> Strangely enough, I don’t desire this pleasure. I go long periods forgetting I can choose well-being. (...) The non-desirability of pure pleasure is echoed in Sasha Chapin’s post on jhanas.
> Current Me: Hi, me from 2016. I have a question for you. You know this thing that we care about, where people become more efficient/rational/smart/well-off, and yet do not become substantially happier as a result? (...) Consider this: what if I told you that people don't actually want to be happy?
> Me!2016: Wait, you can't be serious. People clearly do pursue happiness, I see evidence of this all the time.
> Current Me: Ahaha. That's exactly the part which makes me feel like I've "run out of cynicism". See, the human activity you describe as "pursuing happiness", from my current perspective, 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, and people are puppets dancing on the strings of a mad puppetmaster.
> Current Me: I'll tell you the thing that finally broke me, finally pushed me over the edge with grokking the human condition on a full System 1 level. (...) 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? I enjoy and see great value in happiness when it happens, but when it doesn't I only work on it grudgingly. (...) 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.
For me, happiness is like physical health - something that greatly improves my functioning, and which can be reinforced through mental habits - but it's not directly appealing.
> Strangely enough, I don’t desire this pleasure. I go long periods forgetting I can choose well-being. (...) The non-desirability of pure pleasure is echoed in Sasha Chapin’s post on jhanas.
This reminds me of what SquirrelInHell wrote. https://squirrelinhell.blogspot.com/2017/12/happiness-is-chore.html
> I've literally run out of cynicism.
> Current Me: Hi, me from 2016. I have a question for you. You know this thing that we care about, where people become more efficient/rational/smart/well-off, and yet do not become substantially happier as a result? (...) Consider this: what if I told you that people don't actually want to be happy?
> Me!2016: Wait, you can't be serious. People clearly do pursue happiness, I see evidence of this all the time.
> Current Me: Ahaha. That's exactly the part which makes me feel like I've "run out of cynicism". See, the human activity you describe as "pursuing happiness", from my current perspective, 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, and people are puppets dancing on the strings of a mad puppetmaster.
> Current Me: I'll tell you the thing that finally broke me, finally pushed me over the edge with grokking the human condition on a full System 1 level. (...) 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? I enjoy and see great value in happiness when it happens, but when it doesn't I only work on it grudgingly. (...) 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.
Haha yes!
For me, happiness is like physical health - something that greatly improves my functioning, and which can be reinforced through mental habits - but it's not directly appealing.
Thanks for the reflection