Happiness Is a Chore

Something I think is true but rarely hear stated (except, oddly, by Plato):

The kind of happiness you describe in your post:

Let's say you had been doing some really good work, and took a day off to go on a hike. At some point on the mountain path your mind clears, and you feel calm, content and energetic. There's a warm sensation spreading inside your chest as you look around and find out that you can take in extremely fine details of the landscape, and that its colors seem more vivid than ever. You feel proud of the life you'll come back to, and overall like you are in the right place in the world doing the right things. That's happiness.

That is a mild feeling.

It is a positive feeling -- it is pure and untainted and feels deeply good -- but it is not a loud or intense feeling.

It is not as intensely pleasurable as pain is painful.

It is not as intensely euphoric as a lot of other experiences that are less profound, like recreational drugs or falling in love.

It's no wonder that people aren't willing to put in work to be happy. Happiness is a mild feeling. It isn't the kind of thing you naturally crave really hard. It is a positive feeling -- this isn't some bait-and-switch where an authority tells you "the true happiness consists of obeying my strictures". Pretty much anybody will honestly point at happiness and say "yep, that feels good." Living virtuously really does feel good. The problem is that it feels subtly good.

A character in Eve Tushnet's novel about addiction, Amends, says:

Anyway you do almost get a high from it, from being good to people, making amends, being of service. I mean it's kind of a shitty high, like Robotripping without the headache if you've done that -- no? okay -- but you get a little warm feeling and it takes you out of yourself for a while. Kind of neat.

I think that might be literally true. Living well is a kind of high, but it's a shitty high, measured by intensity of euphoria. It's a hell of a lot more sustainable over time than most other "highs", and less damaging, and has a subtler texture, and it leaves actual tangible progress in its wake -- but as moods go, happiness is really easy to overlook and underrate. Especially if you're used to pain, you expect happiness to be as loud as pain is but in the opposite direction -- and that's just not what it is.

Why does the happiness research point to kind of boring and benign things as making people happy? Practicing gratitude, going to church, tidying up? Wouldn't you expect something a little more sybaritic? But then again, the Epicureans were big on simple living too, instrumentally, as a way to be as happy as possible. I think this might be because happiness is actually kind of low-key by its nature.

Plato compares it to a pleasant scent wafting through the air. The smell of a rose is really beautiful -- but it's delicate. You could miss it. It's not like stuffing yourself with AS MUCH FOOD AS POSSIBLE, which is a very intense feeling but can also give you a bellyache. The rose will definitely not give you a bellyache; it's just beautiful. Subtly, delicately beautiful. Which is why nobody has ever said "god, I would kill for a rose right now."

TL;DR Extracted quotes of what I see as the key points:

[The] human activity [of] "pursuing happiness" [...] seems to be in the same category as other common activities such as "acquiring education", "helping people", "talking to friends" (or should I say "talking" to "friends") and so on. Which is to say, people do them in a way which is outwardly convincing enough to allow everyone to keep up the social pretenses. This is way different from what you'd see people do if they actually cared. The simple matter of fact is that the human brain is a kludge, [...]. Almost anything they claim to be doing isn't for real. This is true even when they themselves know about this. The best you can do is gradually nudge yourself in the right direction, gaining new footholds in consistency and consequentialism painstakingly and precariously.

[...] I have felt levels of happiness which are far above the upper limit of your mental scale. I know exactly how to be happy. And yet I find myself not consistently applying my own methods. Do you realize how impossibly mind-twisting this situation is? What happens in reality is that I enjoy and see great value in happiness when it happens, but when it doesn't I only work on it grudgingly. It's like with exercise, which is great but I'm rarely enthusiastic about starting it. The problem is not that I don't value happiness enough. The problem is rather that there is no gut-level motivational gradient to get actual happiness. There are gradients for all sorts of things which are crappy, fake substitutes. Once you know the taste of the real thing, they aren't fun at all. But you still end up optimizing for them, because that's what your brain does.

Okay, so the obvious question here is, is this a hypothetical thought experiment, or do you claim to actually have figured out such a method?

If it's the former, I cautiously believe that this is largely accurate. If it's the latter, I would like to see a description of it.

That particular scenario sounds more like "contentment" than "happiness"; I find that I tend to chase excitement more than contentment, and my strongest natural highs have come from entering a tense situation, going into a flow state, performing at the highest level I can, and succeeding. For example, one time when I was in high school, I performed a piano solo at a school concert and totally nailed it. I've also gotten this feeling from doing well in large Magic: the Gathering tournaments.

Happiness, to me, is a lot more like what Leonardo DiCaprio's character is doing in this clip: https://youtu.be/ItjXTieWKyI

Could you paint a more detailed picture of what you mean by happiness? There is a wide range of things that can be called happiness, and I assume you only mean some of them. In particular, I don't think you mean the happiness you feel when you get a reward, because that's what we are actually optimized for achieving.

The word proud points to an emotion that's valued by people who are in misery but it's not considered valuable in many spiritual traditions. Even in the more practically minded NLP community proudness is often not considered to be a desireable emotion.

From my vantage point I wouldn't expect you to reach for that emotional state even if your goal would be what I understand to be happiness.

While it's not really the point being made, is happiness all we ever want? Aren't there feelings that are sometimes more "correct"? (In terms of optimizing for a vaguely defined notion of "life satisfaction" — maybe something like aggregated happiness.)

For instance, I can't imagine a life without some sorrow, some melancholia or without some crisis or another that pushes me to question myself to a level that I would otherwise not have.

Heraclitus: "Always having what we want may not be the best good fortune. Health seems sweetest after sickness, food in hunger, goodness in the wake of evil, and at the end of daylong labor sleep."

Maybe we need some "texture" to our life, some trials to make the moment of triumphant happiness all the more meaningful?

By the way, I don't think the correct answer is to just get dragged along. In fact, it might be possible to understand and exploit precisely the balance between hardship and fortune. I'm just saying that I don't need my subconscious to think that an all-time happiness high is not something I long for.

I agree to the fact we need a definition to what is "happiness" in the context of your article.

Also, I would be curious about knowing what this techniques relies on. If your claim is to have grasped some sort of tool/equation that could possibly repeat itself an indefinite amount of time, to achieve the same response over and over, I would like to hear more about its functionning.

Knowing about brain plasticity and the fact you can rewire your responses to given stimuli, or even the fact that your response system will adapt according to the number of occurences of a given stimuli, I would like to see what said formula is about.

Almost all discussion is liable to break down unless we define happiness.

However, on a gut-level, I think I know what is meant. I would ask this: if this is not a thought experiment, have you made a habit of experiencing this happiness? Ie. have you trained yourself to expect the happiness? If not, it might "simply" be your ingrained habits reasserting themselves, and the happiness/unhappiness difference not being great enough to jolt you back to happiness.

I think there can be several possible reasons for why people do not do the thing that they know will make them happy, and here the definition of happiness really does become crucial.

I have felt levels of happiness which are far above the upper limit of your mental scale. I know exactly how to be happy. And yet I find myself not consistently applying my own methods. Do you realize how impossibly mind-twisting this situation is? What happens in reality is that I enjoy and see great value in happiness when it happens, but when it doesn't I only work on it grudgingly. It's like with exercise, which is great but I'm rarely enthusiastic about starting it. The problem is not that I don't value happiness enough. The problem is rather that there is no gut-level motivational gradient to get actual happiness. There are gradients for all sorts of things which are crappy, fake substitutes. Once you know the taste of the real thing, they aren't fun at all. But you still end up optimizing for them, because that's what your brain does.

It sounds like you're describing akrasia. Do you think your meditation-based methods are insufficient to overcome akrasia, or you just haven't applied them to this end yet?