Others' Advice for How to Be Happy

• In his latest book, Joy on Demand, the Google veteran describes his path from someone who was “constantly miserable” to a much happier guy. How did he get there? Sometime in his mid-20s, he discovered that he wasn’t stuck with self-loathing; temperament, he found, is malleable.

  Successfully reshaping your mindset, he argues, has less to do with hours of therapy and more to do with mental exercises, including one that helps you recognize “thin slices of joy.”

  “Right now, I’m a little thirsty, so I will drink a bit of water. And when I do that, I experience a thin slice of joy both in space and time,” he told CBC News. “It’s not like ‘Yay!”” he notes in Joy on Demand. “It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s kind of nice.’”

  Usually these events are unremarkable: a bite of food, the sensation of stepping from a hot room to an air-conditioned room, the moment of connection in receiving a text from an old friend. Although they last two or three seconds, the moments add up, and the more you notice joy, the more you will experience joy, Tan argues.

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  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?

  Ideal, in the sense that it would reflect a life that would make you happy (both helping you maintain a significantly positive average mood, keeping you feeling fulfilled, and including meaningful connections). Ordinary, in the sense that it is the sort of thing that you could actually repeat week after week for years. So base jumping is out, unless you don’t plan on surviving for very long. Eating $200 tasting menus every night is out, unless you plan on making a large sum of money first (and anyway, they would quickly become boring). And going on a roller coaster every week is out, because after six months of that most of the thrill would be gone (unless you are truly a roller coaster aficionado). To construct your ideal ordinary week, it may help to ask yourself questions like:

  • What living situation would help keep me in a good mood?
  • What activities give me a sense of fulfillment or purpose?
  • What excites me that would still excite me if I did it weekly for years?
  • What job would fit into this ideal week, providing the income to support this lifestyle while simultaneously adding to my positive mood and good feeling about life?

  Don’t think in terms of achieving certain milestones, but rather in terms of how the hours in the week are spent. You can fill in these details about your ideal ordinary week with questions like:

  • How much time would you spend watching TV per day? It may not be zero minutes, but your happiness is probably not maximized by watching more than an hour either.
  • How much time would you spend reading or learning per day? What would you learn about and how would you go about learning it?
  • How much time would you spend socializing? What sorts of people would you socialize with?
  • How much time would you spend on hobbies? What might these hobbies be (making sure to choose things that wouldn’t grow boring over the years)?
  • How much time would you spend doing altruistic things (keeping in mind that altruism increases both our sense of fulfillment and raises our mood, in addition to its direct benefits on the world)? Who would you be helping in this time?
  • How many hours would you spend at work (keeping in mind that this job must support the lifestyle of your ideal week plus give you sufficient savings)? What would you want your hours spent at work to be like (being realistic about what you could get paid to do)? What sort of tasks would you be doing and what sort of people would you be working with that would be good for you, week to week?
  • What would your romantic life be like? How would time with a romantic partner be spent?

  Once you have determined what your ideal ordinary week would be like, consider how you can nudge your current life in that direction. What are you doing more of than would be your ideal, and what are you doing less of? Can you cut back on the former and increase the latter?

•  One of the comments...

  (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?

2011.09.10 - Spencer Greenberg - Human Symbiogenesis

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  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.

•  Click here to read some highlights...

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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.