Happiness is its own thing
It's not another thing
Do you ever have the sense that it’s not possible to express something? That words can never be adequate to say what you have to say? That’s how I feel right now. I just wrote “Happiness is its own thing. It’s not another thing.” Those two sentences summarize what I think is just about the most important thing in the world. Seriously! And they sit, there, limp, looking pathetic, doing nothing but making me feel embarrassed to have written them.
Oh well.
Onward! Into the breach!
Before we get started, please go read this other thing I wrote. It’s about two different kinds of happiness. This post (the one you’re reading now) is about what I call S-happiness, as defined in that post.
Let’s talk about bodybuilding
Imagine you want to get super ripped. Let’s say you see a big strong dude … the kind of guy who can pick up a small car and toss it on the side of the road. The kind of guy who gets the ladies … well, some of the ladies, anyway. You want to be that guy.
What are you going to do? You’re going to work out. You’re going to build some muscles. In particular, you’re going to do weight lifting. Strength training. I’ve never been that guy and so I don’t know the details! But we all know the basics.
To get really big muscles, you have to lift things with your muscles. By lifting things with your muscles, over and over, for a period of weeks, and then months, and then years, your muscles get bigger. You become stronger and more able to lift things.
And yes, of course, there are secondary things you can do as part of the practice. You can take protein powder and supplements, stuff like that. But the critical thing is using your muscles. If you don’t actually lift the weights, all the protein powder in the world won’t do you any good!
Let’s talk about distance running
Imagine you want to become a distance runner.
What are you going to do? You’re going to run. By running, every day — a few minutes a day at first, then an hour per day, then more, and more, and keeping it up for weeks, and months, and eventually years, you’re going to become a world-class runner.
Well, ok, you’re probably not, because there are only a few world-class runners! But if you don’t do it, you’re not even on the path.
Again, there are other things that can help. You’ll want to eat right, get enough sleep, quit smoking, and so on. But those things won’t help at all if you don’t do the actual running!
Let’s talk about learning Spanish
Imagine that you want to learn Spanish. What are you going to do? You’re going to start practicing Spanish.
There are a lot of options here. You’re might use an app like Duolingo. You’re might open a textbook. You might take a class. You might decide to learn it yourself: start off by checking a children’s Spanish book out of the library, and learn every word in it — look them all up in the dictionary, or at least the ones where it isn’t obvious what they mean. Then a slightly harder book, and a harder book. As you get more advanced, you might listen to the radio, or watch TV.
Regardless of the method you choose, you’re going to practice. If you’re serious about it, you’re probably going to do it more or less every day, for minutes and then hours, for days and then weeks and then months and then years. And over that time, as you do that, you will learn Spanish.
If you don’t actually practice Spanish, you’re not going to learn Spanish.
We can break this down further. Learning Spanish includes learning to understand it when it’s spoken, and to read it, and to speak it. All three are different. Each part needs to be practiced, if you want to get better! So there are really three different sub-aspects to learning Spanish.
I personally started out learning Spanish by reading, reading, reading. I did almost no listening, and approximately no speaking at all. A few months in, I was pretty good at reading Spanish but very bad at understanding spoken Spanish and unbearably bad at speaking it myself.
Let’s talk about learning Arabic
Same thing but, you know, substitute Arabic for Spanish.
Let’s talk about learning calculus
Let’s say you want to learn calculus. What are you going to do? There’s only one route. If you don’t study calculus, on a pretty regular basis, you’re not going to learn calculus!
There are of course some other things you should do. For instance, you should probably learn algebra first, and trig, and so on. And again you’ll probably want to eat right and get some sleep. You’ll make more progress if you don’t try to study while you’re exhausted or ill or drunk.
But you’re not going to learn calculus unless you actually study calculus. Get out that math book and do the problems!
Let’s talk about becoming rich
So you want to be rich! Here are some tips.
First, make more money than you currently do.
Second, spend less money than you currently do.
Congratulations, you have saved some money! Now third, take that money and invest it well.
There are books you can read, things you can learn, about how to do all three of these things.
To make more money, you might want to start a business, or train yourself with some skills that are in high demand. Or you might want to go into crime, I hear that can pay. I would recommend white collar crime: it seems to pay better and you’re less likely to go to jail if caught.
There are a zillion tips out there that can teach you how to save money — entire websites about how you can live frugally.
And of course learning about investments is its whole thing. Lots of learning to do there.
Or you can take a shortcut and just marry money! That’s another option. Easy peasy.
But if you want to become rich, you have to actually do the things. Reading the books or the websites about how to become rich doesn’t actually make you rich. Thinking about how you might start a business won’t do it! Intending to start saving money doesn’t help!
You have to actually not buy that thing … and then actually not buy that other thing … and then actually invest the money you just saved.
Let’s talk about losing weight
So you want to lose weight.
You have a lot of options! Exercise, eat less, take supplements. Intermittent fasting is popular. Don’t forget liposuction. Gastric bypass surgery. Ozempic. They’re all options! Some are better options than others, in various ways. They have their plusses and minuses.
Intending to go on a diet doesn’t help — at all! Neither does vaguely imaginging what it would be like to ask your doctor for an Ozempic prescription. To get the results, you have to actually do (at least one of) the things! You have to undertake actual actions, which relate to your actual body.
Let’s talk about writing a novel
So you want to write a novel. What are you going to do? That novel, as they say, is not going to write itself.
You’re going to write! If you’re serious, you’re going to work on it most days, maybe every day. For minutes, and then hours. For days, and weeks, and months.
If you don’t write, a lot, you’re not going to be a writer!
Let’s talk about marriage
So you want to get married.
You have to go out and meet a person. You have to talk to them. You have to spend time with them. You have to be decent to them (unless they’re deeply damaged). You should probably learn how to love them, and learn how to be there for them in the ways that they need so that they learn that they can rely on you in a unique way, so that they will fall in love with you.
Then you have to plan the wedding. Could be simple, could be complicated. But you have to plan the wedding and then go through the wedding.
You have to do the things. If you don’t do the things, you’re not going to be married.
Let’s talk about political office
So you want to be a US Senator.
You have to run for office. You have to figure out how to get people to vote for you. There are a whole bunch of things you have to do! It sounds really tiring actually.
If you don’t go through the steps to get your name on the ballot, and then campaign in some way, so that people actually decide to vote for you, then you’re not going to be a Senator.
Getting to that place is not going to happen overnight. It’s going to take hours of work, for months and years. And even then you probably won’t make it happen, because there are only 100 US Senators.
But if you don’t do the things, you’re not going to be a Senator.
Why are we talking about all of this?
In order to do the thing, you have to do the thing.
Also, all the things are different things. If you work on getting married, that doesn’t help you learn Spanish. If you save money, that doesn’t help you learn calculus.
Also, all the things that are worth doing require time and effort. They take constant commitment, for hours and days and weeks and months and years. They take dedication. They take work.
Also, you get better at the things, slowly, as you practice them. There’s not one day when you suddenly say “Today I knew Spanish, but yesterday I didn’t.” Or “My body is excellent today, but it was lousy yesterday!” It’s a progression. It takes time — but every day and every week and every month that you practice, you are making progress. If you pay attention, you will know that you are making progress.
Also, each thing has its own mode of being
This gets its own sub-heading, because it’s the most important thing to notice about the list, and also it’s sort of hard to explain. So listen up and pay attention! This is interesting stuff!
Each thing has its own mode of being. (An ugly phrase, but I can’t come up with anything better right now.) What do I mean by that?
The mode of being of bodybuilding is … your body.
Becoming a bodybuilder literally changes the shape and the abilities of your body. In order to do it, you have to work with your body.
Your mind is irrelevant to building muscles. If you feel like it, you can think while you work out — think about whatever you want! — but the thinking will not make any difference to the progress you make in reshaping your body.
The amount of money you have is irrelevant to building muscles. Rich or poor, your body doesn’t care.
Your marital staus is irrelevant to building muscles.
Whether or not you’re on the road to becoming a US Senator is irrelevant to building muscles.
All of those other things have different modes of being — they’re not in the body — and so they don’t affect bodybuilding at all.
The mode of being of calculus is … your mind.
Learning to do calculus changes abilities in your mind. In order to do it, you have to work with your mind. The body is irrelevant. You can learn calculus while lifting weights … at least one can imagine such a thing. But the weightlifting in and of itself is irrelevant to learning calculus!
Money is irrelevant.
Marital status is irrelevant.
Etc.
The mode of being of getting rich is … money.
Saving money requires saving money. You can commit to studying calculus at the same time as you save money … but learning calculus won’t help you save more money. You can be lifting weights while saving money … but lifting those weights won’t help you save more money. You can only save money by saving money.
The mode of being of marriage is … relationships.
Mind, body, money: these might help around the edges. But fundamentally they don’t matter! If you find the right person and cultivate the right kind of relationship, you just might be on the path to getting married. If you don’t, you’re not.
Some of the modes of being have sub-modes of being
So for instance, body-building and distance running. Both are located in the body. The mode of being of both, one might say, is the body. But one is about building up your abs, quads, and other muscles, and the other is about endurance, speed, lung capacity, and so on. Those are different sub-modes.
Calculus and Spanish are both in the mind. But they use different parts of the mind, and they require you to use the mind differently. Same mode, different sub-modes.
I think in general, if you’re within one mode of being, you probably tend to have at least a small positive impact on other things within the same mode of being (but different sub-modes). Having spent the time to increase the size of your muscles won’t make you a great distance runner, but at least you were working your body. If you choose to change gears and become a distance runner instead, you’ll probably be a little bit ahead of the game, compared to the situation if you had spent all those bodybuilding hours playing video games or whatever.
Learning calculus doesn’t directly help you learn Spanish … but keeping your mind active by learning calculus probably will make it just a little bit easier to learn Spanish in the future, if you so choose.
Learning Spanish will have at least a little bit of spillover into learning Arabic. It will help a lot if you later decide to learn French.
Learning to read Spanish definitely improves your ability to speak Spanish! One might say that these two sub-modes are very closely related to each other. You can be really good at reading Spanish and pretty lousy at speaking it, as I was. But your ability to speak Spanish will still be way better than if you had never learned to read it at all.
Happiness is its own thing
Most of us treat happiness as something that will naturally happen.
I need to attain success at school (or at work), and then I’ll be happy. I need to get married, and then I’ll be happy. I need to get in better shape, and then I’ll be happy. I need to figure out how to make people like me more, and then I’ll be happy. I need to save money. I need to buy a house. Etc.
We treat happiness as an afterthought. As if it were something that just sort of happens, all by itself.
In short, we treat happiness as if it were not its own thing. As if it were an outgrowth of other things, or the natural result of other things.
But happiness is its own thing! It is not another thing!
You don’t learn Spanish by lifting weights. You don’t write a novel by saving money. You won’t become a US Senator by taking Ozempic.
What does that tell you about happiness?
Again, everything in this post is about S-happiness, not E-happiness. Please click that link because if you don’t, none of this is going to make sense.
To make things clearer, I’m going to start using “S-happiness” instead of just “happiness” for the rest of this post.
S-happiness is a feeling in the body
The mode of being of S-happiness is the body.
This means that other things that involve the body will, to an extent, improve your level of S-happiness.
This is not a new observation, on my part. People who are extremely unhappy, suffering from anxiety or depression: what do therapists tell them to do? Go for a walk. Do some yoga. Breathe and pay attention to the breath. Go to the gym and really exhaust yourself for a while. Find someone you love and give them a hug. All of these are body things!
Because the mode of being is the body, breathing and yoga and exercise and so on do help! They really do.
If mental illness were located in the mind, then the best prescriptions to help it would be things like “Do some calculus! Learn Spanish! Research a paper! Worry!”
If I’m right about this, then there are some obvious predictions that can be made. These are empirical, testable predictions. Here are two.
(1) People who go to the gym regularly will turn out to be a bit happier, other things equal, than those who sit around during those hours.
(2) People whose jobs require them to be working with their bodies every day — carpenters, plumbers, landscapers, etc. — are going to turn out to be just a bit happier (holding other things equal) compared to office workers and others who sit on their butts all day. (It’s probably hard to do a study in which you hold other things equal for these two types of people! But hopefully, someday, some smart folks will come up with a way to do the experiment, and find out if I’m right.)
The sub-mode of being of S-happiness is sensations in the body.
Just being physically active — yoga, running, whatever — helps a little bit in terms of achieving S-happiness. It helps a little bit in fighting extreme S-unhappiness such as anxiety or depression.
But what helps a lot is paying attention to the sensations in the body. That’s the sub-mode of being of S-happiness, and that’s where the action is.
In order to learn to be truly happy (a.k.a. S-happy), you need to practice paying attention to the feelings in your body.
Learning to be S-happy takes a long time
S-happiness is like bodybuilding, and learning Spanish, and saving money, and becoming a US Senator. It’s a serious time commitment. You have to spend the time working on it, if you want to get good at it.
Just like all the other practices, you get better at S-happiness as you practice. The journey to S-happiness involves becoming just a little bit S-happier, over and over, for as long as you practice. It’s really quite nice!
Maybe S-happiness isn’t for everybody?
If S-happiness is its own thing, then maybe it’s not for everybody. Just like anything else, maybe some of us will be drawn to it, and others not so much.
If you’re truly struggling with depression or anxiety, then S-happiness is probably the most important thing in the world to you! At least to the extent of climbing out of the anti-S-happiness hole you find yourself in. But maybe once you feel halfway decent again, you’re going to find other things to do with your time — things that matter more to you than extra levels of S-happiness.
For me, so far at least, I’m kind of obsessed with S-happiness. Maybe you can tell. But even for me, the obsession mostly only extends to the hours I’m in bed. While I’m out of bed, up and about in the world, I normally tend to think that there are more important things to do than worry about whether or not I’m S-happy.
This wasn’t the case a couple of years ago, when I was extremely un-S-happy, a.k.a. suffering from serious mental illness. Back then, nothing else mattered to me but my own (lack of) S-happiness.
OK so that’s my thesis.
S-happiness is not another thing. S-happiness is its own thing. If you want to be S-happier, you have to practice the things that lead to S-happiness.
There are at least three extremely important and extremely obvious objections to my thesis
Objection #1
“Happiness doesn’t work like that. Just objectively speaking, the available happiness research points to some important conclusions. People who have more money are happier than people who have less money. People who have more friends are happier than people who have fewer friends. People in loving marriages are happier than people in crappy marriages. (Etc.) So it seems like happiness does flow from other things. It seems like you’re wrong and happiness is not its own thing.”
Response:
Everything in the above paragraph is true! But it’s true about E-happiness. People who have more money are, in fact, more E-happy than people who don’t (at least most of the time). People who have more friends, people in loving marriages: ditto. That’s E-happiness. If you lose your money, lose your friends, lose your spouse: the increase in E-happiness goes away. It’s temporary.
S-happiness is permanent — or, if not permanent, it’s at least context-invariant. To be clear, so is S-unhappiness! In its extreme forms, we know S-unhappiness as mental illness (most commonly presenting as anxiety and/or depression). If you’re depressed and you get a raise, you will be a little bit happier than you were before. But the raise doesn’t cure the depression, because E-happiness and S-happiness are different things.
Objection #2
“Even if happiness is its own thing … aren’t things like love, relationships, and general closeness with other people the things that really determine happiness? How happy is it really possible to be if you don’t have close relationships? In short: maybe the mode of being of happiness isn’t the body, it’s the body-in-relation-to-others.”
Response:
This is also true, and it’s also about E-happiness, not S-happiness.
Now I want to make clear that E-happiness is very important! I very much enjoy being married to someone I love and I’m not willing to let you take that away from me! But when I was suffering from my severe anxiety disorder, I was S-unhappy in a very deep way, and it made me unable to enjoy my E-happiness. It also put a serious strain on our marriage, and it made my wife a whole lot less happy as well.
Objection #3
“Kent, this is all well and good and maybe a little bit suggestive. But you haven’t given any good evidence that it’s … you know … true.”
Response:
I have no idea how to give you that evidence, right now. I’m doing what I can by writing this substack!
But if you’re really, truly, desperately unhappy, I don’t think this is going to be an important objection. You’re probably willing to try anything. If so, all I can say is: try beddhism.
Spend extra time in bed, at least an hour, every single day, doing nothing but paying attention to the sensations in your body. The worse and more painful the sensation is, the more important that it is you pay attention to it. And don’t just pretend to pay attention, or tell yourself you’re paying attention: actually pay attention. Shut up your goddamned chatterbox of a mind for as long as you can, and pay attention to every nuance of what your body is telling you.
This process works. It increases S-happiness. It relieves anxiety and depression. It does so very very slowly and with an incredible amount of pain. In a lot of ways, it’s a truly terrible path. But it works.
If you have specific questions about how to do beddhism, then please ask me those questions! I find it much easier to write when I have someone in mind who wants to know something specific.
Comments more than welcome. Especially if you have objections, complaints, disgruntlements, whatever it might be. Fire away! Let me know what I got wrong.
Thanks for reading. Have a great weekend.
Correct: this clicks more when you frame it with H/S (P/E). 100%.