Others' Advice for How to Be Happy

When people consider how they want their lives to be, they often think in terms of reaching specific milestones. They set goals like earning a certain amount of money, achieving a certain level of success at work, having a certain group of close friends, falling in love, getting married, having a spectacular wedding, having children, and being thought of as a good person. But milestones like these don’t necessarily determine how much people enjoy their lives, how high their mood is on a regular basis, or even how fulfilled they feel day-to-day.

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In other words, accomplishments are great, and you should strive for them. But you also shouldn’t expect them to benefit you that much on your typical days. But typical days are the content of most of your existence. Typical days matter most in terms of your average happiness because they are so abundant.

So in addition to thinking about the things you’d like to accomplish in your life, it can be helpful to also ask yourself:

What would my ideal, ordinary week be like?

(In the comments:)

Michael Vassar: I used to think that this was obviously the correct way to think about things, but now I’m not so sure. Happiness seems like a fairly vague abstraction, and the idea that it should be integrated over time seems far from clear to me. If you model yourself as an information flow, you might think in terms of a state to move your brain into rather than a state to hold your brain in. As a clear example of this, you definitely wouldn’t improve your on average desirable life by slowing down your subjective time by some large factor. (NW: I'm not sure what he means with this last sentence.)

When I actually look at my preferences, it seems to me that I have a lot of different subsystems that pursue different things, and no consistent standard for establishing a consistent trade-off between those sub-systems. However, pleasure, avoiding pain, happiness, avoiding suffering, etc, for my self and for others are not obviously dominant among considerations in terms of their appeal to me. Does it seem otherwise to you?

One of the most mutually beneficial states that two people can achieve is symbiogenesis, where they take such pleasure in each other’s happiness (and displeasure in each other’s unhappiness) that they start viewing each other’s interests almost as their own. The more strongly this happens, the closer the pair is to being a single, two bodied organism, working towards a common set of goals.

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Given the highly social nature of our species, and the fact that people have different skills and preferences, two people are usually better at achieving two people’s goals than one person is at achieving his own.

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To help maximize happiness and minimize risk, symbiogenesis should be a goal of ours in our romances, friendships, and familial relationships. We should try to cultivate genuine pleasure in the pleasure of those we like when they are willing to do so for us as well.

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1. Savoring week is a response to the idea that people often forget to schedule highly pleasurable activities (especially when feeling depressed), and easily fall into a habit of doing the easy, always available things that are only modestly pleasurable (e.g. TV watching). Really enjoyable experiences often take a bit of planning and effort to create.

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2. Gratitude week is inspired by the positive psychology movement and researchers like Martin Seligman, who’ve found that so called “Gratitude Visits” can have a substantially positive impact on people’s moods. The task may sound a bit daunting, but people frequently find it to be a moving experience (for all involved).

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3. Our social relationships are one of the most important drivers of our happiness, yet it’s so easy to fall into routines regarding who we spend time with. It can be helpful to step back from time to time and think about prioritizing our social relationships, so that we stay in close contact with those we most value.

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4. Sleep week has a huge impact on how we feel, yet a great many of us don’t sleep enough or don’t sleep well. For some, it’s been years since they’ve gotten as much sleep as they need for 7 consecutive nights.

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5. So much of the time in our lives is spent working, that even making a small change at work could have a large impact on total well being. Work week is designed to help you reflect on what you’re doing at work and see how you can enjoy it more.

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6. Romantic relationships are one of the largest drivers of our happiness. Our romantic partners are usually the people we spend the most time with, of anyone in our lives.