I’ve been thinking about unhappiness...
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
I've been thinking about impediments to happiness and can see two obvious roadblocks. First is wanting things to be different. Happiness is the state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and stops running into the past or future to regret something or plan something. If you want the world to be different, your happiness is held hostage until that change occurs. Sometimes this is an actual change you need to make: leave an unhappy relationship, change from an unfulfilling career, complete a difficult conversation. We often remain in years of misery to avoid a few minutes of pain.
Second roadblock to happiness is uncertainty. Humans never genuinely pursue happiness. They only pursue relief from uncertainty. Happiness emerges momentarily as a byproduct whenever uncertainty briefly disappears. If you feel like you can't predict the future, you default to fear, worry, rumination, and your mindscape eclipses reality's landscape. Worrying about the thing you can't predict usually involves a nightmare fantasy, which is way worse than what could happen in reality. This imagined nightmare briefly collapses the chaos of the world into certainty. Humans abhor not knowing how the future will unfold. We would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with something unpredictable.
Sometimes these situations overlap:
- A family member gets an uncertain medical diagnosis and we can't be with them.
- We argue with our partner while apart and don't know how they're feeling overnight.
- We try to mend a broken friendship with a letter and haven't yet got a reply.
If you're feeling unhappy, look to where you're uncertain and where you want things to be different first.
A great description of how anxiety works is you're unable to work out what's going to happen in the future. Your mind imagines and invests time and energy into alternative scenarios in hopes that if you had already seen how those scenarios might occur, if they do occur, you are better prepared. If you know one thing is going to happen, you can still be anxious, but the anxiety takes on a different tone. The prediction error of the future is explained by the fact that we would rather imagine a nightmare than deal with uncertainty. It collapses down if it's the worst thing: cancer, gluten intolerance, infidelity, and divorce all at the same time. That is horrible and weirdly more satisfying than thinking 'I don't know what it is.'
There's an idea called compensatory control. When people were asked to imagine an uncertain medical diagnosis in the lab—imagine this is the diagnosis given on a medical report—they were more likely to see meaningless patterns in random static on a TV. They saw trends where there were none and tried to bring order into chaotic situations.
The connection to COVID was that even before the lab leak had sufficient evidence, people leaned into compensatory control. There is a place in Wuhan that does this and the virus started in Wuhan, but nobody knew because there weren't stats. Now it seems the zoological origin and RNA sequence suggest maybe a little bit more. Many early on leaned heavily into compensatory control because it is far easier to believe a pathogen exists because of some malign scientist than the transmutation of some silly little microbe. Even if the lab hypothesis is true, it is much more comforting to work it out by human motivation, carelessness, evilness, or the CCP trying to take over. That is a story we can understand. What we can't understand is randomness like asteroids hitting Earth. People personify it: 'Did we deserve it? This is judgment for something we have done. This is righteous retribution.' It wrangles randomness into certainty, which is an impediment to happiness.
Wanting things to be different plainly gets in the way of happiness. How are you supposed to be happy if you want things to be different, if you are unhappy right now? You're ruminating about the past, dreaming about the future, never in the present. You're holding your happiness hostage. Uncertainty is a multiplier. Sometimes you argue with your partner and don't know how they're feeling overnight: you want not to be arguing and have uncertainty about how they feel. A family member gets an uncertain medical diagnosis and we can't be with them: wanting it different plus uncertainty. This is a potent cocktail of dissatisfaction that often occurs in our lives.
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