I Learned That I Don’t Feel Companionate Love” is “… but you’d choose to feel it if you could, right?”.
Look man, your most treasured values are just… not actually that universal or convergent. I’m not saying that you should downgrade the importance of love to you. I am saying that an awful lot of people seem really desperate to find some story for why their most precious values are the True Convergent Goodness or some such. And love sure is an especially precious value generator for an awful lot of people, so people really want to find some reason why even a person who felt no companionate love would at least want to feel it. Empirically, that is just not what happens.
If I had a button which could magically turn my oxytocin receptors to the usual kind, rather than their current probably-dysfunctional state, I would view that button in basically the same way I view a syringe of heroin. It might be interesting as an experiment, just to see what it’s like. But it sure seems pretty common for heroin to give people a big new source of value to chase, and then their old values get thrown under the bus. And likewise, it sure seems pretty common for oxytocin to give people a great big value to chase (i.e. companionate love), and for their other values to get thrown under the bus.
Relationships are a place where this is relatively easy to see. After all, my path to figuring this all out routed through asking “Why do all these people around me seem happy in relationships which seem pretty darn bad to me? Is there some big source of value which I haven’t seen for some reason?”. I looked around, and saw guys I knew stressed out about earning enough to support their girlfriends who had near-zero income, and also dealing with regular and very unpleasant bouts of PMS plus ongoing background neuroticism the rest of the time, yet apparently these guys were happy with their relationships. I myself had been in a relationship which sure seemed a lot better than most of those, and it still was overall bad. That feeling of deep loving connection, of oxytocin, is apparently good enough to counterbalance all those downsides. And to be clear, I am quite comfortable recognizing that other people have different values than I do, and I’m glad on some level that those other people are pursuing their values successfully. But for myself, I would not hit a button to feel positive about terrible-by-my-current-values relationships, any more than I would shoot heroin to feel positive about other terrible-by-my-current-values situations.
So that’s relationships. But the costs of oxytocin which I consider most important and cruxiest are more speculative than relationships.
Here’s a mental model. Oxytocin has two important things going on, which together make it especially dangerous from my perspective:
Its contribution to one’s values is especially strong—typically the strongest single component, though people do vary a lot.
Deep loving companionship is relatively easy to achieve for a majority of humans.[1]
Put those together, and oxytocin provides a sort of… outlet. It’s a thing that’s sitting on the shelf, easy to reach for, and will make you happy. It’s a much easier way to be happy than, say, achieving some big vision, or growing stronger in some way, or bringing your fantasies into reality. Again, the comparison to heroin is apt: why chase more difficult values, when there are easier and bigger-feeling values sitting right there within reach?
The upshot is that, it seems to me, oxytocin is pretty antithetic to ambition. And not just ambition “at the grand scale”; also smaller-scale ambitions, relevant to the whole range of non-oxytocin-driven values.
And to be clear, I am not saying that those of you with normal oxytocin signalling should turn it off. First, that will just leave you with depression; never having had the thing is importantly different. Second, I do generally like to see people pursuing their own values. I like it relatively better when those values are relatively more aligned with mine, but I still put some weight on people doing their own thing even when I otherwise don’t like it. And third, I am not the sort of person who would try to convince you to pursue values which are not your own (including by self-modifying into someone whose values are not in line with your current values). I might fight you, if your values are sufficiently opposed to mine, but I’m not going to try to convince you that I’m doing you a favor by fighting you. I’m certainly an asshole sometimes, but I at least strive to be an honest asshole.
Yes, I know there is a loneliness epidemic, and I do have some sympathy for those suffering from it. My point is that companionship is not hard for most people to achieve relative to, say, building a successful medium-sized company or advancing the state of knowledge in some research field or winning a local election or whatever medium-sized ambitions one might have.