Tag: Happiness

loneliness

e.

If you are afraid of loneliness, don’t marry. — Anton Chekhov

how we talk about love

Many romance stories—from Hollywood rom-coms, Disney princess tales, and American romance novels to Japanese shoujo manga and Korean dramas—celebrate the idea that finding your life partner is a magical and effortless experience. When you meet your partner, you’ll love them at first sight. Your partner will immediately understand you and your needs, even though you have never communicated those needs before. Your partner will match you in every imaginable way and do everything for you that they can. And you will never feel lonely, ever again.

The reality, we learn, is not so rosy. It turns out that many of us take time to fall in love. It turns out that most people aren’t mind-readers, and even though your partner might be great at interpreting your body language or know your history and personality well enough that they often have a good guess for what you’re thinking, it’s just not reasonable to expect that they’ll always know your every wish. It also turns out that most people have lives of their own, and even though your partner might be there for you most of the time, they can’t always resolve your needs for you. In fact, sometimes, they might choose not to resolve your needs for you, even if they can. And sometimes, that doesn’t make them a bad or mean partner—it just makes them a person who sets boundaries and has needs of their own. It also turns out that if you are prone to feeling lonely, you will probably still feel lonely, time and again.

your needs are your own

I once walked into a management coaching session the morning after my then-partner and I had a fight. Unable to focus on work, I blubbered about the situation: essentially, my partner and I had been talking over the phone about a different upsetting issue (that I can no longer remember), and in the midst of this conversation filled with sad and negative emotions, he told me that he needed to sleep and couldn’t keep talking.

It really wasn’t an unreasonable request on his part. At the time, I lived on the west coast and he lived on the east coast, so he was actually already staying up very late to comfort me, even though he had to wake up very early for work the next day. But it still hurt me a lot that even though he knew I was hurting, he wanted to sleep more than he wanted to be with me. I felt abandoned. I felt that if he loved me more, he would stay awake and be with me. I was supposedly in a healthy relationship with the person I love, and yet I felt so alone.

It sounds like you had a need for companionship that he wasn’t able to fulfill, my coach said. It sounds like he decided to take care of his own needs, and he didn’t continue tending to yours.

I feel like if he loves me, he should put my needs before his own, I said. I know that I’m being hypocritical, because I should have put his need to sleep before my own need for companionship. But I was really hurting.

From what you’ve told me about him before, it sounds like he often does put your needs before his own, my coach said. Let me ask you: do you want him to be there for you because he wants to, or because he feels like he has to?

I feel like he should always want to be there for me because he loves me.

And yet it seems like he loves you, and he wanted to be there for you, and he needed sleep, and he decided to sleep. He tells you this, and you ask him if he would please stay up with you, and he says he’s sorry, but no, he won’t. So let’s say, at that point, you angrily demand that he stay up with you. How do you think he would feel?

Silence.

I don’t think you want him to resent you. It’s good that you communicate your needs to him, but if he can’t resolve your needs, you need to remember that your needs are your own, and that it isn’t his responsibility to resolve them. You can go to him, and he will often be happy to be there for you—to comfort you, distract you, cheer you up. But sometimes he will say no, and you will need to find another way to deal with your feelings.

people who are not our partner

There are many ways that we can feel better with self-care. But if our need is for companionship, we turn to people who are not our partner for emotional support. That’s healthy and a good thing in many cases. But it’s also probably how most emotional affairs begin—when one partner feels like they can no longer depend on the other for emotional support, and instead turns to someone else.

feeling seen

Years later. You hear a piece of music, or see a performance, or behold a work of art—that moves you deeply, to your core, that twists you up inside. What did you think? you ask your partner tentatively.

I thought it was okay, they say. Casually. As if you hadn’t just had your soul ripped out of you.

And you stare at this person you love, and you feel like there is this huge part of your inner core that they can’t see, and you wonder why they love you, and if those are the reasons for which you want to be loved.

love without boundaries

We’re taught by stories that love without boundaries is beautiful. The man who gives up everything to be with the woman he loves. The parent who sacrifices everything to support their child. The soldier who jumps on the grenade to save his comrades. And truly, it is beautiful when people care deeply. I find deep caring to be one of the most beautiful things in the world.

But it’s certainly not “healthy.”

But the beauty of love isn’t in dramatic gestures, they say. Love is beautiful in the everyday. And it’s not wrong that there is a beauty to love in the everyday. In fact, I’m a huge proponent of giving life to the stories of love in the everyday, because I think it isn’t done enough, and I think we (read: I) develop unrealistic expectations about relationships as a result. But the fact that love is beautiful in the everyday doesn’t actually prevent love from being beautiful in unhealthy, unrealistic dramatic gestures. We (read: I) still love The Notebook, not just in spite of its romantic extravagance, but also because of it.

And so there’s this tension between the beauty of deep, self-sacrificing caring—of love without boundaries—and the healthiness of taking care of ourselves.

what we want

So what does it mean, for two people to come together as partners? Are we just two separate humans who decide to experience life together because we like to fulfill each other’s needs, participate in each other’s experiences, and make joint decisions on our collective happiness? I think that’s a healthy definition—that although relationships serve merely as a salve for the loneliness of existence, the beauty of the salve is worth celebrating.

And yet, I feel like something is missing from that view of love. Perhaps it’s the unhealthy and unrealistic beauty of dramatic stories, and perhaps we shouldn’t want that—and we don’t want it, but we also do. Or perhaps it’s this sense that no matter whom we choose as our partner, we still won’t escape being alone.

value, money, and time

e.

While exploring my relationship with music this year, I’ve thought often about the alignment/misalignment of the value you create, the money you make by creating value for others, and the time you spend creating value.

In my teenage years, I was convinced that the optimal relationship among these three ideas was to specialize in creating one type of value for the world, to only choose a type of value that people would pay money for, and to spend all of your time devoted to creating that one type of value. My mother, a passionate venture capitalist, had taken such a route for her own life. She would often tell my brother and me how much she loved her work, and she encouraged us to pursue what we love and make that our life’s work.

With time and different life experiences, I’ve realized that this framework doesn’t fit the place where I currently am in life. For one, I have learned that I want to create multiple types of value – I want to do work that makes a difference, and I want to support and enjoy time with the people I love, and I like having hobbies outside of my primary work. For another, I’ve learned that value and money are not always simultaneous, and that it’s possible to create significant value without making huge profits.

In the music industry, the contrast is stark. I’ve been moved to tears time and again by powerful songs and pieces, indicating just how powerful the value of music can be, yet I candidly don’t pay for most of my music, because most of it is available for free online. (I do contribute to specific artists, but the number is few, and the bar is high.)

Nine months into this exploration, I know for sure that there is something in the space of music, stories, and people that is the value I want to create. I also know that my technical academic background and work experience is in high demand and low supply, and that using those skills is a much straighter path to supporting myself financially, at least until I grow my creative skills further. So it looks like the value I create, the money I make, and the time I spend will continue to be misaligned for awhile.

Thank you to Nick for introducing me to Dana Fonteneau’s work and perspective, which inspired me to write this post.

belonging & conformity

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According to Baumeister & Leary’s research on belonging:

  • people need constant, positive, personal interactions with other people
  • people need to know that the bond is stable, there is mutual concern, and that this attachment will continue
  • people who lack belongingness are more prone to behavioral problems such as criminality and suicide and suffer from increasing mental and physical illness…. It therefore seems appropriate to regard belongingness…as a need rather than simply a want.

Belonging is closely related to group membership, and thus with the concept of conformity. Unsurprisingly, failing to conform is an obstacle for the feeling of belonging. Whether by choice or by chance, those of us who are different from the group are less likely to feel like we belong with that group.

I haven’t stopped yearning for the psychological safety of strongly belonging to one group, but I’ve also accepted that few groups if any truly capture my essence, because I cherish my own uniqueness and the beliefs I passionately hold. Belonging comes from a few strong one-on-one relationships, and from organizations that I care for but that don’t fully define me and in which I don’t always feel like I fully belong (and that’s okay).

For me, this is what it means to be an individual. For me, this is what it means to be an independent self.

scientific approaches to striving for happiness

e.

Many of our strategies for happiness come from anecdotal evidence from our own lives or from friends’ recommendations. What happens when we apply a scientific lens to the art of striving for happiness?

Approach 1: Chemical Analysis

Scientific studies demonstrate that 1) the presence or absence of specific chemicals corresponds with different emotional states, and 2) actions can change the presence or absence of such chemicals. Based on my hacky research,* here are some actions you can take that have been shown to positively affect your happiness chemicals:

Happiness Chemicals 2.png
Made by the author with draw.io

*Researching these chemicals was more complicated than I expected. Many popular media articles reference these chemicals but don’t cite sources for their statements. I opted neither to rely on these articles, nor to do a rigorous review of the scientific literature; rather, I looked to make claims substantiated by at least one or two reasonably reputable sources, such as abstracts of peer-reviewed scientific papers or articles from well-respected scientific news outlets, to form these conclusions.

Endorphins

  • Humans knew about opium & morphine before we knew anything about endorphins. “Endorphin” is a portmanteau of “endogenous” and “morphine,” meaning morphine that originates internally.1
  • Endorphins work by binding to opioid receptors that 1) cause a cascade of interactions that inhibits the release of a key pain transmission protein, and 2) release a neurotransmitter that results in excess dopamine.2
  • Exercise is commonly linked to higher endorphin levels. Contrary to popular belief, however, endorphins are probably not responsible for “runner’s high.” Endorphins have been shown to take more than an hour to increase, and have also been shown not to cross the blood-brain barrier, making it unlikely that they are responsible for exercise euphoria.3, 4
  • Researchers suggest that laughing causes endorphins to increase because your abs get exhausted. Your body may actually be trying to lower the perceived ab pain from laughing.5
  • I already knew that eating chocolate makes me happy, but apparently it’s not just the taste – eating chocolate triggers the release of endorphins, too.6

Dopamine

  • Dopamine enhances our expectations of pleasure.7 When faced with the choice of a low-effort low-value reward vs. a high-effort high-value reward, higher dopamine levels make you more likely to choose the higher-effort and higher-value reward.8
  • Dopamine also has been shown to improve working memory and better selection of goal-directed actions (i.e. focus).9
  • Pleasurable experiences like food and sex cause dopamine hits.10 “Peak emotional moments” in music— and even the mere anticipation of those moments — also trigger dopamine release.11 You are then motivated to repeat the behaviors that led to those rewards.
  • There aren’t specific scientific studies for this, but a lot of popular media articles suggest that you can game your own dopamine systems by accomplishing smaller tasks or breaking down a large goal into small pieces in order to trigger smaller dopamine hits along the way.
  • Beware: Dopamine is addictive. Also, know that more dopamine is not by itself sufficient for more motivation; dopamine needs specifically to be increased in the reward & motivation center of your brain in order to motivate you. “Slackers” also have elevated dopamine levels, just in other areas of their brain.12 While not backed by scientific literature, my guess is that dopamine reinforces past behaviors, and you have to be careful to only reinforce the behaviors you want to keep.

Serotonin

  • Serotonin has been shown to have a bounty of positive effects: biasing people toward having more positive emotional responses to situations (rather than directly affecting mood), reducing aggression and increasing desire for cooperation and good will toward others, and engendering “a calm yet focused mental outlook.”13, 14, 15
  • Thinking of happy or successful memories, experiencing social success or high social status, exposing oneself to bright light, eating carbs, drinking alcohol non-chronically, and exercising have all been shown to boost serotonin levels.16, 17, 18
  • Popular media often seems to indicate that low serotonin levels cause depression, and that increasing serotonin levels can thus cure depression. However, this claim has not been clearly substantiated. What we do know is that impairing serotonin function can sometimes cause clinical depression, low serotonin function may impair recovery from depression, and serotonin-based drugs do bias people toward more positive emotional responses (as mentioned above).19

Oxytocin

  • Originally perceived only as a facilitating hormone for labor and breastfeeding, oxytocin has since been embraced by popular media as the “cuddle hormone.” Increased dosage of the drug has been found to increase trust in games, improve monetary generosity, improve people’s ability to infer emotional state from subtle expressions, increase time spent gazing at a face’s eye region, and make happy faces more memorable.20, 21, 22, 23, 24
  • Oxytocin appears to promote monogamy for people in monogamous relationships: it leads men in relationships to avoid approaching single women, and leads people to perceive their partner’s touch as especially pleasant while perceiving a stranger’s touch as especially diminished in quality.25, 26
  • Oxytocin may also drive conformity. People with additional oxytocin are more likely to follow a charismatic leader, and are more likely to promote the in-group over the out-group.27, 28
  • Frequently hugging your partner, orgasming, getting a massage, and petting your dog have all been shown to increase oxytocin levels.29, 30, 31, 32 Singing lessons and improvised singing have been shown to increase oxytocin levels as well.33, 34
  • Contrary to what many popular media articles say, I have found no evidence that hugging or touching someone who is not your partner increases oxytocin levels. Nor have I found any evidence that giving gifts or money will increase your oxytocin levels; I have only seen studies showing that people with high oxytocin levels are more generous. This is not to say that hugs and generous gifts are a bad idea or that they won’t make you happy, just that I have not found a peer-reviewed study demonstrating that these activities will naturally increase your oxytocin levels.

A few other chemicals that affect happiness that I won’t go into at this time: adrenaline & noradrenaline, cortisol, endocannabinoids, GABA…

Approach 2: The Scientific Method

The scientific method is the process by which humanity aims to get to an accurate representation of the world. Very briefly, the idea is that when you go about looking for answers in the world, you should 1) form a hypothesis or prediction for how the world works, 2) run experiments testing that hypothesis, and 3) analyze the results in order to draw conclusions. If your experiments aren’t conclusive, you go back to the drawing board, modify your original hypothesis, and the cycle begins again.

It turns out you can apply this to life, too. Basically, 1) write down a hypothesis about what makes you happy, 2) try doing those things, and then 3) analyze how you felt about doing them and decide whether you want to keep doing them.

This is, of course, an oversimplified approach:

  • Some things require expertise or time before becoming likable. We often like things more after we understand them or have become good at doing them, and building skill and understanding takes time. You’ll need to be thoughtful about how you set up your “experiment” to account for that.
  • This approach is also somewhat biased toward valuing in-the-moment happiness while you’re doing the work over the retrospective happiness you gain after hitting a milestone or accomplishment. Again, experiment design, particularly the length and ending conditions of the experiment, is key.
  • Finally, your preferences and values will change over time. You may not like Brussels sprouts today, but you might change your mind in five years. You might enjoy working on engaging assignments at work today, but decide in a few years that you want to do work with a stronger social impact mission, even if it’s less interesting day-to-day. There’s not much you can do here, other than allowing yourself to edit what you know about yourself as time goes by, and acknowledging that some experimental results won’t apply forever.

There will be times when we’re actively running experiments, are impatient to know the results, and need to counsel ourselves to stay the course. But if you don’t currently have a promising active experiment, instead of allowing indecision about your life direction to freeze your activity, try coming up with a possible career path you could be interested in, and figure out a way that you can validate whether you would actually enjoy having that career. Can you talk with 5 people in career x about what their days are like and what they love and hate about their work? What is a side project version of career x you can take on? You need to actually run experiments in order to learn more about yourself and the world. If you don’t know what you want, try something.

a reason for being

e.

li-pasricha-pilot2.jpg

生き甲斐 (ikigai), raison d’etre, reason to live.

I like this Euler diagram because it elucidates different types of “lack” that we might feel in what we do every day. My peers who work in the technology, finance, and professional services industries tend to speak of having “Satisfaction, but feeling of uselessness” or “Comfortable, but feeling of emptiness.” Musician friends speak of “Delight and fullness, but no wealth.”

the future: skills for success

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What skills will people need to be successful in the future?

Projects / Power

How to get something done. Intention → action → result. Personal or professional.
  • How to define a problem
  • How to solve problems
  • How to set goals and attain them
  • How to analyze data / qualitative information and understand what it says
  • How to build an inner BS-meter
  • How to take many pieces of information and synthesize them into a coherent narrative
  • How to make a decision
  • How to focus one’s attention & efforts
  • How to measure progress
  • How to evaluate success
  • How to delegate
  • Computer fluency, technical fluency
  • Ability to know when to apply technology, and in complex situations

Relationships

How to build & manage relationships, whether personal or professional
  • Start and building a trusted relationship
  • Dealing with / ending a relationship that’s changing / not working
  • How to demonstrate respect
  • How to demonstrate commitment to your words / to an idea / to a person
  • How to approach a difficult conversation
  • How to listen
  • How to understand people who are different from you — socially, culturally, etc
  • Basic social psychology
  • How to communicate your ideas effectively given an other party / audience
  • How to craft an effective narrative / story and deliver it
  • How to be a leader

Self

How to be happy and well
  • How to drive your own personal growth, growth mindset
  • How to craft a personal narrative
  • How to be self-aware, e.g. about emotions
  • Cognitive-behavioral therapy
  • Mindfulness / letting go / meditation
  • Practical ethics

the future: a best-guess summary

e.

What will the future look like? Here’s a minimal-effort (read: no research) attempt to summarize the different trends discussed by popular media that I have reason to believe will be true.

 

Digitalization

Computers will replace most repetitive jobs

Factories began automating manual labor, and future technology will automate service jobs too. Expect everything from truck-driving to elder-care to be replaced by robots and artificial intelligence paired with “big data.”

The languages that matter will be programming ones

Native languages will exist, but few people will need to learn languages other than their mother tongue; computers can do the translation for you.

All money will be digital

Goodbye physical currency.

People will have to worry about cybersecurity

Today, cybersecurity as we hear about it is primarily focused on governments and companies. Tomorrow, people will have to worry about cybersecurity of their data in the same way that they worry about the physical security of their homes.

Science

Global warming will screw us over

Yeah that’s a thing.

People will live longer

Disease will become much more rare because of genetically targeted medications + cure for cancer. As for how much longer, I don’t know.

Designer babies will be better than normal people

Social justice

Wealth inequality will increase

Urban centralization will increase

Educated people will centralize in the ~20 alpha cities where global innovators live and work. Only cities have the scale and infrastructure so that ideas, labor, and capital can move around fluidly enough to make things happen.

Less participation in government

People will find privatized ways of disseminating information and enacting change; e.g. blogs & private companies (respectively).

Stereotyping (e.g. racism) will continue

At its core, stereotypes are about noticing something different and attributing it to some reason that you can identify. Opposition to immigration will continue to pervade wealthy countries.

Female working roles will grow

Despite the fact that stereotyping will continue, women will continue to have increasingly important roles. Smart countries will take advantage of this massive potential workforce and capitalize on the economic gains.

Mind and society

Awareness of flaws will increase

As information becomes increasingly available, people will be more aware of flaws, both in other people and in products and systems that they interact with. Another consequence is that people will spend more time highly curating product/brand image and personal image for others, so that others do not perceive those flaws. On the other hand, information considered fatal to one’s image today will be less damning tomorrow. Finally, people who are able to come to terms with their own flaws and each other’s flaws will be happier.

Opportunities:

  • help people process large quantities of information for further use
  • help people curate or spend less time curating a public image/persona
  • help people build mindfulness and come to terms with flaws

Traditional marriage will decline

Many will still be married for life, but it will become more societally acceptable to have multiple relationships throughout one’s life, and to have multiple relationships at the same time.

Less participation in religion

People will rely more on mindfulness/meditation and non-deity philosophies 

Life will get lonelier

People will communicate more and more through digital means and short-form communication. (Think Snapchat.) Long-distance friendships, family relationships, and romantic relationships will increase. When in need, people will rely more often on paid services. Without as much physical connection and communication context, people will more easily feel sad and get hurt.

Opportunities:

  • create living communities in cities more similar to college dorms for people to stay connected
  • give people ways to cope with sadness and loneliness

Attention spans will decrease

People will find it hard to focus on any one thing for an extended period of time.

 

Thank you to Raymond for inspiring the exercise behind this post.