Love and DIY [Candide]

[candide]

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Abe Lincoln -- or so they say [1] -- who was a man who struggled with depression his whole life.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

Gustave Flaubert.

Now that is some actionable advice.

If you will, join me in a quest to be happier through being more stupid, more often. The idea is not to become dumb or selfish in essence, but to simulate it tactically. To train the brain to notice the small, stupid good. To build a daily practice of low-context pleasure fragments—raw inputs, not analysis. Not expression. Not narrative. Not even journaling. Just this:

1. Write happiness fragments throughout the day -- learned hypergraphia.

Tiny. Fast. No backstory. Mostly nouns. No commentary. Examples:

Golden hour.
Vanilla latte.
Shave.
Cat in window.
Move boxes - done!

These are not metaphors, nor are they “writing prompts.” They are mood nudges. Bits of sensory happiness, working at the animal level.

2. Strip context.

The more you explain, the more you fall back into the depressive machinery of meaning, including the possibility of grotesque insight seeking. Fragments must float.

This is why the "Lincoln" quote is wrong, or at least incomplete: one does not simply decide that positivity is a narrative or ideology one wants to believe in. Instead, you just keep experiencing little context-free moments inside of the belief.

There is power in the contextless! And this is why all of the radicalized tribal identities are effective. For example, one thing that used to drive me crazy was how more MAGA people cared about innuendos that Soros (or any other part the Cabal) were doing something than actual proof of members of their side openly doing the exact thing they claimed was so bad. But a stream of memes over time is more potent than clear arguments about the same subject, as they drill into you and change your habits of looking... They didn’t need to convince us. They just needed to feed us contextless signals until we started finishing the story for them.

The bastards in charge could have set the algos in such a way to make us happy, and I posit they would have still had great engagement on their platforms. But it wouldn't have been maximally optimized. For that, they needed indignation. And while this led to great harms to sanity, public health, and democratic input, all of that was just collateral damage.

But the good news is that you can harness the power of contextlessness for your own uses.

3. Post nowhere. Share with no one.

This isn’t about performance. It sure as hell isn't about a vibe. It’s not a log of progress, or your journey. It’s guerrilla warfare against despair [2].

4. The selfishness experiment

I am less convinced that selfishness is that important for happiness, regardless of the Flaubert quote. Perhaps he means "self absorbed," although even then it is important to be clear that this means self-absorbed hedonistically, and in terms of status signaling, not reflection or abstraction. Also, the happy often do favors for others within their little groups. In my experience, cliquish is a better term than just selfish.

Still, on the off chance I'm wrong, and selfishness is important to happiness, I am also going to log my wants for a while as well.

This leads to entries where I say I want some coffee, and then later I get that coffee. Which even then is living inside of the lesson that I often get what I want.

Happiness is getting a bunch of singles and then making sure you keep score.

===

[1] Lincoln almost certainly didn't say it.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/10/20/happy-minds/

... currently there is no substantive evidence that Abraham Lincoln used this expression. It was attributed to him by Dr. Frank Crane about fifty years after his death. Oddly, Crane presented at least three different phrasings for the quotation. The words are usually credited to Lincoln, and QI has not discovered any compelling alternative attributions.

[2] Your mileage may vary on not sharing, though. I am meaning-rich, irony-trained, wounded by systems around me. If you don't feel there is anything fundamentally wrong here in the Matrix, then share away and work on those vibes... But if that's you, how did you get this far into the piece?

[zbigi]

Any thinking and not entirely selfish person cannot be truly happy knowing that many others in the world are suffering as much as they do. Hence I think the requirement for stupidity (which helps with not realising what's going on) and selfishness (which helps with not caring).

[grundomatic]

So #1 and #2 are basically using the system's means on yourself, but for your own ends? Creating bits of happiness rather than bits of dissatisfaction [for marketing purposes]?

I can see the value in #3. First, it helps insure you are doing it for yourself. Second, you don't become part of the machine making others unhappy.

As for #4, I think selfishness is required in the sense of "being true to yourself". There are probably some things that are universal in making people happy, but other things are very specific to the individual. Coffee certainly won't make me happy. My current journey is about figuring out how I can selfishly get what I want/need, without being a "selfish asshole" in the process.

[sky]

Happiness fragments. I like the idea of trying to ratchet up your happiness each day by recognizing good things that happen. Why write them down though? Where would you write them?

[candide]

@zbigi
I think that is the spirit the quote was written. I am reminded of a movie review of "Killers of the Flower Moon" where a character was described as too stupid to know, and then when they found out more, too evil to care.

@gru
Yes, I think that is a good way of putting it. I am using a pen and paper, but the key insight is that humans respond to a stream where each bit lacks connection or context. Best to imply an ideology, over and over.

As to selfishness. I'm open to a lot of ideas, and I am seeing the Flaubert quote as wit, rather than holy writ. I am much more confident about my need to be more stupid, more often, both as pass time to stay off the doom scrolls and reorientate my neurotic thought patterns. So I'll be loosely experimenting with whether of not "wants" contributes to my feelings of happiness.

@sky
I think if I don't write it down, I won't really engage in the mental pattern or form the habit. I'd just "yeah, yeah" my through it, like most of us do most things in life. I'm using a little notebook, less than letter-size. I'll probably just toss it when I have filled it up. I will say that as the day goes on, it is nice to see it fill up, and look back... But the value of this as a long-term journal would be about nil.

For the young set, I could in theory see doing it on a note app on a phone, but I think that invites a lot temptations.

[candide]

I think I've come up with a better answer to question

Why write them down though? Where would you write them?

Writing helps to put those fragments on another level than the natural drift of what is going on in my head. It also forms ritual, and by slowing down and imposing the cost of writing, it makes for a more active filter, and takes away the different (and in practice, impossible for me) mental cost of having to cycle "think happy, think happy, think happy."

I am finding this to be effective. But I might just be restoring my cognitive patterns to where it is for most people most of the time. Still, that is a win for me.