Complex Numbers

It's Not Even Half Full

And now it's time for Adventures in Itoldyaso.

Want to be happy? Embrace being miserable  

Ironically (or whatever), this article is from the Before Time: March of 2019.

It’s good to be positive, sure.

I'm positive I'm gonna need a citation for that.

But that doesn’t mean being sunny side up all the time. Keep your frown right where it is. Let your bitch face rest.

Ever since I first heard the expression "resting bitch face," it's bugged me. For starters, it's sexist (even if it's also applied to dudes). For finishers, it implies that one should always be "on," or not resting, when other people are around, and that's exhausting for some of us.

Americans seem to be down these days.

Oh, if only they'd waited about a year.

Duhigg argues that the source of privileged people’s unhappiness lies in overly high expectations and too little practice struggling with obstacles early on. Thompson, meanwhile, blames devotion to work—the fact that people have replaced God and family with careers and callings as the source of meaning in their lives. Because we no longer want to make “time for happiness,” he says, we are busy, confused, and sad.

Okay, I can follow the logic that one secret to happiness is to set your expectations low enough that you can only be pleasantly surprised. That's a big part of my life philosophy. But that other guy doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.

Struggle helps cultivate resilience, and American “workism” is misguided.

I'm not going to argue either of these points, but lots of people struggle and never get any benefit out of it. As for "workism," however they want to define it, well, some people find their meaning in work; telling them they're misguided is only going to get them defensive. The problem comes in when people are expected to always be working, just to make ends meet.

But Duhigg and Thompson also ignore a more fundamental issue. It’s clamoring for happiness that makes people miserable.

And on that point, I can't disagree. Or I'd be an even bigger hypocrite than I already am.

Brock Bastian, a social psychologist at the University of Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences in Australia, argues in a 2018 paper in Emotion that trying too hard to be happy yields the opposite result.

Ah, yes, another name that, if one of us fiction writers came up with it, we'd be accused of being unrealistic.

“Happiness is a good thing, but setting it up as something to be achieved tends to fail,” Bastian told Time.

Which is kind of what I've been saying. Nice to have an actual scientist looking into it, though. Sure, I'm aware this may be confirmation bias on my part, but I'm still willing to hear alternative viewpoints.

The best relationships involve pain...

Oh, yes, baby, yes.

Oh, they're not talking about S&M. Damn. Well, maybe the point of pain (as the author probably intended it) is to better appreciate the pleasurable parts.

...and the greatest jobs are also tedious.

Eh, citation needed.

Nothing can be fun all the time, and some stuff that ends up enjoyable may seem dreadful while you’re doing it. Pretending otherwise, expecting a steady sense of pleasure and satisfaction, only compounds suffering.

Easy, there, you're veering off toward Buddhism. But yeah. Like, doing your taxes, for instance: massive pain in the ass, and I don't know too many people who actually enjoy the process. But then you get to enjoy not being in jail, so there's that.

Also, things like cooking can be difficult or tedious while doing them, but hopefully the outcome is enjoyable as well.

Although the pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the US Constitution, to act upon that right guarantees displeasure. Desire causes suffering, or so the Buddha believed.

Aaaaaand now your GPS plopped you straight into Lake Buddha.

In fact, this whole section is about that philosophical tradition.

Still, liberating yourself from the expectation of happiness lightens your load. It makes life a little easier when you are realistic but resolved, rather than deluded, desirous, and determined to have the impossible. By calculating discomfort and struggle into the mix, you can remain cautiously optimistic, knowing there’s surely trouble ahead, but that you will face it with grace.

Or, and bear with me on this, maybe you can be, instead of cautiously optimistic, hopefully pessimistic. That is, if you expect the worst possible outcome, then you're either right (which is nice), or pleasantly surprised (which is almost as nice).

Happiness is necessarily not lasting, and if you chase it, the emotion will elude you. It’s precious and momentary. That is what makes it so delightful.

Being transient doesn't make it less real. In fact, I think its ephemeral nature makes it all the more worth savoring. But I do agree that chasing it is counterproductive.

Beyond understanding happiness more deeply, we can train, actively cultivating perspective with practices both ancient and new. If meditating your way to the understanding that emotions are like clouds flitting across the sky of your mind isn’t your thing, for example, there’s a bot that will talk to you about feelings and train you to reframe your thinking.

Isn't the future a wonderful place to live? We can talk about our feelings with artificial intelligences.

The Woebot...

As soon as I read that, I became transcendently happy. Seriously. What a name! I'm only a little bit angry that I didn't come up with it.

...is an app designed by Stanford psychologists, based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Aaaaaaand there goes the happiness, fleeing like a ninja in the night. CBT my ass.

Over millennia, no one has avoided suffering. It’s unlikely any of us will be the exception. So the wise thing to do is to accept this sad but funny fact. The joke is on all of us and the quicker we are to see the humor in it, the better our chances of sometimes having fun.

Of course humor is essential.

And, for me, so is beer.