Relentless Positivity

The Pursuit of Happiness

The pursuit of happiness is something of a universal human endeavour. As such, one could consider it odd that we are so divided about how to achieve happiness – after all, it is something we have been trying to reach as a society since time immemorial.  Unfortunately this view neglects the fact that the pursuit of happiness is such a significant motivator for people, that there are an enormous number of people and organisations out there trying to convince people that their method is the one, in order to gain influence, profit or status.  In this environment, it is difficult to filter the noise and disinformation from the genuine signal of how to live a happy life.

This being the case, it is quite natural to look for ulterior motives behind anyone discussing happiness and ways to achieve it, in case they are selling something, or trying to recruit you into a cult.  Nevertheless, I intend to share my musings on the subject.

Philosophical discussions of happiness often touch upon ideas such as “wire-heading” or drug induced euphoria, but to many this sounds unappealing – it is not desirable to become a “happiness robot”.  To remain identifiably human, it seems necessary to still be able to be affected by things happening around you, including the bad – we want to minimise the bad things that happen, not stop caring that bad things are happening.  This gives us two lines of attack – one being reducing the amount of bad things that happen, and the other being improving your baseline happiness. It is the second of these that I am considering here.

In seeking to have a high baseline of happiness, we are not trying to be unaffected by negative things – just to be consistently happier on average.  Sad things will still happen, and we will still care about these and seek to prevent them, but we want to be generally happy, rather than generally mediocre.  Improving baseline happiness is difficult, because our happiness levels tend to renormalise to the level they were at before. Whenever something good happens, we experience a spike in happiness, but this soon dies away, leaving us back feeling mediocre.  This may be why so many people end up with a sense of ennui, fed up with constantly chasing the highs of happiness, only for it not to last.

I am inclined to think however that this renormalisation is not quite so inevitable.  If you are aware of it, you can do things to counteract it. This does take effort, but relatively little considering the pay-off.  Finding things to be happy about – consciously thinking about things that are good about your life, rather than taking them for granted (“appreciating the simple things in life”) is a very powerful way to give yourself a happiness boost.  If you can make a habit out of this, it is possible that without buying anything or joining any cults, you could consistently improve your baseline happiness.

The blog Putanumonit has an excellent post on how to be more mindful of what actually makes you happy.  One of the main messages in this post is something fairly similar – time spent thinking about good things makes you happy – have good experiences, and remember to think about them.  Further to this concept, I would add – if you have bad experiences, find aspects to them that were positive, and focus on those (“character building”). If there is no way to find any positive aspect, and the experience was just too traumatic, it is probably best to try not to dwell on it, and form other better memories to think about instead.  Another key message from this post is not to try to remove all variation – if you “treat yourself”, this will give you a happiness boost, but if you turn a treat into something you do all the time, the boost will not be sustained, and will be normalised away.

There is also an excellent CGP Grey video describing all of the things not to do if you want to be happy.  If someone were doing any of the things listed here, stopping doing them would be a pretty sure-fire way to improve their baseline of happiness.

This idea of improving the baseline could be challenged by claiming that people with a lower baseline might be more motivated to solve the world’s problems, which would make people happier in the long run however I don’t think that is the case at all.  As mentioned above, the aim of having a higher baseline is not to stop feeling sad when sad things happen, so people should still be motivated to improve the world. In fact, despair and despondency are demonstrably huge demotivational factors, so it is likely that someone with a higher baseline happiness will be more hopeful, and more willing to try to make the world a better place.

Stoicism & Epicureanism

Splitting the discussion of happiness in two, between a discussion about the baseline and a separate discussion about making the world a better place, matches very well with the two competing greek philosophies of Stoicism and Epicureanism.

Stoicism, put extremely simply, is based around the goal of being happy with what you have – considering the positives of the situation you find yourself in, and finding comfort in the fact that your life is not worse.  It is a very grounded philosophy, not seeking any dizzying pleasure, but aiming to give people a toolkit with which to deal with adversity and tragedy. It has however often been accused of callousness, as when applied too broadly to other people rather than oneself, it suggests that everyone should be more accepting of their lot in life – if someone cannot find something to be happy about, they are simply not being stoic enough.

Epicureanism is the historical opponent of stoicism, and as such, unsurprisingly takes a fairly opposite approach.  The goal of Epicureanism is to derive the greatest amount of pleasure possible during one’s lifetime. To many people this may be a much more natural way to pursue happiness, but it has in turn often been accused of promoting hedonism and decadence.  (The criticisms of both Stoicism and Epicureanism are quite unfair, and do not do justice to the original, highly nuanced philosophies espoused respectively by Zeno and Epicurus themselves, however they are easy complaints to have against the much simplified concepts that they are often portrayed as today.)

I would argue however that these two philosophies are not so incompatible as it would at first appear.  The strength of Stoicism is in its application to one’s personal situation – giving people the tools to improve their baseline happiness; and its weakness is when it is too simplistically applied to society and used as a stick to beat people with for being insufficiently grateful for their lot in life.  The strength of Epicureanism on the contrary is in its application to society – improving the world we live in, to facilitate greater enjoyment and happiness for all; while its weakness is when it is too simplistically applied to an individual, promoting hedonism and selfishness. These strengths and weaknesses complement each other very well, suggesting a promising hybrid philosophy of personally applied Stoicism, but societally applied Epicureanism. 

Put more clearly, these strengths and weaknesses can be described like this:

Stoicism

• Personally applied is good – appreciating and making the best of what you do have, without dwelling too much on any negatives, developing resilience and positive thinking.
• Societally applied is bad – each to their own, people should just get on with it and accept their lot in life because complaining about things shows a lack of personal responsibility.

Epicureanism

• Personally applied is bad – pursuing the next happiness “high” without appreciating what you already have, failing to develop resilience to adversity, feeling like society owes you something.
• Societally applied is good – help others, be sympathetic to their needs, try to improve society to reduce the amount of adversity that people need to overcome.

It is hopefully not too much of a stretch to identify the parallels between “improving your baseline” and personal Stoicism, and between “improving the world” and societal Epicureanism.

The Free Energy Principle

There has been a fair bit of interest recently in the concept of the “Free Energy Principle” as introduced by the neuroscientist Karl Friston.  Scott Alexander has written about it at great length (archive), but the very simplified concept is the hypothesis that all of the actions our brains take are at a very low, subconscious level focused around trying to improve our predictions about the world we perceive.  This leads to framing concepts using a model of the brain as a probability estimation engine. A corollary of this, is that our moods might be a function of the statistical methods our brains are using to understand the world.  Again, Scott Alexander has explored this particular idea (archive), so I will attempt to summarise it very briefly.  If you have read this article, you may want to skip the next two paragraphs.

To summarise the concept of this theory of “computational mood”, it is proposed that there are two very important axes which determine your overall emotional outlook, over which your mind may vary.  These are firstly the expectation you have of outcomes in life, and secondly the amount of variance you expect in these outcomes. To put this more simply (but admittedly less accurately), this effectively boils down to firstly how positive or negative your outlook on life is, and secondly how sure you feel about what you expect to happen. These axes are usually plotted with the vertical axis corresponding to the expectation, with up being high expectation, and down being low.  The horizontal axis is then variance, with left being high variance and right being low (or perhaps more intuitively left being low confidence and right being high confidence in outcomes). 

If this theory is correct, there is probably a fairly healthy range in the middle, where most people’s minds reside quite comfortably, but taken to extremes, this allows us to proffer explanations for certain psychological issues.  If someone is in the far bottom-right, they have low expectations with high confidence – they have a negative outlook, and are very sure of it, which sounds a lot like depression. The far bottom-left by contrast characterises a negative outlook with high uncertainty – things will be bad, in some vague undetermined way, which sounds a lot like anxiety.  The far top-right is a very positive outlook with great certainty – the view that everything will be great, and will turn out perfectly, which sounds quite similar to mania.

The fourth quadrant – the top-left one, is one that has not yet been explored in academia. That is not to say that no-one has been thinking about it however – Jacob Falkovich has taken the concept of computational mood and attempted to generalise it far beyond its initial scope, paying specific attention to this quadrant.  I do not intend to go quite so far as Falkovich on this, but I hope to be able to draw a further parallel with the discussion above.

Relentless Positivity

Falkovich’s article is excellent, and I must resist the temptation to quote entire paragraphs from it, so I shall limit myself to a couple of sentences:

“I spent a long time staring at that chart and then I realized – the top left is my corner. It’s where I’ve lived all my life.  Top left means that I’m very optimistic in general, but am quick to update to negative conclusions on the particulars.”

Falkovich does not put a name to this outlook, but I feel like I share it, and would describe it as “Relentless Positivity”.  Life may have its ups and downs, but if you inhabit this top-left space, you just roll with the punches, and push onwards. Here, I am not describing a person themselves as relentless – they are not obsessively pursuing a particular course of action, which might be more suggestive of overconfidence or mania – it is their positivity itself which is relentless.  Relentless Positivity to me suggests positivity that behaves in a way similar to The Terminator – dogged and unyielding, regardless of what obstacles are in the way. The top-left mood seems to embody the mental state of being able to be happy and see the positive, despite any setbacks, whilst still seeking improvement – neither blind confidence nor hopeless yearning.  This seems to be a pretty good fit for Relentless Positivity to me.

This mindset suggests the approach of “plan for the worst, expect the best”.  Accepting that outcomes may have significant variability is important, as this allows you to prepare for these eventualities.  Pessimism is expecting the worst to happen, whereas pragmatism is planning for the worst, whilst thinking positive, which stops people from giving up.  Another way to frame this mindset is to have an optimistic perspective on life, but a pessimistic approach to planning.

My feeling, is that this is good advice generally – plan for the worst, but find things to be happy about by noticing and appreciating the positive things in life.  It may come naturally to people that occupy the top-left mood of Relentless Positivity already, but it would be defeatist to suggest that other people could not follow these approaches, or that other people would not see benefits from using them.

Combining Old and New Perspectives

To tie this back to Stoicism and Epicureanism, we can view this vertical axis (high or low mean) as corresponding to personal approach – Epicurean or Stoic.  Epicurean implies dissatisfaction – an awareness that things could be better. Stoic implies making the best of what you have, finding ways to appreciate it. The horizontal axis (high or low variance) can then be viewed as corresponding to societal approach.  Epicurean implies an awareness of the world and the differences therein, allowing an awareness and expectation of a variety of results. Stoic implies an introspective approach, not attempting to make change or perceive differences, but to accept the status quo.

This implies that pure stoicism corresponds to mania.  This goes against our modern day use of the word stoic, which is often used to mean a kind of calm, emotionless fatalism – very much not our image of mania.  On the other hand, in a state of mania, people are usually convinced that everything is great, regardless of how the current situation looks objectively. In some sense, that is actually what Stoicism is trying to achieve, just without the excitement.  Therefore it could be viewed that mania is effectively “overshooting” the ideal of Stoicism, or is perhaps a failure mode of it.

Equally, this implies pure Epicureanism corresponds to anxiety.  This again goes against the idea of Epicureanism being the achievement of tranquility free from fear, but if we look at what it might mean to be a failure mode of this philosophy, we get somewhere.  Epicureanism seeks to satisfy pleasures without devolving into hedonism; to avoid pain without fearing it. At first glance this can seem contradictory, so it is not a stretch to imagine that someone trying to follow this philosophy might simply find new and inventive ways to be unhappy, whilst being stressed at their failure to make the formula work.

I feel at this point that the bottom-right quadrant – depression, is quite self explanatory.  Being societally stoic, will lead you to expect others to be accepting of their lot in life, not allowing for any expectation of change, but being personally epicurean will make you focus on any personal shortcomings or adverse events, seeing the negative without being able to find things to be positive about.

This identifies the top-left quadrant of Relentless Positivity with the proposed combination of being stoic about life – finding things to be personally happy about, and being Epicurean about society – finding ways to improve people’s happiness and planning how to avoid negative impacts on them.  This rather neatly ties together the idea of

Improve your baseline and improve the world

with the idea of

Plan for the worst, expect the best

Two very nice mottos that, whilst somewhat simplistic on the face of them, carry a great deal of meaning beneath the surface.