You Can Just Choose To Be Happy

Your emotions are less rational than you are; fight them and win

I often hear advice like “don’t focus too hard on being happy, just do what you can and happiness will come to you.” This is probably good advice for the layperson, but oh baby, if you’re smart enough, you can just pursue happiness directly.

Self help books often end up spouting vague platitudes like “nurture relationships” and “practice kindness.” While these books aren’t necessarily wrong, they’re mostly going to skew upbeat, and they’re not going to discuss the fact that if you really, truly want to optimize for happiness, you’re going to have to analyze what actually makes your emotions tick. And that might be unpleasant.

So before we start, remember, being happy is not the only thing we care about; we have ambition for more. To change the world, to be famous, to protect our family, to help our loved ones in any goddamn way we can. But I think it’s rare to find someone so altruistic that they don’t care about their own emotions at all; one does not usually say, “I’m going to have a wife and kids and support them, but I’m going to hate them, and not feel any love at all.” One might imagine themselves fulfilled when they dream of the future.

To be completely honest to you about how humans become happy, I’m going to have to view some of the most sacred elements of our lives primarily for what they give us. This is going to feel uncomfortable and selfish, but it is true, and it’s a truth I can give you beyond the platitudes; remember, refusing to look at the sun does not make it any less bright. And truly understanding what makes your life fulfilling will help a hundredfold if you want to have your loved ones live a good life themselves.

KYLE, WHAT ARE WE OPTIMIZING FOR?

When one imagines someone “optimizing for happiness” they might imagine having a bunch of sex and a bunch of fast food. Those sensations sound pretty good, but that sounds like a pretty soulless way to live. To think properly about this, we must think of all of the good in the world and all of the best moments in our lives.

I want you to imagine a farmer on a field sitting with his wife and kids, staring at a sunset with a light smile on his face, truly fulfilled. The sensation of love permeates through his bones as he pets the family dog on his lap — there’s a silence between the family, but it’s a silence of familiarity. He looks at his kids and knows he would die a hundred times for them, and their happiness is his world. He knows that moments like this can’t last, but he would steal the light from the cradle of God to let his family be like this for just an extra day.

Picturesqe. Now, here we go: take the experience here, the FEELING the farmer feels in his bones, put it in a bottle, and ask the question “how can I set up my life to optimize for as many of these moments as possible.”

Because I now want you to realize that in real life, the majority of moments in the farmer’s days are not like this. In fact, because it’s not a movie, the majority of moments are going to be… well, life. Driving to the store, lightly mindless. Focusing on work as he tends to his crops. Light conversations. An easy over egg where the yolk broke when he flipped it, and the farmer really wishes it was runny, but he’s not gonna make another one or anything because that’s stupid and it’s literally just an egg.

If you monitored your mental state 24/7, most people would find that in most moments, they’re not experiencing strong feelings at all, really. They’re just… doing stuff. This might not be misery, but likely the farmer dreams of spending more time with his kids instead of work — to get the joy of teaching them, and to spend time with them before they get older.

Actually, wait — this “monitoring your mental state” might reveal some interesting points. First of all, you might realize the extremely obvious fact that you only experience life in the present. Imagine someone whose childhood is miserable and he hates it while going through it, but when he gets a job he feels nostalgic for childhood when he didn’t have to work, and he misses his childhood. Was he “happy” in his childhood, now that he views it in a positive light?

No! At no point did he have a positive conscious experience! The “arc” of your life is wholly irrelevant to your happiness; you should not be optimizing for feeling like you have well put together life, you should be optimizing for enjoying life. And to do that, you should do more things you actually enjoy in the present, similar to the farmer with spending time with his kids.

MISERY, SERVED FRESH DAILY

If you work 13 hour days, have your priorities under control, are well functioning, and feel miserable all the time, you are miserable. It may or may not be true that if you quit your job you would be MORE miserable, but having your life put together doesn’t mean much IF you are not also fulfilled. Society may not intervene if you’re high functioning, but that’s little consolation for you. That gets me to some key advice:

• You can tank the misery from one-off things that make you miserable (think about moving — it sucks, but it’s temporary)

• But, if you are doing things that make you miserable every day for most of the day, you are living an unhappy life.

  • Examples: you hate your job. You hate your partner and see them every day. You think the state of the world is miserable and revel in that every day.

Look, if you’re doing something you hate every day, that’s going to have a HUGE impact on the actual content of your life — like, what the actual experience is. Always keep scope in mind. One annoying thing on exactly one day, even if you hate it, is a million times better than a job you dislike for 1/2 of your entire waking life. If you are a lucky person who has nothing they HATE that they do daily, then I want you to think of all the small annoyances in your life that add up.

If you are stuck hating something daily, there is literally only two things that will make you happier:

• You stop doing the thing.

• You rig your mind to enjoy the thing you’re doing.

I emphatically say that in 80% of cases, the former will be easier.

Very small example, to show it’s not only the huge life decisions you can fix with this: the shower pressure in my shower was too weak for like 6 months. Since it was such a small thing, I mostly ignored it even when slightly annoyed, because I wasn’t actively problem solving for the annoyance that I felt. But when I realized I could just replace it off Amazon, and it took 2 seconds, it was so easy I felt stupid.

Bigger example, one I’ve never had: if you hate your job you are considerably more screwed. I’ll point out that given that this is such a big risk, it’s actually great advice to try to really make sure you like a field before getting into your job instead of haphazardly choosing a major like most college students. But if you’re in a situation you hate that seems insurmountable, then I guess you want to hear about option 2 above.

RIG YOUR MIND

You, the sentient part of the brain, unfortunately don’t have direct control over the non-sentient part of the brain that decides what emotions it decides to serve you on a silver platter, and so you can’t change them directly — at least, not without plugging wires into your neurons and changing the happiness vector to “true”.

What we do have are the three things that impact your emotion decider — your actions, perceptions, and thoughts.

I’ll remind you that the mysterious emotions of misery and love beamed into your brain are also decided inside your brain, and just as fallible. If you want to live a fulfilling life, it is a major impediment to imagine your emotions as sacred and mysterious. They do not have to be.

Sometimes self help advice is something that sounds really stupid, like “think positive” and “smile more.” Instinctively, the rational man responds “my woes are lack of money and love, and smiling more for no reason will do nothing to solve those.” But if you imagine the emotional center of your brain as a dumb, fallible algorithm in the brain making decisions willy nilly, this advice makes sense. If you’re smiling, the algorithm sees it as evidence that your life is good; why would you be smiling otherwise? If your thoughts are full of “my life is good and better than 99% of lives in history” then the algorithm sees that and thinks “huh, I guess we’re lucky”. If this thought pattern becomes a HABIT, and you default to it, your brain will give you a warm fuzzy feeling of luck that you can vaguely summon by thinking.

This algorithm of your emotions is also greatly influenced by dumb shit that’s not related to your thoughts at all, because we evolved in a crucible of violence completely unlike modern society. Why does going for a walk make you feel better sometimes? That seems dumb. Well, exercise does some wizard shit to the algorithm that shifts its priorities.

My greatest advice if you’d like to be happy is get a lot of sleep. I have, in fact, done the work of monitoring my mental state to try to understand happiness and sadness, and I can tell you my emotions are dulled heavily when I’m tired. When my friends ask me advice on how to be happy, that’s always my first piece of advice, which seems weird for someone talking about “rigging your mind for joy.” But it makes more sense in light of what we’ve learned; the algorithms’ priorities are shaped by madness, and I’m sure that when we evolved, a lack of sleep indicated it’s time to get shit done, not contemplate, love and plan.

You, a thinking man, need to wield the whims of your emotions like a goddamn sword. If you’re miserable, you must be able to diagnose a cause. Are you hangry? Lack of food makes the algorithm unpredictable. Does your coworker annoy you? Is there a burning envy that your friend is getting married? Do you wish you were writing music instead of doing construction work? Is your boss distracting you from working idly? Who do you love. Is your life different from how you dreamed. Are you horny. Are you angry at the opposite sex for not loving you. Are you going to die.

I assure you your brain cares about whether you’ve had food and sleep about 100 times more than any abstract and vague ideals. If you hate your job, you shouldn’t quit before you ask “which part of this job do I hate?” And once you do, importantly: “Will a new job fix that issue?” Fail to ask this, and your next job will leave you in the same amount of misery you thought you could escape from.

One final point here: your brain is stuck in the emotional state that it was in yesterday if yesterday is the same as today. If you are unhappy, you need change, ANY change, or else your brain sees no reason to give you extra joy. Meanwhile, if you are happy, why not continue what you did yesterday? No need to quit your job or move to a different state and mess up a good thing; normality is providing for you.

THE PLIGHT OF MAN

You care about multiple things in this existence we call life. Personally, I care about my friends and family very much, and I love them more than I can put into words without some very long poetry. Being happy is not your only goal; you likely have aspirations of fame, of success, of protecting the people you love, of giving everything for their success.

But not only do you probably hope for a joyous future, you likely wish for your friends and family to live a joyous life too. And understanding and internalizing the fickle and irrational nature of emotions will make you a better lover, a better father, a better planner, and of course: you will be happier, which I imagine you may also care about. Your loved ones want you happier too.

Heed the call. Fight your woes. Analyze. You are a ship adrift in a storm. If you understand the chaos of the waves, you may escape with more than your life.

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This is part one of my thoughts on happiness and that other very overused word — “agency.” If this gets a good reception, I’ll write more about this, so I guess give a like if this type of topic interests you. Thanks to my subscribers, I’m grateful so many of you enjoy my stuff. Join us! Here’s a button.