I’ve faced this problem and partially overcome it. I’ll try my best to describe this. However, I’ve also been diagnosed with depression and prescribed SSRIs in the past, so my approaches to handling the problem may not fit you.
You have acquired your estimates of the dangers of the future by explicit reasoning. The default estimates that your emotional, unconscious brain provided you with were too optimistic. This is the case for almost everyone.
Consider that even though you have realized the future is bleak, your emotional, unconscious, everyday-handling mind still hasn’t updated its estimates. It is still too optimistic. It just needs to be allowed to express this optimism.
Right now, you probably believe that your emotional outlook must be rational, and must correspond to your conscious estimates of the future. You are forcing your emotions to match the future you foresee, and so you feel afraid.
I suggest that you allow your emotions to become disconnected from your conscious long-term predictions. Stop trying to force yourself to be unhappy because you predict bad things. Say to yourself: I choose to be happy and unafraid no matter what I predict!
Emotions are not a a tool like rational thought, which you have to use in a way that corresponds to the real world. You can use them in any way you like. It’s rational to feel happy about a bleak future, because feeling happy is a good thing and there is no point in feeling unhappy!
Being happy or not, afraid or not, does not have to be determined by your conscious outlook. The only things that force your mind to be unhappy are immediate problems: pain, hunger, loneliness; and the immediate expectation of these. If you accept that your goal is to be happy and unafraid as a fact independent of the future you foresee, you can find various techniques to achieve this. Unfortunately they tend to vary for different people.
Expecting to die of cancer in fifty years does not, in itself, cause negative emotions like fear. Imagining the death in your mind, and dwelling on it, does cause fear. In the first place, avoid thinking about any future problem that you are not doing anything about. Use the defensive mechanism of not acknowledging unsolved problems.
This does not mean that on the conscious level you’ll ignore problems. It is possible to decouple the two things, with practice. You can take long-term strategic actions (donate to SIAI, research immortality) without acutely fearing the result of failure by not imagining that result.
We are used to think of compartmentalization as an irrational bias, but it’s possible to compartmentalize your strategic actions—which try to improve the future—and meanwhile be happy just as if the future was going to be fine by default.
In a similar vein, I tend to suffer from a “too-active imagination” when reading about the suffering of other people in the news, and vividly imagining the events described. My solution has been to stop reading the news. When you’re faced with something terrible and you’re not doing anything about it anyway, just look away. Defeat the implicit LW conditioning that tells you looking away from the suffering of others is wrong. It’s wrong only if it affects your actions, not your emotions.
Well said, and definitely an important, oft-neglected point. One thing I’d like to add is that if you can control what you feel good and bad about, you can do some nifty things to your behavior. For example, at some point I managed to flip my reaction to noticing flaws in myself from negative (boo, I have a flaw) to positive (yay, I noticed my flaw and can try to fix it now). This made me significantly more reflective.
This is fantastic. When you do turn it into a post, though, consider the extent to which emotions and actions are part of a feedback loop—if I look away from the suffering of others so as not to feel their pain, I may come to accept it as normal, and that in turn may affect my actions.
I think you focus too much on possible negative outcomes. I thought this when reading your article, and reading this comment confirmed it.
Yes, it is possible that looking away from the suffering of others will affect your actions, so you will not help them. And it is also possible that looking too much at the suffering of others will make you depressed, so you will not be able to do anything, not even helping them. Seems to me that you prefer to focus on the first possibility and ignore the other one. This is your choice.
You are not perfect, and whatever you do, you will never be perfect. This is the bad news. The good news is that you are not perfect, but you can improve. Again, it is your choice whether you focus on the “I can improve” or the “but I will not be perfect anyway” part of the message. Both parts are true.
If something is bad, understanding that it is bad doesn’t make it worse. You see bad things that you didn’t see before, and it makes you sad. But unlike before, now you can also see how to improve things. Even a small improvement is better than nothing (although on higher levels, you should strive for more than just small improvements). Imagine that this is a “lesson 1”. Your first lesson is to make a small improvement, and not care about anything else. After you complete the lesson 1, you get to a lesson 2, which requires you to make a bigger improvement. A bigger improvement can either be something larger, or something that provides long-term benefits. But don’t skip your lessons. Start with the lesson 1, and focus on the lesson 1. You can do it. The goal for now is not to become perfect. The goal is to complete the lesson 1. Higher challenges await you in next lessons. And yes, sometimes the progress is slow. Don’t complain and focus on your lessons. Do something. Then, do something better. Etc.
As DanArmak said, happiness and utility don’t have to go hand in hand. There is no reason why you have to be sad even though all of your preferences fail to be met (on some level, if you no longer achieve basic needs like food, sleep, shelter, companionship, then it is hard physically to not feel sad, but that is a separate issue).
Another thing to consider: by behaving rationally, you will probably end up doing better than 99% of other people in the world. Most of them seem basically happy with their lives, so there is a proof by example that it’s possible to be happy even if is not achieved.
Emotions are not a a tool like rational thought, which you have to use in a way that corresponds to the real world. You can use them in any way you like. It’s rational to feel happy about a bleak future, because feeling happy is a good thing and there is no point in feeling unhappy!
I weakly disagree. Emotions are something the human race have evolved over a long period of time to make sure our gene’s reproduce and contain useful insights. The non-defective ones are perfectly rational, but importantly are based on outdated data. It take a long time for basic human emotion to update it’s view point because it take so long for humans to multiple and undergo natural selection.
So they are a tool as well just a very different one with strategies that are often outdated by a quickly changing data set.
Emotions are far worse than simply being ‘not updated’. They have bigger faults:
Not always beneficial: often they do more harm than good, by anyone’s accounting, and rational thought gives better guidance. It’s almost never beneficial to be severely depressed, or to lose self-control in anger, yet the conditions are pretty common. They are failure modes of the system, not misapplied reactions.
Not always selfish: emotions are optimized evolutionarily for inclusive genetic fitness, which is often at cross purposes with personal interest. Emotions drive people to hurt others and risk themselves in various ways to increase IGF.
The social contract requires that we suppress our emotions a lot of the time; it would be better for us if these particular emotions weren’t too strong.
Strong emotions which you’re not acting on are often painful to experience.
I mentioned two failure modes, emotions based on out of date data and defective emotions. I accept that emotions evolved to help our genes replicate and they are often based on out of date data, this does not mean that they can not be used as a tool. I accept that emotions are not always perfect guides and can be defective(In the evolutionary sense) this does not mean that all emotions can not be used as a tool.
Most of your points revolve around people not controlling their emotions and/or in someway being a slave to their emotions. Which leads me to believe that my following point was not communicated; that emotions can be used as a tool, not that you should be controlled/dominated by them nor that emotions should be used with out guidance from rational thought.
You can use them in any way you like.
I disagree that you can use your emotions any way you like. I have not witnessed or read of such absolute and deep reprogramming of the human mind. Since they serve a evolutionary purpose even if you could you should not arbitrarily repurpose them, but rather take them into account and use them as one of main data points in some rational thought process.
It’s rational to feel happy about a bleak future, because feeling happy is a good thing and there is no point in feeling unhappy!
I do not this is self evident. This is only true if there is not benefit to being unhappy. Part of your argument was that some emotions are beneficial, “feeling happy is a good thing.” Your argument accepts that some emotions are beneficial and some are not but have not provided any criteria to divide the two groups the ones that useful(tools) and the ones that are not useful(not a tool).
It seems to me that calling unhappiness pointless is the equivalent of calling unhappiness evolutionarily defective. One counter point which I think can be considered self evident is that experiencing unhappiness can be a strong motivator to avoiding it again. It is good for individuals to do their best to be as motivated as they can with out any unhappiness, however I do not think humans in general have the power to completely reprogram this trait out of themselves.
That is exactly what I’m advocating. In my original example, use happy/positive emotions to feel better.
I disagree that you can use your emotions any way you like. I have not witnessed or read of such absolute and deep reprogramming of the human mind.
Of course you can’t literally do anything you like. Look at the previous sentence in my comment to see my meaning in context. What I meant was that you can use emotions in a way that, on the surface, does not correspond to the emotion’s “intent”. For instance, you can try to feel happy about things you have so far felt sad about, because you rationally prefer to be happy. Of course you won’t always succeed fully, but you can try; it’s a legitimate and often useful approach.
Since they serve a evolutionary purpose even if you could you should not arbitrarily repurpose them
I disagree. Evolution’s purposes are not my own. The only purpose we share in common is my own survival, and even then, for me it’s an absolute top-level goal while evolution often trades it away for other things.
It seems to me that calling unhappiness pointless is the equivalent of calling unhappiness evolutionarily defective.
Again, even if it was true (which it isn’t), it’s unrelated to whether it’s useful to me. I couldn’t care less about evolution.
One counter point which I think can be considered self evident is that experiencing unhappiness can be a strong motivator to avoiding it again.
Certainly that is the evolutionary reason for, and benefit of, feelings of unhappiness. But humans can behave consciously and rationally to avoid problems. Given this, the amount of negative emotions is vast overkill for the necessary purpose of conditioning, and I wish we could decrease it. It’s similar to pain, which has a useful purpose, but there’s just way too much of it.
That is exactly what I’m advocating. In my original example, use happy/positive emotions to feel better.
We both used the word tool but I was not trying to advocating using “happy/positive emotions to feel better.” I was trying to highlight the fact that emotions are a part of an efective evolutionary strategy and by using those strategy to reverse engineer your emotions you sometimes gain useful data to include in a rational thought process.
I disagree that you can use your emotions any way you like. I have not witnessed or read of such absolute and deep reprogramming of the human mind.
Of course you can’t literally do anything you like. Look at the previous sentence in my comment to see my meaning in context. What I meant was that you can use emotions in a way that, on the surface, does not correspond to the emotion’s “intent”. For instance, you can try to feel happy about things you have so far felt sad about, because you rationally prefer to be happy. Of course you won’t always succeed fully, but you can try; it’s a legitimate and often useful approach.
I agree with this strategy when the emotion is evolutionary defective or if you would become dominated by your emotion otherwise(prevent you from acting rationally). In all other cases it is better to try and extract some useful data from the emotion+evolutionary strategy.
Since they serve a evolutionary purpose even if you could you should not arbitrarily repurpose them
I disagree. Evolution’s purposes are not my own. The only purpose we share in common is my own survival, and even then, for me it’s an absolute top-level goal while evolution often trades it away for other things.
I did not make the argument that the evolutionary purposes are your own and therefore emotions serve your purposes. Only that you can extract useful data, for your own purposes, from it because it arose from evolution/natural selection.
One counter point which I think can be considered self evident is that experiencing unhappiness can be a strong motivator to avoiding it again.
Certainly that is the evolutionary reason for, and benefit of, feelings of unhappiness. But humans can behave consciously and rationally to avoid problems. Given this, the amount of negative emotions is vast overkill for the necessary purpose of conditioning, and I wish we could decrease it. It’s similar to pain, which has a useful purpose, but there’s just way too much of it.
What I take away from this is you are arguing for separating your emotions form you rational thoughts so your rational thoughts are not unduly influenced by your emotions. I was not making points counter to this train of thought. I was trying to highlight a use for emotions that not only were not mentioned in your original post, but that your post seem to make points that ran counter to it.
In the cases that the emotional reaction is “overkill” like people that are severely depressed or suffer from other large emotional overreactions seem to be suffering from evolutionary flawed emotional reaction or an emotional reaction that evolved under different conditions and is no longer helpful(based on out of date data). I think we can both agree that these two categories of emotion are unproductive, so I am curious to know what categories you would add to my list which are orthogonal to the two categories I have provided.
Edit: I had misplaced “(prevent you from acting rationally)”
I’ve faced this problem and partially overcome it. I’ll try my best to describe this. However, I’ve also been diagnosed with depression and prescribed SSRIs in the past, so my approaches to handling the problem may not fit you.
You have acquired your estimates of the dangers of the future by explicit reasoning. The default estimates that your emotional, unconscious brain provided you with were too optimistic. This is the case for almost everyone.
Consider that even though you have realized the future is bleak, your emotional, unconscious, everyday-handling mind still hasn’t updated its estimates. It is still too optimistic. It just needs to be allowed to express this optimism.
Right now, you probably believe that your emotional outlook must be rational, and must correspond to your conscious estimates of the future. You are forcing your emotions to match the future you foresee, and so you feel afraid.
I suggest that you allow your emotions to become disconnected from your conscious long-term predictions. Stop trying to force yourself to be unhappy because you predict bad things. Say to yourself: I choose to be happy and unafraid no matter what I predict!
Emotions are not a a tool like rational thought, which you have to use in a way that corresponds to the real world. You can use them in any way you like. It’s rational to feel happy about a bleak future, because feeling happy is a good thing and there is no point in feeling unhappy!
Being happy or not, afraid or not, does not have to be determined by your conscious outlook. The only things that force your mind to be unhappy are immediate problems: pain, hunger, loneliness; and the immediate expectation of these. If you accept that your goal is to be happy and unafraid as a fact independent of the future you foresee, you can find various techniques to achieve this. Unfortunately they tend to vary for different people.
Expecting to die of cancer in fifty years does not, in itself, cause negative emotions like fear. Imagining the death in your mind, and dwelling on it, does cause fear. In the first place, avoid thinking about any future problem that you are not doing anything about. Use the defensive mechanism of not acknowledging unsolved problems.
This does not mean that on the conscious level you’ll ignore problems. It is possible to decouple the two things, with practice. You can take long-term strategic actions (donate to SIAI, research immortality) without acutely fearing the result of failure by not imagining that result.
We are used to think of compartmentalization as an irrational bias, but it’s possible to compartmentalize your strategic actions—which try to improve the future—and meanwhile be happy just as if the future was going to be fine by default.
In a similar vein, I tend to suffer from a “too-active imagination” when reading about the suffering of other people in the news, and vividly imagining the events described. My solution has been to stop reading the news. When you’re faced with something terrible and you’re not doing anything about it anyway, just look away. Defeat the implicit LW conditioning that tells you looking away from the suffering of others is wrong. It’s wrong only if it affects your actions, not your emotions.
suggest turning this into a post
Thanks for the encouragement; will do.
Well said, and definitely an important, oft-neglected point. One thing I’d like to add is that if you can control what you feel good and bad about, you can do some nifty things to your behavior. For example, at some point I managed to flip my reaction to noticing flaws in myself from negative (boo, I have a flaw) to positive (yay, I noticed my flaw and can try to fix it now). This made me significantly more reflective.
This is fantastic. When you do turn it into a post, though, consider the extent to which emotions and actions are part of a feedback loop—if I look away from the suffering of others so as not to feel their pain, I may come to accept it as normal, and that in turn may affect my actions.
I think you focus too much on possible negative outcomes. I thought this when reading your article, and reading this comment confirmed it.
Yes, it is possible that looking away from the suffering of others will affect your actions, so you will not help them. And it is also possible that looking too much at the suffering of others will make you depressed, so you will not be able to do anything, not even helping them. Seems to me that you prefer to focus on the first possibility and ignore the other one. This is your choice.
You are not perfect, and whatever you do, you will never be perfect. This is the bad news. The good news is that you are not perfect, but you can improve. Again, it is your choice whether you focus on the “I can improve” or the “but I will not be perfect anyway” part of the message. Both parts are true.
If something is bad, understanding that it is bad doesn’t make it worse. You see bad things that you didn’t see before, and it makes you sad. But unlike before, now you can also see how to improve things. Even a small improvement is better than nothing (although on higher levels, you should strive for more than just small improvements). Imagine that this is a “lesson 1”. Your first lesson is to make a small improvement, and not care about anything else. After you complete the lesson 1, you get to a lesson 2, which requires you to make a bigger improvement. A bigger improvement can either be something larger, or something that provides long-term benefits. But don’t skip your lessons. Start with the lesson 1, and focus on the lesson 1. You can do it. The goal for now is not to become perfect. The goal is to complete the lesson 1. Higher challenges await you in next lessons. And yes, sometimes the progress is slow. Don’t complain and focus on your lessons. Do something. Then, do something better. Etc.
As DanArmak said, happiness and utility don’t have to go hand in hand. There is no reason why you have to be sad even though all of your preferences fail to be met (on some level, if you no longer achieve basic needs like food, sleep, shelter, companionship, then it is hard physically to not feel sad, but that is a separate issue).
Another thing to consider: by behaving rationally, you will probably end up doing better than 99% of other people in the world. Most of them seem basically happy with their lives, so there is a proof by example that it’s possible to be happy even if is not achieved.
I weakly disagree. Emotions are something the human race have evolved over a long period of time to make sure our gene’s reproduce and contain useful insights. The non-defective ones are perfectly rational, but importantly are based on outdated data. It take a long time for basic human emotion to update it’s view point because it take so long for humans to multiple and undergo natural selection.
So they are a tool as well just a very different one with strategies that are often outdated by a quickly changing data set.
Emotions are far worse than simply being ‘not updated’. They have bigger faults:
Not always beneficial: often they do more harm than good, by anyone’s accounting, and rational thought gives better guidance. It’s almost never beneficial to be severely depressed, or to lose self-control in anger, yet the conditions are pretty common. They are failure modes of the system, not misapplied reactions.
Not always selfish: emotions are optimized evolutionarily for inclusive genetic fitness, which is often at cross purposes with personal interest. Emotions drive people to hurt others and risk themselves in various ways to increase IGF.
The social contract requires that we suppress our emotions a lot of the time; it would be better for us if these particular emotions weren’t too strong.
Strong emotions which you’re not acting on are often painful to experience.
I mentioned two failure modes, emotions based on out of date data and defective emotions. I accept that emotions evolved to help our genes replicate and they are often based on out of date data, this does not mean that they can not be used as a tool. I accept that emotions are not always perfect guides and can be defective(In the evolutionary sense) this does not mean that all emotions can not be used as a tool.
Most of your points revolve around people not controlling their emotions and/or in someway being a slave to their emotions. Which leads me to believe that my following point was not communicated; that emotions can be used as a tool, not that you should be controlled/dominated by them nor that emotions should be used with out guidance from rational thought.
I disagree that you can use your emotions any way you like. I have not witnessed or read of such absolute and deep reprogramming of the human mind. Since they serve a evolutionary purpose even if you could you should not arbitrarily repurpose them, but rather take them into account and use them as one of main data points in some rational thought process.
I do not this is self evident. This is only true if there is not benefit to being unhappy. Part of your argument was that some emotions are beneficial, “feeling happy is a good thing.” Your argument accepts that some emotions are beneficial and some are not but have not provided any criteria to divide the two groups the ones that useful(tools) and the ones that are not useful(not a tool).
It seems to me that calling unhappiness pointless is the equivalent of calling unhappiness evolutionarily defective. One counter point which I think can be considered self evident is that experiencing unhappiness can be a strong motivator to avoiding it again. It is good for individuals to do their best to be as motivated as they can with out any unhappiness, however I do not think humans in general have the power to completely reprogram this trait out of themselves.
That is exactly what I’m advocating. In my original example, use happy/positive emotions to feel better.
Of course you can’t literally do anything you like. Look at the previous sentence in my comment to see my meaning in context. What I meant was that you can use emotions in a way that, on the surface, does not correspond to the emotion’s “intent”. For instance, you can try to feel happy about things you have so far felt sad about, because you rationally prefer to be happy. Of course you won’t always succeed fully, but you can try; it’s a legitimate and often useful approach.
I disagree. Evolution’s purposes are not my own. The only purpose we share in common is my own survival, and even then, for me it’s an absolute top-level goal while evolution often trades it away for other things.
Again, even if it was true (which it isn’t), it’s unrelated to whether it’s useful to me. I couldn’t care less about evolution.
Certainly that is the evolutionary reason for, and benefit of, feelings of unhappiness. But humans can behave consciously and rationally to avoid problems. Given this, the amount of negative emotions is vast overkill for the necessary purpose of conditioning, and I wish we could decrease it. It’s similar to pain, which has a useful purpose, but there’s just way too much of it.
We both used the word tool but I was not trying to advocating using “happy/positive emotions to feel better.” I was trying to highlight the fact that emotions are a part of an efective evolutionary strategy and by using those strategy to reverse engineer your emotions you sometimes gain useful data to include in a rational thought process.
I agree with this strategy when the emotion is evolutionary defective or if you would become dominated by your emotion otherwise(prevent you from acting rationally). In all other cases it is better to try and extract some useful data from the emotion+evolutionary strategy.
I did not make the argument that the evolutionary purposes are your own and therefore emotions serve your purposes. Only that you can extract useful data, for your own purposes, from it because it arose from evolution/natural selection.
What I take away from this is you are arguing for separating your emotions form you rational thoughts so your rational thoughts are not unduly influenced by your emotions. I was not making points counter to this train of thought. I was trying to highlight a use for emotions that not only were not mentioned in your original post, but that your post seem to make points that ran counter to it.
In the cases that the emotional reaction is “overkill” like people that are severely depressed or suffer from other large emotional overreactions seem to be suffering from evolutionary flawed emotional reaction or an emotional reaction that evolved under different conditions and is no longer helpful(based on out of date data). I think we can both agree that these two categories of emotion are unproductive, so I am curious to know what categories you would add to my list which are orthogonal to the two categories I have provided.
Edit: I had misplaced “(prevent you from acting rationally)”