Bob

My life is a near constant state of mild annoyance, discomfort, foiled expectations, and boredom, and yet I’ve never been happier. I’ve transitioned to stay-at-home dad to five kids aged 2-8 and, on a moment to moment basis, it’s rarely fun. It’s almost never the case that all five are in a good mood, that nobody is asking me for something, nobody is disappointed or outright upset. The plans I make for the day rarely work out, and almost never work out for everyone. I make blatant mistakes all the time - I forgot the diapers, I left the crocs somewhere, the kids were too hungry and started fighting at the science museum, the water was too cold, etc etc. And I rarely get a chance to have an extended conversation with an adult, to read/listen to a good book, or to write out my thoughts on X (posting has fallen off dramatically this summer.) But, I’ve never been “happier.” This is easily the greatest period of my life, and I’m not sugarcoating it just to pretend that I’m a devoted husband/father. I also reject the “no pain, no gain” ethos that says that hard things are inherently satisfying, or that satisfaction can only come from struggle. (I absolutely cannot stand the common practice of rationalizing an unpleasant existence instead of improving it.) How can this be, that I’m both happy and unhappy at the same time? It’s because the word happy has several uses, and this has caused a lot of confusion. A simple clarifying distinction is between happiness as feeling good, and happiness as satisfaction. Writing this strikes me as so obvious that I’m tempted not to post it, but the confusion runs quite deep. I started following the happiness research in 2006 when I read Jonathan Haidt’s Happiness Hypothesis and then Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness and Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow and Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice, and their arguments were based on these experiments where they’d measure happiness with surveys, with asking people how happy they were in various circumstances. They called this science because they did all this scientific stuff around these surveys and published it as the psychology of positive emotions, of happiness. I lapped it up because it made so much sense. Before these guys, psychologists only studied pathology, depression, insanity, addiction, stuff like that. What about happiness? These guys did acknowledge, almost in passing, that what someone says about their state of mind (a survey response) is not actually their state of mind, but they said that if they simply collect enough responses and average them together, then the result would actually reflect their state, at least to some statistical probability. And after all, is there a better way to get at someone’s state of mind other than just asking them? I remember sitting on the floor and watching them sweep this ugly little fact under the rug and calling it good myself. Heck, this stuff was published psychology, and to my 2006 self, that was good enough for me, especially when the stuff they wrote in their books and said in their TESTalks made so much damned sense. But I never forgot that rug sweeping definitely happened. Fast forward to 2018 and it all crashed down with a paragraph in my favorite book, The Beginning of Infinity. Throughout the book, @DavidDeutschOxf is at pains (quite happily, I bet) to make the case that we don’t understand stuff that we can’t explain, and if we can’t explain it, then we can't make meaningful predictions. We certainly can make predictions, they're just not meaningful. Take astrologers, they make lots of predictions, but since astrology lacks an explanation of HOW star positions affect human affairs, astrology can only succeed by getting its patrons to ignore this lack of understanding, usually by misdirecting their attention on mumbo jumbo like mystical vagaries and credulous testimonials. In other words, charlatans use various methods to sweep their lack of an explanation under the rug, and science (and knowledge creation in general) is about pulling things OUT from under the rug! (Deutsch references conjuring tricks multiple times throughout the book.) In Chp 12 A Physicist’s History of Bad Philosophy he addresses happiness research head on. He notes that we don’t have an explanatory theory of what happiness is, so, like astrology, predictions about happiness are bullshit. Instead, happiness research is full of supposedly happy behaviors, like checking boxes on surveys that say “I am happy." But we don't have an explanatory connection between those checkmarks, those behaviors, and the actual state of someone's mind, just like astrologers don't have an explanatory connection between the location of stars and their patron's romantic prospects. Deutsch notes that, not only do we have no way of measuring happiness (measuring happiness without understanding it is like measuring temperature without a theory of thermodynamics), we know that "some people believe that behaving in 'happy' ways is a remedy for unhappiness, so, for those people, such behaviors might be a proxy for unhappiness." I never heard the happiness researchers account for that inconvenient little tidbit. The point I've been driving at so far is that we shouldn't put much stock in conventional ideas about happiness, including that it's a goal we should even strive for, because we don't understand it. What is the alternative? I think the alternative is rearranging the order. Instead of seeking the feeling or state of being, we should seek something meaningful, "satisfying," important, and let the feeling state derive from that. As @Supreme_Owl_FTW says, we need to avoid putting the cart (feeling) before the horse (meaning). For a longer treatment on this, I enjoyed Raymond Angelo Belliotti's Happiness is Overrated. In it he points out what I am currently experiencing, having a good life raising five kids with a loving wife even though my day-to-day is rarely happy. (It has its moments, don't get me wrong, but they are... infrequent.) Wrapping up with some basic points: I think it's a bad idea to constantly assess how we're feeling. I think it's a bad idea to ignore feeling bad. Feeling bad is always a signal that something can be improved. Problems are solvable. Also a bad idea to ignore feeling good, feeling good is great and amplifying the causes of good feels is great, all things considered of course. All things considered means amplifying feeling good (and alleviating feeling bad) often comes at a cost, and the costs may not be worth it. Ignoring the costs of optimizing how you feel is a good way to feel bad. Often I don't have the energy to solve a problem and I just endure it. It's easier to endure discomfort when I'm not pressuring myself to optimize my life. I often reevaluate my overall goals, how things are going with the kids, how they are doing/growing, how me and my wife are doing etc. This helps to avoid complacency and bullshitting myself, such as telling myself that, since I'm doing something wholesome like taking care of the kids, everything is fine. What is meaningful and important is very, very specific to each person. Beware off-the-shelf sources of meaning as they are almost always too blunt to fit one's specific life. And worse, they are loaded with social approval and other anti-rational reasons to adopt them. Finding meaning requires constructing meaning. Something that matters to you has to be deeply understood by you. It has to be deeply interesting. And the way to arrive there very likely involved allowing your creativity to engage with it at some length and with few restrictions.