Think, Try, Learn: A scientific method for discovering happiness

http://thinktrylearn.com/index.php/Main_Page

by da5e • 16 years ago

28 14 16 years ago

funthree• 16 years ago

Is this something like being human 101? Captain obvious? Some other cheesy reference? Think, then try, then learn, then think. Okay. I needed that.

todayiamme3• 16 years ago

The irony is that you won't discover happiness until you realize that there isn't such a thing as happiness. Misery and pain is part and parcel of being alive and that's the way it should be.

It's ironic because this encourages people to use the scientific method to delude themselves into thinking that eternal bliss is possible. I actually implemented something like this. I used to keep a detailed diary of the things that have happened and I used to analyze the shit out of everything on paper and then I would check the conclusions and do it again, but somehow it never worked. Upon hitting this I would blame myself and everything I've touched for it. Clearly there has to be something wrong with me , but what I failed to realize was that I was fooling myself in the most logical manner possible.

It's amazing how twisted things are.

Although, this concept will help you to evaluate things and get things done. It won't help you to achieve happiness. Nothing can.

Jach2• 16 years ago

> Misery and pain is part and parcel of being alive and that's the way it should be.

While I don't disagree with your message overall, this statement stood out as being quite odd. Why should we have misery and pain?

todayiamme3• 16 years ago

I read a story about the Buddha as a kid and I never got it until a few days ago. Once Buddha meets a woman in pain because her new-born child had died. She begs him to bring him back to life and he agrees provided she could get him a handful of rice from a house without death.

Needless to say she couldn't find such a place.

The point is that eternal bliss would be such a wonderful thing, but it doesn't exist anymore than perpetual motion does. Let's face it everything alive today on this earth during this very second in which you have read these words will die. I am an atheist to the core and I will remain an atheist to the core. I don't think that there are any angels, or heaven or some kind of hell out there. I know that the only thing out there is emptiness. There is no doubt about it, and that's the beauty of it.

By accepting the fact that nothing truly ever lasts we can prepare ourselves for peace. It's a really twisted concept that I can't explain in words, but whenever you see the truth that happiness is not just another shot away then you don't crave for things. You don't seek to replace the pain with something else. All you do is focus on just being and that opens the doors for everything else. You learn to love and create for the sake of doing just that. You see beyond yourself and you actually care about other people. Most importantly you realize that just like life learning is a process that will never end till the day you die. It's amazing.

I hope that you understand.

Sumason• 16 years ago

"Although, this concept will help you to evaluate things and get things done. It won't help you to achieve happiness. Nothing can."

Sounds just a liiiiiittle to depressing for me. While I admit that your not going to be %100 happy all of the time, do you not find that there are moments when your in bliss?

Also I found that economic concepts do a pretty good job predicting happiness for myself. They're not going to be perfect (obviously), but I would say that I'm reasonable happy with my life using the simple concept of diminishing returns and returns to scale.

DeusExMachina• 16 years ago

It won't help you to achieve happiness. Nothing can.

Really? I don't agree with this. Reaching happiness is hard, indeed. Impossible? Not at all. Go around and look for happy people, you can find them, in different parts of the world. Personally, now I'm on average happier than I was some years ago.

Happiness is a long journey and one of the first big steps is to realize what really makes you happy. People delude themselves they would be happy in certain situations, but they are usually wrong. This is something that prevents people from being happy.

But if you spend enough time growing, looking inside yourself to what is really important to you and learn to enjoy the journey too, you can be happy. This at least is my experience and I think is enough to refute your final statement. But there are better experiences out there than mine.

Probably some pain and problems will always be part of your life, but unless pain pervades all your life and is just occasional, you can be happy.

psnj• 16 years ago

> [...] there isn't such a thing as happiness.

> Misery and pain is part and parcel of being alive and that's the way it should be.

Is it not possible that there is happiness, but also misery and pain? I've felt both.

Is happiness "achieved"? Or "encountered"? "momentarily brushed-up against"? "allowed"?

In any case I think an approach like TTL's is worth trying: nowhere do they say "that eternal bliss is possible". It seems they're just trying to help people make things better for themselves.

jasonmorton• 16 years ago

Happiness is the sensation of gradient ascent.

dan00• 16 years ago

You can't directly achieve happiness, because it's a by-product.

thinktrylearn• 16 years ago

Thanks for the great comments, everyone. My thinking is that any discussion is good discussion. I have a few replies:

@todayiamme (a fine and apropos, name :-) Thanks for the points. This is a Buddhist approach, right? The idea that attachment leads to suffering is one that's been with me for years; very influential. From the Think, Try, Learn perspective, I talk about attachment to experimental outcomes. If we desire and expect a particular result, we have a binary success metric, which makes the process an unhappy one. If things are going our way, we are unhappy because we are afraid it will change. Likewise, if things are not going like we want, we are sad too. Much better is to participate in unfolding events as a scientist would - by observing fully, which brings you into the moment. And mindfulness is a way to be happy (another time-tested idea).

So in fact I'm trying to create a philosophy that resonates with the rational mind, but ties in classic ideas for how to be fulfilled. This is opposite to the idea that eternal bliss is possible. (In fact I'm an atheist, and religion doesn't make sense to me. Jack describes this well. That's why TTL is athiest compatible)

Your experience of keeping a detailed diary is interesting to me. It seems to me that keeping a general record is periodically valuable, but in my work the recording is specific to experiments. The thought that I mention in my recent slidecast (http://www.slideshare.net/matthewcornell/quantified-selfexpe...) is that observation -> awareness -> change. The self-blame sucks, of course, but ironically, in TTL I argue that you get a "health sense of detachment" by looking at events as information/data, which might help with the negative feelings.

Also, I like your clarification to @DeusExMachina. Well put.

@DeusExMachina: I love your quote:

> "But if you spend enough time growing, looking inside yourself to what is really important to you and learn to enjoy the journey too, you can be happy."

In TTL, the ultimate guarantee of success is that you'll learn something about yourself and grow your character. The process of experimentation will take you in a personal direction you like. Put another way, the focus is on being excellent at discovery, which we all have control over.

Dealing with pain and problems: As you say, they are inevitible, and it's how we cope (with grace, ideally) that defines us. With TTL, my perspective is that those situations are externally-imposed experiments, ones that provide data like such as feelings and pain. Still working this out...

@Jach: Re: brains being a function of ancestral environments - absolutely! I love this quote by Nancy Kress: "A belief in the afterlife [is] probably the single largest aberration of the human mind." (From "Steal across the sky.") In TTL my idea is to manage irrational thinking by modeling it, testing it, and working to make them consistent (AKA "cognitive dissonance," as orangecat points out). In science, throwing out pet theories in is hard, but the truth is ultimately more useful to discoveries. Doesn't work for everyone, though, and may not be as comfortable as other (unprovable) theories.

@todayiamme: re: radical life extension, I'm ready for it now (I'm soon to be 48 YO) but I'm certain it won't be in time. I don't fear death, but I very strongly don't want it. From a time management perspective (my other hat) it can be a real incentive. Just as you point out with the TV watching. (BTW, a "micro" experiment is to go without TV for a week. I guarantee they will have new experiences, even things like being bored, talking more, etc. This is an appropriate setting to have a diary.)

Your quote is poetic, and expresses how I feel too. Thank you for it:

> "I have decided to spend every moment I have loving other people, and making their lives richer. I've decided to make others smile and create beautiful things. I've decided to learn as much as I can about this amazingly beautiful world before I die. I've learnt that happiness is only real when shared. I can do this only if I am at peace and I accept that problems will always exist around me. Fretting about them doesn't solve much, does it?"

The way this fits into TTL is via collaboration with others, from which the best science comes. The idea is to love and help each other with our experiments, and to tune in (i.e., observe) to the great stuff we have going on in our lives right now. After adopting these ideas, I literally see the world differently. I spent 45 minutes one day last winter marvelling at sunlight reflecting off snow crystals. I found that as I focused I could see individual prismatic effects that varied greatly as I moved my head slightly. It occurred to me that this might have been the inspiration for Chrismas tree lights. Just a thought.

@dan00: Re: happiness being a by-product - absolutely! I think of love that way too. Like happiness and humor, you can't force it, you can only make space and invite it in. [insert garden/seed metaphor, etc.] (Actually, forcing humor via "laughter clubs" is a cool idea - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter_Yoga)

@funthree: "Think, then try, then learn, then think. Okay. I needed that." I understand that the title seems obvious. Then again, it's a short name that is supposed to capture the spirit of the scientific method - treating everything in life as an experiment. (P.S. It's funny that you mention Captin Obvious. Check out The Personal Productivity Encyclopedia Of Superhero Powers - http://is.gd/ezzfu)

Thanks again, everyone! -- matt

Think, Try, Learn: A scientific method for discovering happiness

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