“The better decision maker has at his/her disposal repertoires of possible actions; checklists of things to think about before he acts; and he has mechanisms in his mind to evoke these, and bring these to his conscious attention when the situations for decision arise.” (Herbert Simon, Nobel Laureate)
How you analyze the purpose of your life and the causes of your happiness and unhappiness matters a lot. Not because they may not be based in reality, but because it changes the systems you use to analyze your life and changes how you try to engineer it. Some see life's value in terms of god, or oneness with the universe, or seratonin levels, or family, or career, or impact, or altruism, or selfishness.
Whatever it is, you are using these terms to create systems in your mind. Systems are ways of organizing the data of a situation in order to make decision making and analysis faster and smarter. Instead of analyzing every single situation based on all the unique data in the moment, your brain uses patterns and assumptions. For example, if your stuck with yogurt and no spoon in the middle of a dessert, you won't need to reinvent a whole new utensil. You use yogurt systems to analyze and solve faster.
1. This is yogurt
2. System: yogurt and spoons work nicely together.
3. I have yogurt, but no spoon, how can i make a spoon?
4. Take the lid, bend it a bit so it resembles a spoon as much as possible,
5. Eat yogurt.
Without the system, it would take much longer and require more mental energy to come up with the lid-spoon idea. This is a very basic example. But systems thinking is more ubiquitous in your day than you would imagine, it's the basis of a large part of all sorts of learning. Warren Buffet and Charles Munger have identified 90 specific systems they use to make fast and reliably successful investment decisions. It's worked fairly well for them.
While systems thinking is great for a lot of things, it can also backfire in a major way. The more we use a system, the more automatic and defaulted it becomes in the mind. Systems were great for helping us to invent our way out of the stone age and tons of other things, but they can also make us close minded, out of touch with reality, and make uninformed bad decisions (the opposite of what they're meant for.) For example, defaulted systems thinking is why people are racist, or try the same solution to a problem over and over again failing every time. It's why, perhaps subconsciously without realizing, you may think that "no one really likes me" or that "I'm always going to fail." Those are ridiculous notions, but bad experiences can cause bad systems, and lots of people are dealing with bad systems and not aware of it.
You most likely have a system for seeking value in your life. If your unaware of it, it was engineered unintentionally. That doesn't necessarily mean its a bad system, but being aware of how you think makes you think better, and if you see room for improvement in your system, you can make change on purpose and with clear headed intentions.
For seeking happiness, i've come up with a system. For a long time I struggled with whether to deal with happiness through biology or emotions. I couldn't figure out if happiness was about seratonin levels, money and cars, or being one with the universe. As all polar conflicts tend to go, the answer was somewhere in the middle.
I now use a really basic system to understand why and how i feel good and bad and how to change it. There are two important and inseparable aspects of long term happiness: a thriving brain-body, and emotional fulfillment.
1. Biology
You need your biology to feel positive emotions. Your thoughts and feelings can all be boiled down to neurons firing and chemicals moving around. Any time you feel anything good or bad, its happening because of your body. No matter how happy you should be, if you can't muster up enough seratonin (oversimplification) you'll feel like depressed shit on the street.
Those days or moments when you feel bad for no reason are usually a result of some kind of wackiness in your homeostasis. And even when you can think of ten reasons to feel depressed (especially if they're broad and existential) they can be completely the result of momentary deficiencies in brain and body health. And if there is a real external reason for bad feelings, biology can make it a 1,000 times worse. Imagine the difference between a creditor hounding you for money you don't have after green tea, meditation, and a big healthy breakfast, and a creditor calling you 2/3 of your way into a meth bender (an extreme example to emphasize the point, but the concept is constantly happening on a subtler level.)
BUT, even if your buzzing on a perfect homeostasis, you can still be unhappy, especially in the long run. Thats where emotional fulfillment comes in.
2. Emotional fulfillment
You have emotional needs. Theres tons of theories on how and why they got there (evolution, culture, ideology, god, personality) and how to categorize them (maslow, psychology, love, ego, altruism, selfishness, yada yada) but what matters is that they're there and you need to fulfill them to feel happy.
The best way i've found to quickly and efficiently analyze how to fulfill those needs is best described by what this one question: "How do I feel about what i do?" (Or how will i feel or how am i feeling). Ask that question as often as possible, in reflection on future improvement and during real time decision making and try to answer with as thick and heavy honesty as possible. The better you feel about what you do the more fulfilled you'll be. Its a great way to analyze happiness because it doesn't rely on anything external or out of your control.
It can get complicated when trying to figure out if you should alter what you do or alter how you feel about it. But giving my brain this type of simple straightforward framing makes it all much less complicated, and makes the solution usually come easier and faster.
How you analyze the purpose of your life and the causes of your happiness and unhappiness matters a lot. Not because they may not be based in reality, but because it changes the systems you use to analyze your life and changes how you try to engineer it. Some see life's value in terms of god, or oneness with the universe, or seratonin levels, or family, or career, or impact, or altruism, or selfishness.
Whatever it is, you are using these terms to create systems in your mind. Systems are ways of organizing the data of a situation in order to make decision making and analysis faster and smarter. Instead of analyzing every single situation based on all the unique data in the moment, your brain uses patterns and assumptions. For example, if your stuck with yogurt and no spoon in the middle of a dessert, you won't need to reinvent a whole new utensil. You use yogurt systems to analyze and solve faster.
1. This is yogurt
2. System: yogurt and spoons work nicely together.
3. I have yogurt, but no spoon, how can i make a spoon?
4. Take the lid, bend it a bit so it resembles a spoon as much as possible,
5. Eat yogurt.
Without the system, it would take much longer and require more mental energy to come up with the lid-spoon idea. This is a very basic example. But systems thinking is more ubiquitous in your day than you would imagine, it's the basis of a large part of all sorts of learning. Warren Buffet and Charles Munger have identified 90 specific systems they use to make fast and reliably successful investment decisions. It's worked fairly well for them.
While systems thinking is great for a lot of things, it can also backfire in a major way. The more we use a system, the more automatic and defaulted it becomes in the mind. Systems were great for helping us to invent our way out of the stone age and tons of other things, but they can also make us close minded, out of touch with reality, and make uninformed bad decisions (the opposite of what they're meant for.) For example, defaulted systems thinking is why people are racist, or try the same solution to a problem over and over again failing every time. It's why, perhaps subconsciously without realizing, you may think that "no one really likes me" or that "I'm always going to fail." Those are ridiculous notions, but bad experiences can cause bad systems, and lots of people are dealing with bad systems and not aware of it.
You most likely have a system for seeking value in your life. If your unaware of it, it was engineered unintentionally. That doesn't necessarily mean its a bad system, but being aware of how you think makes you think better, and if you see room for improvement in your system, you can make change on purpose and with clear headed intentions.
For seeking happiness, i've come up with a system. For a long time I struggled with whether to deal with happiness through biology or emotions. I couldn't figure out if happiness was about seratonin levels, money and cars, or being one with the universe. As all polar conflicts tend to go, the answer was somewhere in the middle.
I now use a really basic system to understand why and how i feel good and bad and how to change it. There are two important and inseparable aspects of long term happiness: a thriving brain-body, and emotional fulfillment.
Takeaway: The more you take a balanced approach with decisions that honor both of these two aspects of happiness, optimum biology and emotional fulfillment, the faster you'll find value in your life and the better you'll be at cultivating even more.
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