How to be happy

#cognitive-tuning

I claim that it is not terribly difficult to be happy, and that happiness is mostly something you can choose.

By "be happy," I mean something along the lines of "an enduring sense of satisfaction and peace, and a joyful relationship with your life." Don't try and analytic philosophy me please; linguistic exactness tends to come at the cost of meaning and usefulness, like how precision in measuring position comes at the cost of precision in measuring velocity.¹

This post is built around gratitude. If you learn one thing from this post, it should be that gratitude is stupidly powerful. It sounds kind of dumb, but it works unbelievably well. Consistent gratitude = persisting sense of well-being, satisfaction, joy; happiness.

However, there are a bunch of other things that I think are really important too — gratitude is powerful all other things being equal, but (at least in my experience) there are lots of other things that are important to cultivate/deal with in addition to, on top of and underneath, gratitude, that magnify and integrate with it.

Basically, this post is an attempt to distill everything that I've learned about how to be happy.

Epistemic status: I'm overall usually happy, and often have spikes of great joy over minor things. I feel a sense of lightness pretty consistently; this wasn't the case ~a year to six months ago, and was not the case for most of my life preceding that — at least, it was never as consistent and never reached the levels of joy that I do now. These are (what I think are) the things that I have come to understand in the past year that caused this change to happen.

Anyway, here's how to be happy:

I.

Take care of your basic needs. Sleep enough and at a consistent time; eat food that makes you feel well-nourished at a consistent time; drink enough water; wear clothes that you feel comfortable in; get consistent sunlight and exercise. Live in a place that you feel safe.

These "basic needs" are technically not necessary to be happy in my experience — I can still access happiness when I'm starving or very tired, sometimes — but they make it much, much easier.

As a disclaimer, basic needs require security and wealth to be consistently fulfilled — a certain amount of privilege is required to even have the space in your life, the mental energy, to expend effort on your thoughts.² You may not always have this luxury; we live at an unprecedentedly good time in human history, but the world still sucks in many ways, and it is mostly not within our control. Do the best that you can.

II.

Listen to cues from your body for higher-order/emotional needs. Generally your body will give you signals about what it needs. Some of these are easy to interpret, especially those related to more fundamental/simple needs (e.g. "I am hungry" or "I am tired" or "I feel trapped in this house, I want to get outside") — but some are more difficult to interpret.

The mind is a weird place and sometimes things that seem to be about one thing are actually about something else (e.g. "I feel really resentful about having to go to work tomorrow" might actually be "I am exhausted; tomorrow I will likely feel differently, especially if I get extra rest tonight"). If you practice paying attention to how you feel, physically and emotionally, you'll learn patterns and get better at figuring out what experiences arise from what underlying causes.

But even if you're new to this idea, a little bit of attentiveness (and action, if needed) can go a long way to making things easier for you to be happy. If you notice you're subtly uncomfortable while you're trying to work, it might be time to take a break — if the cognitive discomfort persists, it might be that attempting to multitask makes you uncomfortable, and you should just do one thing at a time, or maybe it's literally just that you have an uncomfortable chair. Attempt to approach yourself with curiosity.

In my experience, many times things that seem like higher-order signals are actually just the rippling effects of unsatisfied lower-order needs.³ For example, if I feel intensely emotional, first I check if my basic needs are met — often I'm tired or hungry and satisfying those needs mostly makes me feel better — and if those needs are met, then I investigate further.

There's a common concept across... emotionally intelligent people (??) which can be framed in one way as "emotions make sense" — this is a special sub-case of the general "your body gives you signals for what it needs," but it's so helpful it's worth giving special emphasis.

Emotions are signals — you don't need to fight with them or reject them. Doing so will probably make your life worse. Rather — to reiterate — approach them with playful curiosity, and without judgment. When you notice you are feeling a certain way, you can just think, "hmm, I feel melancholy right now," or "wow, I'm really getting irritated about this situation." This verbal acknowledgement can give you a little bit of space to breathe, a little distance from your emotions; after all, you're experiencing your emotions, but they're not you.

We often (at least, in the pop culture/broad society I grew up in) treat "negative" emotions as bad, undesirable, worth getting rid of or suppressing. Anger is bad, sadness is bad, we don't want to experience these things — "oh no, I feel sad, I need to do something about it so I don't feel sad anymore." When you recognize that emotions are signals, not just arbitrary things happening to you, you can recognize even negative-valence emotions as useful and worth experiencing.⁴ You can notice that you're feeling sad, and just accept that! You can just, feel sad. That's totally fine. You can hold two things in hand at once — you can simultaneously experience great grief that someone you love has died, but also be grateful for the life they lived, and the impact they had on you. (See letting-be below)

When you're ready, come back to those emotions and consider their meaning.

Jealousy might be a signal of something that you intensely want, something that you value — or, even more importantly, a signpost indicating where your own insecurities lie.⁵

Anger might tell you that you're feeling like your values have been disregarded, and e.g. clear communication about those values might be enough to resolve it. On the flip side, anger or hatred can be useful — they can motivate you to protect things that you care about.

Fear might tell you that something inside you feels like there's risk in the thing you're afraid of doing; identifying what that risk actually is might help you recognize that, actually, it's not that scary at all! (This might not actually remove the fear — but knowing that your fear is in a sense 'accounted for' might make it easier to exist with it and still do the thing that you're afraid of doing, since often scary things are highly valuable in the long-run.)

Stress often indicates that you care a lot about the thing you're stressed about. Longing indicates that there's something you care about that's missing. A sense of inadequacy indicates places you want to improve. Guilt indicates that there is a lesson that you need to learn, that you need to self-correct.⁶

I would love to keep going, but this is not the most important point I want to make here.

The main ideas: emotions, along with other sensations and experiences, are signals from your body. They are good to have. They don't need to be fought; they make sense, i.e. they are 'logical' in the sense that they are not arbitrary, they correspond to things of importance within you — though sometimes it can be harder to "make sense of them" than usual.

You don't always need to try and make sense of them; often it is enough just to give them gentle attention. An approach characterized by curiosity will be effective here. The better your toolbox for engaging with your emotions, the easier it will be to cultivate happiness.

III.

Tune your cognition so you can just be happier. This is not just doing one thing; mixing multiple techniques is worthwhile, and you'll need to adjust things as they uniquely need to be adjusted for you. Nevertheless, these are what I think the core of "cultivating happiness" is.

Now that we've established a baseline of life being pretty good — you're safe, healthy, and reasonably attuned with body and emotions — it'll be easier to make this work. (Though remember, you don't have to have a perfect life to be happy — a well-balanced life probably makes it easier, but the whole point is being happy with an 'imperfect' life.)

There are 2 core things I think you need: Gratitude and letting-be.

Gratitude is the first and most powerful thing. If there was one thing you left this post having learned, it would be that gratitude is stupidly powerful. Everyone says this and nonetheless does not practice gratitude, for various reasons, none of which are particularly satisfying — especially not, "I don't do gratitude because the vibes are wrong or something, like it feels like something that only people who spend all their time scrapbooking and practicing dumb pseudo-mindfulness productivity blogger things and watching rate my morning routine tiktok videos do."⁷

I say this as a deliberate point to my younger self, who felt approximately like this (albeit not really consciously) — for me, at least, I think the practice of gratitude had associations with 'a certain kind of person' that I was not, and it turned me away from it.

Until I started doing it and it made my life way better. Crazy how that works!

All you need to do is write down things you're grateful for, and it's free happiness. It's that simple. Here's an example of me doing it right now:

I'm grateful for:

• the peaceful foggy night outside my window
• the well-designed laptop i'm writing this blog post on; the fact that i have the economic means to be able to own it
• the little plants that are on the living room table
• the fact that I have a blanket on my legs (warm), and that I can literally just buy a blanket from basically anywhere in the world at any time I want because of international trade
• the quiet ticking of the clock next to me, it's kind of a cool noise. also, if you want to be annoying, it's a nice reminder of my own mortality — the infinite value of time.
• the stack of books on the table. i have so many books. this is awesome.
• also i can access BASICALLY ANY BOOK IN THE WORLD online. how did i get born into a world with the internet? it's so not-obvious that I should be born at this exact time in this exact location, to benefit from the thousands of years of history and hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that has brought humanity to this point
• i'm grateful for gpt-4. i'm not using it right now but on the topic of tech, like this model basically knows all the things, or at least can help point me in the right direction for ~anything

Hopefully the aesthetics of that example didn't turn you off from gratitude. (Maybe you don't like international trade) If so, that's actually fine. If the aesthetics sort of did turn you off, or even if they didn't, just replace all those things that I wrote with things that you like better and are personally grateful for.

Haha! Got you! You just practiced gratitude. Now you can't stop. It's an infinite supply of free happiness. Do it a bunch more. Become happy.

My best guess at how this works is that the brain generates ~happiness/reinforcement from positive suprise, and ~unhappiness/punishment from negative surprise. (This is the basic idea of Carl Friston's theory of the mind, based on the free energy principle. For more info, look into Carl Friston, surprisal minimization, free energy principle. I don't know if these models are correct, but they seem useful even if they're wrong — notably, they seem to converge well with, play nice with, the useful/practical Buddhist models.)

By practicing gratitude, you recognize how insanely surprising it is that things are as good as they are (even if they also sort of suck — remember, holding multiple things in hand at once). This stream of positive surprisal,⁸ if you practice consistently, can sort of stick — you start to live in a general state of childlike joy; you don't hedonically adapt to it (at least, I haven't. Sorry I'm not a happiness guru).

The second thing that I think is really important is harder to convey. It's an anti-meme. I'll do my best, though.

Above, I repeatedly mentioned the idea of "holding multiple things in hand at once"; the idea of acknowledging and accepting, coexisting with emotions without needing to change them — this is what I mean by letting-be. You experience things — whether they are perceptions of the outside world, or whether they are your own emotions or bodily signals — and see them as they are, with no need to change them.

In fact, you adjust your expectations of your experiences, and by extension the world, to be exactly what they are.

(We're now sort of reaching the woo/spirituality/jhanabro/butchering deep and nuanced traditions zone; sorry in advance, but I think I'd rather butcher the traditions and get something somewhat right — introduce you to some really, really important ideas if you're not already familiar with them — than say nothing at all. Kill not the part of you that is cringe, kill the part that cringes.)

There's a Buddhist framing of this, a Stoic one, a formal cognitive one, a Christian one, and basically a million others; pick whichever one you prefer. (There's also a Taoist version of this I think, but I can't remember enough particulars to make that reference useful.)

Something like:

Universe, your harmony is my harmony. Anything that comes in your good time is neither too early nor too late for me. Nature, all that your seasons bring is fruit to me. Everything comes from you, exists in you, and returns to you. (Meditations, Ch. 4)

This can be the idea of Amor Fati: Love fate. There is no other world; love the one you are in. Do not wish for something else, because there is nothing else.

You can think of it as, "suffering is pain times resistance": pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice; you choose to suffer when you wish that things were otherwise, when you resist the fate that the world has brought onto you.

The Buddhist framing is something like (to once again butcher tradition), "there is dukkha — suffering, pain, sorrow, but also impermanence, emptiness, insubstantiality — and its cause is tanha, craving, or desire — thirst, attachment, clinging to transient things, that leads to suffering. The cessation of suffering can happen if you relinquish this craving/desire, this tanha⁹ — letting go of your hold on how you want the world to be, how you expect it to be.

The formal cognitive model of this would be something like: if pain is caused by negative surprisal — which itself is a mismatch between how you expect/desire things to be (when I introspect, I realize that these things are sorta the same thing) and how things actually are — you can have no suffering if you, just, stop expecting things of the world. You let the world be as it is. You approach it with gentleness, hold onto it only lightly.

The Christian model of this is that of unconditional love — loving others despite their imperfections, loving the world despite what it does to you.

All of these have their own doctrinal peculiarities, and I'm being deliberately imprecise here because I want to make this point. I'm throwing a bunch of things at the wall because this is sort of an anti-meme, and I'm hoping one of them will have enough pull to make the idea click — or that seeing all these different framings might be enough to expose the bare flesh of the truth that lies underneath them.

Love, accept, choose the world as it is; expect nothing of it, relinquish your craving, love despite it all — not romantic love, something weirder and probably more fundamental. Love people only as they are; do not try to change them, but help them if they wish to change for the better.

To be clear, this is not saying that you should have no agency — it is saying that when things have already happened, you can only move forward, not backward. Resisting what has happened in the past only drags you back. Make the world better, but do not expect it to change — do what you can and leave the rest to fate, or God, or the sort-of deterministic path of the Universe, or whatever you want to call the general class of things that happen in the world, I mostly don't have a preference. Whatever idio-spirituality¹⁰ works for you is probably fine.

When you have this base idea internalized, you see it everywhere. It is in a healthy approach to emotions. It is in a healthy approach to relationships. It is in being happy. (I also claim that you can experience approximately no status anxiety if you want, but that's a blog post for another day.)

Anyway, these two things together — bringing up your baseline happiness with practiced gratitude, becoming light and peaceful by letting-be or whatever — on top of having a baseline of met needs, is the bulk of how I am happy, and how I think people in general can be happy.

Hopefully I'll get better at articulating these things with time and practice — but as it is, I think these things are important enough and useful enough that a quite imperfect articulation of them is worth sending out to the world.

There are a bunch of other threads that I'm leaving here — this post is already long. Also, I expect to significantly revise this over time as I become wiser.

Appendix: Unexplored threads

• Falling in love can make happiness much, much easier (if you have a healthy relationship with the person you are in love with) as well as much, much harder (if your love is unrequited or your relationship is unhealthy/unstable)
• A sense of progress/self-efficacy is important to well-being, I think
• A willingness to engage with spirituality, an openness to non-rational ways of approaching the world, is probably needed for the second one to really viscerally connect.
• Personal meaning: I think personal meaning arises not from a systematized value system, but from lots of examples — basically, you follow your values, and then you understand meaning via induction. So just do things that are aligned with your values or something.
• There's a lot more interesting stuff about formal cognitive models I'd like to write more about
• I mentioned the concept of an "anti-meme" — need to write something about that as well

Footnotes