TEDxBU

I got the chance to speak on this topic (specifically, how evolution makes it hard to find happiness) at the TEDx conference at BU yesterday. I'll post a video as soon as I get it. It was a great event, with a lot of students speaking. I was really impressed with the quality of the other presenters (especially since I thought "if they let me speak, the others can't be that great..." But I was wrong!).

I think I missed the wave of traffic from the event, but if you were at the conference, please leave a comment on this post with your thoughts. Thanks!

Deep thoughts (by Jack Handy)

I was emailing back and forth with a friend, discussing some "deep" topics. We had a discussion about the point in my life where I realized that I'd always be reasonably happy (no matter what my situation -- rich/poor, alone/with friends, in the US/somewhere else, etc.). After that realization, I knew that there was nothing left to do except try to help others as best I could.

My friend asked why the two were connected. I thought about it, which helped me come up with a much clearer answer:

"i think it was basically seeing that i would be at about the same happiness level no matter my circumstances, so there was no need to do anything further for myself. i was "done" in a way -- finished with trying to improve my own situation. But with all this energy and life left in me, what else is there to do but help others realize the same thing for themselves?"

Back to School

After a month out in Cambodia saving the world, it's back to the "reality" of business school (which, in reality, is probably less like reality than Cambodia).

At the start of my last semester, it's finally apparent that this experience is coming to an end. Semesters always begin slowly, so I've had a bit of time to think: what can I do that would be most effective in furthering my goals? Am I pursuing the right goals? I'm pretty confident that the answer to the latter is yes, since I've spent a lot of time questioning myself for the past few years. Now it's just a matter of getting there.

The slow start has also helped with meditation. I spent about an hour a day for 3 days, and felt like I made more progress towards "real" happiness than I did the entire last semester. I really owe most of it to careful reading of this (free) book, which I think is absolutely amazing. It describes what I had been trying to do for the past few years, but in such a clear and concise way that I've been able to turn it into tangible (and energizing) progress. (If you do end up reading it, make sure to take it slow. I've re-read a lot of sections I didn't understand the first time, and it has really paid off).

One closing thought -- lack of sleep definitely hinders progress towards happiness. Get some rest :) (Or pre-order your Lark here! :) )

A ramp into the clouds (on the Charles)

Laughing at pain

Today while meditating, I had two amazing realizations. They're both well understood to experts, but it was powerful to experience them first hand.

As I sat there, somewhere around 45 minutes in, my leg began to hurt. As I sometimes do, I turned my attention to the pain, which steadily increased. As time passed, the pain became intense, but so long as I paid attention to it, it was manageable.

This time, however, I looked very closely at the sensation of the pain, and noticed there were two parts. One was the pain itself, which had a dull, aching, almost sour quality to it, and was located directly inside my leg. However, there was nothing inherently objectionable about that feeling. The other part was some piece of my mind that was constantly triggering thoughts about getting away from the pain. It wasn't the thoughts themselves; whatever it was lay deep beneath anything conscious. Still, I could see its effects directly. It was spewing a stream of different thoughts aimed at getting me to take action to remove the pain.

Some of the more common ones included "how much longer do I have left before this session is up?", "if i just lean forward a bit, circulation will come back and the pain will lessen", "remember how good it feels when you're done meditating and the pain stops?", "check the clock to see if it's almost time to stop meditating", and "I think it's time to go -- Julia's waiting for you. Let's end this pain". It was amazing how clever this "pain avoidance" part of my brain was. It dressed itself up in all kinds of different thoughts, both direct and indirect, in an attempt to get me to take action. Still, I sat there and watched the pain. And that's when the second realization came.

As the pain intensified, I noticed that my sense of time became much sharper. I was very aware of how long each minute was, and felt worried that it would be a long time before I finished meditating. I began to feel a sense of urgency about a lot of things: urgency to finish meditation, urgency to get up and go do something, urgency to go eat lunch, urgency to go hang out with Julia. For a while, I felt the urgency without noticing it consciously. At some point though, I suddenly became aware of it, and realized that it was completely arbitrary. I saw that it too was arising from my mind's attempt to get me to stop the pain. Once I understood that, I took a good look at the feeling of urgency itself, and it quickly dissipated (very similar to the way that a patch of fog dissolves in the warm sun).

Once I had realized the arbitrary and desperate nature of my mind's attempts to escape pain, I just started laughing (which has never happened to me before during meditation). Despite the intensity of the pain, a deep happiness washed over me, and I couldn't stop smiling if I tried (which has happened before :) ).

Behind that joy and laughter was a profound sense of contentment stemming from the understanding that pain, no matter how intense, can always be overcome. And that follows for all the negative emotions like sadness, anger, greed, hate, depression, jealousy, uncontrollable desire, and so on. All it takes is time, effort, and focus.

I will definitely keep at it.

Don't forget

Today I got caught reading a long Khmer Rouge survival story (that triggered some thoughts).

When we went out to interview people for a sanitation project in rural Cambodia, I sometimes stopped listening as they spoke; I couldn't help but wonder what their eyes had seen during those years.

Back in the US, I find it hard listen to the idle chit-chat about the newest gadgets, random music, or someone's latest startup idea. It's not that thoughts of tragedy make me depressed -- rather, they strengthen my motivation to help. I'm reminded that life is short, and that we must maintain focus on that which is truly meaningful. So many still need the help that we are fully capable of providing (if we could only stop worrying about the little things in our own lives).

Find your inspiration, and make it happen :)

Made to Suffer?

One interesting way to look at happiness and suffering is from the perspective of evolutionary design. Positive and negative emotions (as well as their more direct physical counterparts, pleasure and pain) were nature's way of ensuring that an organism avoided situations that would lead to its untimely death, and pursued things that would help it prosper. Severe heat is painful so that we avoid it (and avoid injury which could lead to death). Accomplishment feels good because doing things like building houses or harvesting crops helped us weather the uncertainties that nature brought. Rejection feels horrible, because we needed to learn to avoid things that made others expel us from social groups critical to our survival.

The key to the efficacy of the "driving" emotions in guaranteeing our survival is that they feel absolutely real. We must suffer from pain. We must suffer when we don't achieve, or when we fail to accumulate wealth. If we didn't, we wouldn't have avoided the situations that result in death when we were evolving in the wild, and our species wouldn't have made it to today.

However, to go with "what feels natural" (i.e., responding directly to the impulses our bodies and minds produce) is actually the path to continual dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction is evolution's crude method of making sure your genes make it to the next generation. It keeps us striving for the things that matter for survival of the species (food, wealth, sex, etc.), but not for the things that matter for our own happiness (contentment, peace, etc.). As a pawn in the game of species-level survival, evolution requires you to be permanently unsatisfied.

However, things are different in the context of modern civilization -- survival in the developed world is guaranteed until old age. We no longer need our emotions to drive us to do what we must to survive. Using logic and science, we have built incredible systems to support our survival. Yet, we are still driven by an unconscious system of emotions that push and pull us uncontrollably.

Powerful emotional drive is an old-fashioned machine that we no longer need for survival. It's like a polluting coal-fired power plant -- big, powerful, inefficient, and causing more harm than we can afford.

We need to figure out a better way to live our lives. We need a way to reduce the strength and "real-ness" of those powerful drives. Surprisingly, one has existed for thousands of years. It involves taking the time to understand the way our minds work, developing the ability to observe our thoughts and emotions, and consciously making an effort to change our minds for the better.

If it means transformation of your life, and experiencing profound happiness that grows, are you willing to try?

The Dynamics of Happiness

In the past two lectures of Systems Dynamics (a discipline that aims to explain the behavior of systems through simple diagrams and feedback loops), our professor, John Sterman, used some very convincing models of human society and the economy to show that without radical change, human society is headed for a period of population collapse and great suffering. The simple fact of the matter is that we cannot continue to grow (in population and in economic terms) indefinitely while consuming finite or slow-to-regenerate resources without a severe crash. The dynamics of the system lead to no other conclusion. No amount of tweaking the inputs (amount of resources, technological innovation, market dynamics, etc.) results in any significant change in the outcome.

But what does that have to do with us as individuals in the system? In today’s lecture, he presented the results of a survey to the class asking how much money you would want to receive every year until you die to satisfy your consumption needs. In other words, how much money would you have to be able to spend each year to be satisfied? The results were astounding -- the median value was $200,000 per year, with an average that was even higher. This was apparently typical for the dozens of times he’s done the survey in an MBA class. (We’re talking consumption here, not income!)

We then explored the dynamics of consumption, and how it relates to life satisfaction. We came across the familiar “hedonic treadmill” and a few other dynamics that prevent us from ever being satisfied with what we currently have, and lead to more and more striving for money and “success.” Everyone nodded their heads in agreement -- the idea that once you get used to something you enjoy it less and less is both simple and obvious. (Remember how awesome it used to feel when you looked at your new iPhone/computer/car/anything?)

The problem here is that even if the concept makes sense in academic terms, nobody behaves as though they understand. I was amazed to be sitting in a room with a slice of the world’s smartest people (at one of the top academic institutions on the planet), and realize that almost none of them actually understand the dynamics of their own happiness/life satisfaction. They simply don’t have the knowledge to effectively improve their life satisfaction without a large amount of misdirected effort. $200,000 per year of spending cash is ludicrous, and won’t bring you happiness to any significant degree -- you’ll adjust and simply want more.

The fact of the matter is that money and the things it buys are just that -- things. It is our minds that determine whether those “things” make us feel good, bad, or neutral. There is nothing objectively desirable about money. To a man lost in the woods, $100 bills are nothing more than fuel for a fire to keep him warm. The key here to remember is that whether we feel good or bad at any time is entirely determined inside our minds. I challenge you to come up with one example to the contrary.

(really, try it! Post in the comments if you’ve got something)

So anyways, what does this have to do with the doomsday model of the world Professor Sterman presented on Monday? It’s that there’s one assumption in the model that we presume cannot be changed -- that we must always consume more and more to sustain our happiness. If we were somehow able to change ourselves to be satisfied with what we currently have, a crash would no longer be inevitable.

We’ve all heard this kind of thinking before -- we need to live more sustainably, save energy, recycle, blah blah blah. But in reality, that’s not enough. The outcome doesn’t change with a 20% savings in energy, or 30% less oil consumption. It only changes when we defeat the effects of adjustment by learning to be satisfied with very little, and without continuing to push for more at an accelerating pace.

Now, most people find this kind of talk distasteful. They don’t want to have to cut back on something like shopping or travel or anything else that incidentally increases consumption of non-renewable resources. It’s taking away the things in life that often give us the most pleasure and joy. Plus, if my neighbor isn’t conserving, then why should I? The world will collapse anyways because of him.

The simple fact is this -- relinquishing the need for external things like money/houses/hobbies/careers/success to be happy is NOT giving up your happiness. It is the path to complete freedom. It is the path to unconditional satisfaction with life. It is the path to true and lasting happiness. And this kind of happiness is without cost to the sustainability of the planet, and of the human race.

(pause)

I think that a lot of people might scoff at that paragraph or question the practicality of it. The only reason I’m so confident, and the only reason I bother writing this stuff, is because I’ve experienced that transition for myself. I went from insecure, overly ambitious, fearful of death, and somewhat prone to depressive bouts to become one of the happiest people I know. The answer didn’t come from the outside. I didn’t win the lottery, I didn’t sell my company for $1B, and I didn’t become a respected figure in the business community. Almost nothing changed in my day-to-day situation. It was my mind that changed.

At some point, I decided that if I wanted to live a good life and make the world a better place, it made sense to focus on happiness. By becoming happier, my life would be much more pleasant, and I would be able to focus on helping others instead of trying to address my insecurities (by constantly striving for money and success through business). And with that resolution, I found a way to change.

The truth is that different things will work for different people when they’re looking for sustainable happiness. Some people find it enough to try to spend more time expressing gratitude for everything they have and everything others give them. Other people find it by developing a deep devotion to their religion. Personally, I find that meditation is the most powerful and direct method to change the mind to make it work for my happiness (instead of against it).

But whatever the method, the point is that you’re never going to get to a deep, sustainable happiness (that doesn’t harm the rest of the world) unless you focus on it and develop it.

Develop your happiness. Find your method. It is the most important thing you can do for yourself, and for the world.