Philosophy The Right to Be Happy 10 September 2023 I spent the whole last week contemplating why, despite the qualitative improvement in my quality of life, I still can't seem to derive enough satisfaction from it. Indeed, if I compare my current life with how it was a year ago, everything has radically changed for the better: I now live in a safe country (not Russia) and work in a job I like, I have found the love of my life, I've moved my mother to Sakartvelo and no longer worry about her safety, and have moved to a city that I wholeheartedly adore. So why can't I still find satisfaction in the life I have now? In psychology, there's a term called "negativity bias" - it's a feature of our brain's functioning that causes us to focus more on negative information than positive. From an evolutionary standpoint, this is entirely justified: our ancestors lived in conditions where resource scarcity and predators were daily realities, and quick, effective responses to negative stimuli could greatly increase chances of survival. The survival itself was the cost of failure every now and then, so only those with negativity bias used to survive: for example, those who heard a noise in the bushes and assumed it was a predator rather than just the wind. Nowadays, of course, it's unlikely that a predator will suddenly pounce on us from a bush, but this mechanism continues to operate as if we lived thousands of years ago. Here's an example: imagine you have achieved all the goals we set in your life. So, you've got your own home, your own car, a family, a job you love, and peace around you. But then, let's say, you develop a toothache, and now neither your own home, nor your car, nor your beloved job can fully compensate for the negative emotions you are overwhelmed with because of this ailment. In summary, we have built a civilization, but the firmware in our brains remains rather archaic. Moving on. There's also something called "hedonic adaptation": this is when we quickly get used to the good things. Roughly speaking, if you repeatedly perform a pleasant action, the intensity of the positive emotions derived from it is going to exponentially decrease over time. For example, upon entering a relationship, many feel like they are on cloud nine, but after living together for a while they fall into melancholy and sadness, often breaking the relationship because they feel that "the love has gone" and "everything has become monotonous." This, by the way, is one reason why I prefer Long-Distance Relationships - yes, people in such relationships see each other less often, but the experience gained from less frequent encounters is almost always more vivid than if these meetings happened on a regular basis. Hedonic adaptation is a good explanation for why people so often strive for "bigger and better," but rarely experience long-term happiness from their achievements. Again, from an evolutionary standpoint, the existence of hedonic adaptation makes sense: for example, in the distant past, people discovered how to make fire. This is much more pleasant than sitting and freezing at night without it. But eventually, they grew accustomed to the warmth from the bonfire - and it wasn't a big leap from there to skyscrapers with central heating. Essentially, many of the benefits of civilisation that we enjoy today are partly due to hedonic adaptation and a constant nagging feeling that "everything is stale," "there's not enough," and "to be happy, I want to have more than I have now." And because of negativity bias, we adapt far worse to bad things than to good things. Sic! Now, Monsieur Dopamine enters our (already rather sad) story. The good news is that it has absolutely nothing to do with happiness, although it is often erroneously referred to as the "happiness hormone." It is thanks to this hormone that any achievement turns into yet another disappointment, because - surprise! - dopamine is responsible not for happiness, but for motivation. In rough terms, dopamine is the hormone of anticipated happiness. You need it to keep going until you reach your goal, even if you don't yet see the results. An example: you save money from your salary for several months to buy a new iPhone and eagerly await the purchase, yet just a few days after buying it, you realise it's not that big of a deal. All because dopamine level starts to decrease. It's important to remember that we are the descendants of people who were most dissatisfied with their lives. Because if, in the ancient times, a person preferred to take a short nap in the shade instead of constantly striving to find food, they risked becoming prey themselves. The moment following the achievement of a goal is always less pleasant than the moment before achieving it. That's because when you're chasing a mammoth, you feel exhilarated and excited, but once the mammoth is killed, you realise you still have to butcher and cook it, and then eat it, and then hunt for a new mammoth... It's all a long chain of problems! You had a purpose just a moment ago, and now it's gone - taken away. Killed along with the mammoth. The constant pursuit for a better life, coupled with hedonic adaptation, makes you feel like happiness is just around the corner; you just have to wait a little longer or speed up. But days, months, and years pass, and there's no happiness - only dissatisfaction with life and constant self-deceit: "happiness will come, but only later." As a result, there is no happiness in the past, present, or future - nowhere. When we treat the present moment as the preparation for a future in which happiness will definitely come, we deceive ourselves: in this case, we risk ending up in a future that will inevitably turn into the present, and we are not accustomed to waiting for happiness in the present - and thus, a wonderful future turns into a dreary present. The conclusion is straightforward: if we're not living in the present moment, there's no point in planning for the future. Because when that future becomes the present, when "that long-awaited event" occurs, we'll rob ourselves of the chance to feel happy by being preoccupied with building up expectations for a new happy future. There's no happiness in the future, and it's no use to search for it there. In fact, it's pointless to search for happiness at all: happiness should not be an end in itself. In most cases, we experience anxiety and restlessness precisely because we can't live in the present moment. For some strange reason, it seems inadequate to us. This makes sense: no matter how good the present life is, our brain has the remarkable ability to envision an even more wonderful future and make us suffer from the mismatch between reality and expectations. We're constantly chasing happiness and end up unhappy in the present. Therefore, to become happy, we need to stop chasing an unattainable future and stay in the present, embracing it with all its pros and cons. We need to stop treating the present as something inadequate. We must see it as the only kind of reality accessible to us. We must understand that neither the past nor the future exist - they are merely constructs of our brain - and only the present moment truly exists. A simple formula: if we think we will be happy in the future, we automatically become unhappy in the present. And by denying ourselves happiness now, we deny ourselves happiness forever. Paradoxically, the only way to become happy is to stop striving for happiness; to give up on happiness as an end goal. Equally important, happiness shouldn't be dependent on another person or any material thing. True happiness is always unconditional and doesn't require the presence of anything or anyone. Here, I'll make a clarification about what I personally understand by happiness. Since I adhere to Stoic philosophy, the term that comes closest to describing happiness for me is "ataraxia." Ataraxia is a state of mental tranquility, equanimity, serenity, and complete absence of fear. Life is a game, and for some odd reason, its first rule is to consider it not a game but serious business. A greater mistake is to believe that life is a path or even an obstacle course. This concept has a significant flaw: every path must lead somewhere. A path is akin to a goal. But life can't have an ultimate goal; otherwise, at some point, we'd reach that goal and be deprived of the purpose of life. This is what makes life beautiful. We've always misunderstood life, thinking it's a path, but actually, it's a musical composition. Life has been a musical piece since the very first day of our existence, something aimless, the value of which is evenly distributed among all its parts, just as it is in music. From the first day of our lives, nothing has been required of us except to enjoy the present moment, to sing and dance while the record called "life" plays. Our aversion to the present moment and attempts to live in the future (which is impossible) are due to our outdated mental firmware. You can download a new version of the firmware either by reading this text, or, if that doesn't work, with the help of a therapist: essentially, that's what they do - update obsolete worldviews as perceived by our ancient brain, and replace them with more accurate and modern ones. Copyright (c) 2023 contact@renecoignard.com Powered by Weblog v1.17.7