The Source of Happiness

Tracing the causal chain to Happiness and nailing it down.

Below is an anecdote from my youth, when I was not self-aware and literate enough to put words on my internal life. While I will recount it with clear lines of reasoning and well-chosen words, this should not be understood as past-me being that coherent.

I certainly had my moments, but I was overall quite stupid. Like all children are.

The Quest

At some point in my youth, I got the idea of trying to understand where my emotions come from. I don't remember where I got this idea. Knowing myself, the idea surely came from a cartoon or being confused about why I felt something I felt.

Nevertheless, I had the idea. To get my answer and find out where my emotions came from, I decided to experiment with happiness. It was the first emotion that came to my mind.

I thought about what would make me feel happy. My obvious answer was "winning the biggest prize at the lottery". Obviously, if I won the lottery, I would be super duper happy! The adults also agreed with this assessment.

A Physical Key

Yet, after thinking more about it, I was not convinced. Something smelled wrong. How could winning the lottery make me happy? I was very far from the lottery drawing machine. How could something so far, so disconnected from me, make me happy? Did it mean I would instantly become happy as the last ball was drawn from the lottery machine? Surely, there was a missing link.

I investigated it more. And after a while, I found a counter-example that proved this intuition correct! A counter-example where I would win the lottery but not be happy about it.

What if I won the lottery, but no one told me about it? Then, I would not be happy! This means that winning the lottery did not make me happy, as this would be a situation where I won the lottery and would still not be happy.

This felt great. The adults, who agreed that winning the lottery would certainly make one happy, were wrong. I was right, and they were wrong (great feeling when you are a kid!). It was not winning the lottery that would make me happy but someone telling me about it.

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At that point, I felt vindicated in my approach, which led to my first counter-intuitive (but correct) result. So, I tried to push it further and find a new counter-example following the same pattern.

Could I imagine a situation in which someone told me that I had won the lottery, and yet I was still not happy?

Yes!

…

What if I just asked someone to tell me I won the lottery? Let's say I found someone and asked them to repeat, "You won the lottery, Gabe!" and they repeated that sentence. Then I would be in a situation where someone told me I won the lottery, yet I still would not be happy.

Still, this counter-example was not satisfying. Because I had not actually won the lottery in it, it made sense that I would not be happy, even if someone told me that I had. It might well be that the condition for happiness was the combination of being told that I won and actually winning.

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This started to get confusing, though. Did it mean that the truth of what someone told me would cause my happiness?

This felt like going backwards as it seemed even more wrong than the lottery itself being the cause. Consider: the lottery drawing machine was far from me, so it was hard to envision it remotely making me happy, but it was still physical. If it was whether someone was telling me the truth that would trigger or not my happiness, then it was even more incomprehensible! How could a metaphysical property be the key to how I felt?

So, I went back to looking for counter-examples.

—

And I finally found one that clarified the situation!

What if I won the lottery, and someone told me about it, but I did not believe them?

Then I would not be happy!

But this did more than explain that it was not a metaphysical property such as truth that held my happiness hostage. It led me to a major insight.

One of the keys to my happiness was whether I believed them or not. And whether I believe someone or not happens inside me. In other words, the source of happiness was inside me.

This felt like a plot twist.

Everyone had taught me thus far that emotions were caused by outside phenomena. Something bad happens, and you get sad. Someone causes you grief, and you feel angry. Something good happens, and you feel happy.

But I had a strong result that went against all of that.

An Internal Key

When I was young, I thought that with enough training, one could control everything that happened in our mind. This is why discovering that a belief was gating my happiness was great: it was inside me, which meant I could control it.

But it felt wrong. Even though I might reach a point where I could change my beliefs to make myself happy, I might not reach a point where I could do so while keeping my beliefs true.

It also felt slightly wrong because beliefs felt like they had a nature separate from the one of "emotions".

—

So I kept going. I had established that the trigger was around the point of believing whether I had learnt the lottery or more downstream, but I wanted to pinpoint it.

Now that I knew this was inside me, my search was easier. I could start considering things I did not consider before.

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Given that it was inside me, I tried to think of something inside me connected to me becoming happy. The most likely candidate was the moment where, upon learning that I had won the lottery, I would start imagining positive scenarios. Things like never having to go to school again, paying for everyone close to me all the things they ever wanted, or infinite McDonalds.

So I considered that and…

Imagining such scenarios did make me feel somewhat happy! Still, it was obviously different from the heights of happiness that I would feel if I had actually won the lottery, so it was not the real thing.

—

After that, I kept thinking more.

Unfortunately, this is now reaching the point where I do not remember enough to describe the entire process that led to what follows.

I did not take notes when I was that young.

—

The gist of it was that if I did not imagine any positive scenario, I would not be happy. Yet imagining the positive scenarios was not enough to be happy.

After more thought experiments, I concluded that if I knew that I actually won the lottery when I imagined the positive scenarios, I allowed myself to take them for real as if I was justified in being happy for them.

This was a big discovery for me: that I held the key to some of my emotions. This felt like a much more direct key than changing my beliefs and much more like an actual answer to my initial question: Where do my emotions come from, and when and why do I feel some emotion?

The answer is that I can feel any emotion at any given time, but I only let myself feel it under specific conditions. With training, I can relax those conditions and tap into those emotions at will.

Aftermaths

The immediate consequence was that I practised allowing myself to be happy. Whenever I wanted to be happy, I would imagine positive scenarios and allow myself to feel more happy about them over time. For a while, I did that before sleeping to calm myself down and fall asleep faster.

I did not think much more about it until years later when I became more directed and explicitly interested in self-mastery.

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Back then, I tried to explain it to the adults around me. The adults around me (family, friends of family, teachers, etc.) would usually listen to my questions on serious topics (like maths, business, or history) and do their best to answer. And I thought that understanding the source of emotions was obviously a serious topic if not one of the most serious ones. And they were wrong, so they had to know!

In practice, my explanations must have sounded to them like the most stupid shit they'd heard from me in a while. Just gibberish.

Internally, I thought adults were perfectly rational beings. I thought that if they did not have the answers, they would at least perceive the answers as self-evident when presented with iron-clad reasoning. So I did what any young child would do in this situation: excitedly ramble semi-coherently about that whole chain of thoughts, expecting them to get it.

They did not get it and dropped the topic for a while. There were other more serious topics to which adults around me were more sensitive. These ones would allow me to have more interesting conversations.

—

For a while, I thought that all adults knew about this and that I just badly expressed myself. I learnt much later that this was not the case.

Conclusion

I think it's a good story to reflect on. Its content itself is interesting. But more than that, I wanted to share an example of some atypical ways of thinking: coming up with more thought experiments to corner an intuition until we have a solid grasp on it; performing binary search over a causal chain in our models to find where the best lever to change the outcome is; this type of thing.

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I have taught many things, but not this.

I can not even say that I learnt it. A lot of this came to me naturally. I can find chunks of it in my education, my neurotype, and the type of stuff I tended to read at the time.

I nevertheless think it is teachable. These intuitions are similar to other intellectual methods I have taught. But the first step is to start writing things down, as always.

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And I guess, thanks, Bernard Werber, for writing a lot of French Buddhist Hardish Sci-Fi when I was young? And Internet randos for recommending Zen koans to a young mind that was ready to reflect and meditate on anything?

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Cheers, and have a nice day!