The Need for Meaning

I’ve often heard it said that to be truly happy you need to be a part of something bigger than yourself. In other words, limitless leisure and pleasure don’t necessarily lead to the ideal life. Those who have adopted this belief into their life philosophy try to find something more meaningful to give their life a feeling of purpose. Oftentimes pursuing meaningful work requires sacrifices of time and money that are never made up for in kind. Some individuals are even led into celibacy or death in their pursuit of meaning. It makes one wonder how evolution could have favored a gene that produces this kind of behavior.

To understand the evolutionary function of the need for meaning, we must first examine the things that we find meaningful. People seem to find meaning in things like: making the world a better place, saving lives, helping the poor, producing a great work of art, discovering a cure for cancer, and so on. People will also say that they find meaning in taking care of their family, but that is easy to understand evolutionarily and can be categorized as a separate type of meaning. Right now we want to understand the type of meaning that does not have a direct connection to replication. If we were to summarize all of these non-family related types of meaning in one sentence, we could say that meaning is achieved by contributing to the community by helping or influencing a large number of other people. Of course there are exceptions to this general statement. Some people just want to help animals, but that could be explained as a “misfiring” of a gene that primarily targeted humans as the recipients of aid. Or it could be that they have a hidden hope that by helping animals they can earn the praise of other people. It’s possible that this definition of meaning is incomplete, but it is surely a good approximation to the truth.

Now let’s put this meaning-gene to the test in a hypothetical hunter-gatherer tribe of about 100 people. Those who have the gene would become the tribal priests, craftsmen, and witchdoctors as a result of their perpetual desire to help others. Those without the gene would tend to mind their own business and focus on their personal matters like food and close relationships. At first glance it seems that the extra time to focus on one’s own problems would be advantageous. But humans are social creatures so the situation becomes more complex.

In a social group, individuals often look to others for advice on what to do. Sheep are famous for this because of their herding instinct. Humans don’t herd like sheep, but we still use the reactions of others to judge things like the danger of a situation or the character of a tribe-member. This causes a circular feedback loop that can produce group polarization for or against something. If the tribe becomes polarized against a particular individual, that individual could face ostracism, expulsion, or execution. All of these would likely bring about the end of that individual’s genetic lineage. Even if they already had children, those children would be much less likely to survive without a father in good standing within the tribe.

Now consider the effect of the meaning-gene. Those with the meaning gene are integral members of the community. The whole tribe relies on their skills and services. Those without the meaning-gene are only valued by a minority of the tribe. It would take a much bigger stimulus to cause the tribe to polarize against a tribe-member who has the meaning-gene. So if the loss in practical efficiency isn’t too large, possessing the meaning-gene could be an evolutionary advantage. So perhaps the need for meaning is just our genes’ way of telling us to integrate tightly into our community so that we decrease the chance of ostracism, expulsion, and execution.

My Extreme Multivitamin Case Study

My experience with multivitamin supplements dates back to the days when I ran track in high school. Before I started taking supplements, my performance fluctuated wildly–on some days I would have no endurance and on other days I would feel great. At one point my coach recommended that I try a multivitamin supplement. After I started taking them, my endurance seemed to become more stable, though not infallible. The effect seemed clear enough to me, so I continued taking a daily multivitamin every day for the next several years.

My belief in the effect of the vitamins was reinforced by the fact that whenever I forgot to take them for a few days, my endurance dropped significantly. Taking them didn’t guarantee good performance, but not taking them seemed to guarantee bad performance. Of course everyone was quick to cite the placebo effect, but I can assure you that I was pushing the physical limits of my muscles-it definitely wasn’t because of laziness.

Fast-forward to one year ago. After reading five books about nutrition and designing a new diet based on what I learned, I decided that I didn’t need to take multivitamin supplements anymore. The attitude of many nutrition experts was that vitamin supplements only help when there is a deficiency, which shouldn’t happen if you have a reasonably healthy diet. Some books I read even claimed that there was no solid evidence that multivitamin supplements have any benefits for healthy individuals, while warning of the possibility that excess fat-soluble vitamins might cause major problems. It seemed the safest bet was to just stick with healthy foods and forget about all the supplements.

Four days ago, I started taking One-A-Day Men’s Health Formula multivitamins because I was concerned about vitamin D, considering that I don’t spend much time in direct sunlight and that is how vitamin D is usually produced. I didn’t expect to see any effects. It made sense that I benefited from vitamins in high school when my diet was terrible, but now my diet is full of a wide variety of powerful nutrient sources, so it didn’t seem likely that I had any deficiencies.

So when I got in the pool to do my typical swimming workout yesterday, I didn’t think about the vitamins at all. In the past few months I did about a dozen swimming workouts-not too many because it’s an outdoor pool and it’s winter. Each time I swam as far as I could at the beginning, then rested and did a few more laps with a rest in between each lap. Since this is an Olympic size pool, 50 meters in length, each lap is 100 meters. Every time I tried, I was exhausted and on the verge of drowning after 2 laps. Then after resting for a couple minutes I would do three more laps with a break in between each for a total of 5 laps. By this time I would be too tired to continue. But yesterday, after I hit the 2 lap mark I didn’t feel very tired so I thought maybe it could be the first time I ever hit the 3 lap barrier. And I did, but I still didn’t feel too bad, so I went for a fourth. When I finished the fourth lap and still wasn’t tired I started to wonder what was going on. I felt like I wasn’t any more tired than at the end of the second lap. I was breathing heavy, but there was hardly any fatigue. That’s when I remembered that I had recently started taking vitamins. It was the only explanation. I was really curious to see how much of an effect they would have, so I kept going. By the time I got tired, I had broken my previous swimming endurance record of 2 laps by a factor of 10! I swam 20 laps for a total distance of 2 kilometers during 55 minutes of continuous swimming. After this, I’m totally convinced that there is something missing in my seemingly diverse and healthy diet.

The Mobile Lifestyle Project: Can you carry everything you need to live well?

Six months ago I was living in San Diego. I had been working at a tech company doing a programming internship in the research and development department for a project based on augmented reality. Things were going well and I was considering staying for a full-time job. Then I found out the company I was working for had placed a freeze on hiring due to economic circumstances. I wasn’t going to be able to stay. That’s when I realized that my life was too volatile to carry around a bunch of stuff that I rarely use. The luxuries provided by most of my personal possessions just weren’t that necessary. It was nice to have them, but not if they put constraints on my lifestyle. At that time, I needed flexibility more than minor comforts and conveniences. So I decided to put my stuff into storage and move back to LA with just what I could carry.

After locking my storage compartment, I returned to my apartment where I had left two duffel bags, a backpack, a laptop case, and a bicycle. I had planned my move meticulously and now I was ready to see if it would all work. I called for a van cab to take me to the train station and waited outside. It showed up 15 minutes later and the driver helped me squeeze my bike in on top of the duffel bags in the back.

During the ride to the train station, the cab driver made some friendly conversation. He seemed more playful than your typical cab driver, like everything was a big joke. But there was also a bit of cynicism in his voice. He seemed rather polite, so I was a bit surprised when somebody cut him off and his calm demeanor instantly erupted into a roaring “This cocksucker’s gonna piss me off!! Ahem, pardon me.” Our conversation continued and he started telling me about his past. At one point he had been a successful lawyer in Phoenix with a wife and a passion for triathalons. One day he was riding his bike, with his helmet on, and he hit a rock on the bike path. He went flying through the air, landed on his head, and cracked his helmet in half. He woke up in the hospital with permanent brain damage. When he tried to resume his law practice, he realized that it gave him severe migraines. So now he’s a taxi driver, and divorced. He’s tried several times to commit suicide. Once he dropped a curling iron in the bathtub, but the shock launched him right out.

Even after I paid him, he offered to wait and watch my bike for me while I dragged my bags into the train station. But I had that figured out already–I just locked it to a street sign, so we said farewell. At the Amtrak station, one of my bags was overweight, so the attendant gave me a free cardboard box to put some stuff in. When it was time to board, the attendants sent me to the front of the line so I could put my bike in the racks. I was the first person on the train just because I brought my bike, at no additional cost, still just $29.

The train ride was relaxing and I was surprised at how busy it was. For most of the ride the train was packed and lots of people were standing in the aisles. Out the windows, there were some nice ocean views, but most of the ride was through industrial wasteland.

After arriving at the train station in LA, I rigged up my makeshift trailer. I had attached cable ties to the bottom of the duffel bags, which I locked together with small padlocks. The bags were also tied together with a bungee cord on top and then suspended from the rack on the back of my bike. I had to ask two station workers on break for some help holding my bike steady. They seemed annoyed with my silly contraption. I was thinking to myself, “Come on, how can you not think this is hilarious?”

Then I took off to the bus stop as fast as I could go with over 100 pounds dragging behind me, which was about the speed of a casual walk. Some hippie guy ran up to me all excited, “Woah, this is awesome, I love making stuff like this! Is it designed for that?? Here, let me adjust this for you!” He picked up a strap that was dragging but I didn’t stop because I was afraid I would fall over.

I pulled out into the streets of downtown LA, blocking the right hand lane of traffic going 2 mph. After riding for about 10 minutes I realized I must have taken a wrong turn. I yelled from the street to ask some people near a bus stop for directions because I couldn’t get onto the sidewalk. They all just stared at me. In all likelihood none of them spoke English. Someone crossing the street told me I was going the wrong direction entirely, so I tried to turn around. Unfortunately, I turned a little too fast and my whole trailer fell apart in the middle of the street. I didn’t want to think about what was going on in the minds of the dozens of people who were watching me then. I dragged the wreck onto the sidewalk and did some quick repairs. Then I headed back toward the bus stop.

When I got to the proper intersection, I couldn’t see the stop. I asked an old lady and she told me it was straight ahead, up a steep slope. I knew I couldn’t pedal up that, so I dismantled the trailer. The old lady saw I was struggling, so she helped me across the street, dragging my 50lb rolling duffel bag. I thought to myself, “Aren’t men supposed to help old ladies across the street and not the other way around?”

When the bus came, I raced to load all my luggage into the aisle and my bike onto the rack. When I finished, I realized I had forgotten to leave any one dollar bills in my wallet. Nobody had change for a five, but a woman handed me a single. She probably felt sorry for me. I thanked her sincerely and took my seat. A few minutes later, I remembered I had some extra cash in my backpack, so I dug out a single and returned it to the woman. She tried to refuse, but I left it on her purse.

At the end of the line, I got off the bus and reassembled the trailer. I was getting good at it now. I rode across the village to my new apartment and arrived with a feeling of accomplishment. It was a tough job, but it showed how things can work out well sometimes. For the last six months I have been living with just the contents of those bags, and I’ve hardly missed anything I left in storage. Here is what I have.

Bag 1, Bottom: 3 Pairs of Jeans 5 Dress Shirts 3 Hooded Sweatshirts Leather Belt Bag 1, Top: Coleman Twin Air Mattress and Pump Spare batteries for mattress pump Fleece Blanket Bedsheets 2 Tek Towels Cosmetics Kit Windbreaker Winter Jacket Chess Board Bag 1, Side: 12 Pairs of Socks 1 Pair dress socks 1 Pair soccer socks 1 Pair leather gloves 1 Pair biking gloves Backpack, Outer compartment Passport Wallet for emergency cash Checkbook Extra checks Cell phone charger Contact lens case Contact cleaning solution Spare contacts Glasses in case Sunglasses in case Swimming Goggles Sunblock Facial Sunblock Sleep mask Earmuffs Pencil case containing pens and pencils 9in flexible ruler Extension Cable Bag of heavy duty cable ties Backpack, Main Compartment Laptop in carrying case Power supply for laptop Mouse 15ft Ethernet cable Zipper Portfolio with important documents Clipboard 2 Books Backpack, Outside Bike helmet clipped to handle Wear Full outfit of clothes Cell phone Wallet Watch Key chain with USB drive Superfeet Insoles Other Bike with U-Lock, rack with grocery baskets, zipper pouch, LED headlamp Bungee cord to hold up bags Two Pillows on the outsides of the bags Lunchbox with DVDs and video games inside

Bag 2, Bottom: Khaki Shorts Board Shorts Rash guard Swimming Trunks Speedo Swimsuit 7 Graphic Tees 8 Undershirts 7 Athletic Tees 5 Athletic Shorts Bag 2, Side: 10 Pairs Boxers Bag 2, Top: Soccer cleats Shin guards Tennis Racket 3-Pack of Tennis Balls Racketball Theraband Beach Sandals Bathroom Sandals Hat 2 Maps 2 CD Cases (12 CDs each) Incense and Holder Knife Rack: 3 Knives, 1 Pair of Kitchen Scissors Cutting Board Large Plate Frying Pan Large Pot Salad Bowl Collander Sauce Pan with Lid Microwavable Sauce Pan with Lid Plastic Bowl Oven Mitt 4 butter knives, 4 big forks, 4 small forks, 4 big spoons, 4 small spoons, and vegetable peeler Mug Ladle Spatula Can Opener Half-cup Measuring Cup Glasslock container full of electronics and gear: Digital camera in carrying case, Camera cable, Camera charger, Spare battery for camera, iPod, iPod cable, Headphones, Extra MP3 player, USB Drive for Backups, Cellphone headset adapter, MicroSD to USB Adapter, MicroSD to SD Adapter, 3.5mm to RCA Audio cable, 3.5mm M-M Audio Cable, Headphone adapter, Headband, Wristband, Wallet Chain Glasslock container full of office supplies and misc: Stapler, Staple remover, Box of staples, Scissors, Scotch tape, Large and small post-it note pads, Rarely used wallet cards, LED Headlamp, Scripto Safety Lighter, Hex wrench, Badge clip, Keys to storage lock, Extra keys for bike lock, 5 Small Locks with keys Buy each move Bathroom Supplies Laundry Detergent Water Filter

Six months in, everything is going well and I have no plans to move my stuff out of storage.

The Problem with Goals

Conventional wisdom tells us that we should strive to be goal-oriented, and to most of us this sounds like good advice. There are things we want and setting up goals will keep our efforts focused on achieving those things. It’s true that goals will help you focus your efforts and thus aid you in attaining what you want, but that is also the problem with goals: they keep you focused on some target in the future. Now I’m definitely not trying to say that you should disregard the future, not at all. But if you spend a lot of time focused on the future, you automatically become attached to expectations about the future and the results of your efforts, which is likely to generate mental anguish at some point when things don’t work exactly as planned.

First of all, what do I mean by an attachment? An attachment refers to that portion of one’s mental configuration that causes one to experience mental pleasure or pain corresponding to one’s success or failure in some aspect of life. So if you are attached to making money, then you feel mental pleasure when you get more money and feel mental pain when you lose money. Attachments often end up causing problems because of what’s called negativity bias: you feel more pain for a given loss than pleasure for an equivalent gain. And what is worse is that we don’t have direct control over the attachment formation process. It happens automatically when we make conscious efforts and plan for the future.

The only solution is to avoid thinking about the future so much, but how is that possible without abandoning our desires? The solution is to establish principles and have confidence in their ability to steer your life in the right direction. The key idea here is that you only have to do a small amount of planning to get yourself on the right course, then let autopilot take over while you live in the moment.

For example, I have the principle of never drinking alcohol. So when I go to a bar, I never have to analyze if I should drink or how much I should drink, which would be contingent upon what I have to do the next day, who is driving back, if I can handle the extra calories, what people will think about me, and so on. It can be a complex decision, and making the wrong choice either way can make you feel bad the next day. For example, if you have to go to work hungover or if you did not drink and missed out on meeting someone because of it. I never have such regrets because drinking is not even a choice in my life.

This same concept can be applied to many other examples, such as the common one of saving money. Let’s say you really want to be able to travel abroad once a year. You can establish the principle that your job must pay enough to support this habit, assuming this is realistic. Then you will never be tempted by the job that seems a bit more fun, but pays less - it’s just not a financially viable option. Then you use direct deposit to have a portion of your paycheck go into a vacation account that is hidden from your sight and difficult to access. That way you don’t have to stress about how much you get to spend, as long as you follow the principle of never touching the vacation account except for use on vacations.

Of course the hard part is truly convincing yourself of your principles. If you are not fully convinced, then doubt will creep in, forcing you to re-evaluate your principles often, which constitutes further planning. That is where philosophy comes in. Philosophy takes you through all the concepts needed to make these decisions wisely. But most of all, philosophy helps you get past the fear of making a mistake in your planning, which stems from an attachment to life-quality maximization. A good philosophy will detach you from life-quality maximization so that you can see clearly that “getting the wrong answer” is not the same as making a mistake in a forced-choice paradigm. If there is no way to deduce the best option, as is often the case, then you shouldn’t think of your decision as a mistake even if it turns out poorly. The best that you can do is tweak your principles as new information comes in.

Is it possible to make mistakes that could have been prevented by active planning? I suspect so, but I think it is rather unlikely that they will be grave enough to outweigh the costs of active planning. Most probably, active planning will buy you some small extra pleasures at the cost of a big attachment liability. The reason the extra pleasures are relatively small is due to pyschology. Once our fundamental physical and psychological needs are met, additional benefits provide little additional happiness. Principles generally suffice for attaining these needs. Beyond these fundamental needs, the biggest hindrance to happiness comes from our own internal mental problems, which are only exacerbated by active planning through the attachment formation process. Continually churning on your dilemmas, as in the case of goal-oriented behavior, is not likely to get you much further, but it is likely to cause more problems for you.

The Paradox of Hedonism

Human motivation is governed by two genetically-programmed features: the pleasure/pain mechanism and the illusion of ego-persistence.  The pleasure/pain mechanism is here to be understood in the broad sense of the “pleasantness”, positive or negative, of present experience. The illusion of ego-persistence is the programmed assumption that we have to be concerned about the future experiences of our body, despite the fact that there is no objective evidence that we are the same person we were yesterday. [Zen and Ego Persistence] These factors conspire to produce a natural morality known as rational hedonism. Hedonism means that the morality is based on the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, while the qualifier “rational” means that one’s course of action should be decided based on forecasting that takes into account future pleasure and pain.

To say that this is the natural morality of humans does not necessarily mean that all humans operate according to this morality. It is possible for the hedonizing process to be skewed by what Richard Dawkins would call a memetic infection, which is a belief that plants itself in a person’s mind and spreads among a population like a gene undergoing natural selection. Such a memetic infection might convince a person that certain courses of action are absolutely unacceptable. Then when a situation arises where they would have wanted to take the course of action if it weren’t for the infection, they won’t even take the opportunity to consider it. Thus the person can no longer act properly hedonistic. There is also the separate issue of distorted hedonism, where a memetic infection such as religion can cause a person to believe their ego-persistence will continue past the point of death. In this case, the person is still acting hedonistically, but using a distorted frame of reference.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines two terms with regard to hedonism, “Motivational hedonism is the claim that only pleasure or pain motivates us. … Normative hedonism is the claim that all and only pleasure has worth or value, and all and only pain has disvalue.” Both of these claims have been disputed, but it seems clear to me that both are true, as long as the concern for future pleasure and pain is among the implicit assumptions.

As mentioned above, I believe the confusion over motivational hedonism derives from the existence of mental blocks due to memetic infections. If these are accounted for, then it becomes clear that people don’t always act according to their motivations, and thus the apparently missing motivations are seen to be unnecessary.

As for normative hedonism, I think the confusion arises due to what is known as the Paradox of Hedonism. The paradox is based on the observation that the direct pursuit of pleasure is ineffective. Usually when we want something, the best approach is to get down to business and go get it. But when it comes to pleasure, this never seems to work as well as hoped. We think that we will be really happy after we accomplish some big goal, but when it happens we quickly adjust and have to start worrying about the next big goal. The paradox isn’t difficult to resolve, the answer is that we are all just really bad at predicting future happiness. We aren’t designed to be happy creatures. Our genes need to keep us somewhat discontent so we will continue striving to propagate them, both directly and through indirect means.

When we plan, strive, and grasp for more, we sometimes can improve our circumstances and increase our subjective life quality, but there is a strong bias in our psychology that counters this potentiality. The planning, striving, and grasping subconsciously create expectations and attachments that often constitute a larger liability for happiness than the opportunity for gain warrants. On the other hand, attachments can add richness to life. You might really enjoy making money and if you have an occupation where money comes easily, this could be a beneficial attachment. So it is a very personalized issue to decide what attachments are acceptable and to what extent those attachments should be allowed to grow.

However, there is one attachment that is universally bad: the attachment to subjective life quality. The only way an attachment can be good is if it causes you to gain pleasure when things go your way and the negative side doesn’t offset this gain entirely. But think about what happens when if you are attached to subjective life quality. When things go poorly, you feel even worse because your thoughts shift to your attachment and how you are failing at it. And when things go well, you are already experiencing pleasure, so if your thoughts shift to your attachment, you are passing up the benefit of the present experience.

This helps explain the paradox of hedonism. If you think to much about seeking pleasure, you become psychologically attached to the results (your subjective life quality), and as shown this can never be a beneficial attachment. Of course, our goal then should be to somehow beat the system and circumvent the paradox of hedonism. This mission has been attempted by probably every religion known to man, but they have all utilized some form of psychological distortion to gain their effect. This is not necessary, it is possible to circumvent the paradox of hedonism without the use of psychological distortion. One can be aware of the reasons why they are seemingly not hedonizing — because they are using an advanced hedonistic technique.

There are three famous hedonistic philosophies that can be used as guidance in avoiding the paradox of hedonism: Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Buddhism. Each of these comes with some mystical baggage, but there is still much to be learned from their ideas. The chart below shows their respective views on what is of fundamental value, what is instrumentally valuable (helps you attain fundamental valuable, but not valuable by itself), and what type attachments are advocated.

	Epicureanism	Stoicism	Buddhism
Fundamental	Pleasure/Pain	Virtue	Pain
Instrumental	Virtue & Circumstance	Circumstance	Virtue
Attachments	Simple Only	None	None

Much of the literature on these subjects is now in the public domain and can be accessed for free through the internet.

An Interview with Ayn Rand

The following interview is fictitious, but is based entirely on quotations by Ayn Rand herself (see citations at the end). To the best of my knowledge, none of the quotations are taken grossly out of context.

cspice: Your philosophy of Objectivism is based on self-interest. Would you say then, that you are a type of Hedonist?

Rand: “I am profoundly opposed to the philosophy of hedonism. … pleasure is not a first cause, but only a consequence … only the pleasure which proceeds from a rational value judgment can be regarded as moral, that pleasure, as such, is not a guide to action nor a standard of morality.”

cspice: What would you consider to be a proper guide to action?

Rand: “Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man—in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life.”

cspice: So the fundamental values driving action are: being born, surviving, and being happy. We have all been born already, so I suppose we are left to focus on survival and happiness. Survival is clearly defined, but what exactly do you consider to be happiness?

Rand: “Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.” “One can achieve happiness only on the basis of rational values.”

cspice: What are “rational values”?

Rand: “… rational values [are] values chosen and validated by a rational standard.”

cspice: So happiness is a result of achieving values that were chosen and validated by a rational standard. What is your idea of a “rational standard”?

Rand: “It is the province of morality, of the science of ethics, to define for men what is a rational standard and what are the rational values to pursue.

cspice: So this part is best left to the experts. But what standard should the experts base their analysis on?

Rand: “An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.”

cspice: Well we’re back to survival again. So how do pleasure and pain fit into the picture?

Rand: “The pleasure-pain mechanism in the body of man—and in the bodies of all the living organisms that possess the faculty of consciousness—serves as an automatic guardian of the organism’s life.”

cspice: Isn’t there more to life than mere survival?

Rand: “Life or death is man’s only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.”

cspice: Of course the more money one has, the greater their chances of survival because they can buy more physical protection and state of the art health care. So this seems to suggest that we should pass up all of life’s pleasures in favor of becoming extremely wealthy.

Rand: “Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival.” “Productive work is the central purpose of a rational man’s life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values.” “The man without a purpose is a man who drifts at the mercy of random feelings or unidentified urges and is capable of any evil, because he is totally out of control of his own life.” “The physical sensation of pleasure is a signal indicating that the organism is pursuing the right course of action.”

1. “Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” March 1964.
2. “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 25.
3. “Galt’s Speech,” For the New Intellectual, 123.
4. “Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” March 1964.
5. “The Ethics of Emergencies,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 44.
6. “Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” March 1964.
7. “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 25.
8. “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 17.
9. “Causality versus Duty,” Philosophy: Who Needs It, 99.
10. “What Is Capitalism?” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 195.
11. “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 25.
12. “Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” March 1964.
13. “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 17.

The Desperation Cycle

Many Eastern philosophies advocate the reduction of desire in order to prevent suffering. The logic goes that if you desire little, there will be much less to disappoint you, and this is true. If you care about nothing, not even your own life, then what could possibly upset you? But by the same token, what would ever excite you? If taken to the extreme, the elimination of desire effectively throws the baby out with the bathwater, and merely makes your life quality more stable, but not necessarily better. But suppose you are after stability, perhaps because the pain is too much and you are willing to forego the pleasure. Even then, you must question whether the elimination of desire is even feasible. There are some desires that are so strongly ingrained in us that their elimination would require huge amounts of effort and strain, which would cancel the potential benefits. The most significant such examples would be social desires such as the desire for friendship and romance, which can lead to feelings of loneliness through the desperation cycle.

The key to understanding desperation is that it is not stem from just desire. You do not feel desperate just because you are alone, just as you do not feel desperate just because you are not rich or are not in Aruba right now. Desire is not enough, desperation requires the combination of desire with negative thought patterns based on non-present thinking.

Here is the basic mechanism of the desperation cycle. First you stumble on some desire, nothing painful or problematic, just a realization that you would prefer some other state to your current state. This desire inspires you to make a direct effort to attain the preferred state as quickly as possible. Sometimes this effort may succeed, but if it doesn’t you feel a bit disappointed because you lack control over the attainment of this desire. This lack of control creates a slight insecurity (in this case desperation), initially unnoticeable, but identifiable by the thoughts that it produces. Your planning mind considers the future and worries about what it would be like if you can’t find success. You may worry that your life won’t live up to the standards that you’ve set. You may even have fear of future regret - that you didn’t try hard enough and you missed out on a good opportunity. These non-present thoughts generate an artificial need which feeds back into your lack of control due to the fact that you have a perception of unmet needs. This cycle is what we call the desperation cycle. This process is illustrated in the state diagram below.

There is a way to avoid the desperation cycle without the elimination of desire, which can be found in the state diagram above. If you are in the cycle, you need to break out by detaching from the desire. This amounts to convincing yourself that what feels like a need is in fact just a desire. You can still be happy without it. In fact, psychological studies suggest that people can find ways to adapt to almost any conditions and find ways to be happy. Poor celibate monks, people who have lost their vision, and siamese twins connected at the head have all found ways to be happy with their lives. Our minds are just very bad at predicting future happiness [see Stumbling on Happiness for a thorough explanation]. It may help to meditate or use cognitive therapy to facilitate detachment.

Unless detachment training techniques are continued permanently, the original desire will likely sprout up again soon after the desperation was quelled. Naturally, there is a danger of falling right back into the same cycle. One way to prevent this is to avoid direct effort and instead use indirect effort. Indirect effort refers to the techniques of result detachment, where you put yourself on the path to success, but don’t consciously strive for it. The distinguishing factor between direct and indirect efforts is whether you would still want to perform the action if it was guaranteed that it would not help you in attaining your desire. If you would prefer to not do it, but you do it anyways in the hope of attaining your goals, then it is a direct effort. It may sound like a trivial distinction, but it makes all the difference in the world how you think of things. When using indirect effort, you don’t provide yourself with anything to fail at, and if you can’t fail, then you don’t feel a lack of control.

But is indirect effort as effective as direct effort? In general no, but it depends on what you mean by effective. For example, if you want to start a business, using direct effort will probably help you reach profitability faster. But if you use indirect effort, say by taking your time and exploring your business interests, you will more likely find an option that you truly enjoy. With romance, making a direct effort by going to bars every night may find you a partner faster. On the other hand, you could make an indirect effort by spending more time in social activities that you are really interested in, and increase the odds that you find someone you are truly compatible with. Even if you are not in the desperation cycle, there may still be times when your desire outweighs your other concerns. In this situation, it is probably best to optimize your indirect efforts. For example, you could find new activities to join or develop yourself in ways that make it easier to meet people. If you can learn to avoid creating expections, comparing yourself to others, and rushing for the future, then you will find that life unfolds moment by moment in a perfectly satisfactory way.

The Dilemma of Self-Revision

Our genes endowed us with a great power when they gave us an independent consciousness. Unlike probably any other species, we can use thought to change the program that we run during life. Other animals may be capable of some form of experience, but I think it is very unlikely that any non-human animal has ever thought “I would be happier if I took a vow of celibacy.” The fact that humans are capable of not only thinking such thoughts, but actually executing this kind of plan, means that we have the ability of self-revision, or in other words, the ability to intentionally fight our own nature. The dilemma thus arises: when should we self-revise?

First let’s try to get an idea of where this abilty comes from. Before consciousness, animals were confined to executing relatively simple algorithms that facilitated survival and replication in one way or another. Memory and learning can still exist without consciousness, but they are restricted to recognition of simple patterns that are probably preset in the brain. But humans have a whole set of mental functions that stem from the evolved consciousness or awareness. Awareness permits imagination - without awareness it would not be possible to imagine anything. When imagination is combined with intelligence, analysis becomes possible. Planning emerges when analysis is applied to memories from past experiences by extrapolation of patterns. Intention occurs when a decision is made based on the results of planning. When intention is steered by the value system created by the experience of pleasure and pain, desire is formed. If the self-modifying ability of the brain is used to meet this desire, then this is self-revision.

Note that in this diagram, experience is separate from awareness. This is an important distinction. Experience is the feeling of physical existence - seeing sights, hearing sounds, feeling pleasure and pain - it is all in the present. Awareness is the feeling of mental existence - abstract thought, mental chatter, planning - it is the inspiration for the concept of the soul.

Experience and awareness are separable. It is possible to have experience without awareness, like animals or when you are wrapped up in a movie. It is also possible to have awareness without experience, like when you are lost in thought. I once drove several miles with no awareness or memory of having done so.

These states of separation are not just illusory, the distinction between experience and awareness is supported by psychological studies. Psychologists have identified the pre-frontal cortex as the center of planning, which suggests that it may also be the source of awareness. [See the book "Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert] Individuals who have had damage to the pre-frontal cortex through accident or lobotomy show an inability to plan for even the remainder of the day. Frontal lobe lobotomy was established as a treatment for severe depression and anxiety because it was found that it calmed patients down and made them stop worrying about the future. Surprisingly, it is not that easy to tell if a person’s frontal lobes have been destroyed. This is evidence that the ability to plan is not as necessary as many of us believe. Perhaps for some it is more of a liability than an asset. This is the idea behind Zen Buddhism - that one can relieve suffering by suppressing awareness. It is basically a program for simulating a frontal lobe lobotomy.

Why would our genes give us the power to override their commands? Basically because it is the only way they could allow general-purpose adaptation to occur within a single lifespan, unlike evolution which can only cause adaptation over many generations. And really it isn’t much of a sacrifice for the genes because they still keep us on a pretty tight leash through the pleasure and pain mechanism, at least for most people.

So should you fight your nature? I think everyone would benefit from fighting their nature in some instances. For example, you probably would be better off to not eat everything you are tempted to eat. Our genes just haven’t had time to adapt to the abundance of junk food in the world today. Another largely obsolete tendency in our nature is “approach anxiety”, which makes men nervous to approach and begin a conversation with a woman. This evolved for small communities where a bad rejection could mean social ostracization. Now there are so many people that rejection isn’t a big concern. But then there are cases like the fear of snakes, which is still a pretty good idea in general, so it probably isn’t worth fighting that one too hard.

So when exactly should you fight your nature? I think this is a difficult question. It depends on your values and how difficult it is to fight. It is complicated further by the fact that both of these factors change over time. Basically you have to weigh the costs of revising yourself against the benefits of the change. There is no doubt that self-revision can save you from a lot of suffering, but I think there has to be a line somewhere beyond which self-revision becomes self-destruction. I think the Buddhists have the right idea - moderating non-present analysis (planning and rehashing) really does make things better - as long as it doesn’t go too far.

The Psychology of Insecurity

Feelings of insecurity arise from a lack of control and confidence. When you have control of a situation, you aren’t so likely to get upset. If someone is giving you a hard time, you can just utilize your power to deal with it. But if you are relying on the cooperation of others in a way that you cannot effectively enforce, it can be very frustrating.

In a relationship, you can never guarantee that your partner won’t leave you, so there is a lack of control that can often lead to insecurity. This is why jealousy in relationships is so often a source of troubles. Even when the concern is rationally justified, the jealous partner often responds in an irrational way due to their insecurity.

When you have a large degree of confidence in something, it is less upsetting when someone disagrees with you. Even if you do get into an argument about something you are confident in, it probably won’t make you feel too disturbed and upset. Instead, you will probably just laugh when you hear something that you confidently know to be wrong. On the other hand, when you have a belief, but you are very unsure about it, you will more easily get agitated and defensive when people challenge you on that belief.

Once during a philosophical conversation, I told a religious believer that I did not respect her beliefs as much as my own because I thought hers were irrational. Logically, this should have been obvious already because it was already established that I was an atheist and of course I am not going to respect what I view as psychological distortion as much as what I view as the truth. However, my statement made her cry. This was strong evidence that she had some insecurity with regard to her faith. If she was absolutely convinced, she just would have thought that I was foolish and it wouldn’t have created an emotional response.

Insecurity induces irrational behavior that can threaten your life quality maximization. Insecure people also have a tendency to avoid situations that challenge their beliefs. Blocking things out like this can leave you in a fragile state that can be dangerous if you are accidentally exposed to these challenging situations.

It is possible to use philosophy to establish principles that you are confident in. Many insecurities stem from philosophical issues such as how to live. If you aren’t sure of your principles in life, you will always run the risk of thinking you’ve been doing things wrong and that someone else is doing it better. If you can decide on a solid set of principles to live by, you can relieve yourself of the problems that come with insecurity.

Future Worship

Religion is usually defined by its promotion of belief in some supernatural power. But more fundamentally, we could define religion as a system of morals and beliefs that skews one’s ability to properly compute their life-quality maximization function. According to this definition, there is a subtle and insidious religion thriving in modern society that is rarely discussed-the religion of future worship. Future worship consists of a set of beliefs based around the idea that one should worry about their future. The italicized words are each important. The beliefs suggest that if one is not worrying, then one should start worrying, and that simply considering the future is not sufficient, worrying is necessary. This worry is responsible for many important life decisions and thus produces a large influence on the way the world is developing.

The reason future worship is so difficult to recognize is that it actually does make sense to invest for the future sometimes. There is an ideal level of investment for each person and for each situation, but there is no non-arbitrary place to draw a line that will handle all cases. So by the principle of non-arbitrary distinction, there is no absolute principle that will tell you when you are making a reasonable investment and when you are worshiping the future. But because future worship is based on worry rather than reason, a systematic bias is created in favor of sacrifice and investment. People are led to become disciplined and to rush into things they are not ready for, which has the consequence of degrading their own life quality and making the world less enjoyable for others as well.

Mental discipline emerges as a result of the need to make sacrifices for investment in the future. Major investments like education and career goals usually require that specific actions are taken at specific times regardless of one’s mood. This situation creates a system of pressures and deadlines that can only be managed with a good deal of mental discipline. These pressures are not entirely a creation of modern society - even primitive man had to go out and work to obtain food every so often, which may not have always been the most enjoyable option available. But there are some fundamental differences with the current situation. We now have larger discontinuities in life quality due to our deadlines. If you miss a final exam, you might end up failing the class and be forced to go through a whole lot more suffering next semester. For primitive man, deadlines were generally flexible, meaning that they provided a continuously increasing negative influence on life quality. When a primitive man was too lazy to hunt or gather, he would become hungry, but he doesn’t die until about three weeks of strong, direct incentives to collect food have been experienced. During the better part of these weeks, his body would ensure that he was in the mood for obtaining food. The same is not true for most modern pressures. Your body does not understand the significance of income tax returns, so any incentives that you have to do them will be indirect, through a long chain of abstract, assumed connections.

Ideally, we want to feel like everything we do is for our personal benefit, not just think that it is for our personal benefit. This is the problem with jobs. You think that being in the job is beneficial, but you feel like everything you do while at the job is for someone else’s benefit. The discrepancy arises because there is a disconnect between your motives and your actions. They are only connected through a contract signed a long time ago. No matter how many times you remind yourself of how well you are getting paid through your employment contract, you are never going to be able to get over the natural feeling that doing someone else’s chores is not in your self-interest, even if this feeling is actually incorrect and merely due to the limitations of human psychology.

In addition to such problems caused by discipline, there are the problems caused by rushing. It is now common for many high school students to feel that going directly to college is the only option after graduation. This forces the student to decide on a concentration at just about the time they are sobering up from all the partying they do in their first year on campus. At this age, most students do not have a strong conception of what it would feel like to work full-time in the career they are choosing. By the time they find an internship a few years down the road, they already feel that it is too late to switch majors. Due to the high costs of college, there is a strong disincentive to starting over. So they convince themselves that it won’t be that bad and continue along the path they chose based on insufficient data. Other students might actually have chosen the best concentration for them, but don’t yet realize it and so end up resisting their education rather than enjoying it. And even the lucky students who truly enjoy their studies often wind up over-worked and over-stressed to the point of losing interest in their studies, especially during graduate school.

As a consequence of the discipline and rush induced by future worship, people turn out to be less interesting. Often they must temper their passions and natural interests to support their career goals. And after long hours of draining work, it is difficult to have enough stamina to do anything but to seek recovery through passive forms of entertainment such as television and spectator sports. Such a person is less fun to talk to because they don’t have many unique experiences to talk about, and they are less fun to be friends with because they are always either working or recovering from work. But the harm due to their mistakes is not limited to their acquaintances-it affects everyone in the economy. The future worshiper creates demand for junk television and supports the outrageous salaries of professional athletes instead of stimulating markets for interests that require more active involvement. This makes it more difficult for others to make a living doing genuinely meaningful things. Furthermore, the willingness of the future worshiper to work such long hours makes it much harder for others to live without working long hours. If everyone simultaneously agreed that they would refuse to work more than 20 hours a week and refused to take a pay cut, the world would adjust and still work fine. Of course GDP growth would slow, but the structure of society would not change too much. Why are we still working 40 hours a week then? It is simply because there are too many future worshipers. Consider the example that Bertrand Russell gives in his essay In Praise of Idleness: a factory employs workers for 40 hours per week to produce pins and one day a new invention comes along that doubles the efficiency of the factory. It would be possible to reduce work hours to 20 per week without changing anything else, but that is not what happens. Worker’s pay rates are not determined by their productive output, but by the labor market. The factory owner knows this and just fires half of his staff. Those who got fired find new jobs; all the workers continue working full-time and the factory owner pockets the increased profits.

Many commentators take this as justification for an attack on capitalism. Indeed it does seem that the harshness of free-market competition is responsible for the plight of the workers in this case. In a way, free-market competition is responsible in the sense that it is a necessary ingredient for the situation to exist. But capitalism is not the culprit here. Blaming the problem on capitalism would be like blaming the laws of physics for the bad weather. In both cases there is simply no other feasible option and blame relies on choice. Capitalism is just the way trade (and hence economics) works. You can either have capitalism or capitalism twisted by threats of violence (socialism), but both are fundamentally capitalism.

So if we can’t blame capitalism, then what caused this unfortunate situation? We can only blame ourselves. It is the way we behave that creates the world we live in. The motives for our future worshiping behavior can be explained with the following observations. Primarily, our genes make us competitive and sacrificial straight from birth. Our genes are not concerned with our subjective life quality-they don’t mind if we are constantly stressed and worried as long as that stress and worry is helping us to survive and reproduce. When it comes to survival, our genes’ interests are allied with our own, but from our genes standpoint, it is ideal to be safe and boring so as to make it easier to raise children at a young age, which is not entirely ideal for us. Furthermore, parents assist in the promotion of future worship because they don’t want to have to take care of their children forever. Even if their children would survive fine on their own, they know that they will feel the need to send money if their children are experiencing severe hardship, again due to genetic factors. But they would prefer to just get their children into medical school so they won’t have to worry about this potential burden. Schooling too biases children toward future worship because the whole educational system is setup to convince students that life requires massive sacrifice, and the process is started long before they are old enough to see through the wool that is over their eyes. There is also the factor that the wealthy benefit from the sacrificial behavior of the poorer classes, which encourages the rich and powerful to promote propaganda based on the idea that hard work is virtuous for its own sake (e.g. the Puritan work ethic). Along with such propaganda comes the insinuation that it is somehow bad to not want to work, which is an absurd value judgment. Another factor is that we don’t have good lifestyle options for those who choose not to work. Homeless shelters and soup kitchens are unnecessarily inconvenient. Under an ideal form of government like geolibertarianism, everyone would receive a living wage coming out of the nation’s property taxes, alleviating the compulsion to work and curbing the exploitation of the poor.

Conventional wisdom would say that if a person just does whatever they feel like doing, they would become extremely lazy and their life would be purposeless. Based on real-world evidence, I am quite certain that this is simply not true. It is just one of the many false assumptions that has been implanted into our collective consciousness of our society by Christianity, which declares sloth as one of the seven deadly sins. Though some people may be naturally more lazy than others, I believe that aside from a few depressed individuals, laziness is self-limiting and everyone will equilibrate to natural level of laziness that leaves plenty of room for productivity and purpose in life. People are often deceived by the level of laziness seen on vacations. Of course you will be lazy on a vacation from a hard job, you are in a sort of motivation debt from all the sacrifice that you have been making. But after all that debt is paid off, assuming your vacations was as long as you choose, you would realize that sloth is not as fun as engaging in interesting activities that provide flow experiences.

The obvious question at this point is: How can one actually escape from the religion of future worship in the real world where we have all kinds of financial concerns to deal with? All you really have to do is stop worrying, but of course that is much easier said than done. To stop worrying, you need to convince yourself that worry is unnecessary. This can be accomplished by presenting yourself with a potentially plausible plan and using reason to justify its plausibility and desirability. So here is a generic plan that seems plausible: Be greedy with your time, don’t let anyone take it unless if you have no choice. Start by saving up a year’s worth of living expenses as a psychological security buffer, then live modestly and work as little as possible to get by. Use your free time to pursue your true interests, some of which will lead you to new money-making opportunities that will allow you to reduce your working time further through freelancing and business. Don’t go to college until you find something that you are truly interested in studying. When you do go to college, don’t pay attention to grades. Don’t have expectations for the future, then you won’t be disappointed when your grades are not good enough for the nation’s top medical school. Don’t have goals for the future, just let your rational desires guide you through each stage. Goals are based on the notion that the future is predictable, which is not true, so goals just lead to frustration and disappointment. Following your rational desires is the organic and adaptable way to optimize your life.

The difficult step is to convince yourself that such a plan is in fact plausible and desirable. Since it is hard to predict the future, the best bet is to just try it, but that is not easy either. You need to realize that you can always change your mind. And even if you do change your mind, that doesn’t mean you were wrong. The situation is different and the right decisions in differing situations may differ. You can’t be wrong about lifestyle decisions if you are using your best reasoning. So fill in some specifics such as what type of work you might want to do and see if it is possible. Here is some additional reading that might help.

• In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell
• Life by Alan Watts
• Lectures by Alan Watts
• The Unabomber Manifesto by Theodore Kaczynski
• The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt

Looking for Something?

About

This is my philosophy on life:
Religion: Atheist (with Buddhist influence)
Morality: Detached rational hedonism
Politics: Geolibertarianism (a.k.a Georgism)
Free Will: Compatibilism
This blog records my thoughts and adventures as I follow the course that emerges from my attempts to live life to the fullest.

Recent Network Posts

• The Desire for Purpose and Meaning
• The Need for Meaning
• My Extreme Multivitamin Case Study
• The Mobile Lifestyle Project: Can you carry everything you need to live well?
• The Problem with Goals
• The Paradox of Hedonism

Recent Network Comments

• Comment on An Interview with Ayn Rand by Monica
• Comment on The Paradox of Hedonism by payday loans
• Comment on The Need for Meaning by aspice
• Comment on The Paradox of Hedonism by K
• Comment on The Paradox of Hedonism by cspice
• Comment on The Problem with Goals by cspice

Categories

• Economics
• Efficiency
• Evolution
• Health
• Lifestyle
• Personal Finance
• Philosophy
• Psychology

Archives

• February 2010
• September 2009
• August 2009
• July 2009
• June 2009
• May 2009
• April 2009
• March 2009
• February 2009
• January 2009
• December 2008
• November 2008
• October 2008
• September 2008
• August 2008
• July 2008
• June 2008
• May 2008

Lifehacking

• Tim Ferriss
• Tynan

Philosophy

• Alan Watts Podcast
• Change This
• Paul Graham’s Articles

Resources

• Librivox
• MIT OpenCourseware
• Project Gutenberg
• TED Talks
• Wikipedia

© Copyright spicy lifestyle network - Powered by Wordpress - Designed by Speckyboy