
What If Unhappiness Contains the Secret to Happiness? - kelvinp
https://medium.com/personal-growth/what-if-controlling-unhappiness-contains-the-secret-to-happiness-acd96242970c
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mbostleman
This is similar to Type 2 fun that is part of the popular "Fun Scale"
([https://www.rei.com/blog/climb/fun-
scale](https://www.rei.com/blog/climb/fun-scale)) idea in backcountry
activities: Type 1 fun is an activity that is enjoyable while it is happening
(eating, drinking, sex, etc.). Type 2 fun is not only not fun while it
happens, it's miserable (freezing all night in a tent, being hungry for days
on end, fearing for you life, etc.) - but in retrospect the experience creates
a great deal of happiness, satisfaction, and a desire to do it again.

~~~
derefr
I’ve always considered the existence of “Type 2 fun” as a bug in our brain
hardware: it’s the same mechanism that makes your brain believe that
experiences like “playing a slot machine for hours with a negative rate-of-
return (both average and total)”, or “taking a drug that you’ve long grown
habituated to and don’t experience a high from any more”, were still
rewarding-enough experiences to reinforce their addictive potential.

~~~
penagwin
There's the reverse side too. Many experiences are unpleasant but I'd consider
important for people to "enjoy". I don't have kids, but I think raising kids
is a good example? No the direct experiences of being awake 24/7 picking up
poop isn't fun, but the overall experience is what people are after?

~~~
derefr
IMHO people are often (not always) after specific things that _having raised
kids_ provides—posterity, people who will take care of you when you’re old,
etc.—and are actually not interested in _any_ aspect of the experience of
actually raising them.

For people with such perspectives, I would say that what they experience is
less like “something that was no fun in any part but still fun as a whole”,
but rather “an _input_ of a non-fun activity that is expected to _pay out_ in
happiness down the line”—in other words, the same kind of experience that
working at a job to earn money is.

As such, people (for whom this calculus works out) don’t actually have to be
irrationally drawn to having kids by addictive brain signals. They have
perfectly _rational_ reasons to do so!

~~~
jlokier
I think in many ways, you have just describe _most jobs_.

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lordnacho
Nerd summary: let feedback do its job. The point of being unhappy is to allow
adjustment. To let that happen, you generally need to talk about what's
happened, acknowledge it, make changes.

There's been a fair few happiness articles on here lately. I've commented on
all of them, it's not necessarily happiness that you should care about.
Someone suggested equanimity as the thing to strive for.

There's a point where you've seen all the major life events. Either they
happened to you or someone you know. There's no avoiding them, and they happen
to everyone. It's part of the marvel of existence, a thing that had endless
content whether you zoom in or out.

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peterwwillis
Say the sun makes you happy, and one day you wake up to a cloudy day. Will you
be unhappy? The sun didn't impose happiness upon you, just like the clouds
didn't impose unhappiness. Your expectations and desires created your
feelings, which respond to change. But you can choose what your expectations
and desires are. And this means that you choose what creates happiness or
unhappiness.

Rather than having an expectation, have no expectation. Don't have an
expectation, and you won't be disappointed at a different outcome. Don't have
a desire, and you won't be unhappy when it goes unfulfilled. Don't expect the
sun, and the clouds won't make you sad. Don't desire pleasure, and you won't
feel cheated when you receive none.

Aside from your feelings, you can of course change things in your life if you
want to. You can right a wrong, improve your standing, paint your room green,
move to a new city, whatever. But don't do those things in order to chase a
feeling of happiness; that's a dog chasing its tail.

~~~
derefr
But on the other hand: if you aren’t consciously acting to optimize your life-
experience toward any particular terminal preferences you have, then aren’t
you just a mental vegetable—in the “elephant and rider” metaphor, an elephant
whose rider has checked out and isn’t steering the elephant any more? Can the
rider actually _survive_ without ever attempting to do anything but passively
observe? I would expect your consciousness to simply decay, like an unused
muscle. (And it is my understanding that heavy enough doses of anti-psychotic
drugs, taken chronically, _do_ effectively submerge consciousness in this way,
resulting in
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delirium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delirium)
.)

I get that this is kind of what is meant by the Buddhist concept of nirvana;
but I’ve always wondered what the difference is between “achieving nirvana and
then living for a hundred years” and “achieving nirvana and then immediately
committing suicide.” If you don’t _care_ any more, why are you still going on?
Why is the sensory tape still playing, if nobody is watching to learn anything
from it?

~~~
peterwwillis
Does a flower stop being pretty just because you don't expect or desire it to
be pretty? Your desires don't have any effect on the flower. But it's still
pretty. And so, it being pretty, you can choose to experience this flower as a
beautiful, wondrous thing, and take great pleasure out of its existence.

It may also be stamped upon in the next moment by a passer-by. But because you
did not expect this gift, when it is gone, you won't despair. So if life gives
you a gift, receive it with humility and gratitude, but do not expect to be
given it.

I think there's more to it too, like how you can use your time here to create
things that will also bring you peace and happiness, and not being
disappointed when they don't work out. Hard to explain here as it's kind of a
broad topic and I'm no Buddhist monk ;)

~~~
derefr
What does it mean for something to be beautiful, except to _desire_ the
sensory experience of looking at it?

I mean that in a neurological sense—is there really any kind of reward you can
experience from sensory data other than the dopaminergic kind that is
attempting to potentiate you toward a specific response to said stimulus (e.g.
increasing place preference for places that have pretty flowers in them)? If
you were to permanently shut down your dopaminergic reward system—to cease to
want—would you still experience sensory stimuli as rewarding? (I honestly
don’t know; it’s an interesting question.)

If you truly have _no desires whatsoever_ —if all is equal in your mind—I
would expect you to also have no aesthetic experience. You wouldn’t see “a
beautiful flower”; you’d just see “a flower.”† Seeing a flower and seeing a
garbage dump would be strictly equivalent to you, just as they are to someone
who is heavily depressed. (And this is what I was getting at by mentioning
delirium: people in a delirious state do not bother to move their heads to
look at things, _unless_ doing so is necessary to do something they’re forced
or ordered to do. This is because they _don’t_ prefer the experience of
looking at a flower to the experience of staring at the wall—so why stop
staring at the wall?)

† Which is, again, a thing they say that reaching Buddhist enlightenment gets
you: “mountains are mountains, and waters are waters.”

~~~
peterwwillis
Desire isn't pleasure. Desire is essentially an expectation with an ultimatum:
I want this thing, and if I don't get it, I'm going to be unhappy. Desire is a
slightly more intense form of 'to want'.

Pleasure is a subjective, aesthetic experience. Increased dopamine levels
certainly map to increased feeling of pleasure, but you can also experience
pleasure without increased dopamine levels. You can feel pleasure about just
about anything - it's just an idea in your head. You don't even have to "want"
that idea, as in expecting it, working towards it, etc. It can just kind of
pop up in your brain and you can feel good, or you can search for it and make
it pop up.

I think the distinction is really whether you have pleasure as your goal, and
whether you let outcomes change your state of mind. If the root of suffering
is the dissonance between desire and reality, avoid suffering by not having a
stake in the outcome. Decide to experience pleasure when you want to, without
attaching it to an expectation. Go for a walk to look for pretty flowers, but
don't expect them to be there. I would again compare it to a gift: don't feel
bad when you don't get one, but enjoy it when you do.

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paulpauper
What's the deal with randomly italicizing words? Annoying trend I have seen a
lot lately. Dunno how this got 4.4k claps. Nothing that interesting here.
Seems like medium is an inverse-meritocracy where the most unoriginal stuff
written for marketers and by marketers get all the votes and promotion and
traffic.

Happiness comes from the attainment status and progress, and those two things
tend to be correlated. That's why beating a video game level or getting an
award or promotion makes you happy. it does not come from reflecting on
failure or any abstract philosophical belief/teaching. The idea that happiness
is encoded in failure seems ludicrous unless one means not repeating mistakes,
but that is learning , which is not the same as happiness as an emotion. Not a
fan of stoicism either. I think people should express how they feel. Bottling
it up only makes it worse later.

~~~
eswat
> Not a fan of stoicism either. I think people should express how they feel.
> Bottling it up only makes it worse later.

Being stoic doesn’t mean not expressing your feelings.

Issues that someone would have to bottle up because it introduces entropy in
their feelings about life might be a non-issue/non-existent to a stoic. i.e.
why get angry and express my feelings if someone that cuts me off on the
highway, when I’ve learned not to care about such events? There’s plenty of
other things a stoic can express their feeling about.

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barleymash
Any reading on stoicism that you recommend?

~~~
intertextuality
_Marcus Aurelius Meditations: A New Translation_ by Gregory Hays.

 _The Discourses of Epictetus_

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lionhearted
I'm reminded of my favorite quote by pioneering alpine climber Mark Twight —

"It doesn't have to be fun to be fun."

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rgrieselhuber
Reminds me a lot of the idea of Wu Wei.

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beckyjewell
My dude Maarten would love the Pixar movie Inside Out

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Dirlewanger
tl;dr: learning from our mistakes is good for us.

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crimsonalucard
This article is unrelated to programming and technology in general. I enjoy
seeing these articles make it to the front page but I also wonder why they do.

What is the relation between this seemingly unrelated topic and technology in
general? Did this article make it to the front page because engineers are
unhappy or did it make it to the front page because people in general are
unhappy?

~~~
griffinkelly
I think its a question for all humans, not just specifically related to
engineers.

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perrygrande
Quite Interesting!

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OneWordSoln
What if we all treated each other with respect and compassion?

What if creating happiness in others was our fundamental objective as
individuals and societies?

Only with compassionate honesty can we root out the truly bad seeds and strip
them of their power to harm others.

Without compassion as our basis, our prejudices blind us and lead to callous,
destructive competition via blind ambition.

Only in compassionately equal cooperation can we determine which individuals
and groups seek to oppress others, for cooperation is anathema to those filled
with hatred and cruel self-superiority.

Our callous attitudes and systems of competition are destroying the Earth and
inflicting misery upon the vast majority of humanity for the benefit of the
few.

Committing oneself to become consumed by selfless compassion that motivates us
to shape our societies into compassionate systems of mutual benefit and
cooperation for ALL human beings is the ONLY path to happiness. Happiness for
the individual begins in every interaction we have with each other and the
Earth itself. The goal of that happiness is to spread this wisdom far and
wide.

To achieve that ideal we must strip the cruel, hypocritical, hateful liars of
their power to cause misery for others. And this unfettered capitalism must be
tamed to serve everyone while allowing the ambitious to reap the benefits of
their hard work.

Happiness is not pleasure and is so rare these days because very few people
learn to selflessly, compassionately serve others' happiness. Worse yet, the
most ruthless, amoral people have usurped the power structures of the world:
governments, corporations and religious institutions.

Selfless compassion is the root of happiness and we much each hurry up and
implement it because the evil bastards are running rampant over our precious,
beautiful Earth and the vast sea of poors.

As with all things human, it is equally each our choice.

~~~
peterwwillis
Fwiw, I think you've been downvoted because of the dissonance between being
selflessly compassionate and being preoccupied with "cruel, hypocritical,
hateful liars". Ultimately we're all the same, so if you really want to be
selflessly compassionate, that should apply to those people you dislike, too.

~~~
jlokier
Hmm to "ultimately we're all the same".

A quote I like says, paraphrasing, "as soon as you realise _you and I are
different people_ , then we will start to get along much better".

~~~
OneWordSoln
And related: "Know your enemy."

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fopen64
There is a stoichiometric mix of pain and pleasure that lends to happiness. In
the present time, we have too much pleasure over pain, and we respond to
unhappiness by adding even more pleasure.

