More Thoughts on Happiness: Part 2
Friday, August 30th, 2013 02:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robinturner[continuing the excessively long post started here.
All this talk of goals may seem very, well, goal-driven. Isn't there room also (I wondered) for the joys of purposelessness? After all, I once gave a TEDx talk on why life doesn't have to be seen as a journey, and we might do well to appreciate aimless wandering as well. I mentioned that the bulk of happiness is the perception that we are moving toward some valued state, and it is here that clear goals are useful. The other components are the achievement of that state (which is necessarily brief) and the appreciation of the state, by which time you don't want to be thinking about goals. Unfortunately appreciating what we have isn't so easy. The brain, we are told, evolved for solving problems, so it doesn't make evolutionary sense for it to waste energy on non-problems; nevertheless, this is a good way to sabotage what psychologists call "the hedonic treadmill".
Some years back I went to a workshop by the Turkish musician and yogi Seda Bağcan, who stopped dead in front of me and asked "Do you consider yourself fortunate?" (Actually the Turkish translated literally as "Do you feel lucky?" but that sounds too Dirty Harry.) I was stumped and responded "I don't know." Some parts of my life were good; other parts weren't going so well … the usual story. Seda's question remained wiggling in my brain like the wiggly thing in The Wrath of Khan until I came across a Bektashi injunction to imagine all the good things God has given you in your right hand and the bad things in the left—the pile in the right hand is going to be much bigger. (Well actually both piles are going to be astronomical; you have to employ some kind of visual scaling mechanism.) Suddenly I got what Seda was on about and went on to construct my own little mental exercise, which consists of iterating "I am fortunate because $x." Possible values for $x include:
As an aside, this method is very like the currently popular focus on gratitude; it just skirts round the question of who or what we should be grateful to (and whether we should blame them for bad things that happen).
The hedonic treadmill can also be sabotaged by refreshing sensory experience, enabling us to appreciate things anew. Buddhist mindfulness meditation may do the job here, but since I haven't practised it much, I can't comment on it. I have, however, tried various sensory awareness exercises and concluded that they work well. In fact, I suspect any aesthetic experience works well. My old art teacher once said "You're not drawing what you see; you're drawing what you think is there," and this is the problem in a nutshell: habit and preconception muffle the senses. You can have a breathtaking sunset spread out before you, but if your mind just goes "sky", your breath will not be taken away. Paying attention to what we are actually seeing, hearing etc. breaks the habit, or as Blake put it, cleanses the doors of perception. (Note: this is not an invitation to take mescaline.)
2. Appreciate what you have
All this talk of goals may seem very, well, goal-driven. Isn't there room also (I wondered) for the joys of purposelessness? After all, I once gave a TEDx talk on why life doesn't have to be seen as a journey, and we might do well to appreciate aimless wandering as well. I mentioned that the bulk of happiness is the perception that we are moving toward some valued state, and it is here that clear goals are useful. The other components are the achievement of that state (which is necessarily brief) and the appreciation of the state, by which time you don't want to be thinking about goals. Unfortunately appreciating what we have isn't so easy. The brain, we are told, evolved for solving problems, so it doesn't make evolutionary sense for it to waste energy on non-problems; nevertheless, this is a good way to sabotage what psychologists call "the hedonic treadmill".
Some years back I went to a workshop by the Turkish musician and yogi Seda Bağcan, who stopped dead in front of me and asked "Do you consider yourself fortunate?" (Actually the Turkish translated literally as "Do you feel lucky?" but that sounds too Dirty Harry.) I was stumped and responded "I don't know." Some parts of my life were good; other parts weren't going so well … the usual story. Seda's question remained wiggling in my brain like the wiggly thing in The Wrath of Khan until I came across a Bektashi injunction to imagine all the good things God has given you in your right hand and the bad things in the left—the pile in the right hand is going to be much bigger. (Well actually both piles are going to be astronomical; you have to employ some kind of visual scaling mechanism.) Suddenly I got what Seda was on about and went on to construct my own little mental exercise, which consists of iterating "I am fortunate because $x." Possible values for $x include:
- my kidneys work
- I have a good Internet connection
- I have enough to eat
- it's sunny
- I can walk
- I have an interesting job
- my house has drinkable water.
As an aside, this method is very like the currently popular focus on gratitude; it just skirts round the question of who or what we should be grateful to (and whether we should blame them for bad things that happen).
The hedonic treadmill can also be sabotaged by refreshing sensory experience, enabling us to appreciate things anew. Buddhist mindfulness meditation may do the job here, but since I haven't practised it much, I can't comment on it. I have, however, tried various sensory awareness exercises and concluded that they work well. In fact, I suspect any aesthetic experience works well. My old art teacher once said "You're not drawing what you see; you're drawing what you think is there," and this is the problem in a nutshell: habit and preconception muffle the senses. You can have a breathtaking sunset spread out before you, but if your mind just goes "sky", your breath will not be taken away. Paying attention to what we are actually seeing, hearing etc. breaks the habit, or as Blake put it, cleanses the doors of perception. (Note: this is not an invitation to take mescaline.)
