Why isn't happiness a choice?
Can anyone elaborate as to why isn't happiness a choice?
I mean we all want it, and even it seems some need it; but, very recently I view it as a choice between competing interests. At the moment I have no competing interests or wants and kinda feel happy.
What would you do?
I mean we all want it, and even it seems some need it; but, very recently I view it as a choice between competing interests. At the moment I have no competing interests or wants and kinda feel happy.
What would you do?
Comments (45)
I think it might be a choice.
What is happiness anyway, is it real or just some chemical reaction?
Quoting Wallows
That’s a bit like a meditative state, isn’t it?
Chemical reactions are real.
As to whether or not and why not happiness may or may not be a choice, I think it's worth reflecting on the nature of choice in general.
As I see it, and to my understanding psychological and neurological research backs this up, we are not actively intervening in the moment when we make the decisions that we make. Rather, we review the decisions we made in retrospect and construct a narrative about why we did what we did. But I think it's important that that narrative is not only looking backward, but looking forward. It's not just an explanation of what happened in the past, but a script for the future.
I think of it as though we are each a parent to ourselves. Imagine yourself as a ghost following a child around. You can speak into the child's mind, and watch his actions, but you cannot control him directly, physically move his body, or directly alter his mind. All you can do is watch what he does, try to figure out why he's doing what he does, and give him education and positive or negative feedback so that in the future he will maybe do things differently.
That child is you. You can't make yourself do something, but you can try to understand why you do things, teach yourself, and give yourself positive or negative feedback so that in the future you will maybe do things differently.
Now back to the topic: can you make the child happy? Why or why not?
You can't just reach into his brain and force him to be happy, just like you cannot force him to do anything. But you can teach him and give him feedback on his actions that will, hopefully, encourage happiness in him in the future.
Also, if something is chemically wrong with the kid, you can try giving him some medications to fix that.
One big conclusion I've reached this past year of existential dread is that often times, the feeling of things being fine or awful, hopeful or desperate, meaningful or meaningless, etc, come first, and then (like the post-hoc narrative of our actions) we find things to pin those feelings on, rather than external things putting those feelings into us. (Though that often happens too, of course). If your brain is just chemically in an "everything is awful" pattern, you will find things to feel awful about, even if they're things you already knew and didn't feel awful about before. Conversely, if your brain is just chemically in an "everything is great" pattern, you will find things to feel great about, finding joy and beauty even in ordinary little things that you might have otherwise overlooked.
I've have some limited success in trying to focus on those little things I might otherwise have overlooked as a way to jump-start the feel-good pattern in my own brain. Taking walks around my neighborhood at sunset and photographing ordinary little flowers I see in people's yards along the way is one of my go-to cheer-me-ups.
I agree that it does seem that you cannot chose happiness. But I do know from experience that you can turn a negative frame of mind around and feel” happier”. That may be a matter of experience. I also know you can also chose not to get yourself out of a negative frame of mind and instead wallow in it.
Sorry, I didn’t see your last two paras when I replied. Or did you add them?
Quoting Pfhorrest
Do you think this is a skill. Because aren’t you essentially overriding the chemical negativity and purposely applying positive actions, that you know from experience help?
When I am unhappy with things, I'm motivated to make them better - run away from the mad axeman, comfort the sick neighbour, clean up the shit. Right now I want to take away your happy pills 'coz they won't do you no good.
No, just a little more joyful, I suppose?
Quoting unenlightened
Yeah; but, I aint on any to begin with.
Look, I just came out of a suicide attempt, what should I do?
There's no getting away from the intensity of your vessel's base pain, unless you like meagre suppresion.
You can do literally anything in your vessel. A lot of troubles may come from your own sense of restriction - a statically average malfunction. I'm someone who believes in heaven and hell. Once this pain is through, unless you deserve another term, there's a huge jump in potential comfort.
What should you do based on this information? Waste, or don't waste yourself, but realise time and how things can quickly change.
Quoting Wallows
That sounds like simplifying to me. Remove what’s not working or complicating things. Keep only what you need.
Lot's of evil people in the world, you may find kindness is scarce.
You think of good movement, even if that is just the blood flow of a "dead fish in the stream."
There is a good side, use it.
Sex isn't that great, neither is love. I'd enjoy life like a solipsist. Being alone ain't that bad. Then again, I'm in moral comfort, I don't have to fret about beauty or ability - if that restricts, even your alone time, then I'm sorry for you. If not, great, because it's time to think about how I've not been out in over a Decade, bar a few. Alone, can work. You're free to cease to exist in your mind and you can imagine you were someone else, if that helps.
I do. I want to be rationally motivated to do things that will help other people be happy and keep me and them alive to continue being happy, and then so long as I'm doing the best I can toward those goals, be happy with the things that are already good and calmly undeterred by the things that are still going wrong.
Quoting unenlightened
The same things that Pfhorrest describes above that helped him "learn" to be happy more often can apply to your scenarios. The goal would not be to be "happy" in each of those examples, but to be LESS upset, worried, or scared.
Quoting unenlightened
And that is the purpose of negative emotions. However, most people feel them for far longer, and more intensely, than what is needed to act as motivation. Notice that if a person is too scared, they might freeze instead of run away.
Quoting unenlightened
I would think you would NOT have to "take the happy" pills from someone who practices emotional control. While they can choose to be happy most of the time, they will have shaved off the highs and lows. Part of being happy all the time (or the vast majority) is never being ecstatically happy...with great highs come substantial lows.
I have never studied Stoicism, but when people describe it here, it sounds very similar.
What do you mean by happiness and what do you mean by choice?
I don't. I want to be angry about injustice, worried about my children, desperately sad about the state of the world, agonised by love, and frightened, mainly, of becoming an unfeeling grinning mannequin. To choose only happiness would be to reject most of life.
What good will being a tormented soul do you?
If you define happiness as getting what you want, then everyone wants to be happy, because everyone wants what they want. But this says very little.
Quoting Wallows
Interesting that you regard any strong feeling as torment. I dare say you are not alone.
So, what then?
Quoting unenlightened
What do you mean?
I think most people have no idea what happiness is. It remains some vague idea in their heads, usually related to the possession of material things. Not that they can be blamed too harshly; this is what society teaches us.
If happiness is sought in external things, it truly becomes the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
If happiness is sought internally, suddenly happiness starts looking a lot more like a choice.
Since when does the mad axeman ask first?
Our emotions don't just pop up, like mushrooms. Circumstances, events, various factors bring them about. If you went to the grocery store and, while there, @unenlightened's mad axewoman entered the Safeway and started whacking people (before she was shot by the security guard), you might very well feel a great deal of fear--assuming you weren't one off the victims, put permanently beyond feeling anything.
Concersely, if, while standing in the checkout line at the mad axewoman-free grocery store, you struck up a fascinating conversation with a really interesting person (not the mad axewoman), and the conversation continued for an hour or so outside the store, you would probably feel contented, happy, or pleased--any number of positive emotions.
There are many things you can choose to do (quit a horrible job, end a horrible relationship, do vigorous exercise, practice the piano, make a chocolate cake...) and some of these acts might contribute to feelings of happiness, at least for a while.
Re-engineering different thoughts and feelings might be a losing proposition. I'm not sure how successful we can be at that game. My guess is that people who are happy are lucky in their arrangement of thoughts, beliefs, habits, and practices, and are blessed with a tendency to feel 'happy'.
Happiness is a goal to which everyone inescapably aspires; how they get there is a matter of choice, everyone takes a different path
Since he was an Englishman, obviously.
Surprisingly, Jesus does not say how happy are the lottery winners, those whose wives give great head, popular politicians, and receivers of honours, emmys, baftas, Nobel laureates, etc or people who are well tranquillised.
Animals that understand abstract concepts are more prone to depression and the severe consequences of continual prolonged depression. In general it is good to be happy. Its one of those things that if you are sad for too long you just stop caring about certain abstract concepts. Money is an abstract concept.
Cheers friend.
Because the mad axe wielding British bloke ate it?
Also, when a crisis or disaster happened, I would tend to shut down emotionally and just focus on doing whatever needed to be done to fix the problem. Even that was a weirdly positive kind of feeling, a kind of peaceful sense of purpose.
Of course at other times I felt despair about certain things that seemed hopeless in life, if something reminded me of those things. And at other times I would feel rage when I felt like I was personally under attack.
The kind of person I would like to be is someone like me when I was younger, minus the rage and despair, which were useless and did no good. I wish that by default, so long as nothing bad was happening, I was just happy, for no reason, though of course I would find things to be happy about. And when bad things happened, sure I wouldn't be happy happy anymore, but just have that calm productive focus on making them better again, so I could go back to being happy again.
I don't see how this follows. If happiness were a choice, then eventually some people might grow tired of being happy all the time, and indulge in some boredom or apathy before deciding that they'd rather be happy again.
Is the question ill formulated? Why is it?
I feel like it has more to do with deeper unfulfilled feelings or issues at play, like addiction or depression.
If one could choose to feel loved, secure, and safe, those two issues might stay (hopefully not) or go away?
What do you think?
????
Nothing follows. Not I, nor Jesus are making any argument. However, here is a suggestion from some psyche expert whose name I forget. There are two types of happiness; there is the immediate momentary thing - the chocolate melting in the mouth or whatever, and then there is the happiness of recollection. There's not much happiness in the recollection of the chocolate, but there may be much happiness in recollection of the smile on the face of your friend as you shared it.
And the message is that if you are chasing happiness, all you will get is momentary, and it will never amount to anything. It is the happiness that you give that will stay with you.
Let's suppose we agree, and for good reason, that happiness means the presence of pleasure and the absence of suffering. I've always struggled with the idea of hedonism. In one way, it seems to have cut a path through the complex philosophical jungle to arrive at a very basic fact of life and living viz. that we, as all animals do, prefer laughter over tears. If an alien could observe our behavior or even read our minds they would immediately notice without the slightest difficulty that we prefer and make an objective of :rofl: and avoiding :sad:
However, despite not meeting anyone who really cares about the meaning of life, philosophers have made it some kind of a holy grail of sorts and indeed if one studies people they all seem to seek some fulfillment in life, whether in terms of success or some other form of achievement, failing which they become increasingly ill, both mentally and sometimes physically too. Ergo, it may be safe to say that our highest pleasure is to be found in discovering the meaning of life and living accordingly. Yet all searches in that department have returned null and there's an entire philosophy, that of absurdism, which simply claims that there is no meaning to be found at all. What I want to highlight here is the obvious clash between happiness gained through knowing the meaning of life and something else. What is this something else? To me this something else is truth and here we're put in the uncomfortable position of making a choice between truth on one hand and happiness on the other but not both: the bitter truth is that there's no meaning to life but the sweet lie is that there is meaning to life. We value truth don't we? We value happiness don't we? However the situation is such that to know the truth (lack of meaning to life) means we'll be unhappy and being happy in this case involves believing a falsehood. Some have chosen to opt for truth and forego happiness which indicates that it's not a given that we automatically choose brightly colored artificial roses; sometimes we go for the real, dull green flowerless fern. In short, there are some things, like truth, we value in and of itself and sometimes, just sometime, more than happiness.
Perhaps happiness is a choice...sometimes.
I would instead say that the highest pleasure is for life to feel meaningful, the feeling I call ontophilia or love of being; and the meaning of life is to bring pleasure, to oneself and to others. The meaning of life is thus to make life seem meaningful. And there is nothing more to meaningfulness than the seeming of it: seeming meaningful is being meaningful.
All that’s left is to ask what, generally, seems meaningful, and I answer that is is learning, teaching, loving, and being loved: having both goods and truths flow through you, from the world into you and from you into the world.
Hedonism has this ability to subsume everything. There is no way to refute it because, the most frequently presented "counter-examples" to it can easily be reworked into a form that is in its favor, just like you have. If I must say anything at this point is that a theory that explains everything explains nothing.
Quoting TheMadFool
:up:
Aren't those quite high expectations? Maybe some can get by with less?
You could say the same thing about empiricism with equal(ly little) justification. Hedonism is just the empiricism of ethics: judging assessments of goodness based on the experience of them seeming good. It's not a statement about what people do value, meant to predict people's behavior, but about what is valuable, meant to adjudicate normative claims.
Anyway, I was agreeing with you (that meaningfulness is the highest pleasure), just with slight adjustments and elaboration.
Quoting Wallows
They're ideals, the furthest endpoints to aim for. Anything in that direction is on the right path; you don't have to go all the way.
:up: