I have felt levels of happiness which are far above the upper limit of your mental scale. I know exactly how to be happy. And yet I find myself not consistently applying my own methods. Do you realize how impossibly mind-twisting this situation is? What happens in reality is that I enjoy and see great value in happiness when it happens, but when it doesn’t I only work on it grudgingly. It’s like with exercise, which is great but I’m rarely enthusiastic about starting it. The problem is not that I don’t value happiness enough. The problem is rather that there is no gut-level motivational gradient to get actual happiness. There are gradients for all sorts of things which are crappy, fake substitutes. Once you know the taste of the real thing, they aren’t fun at all. But you still end up optimizing for them, because that’s what your brain does.
It sounds like you’re describing akrasia. Do you think your meditation-based methods are insufficient to overcome akrasia, or you just haven’t applied them to this end yet?
Yup, that’s the word. No, the situation described in the post was with not making any attempt fight akrasia. This will sound silly but somehow I thought I had been fighting akrasia in all the other cases because ultimately I wanted to be happy. So faced with happiness as the direct outcome, I’ve somehow been expecting akrasia to not apply. Duh.
anecdata: my conscientiousness went up on the big five from one year ago to today (very significant investment in a practice program + retreat over the year).
It sounds like you’re describing akrasia. Do you think your meditation-based methods are insufficient to overcome akrasia, or you just haven’t applied them to this end yet?
Yup, that’s the word. No, the situation described in the post was with not making any attempt fight akrasia. This will sound silly but somehow I thought I had been fighting akrasia in all the other cases because ultimately I wanted to be happy. So faced with happiness as the direct outcome, I’ve somehow been expecting akrasia to not apply. Duh.
So now that you’ve realized this, do you think you’ll be able to use meditation to overcome akrasia?
anecdata: my conscientiousness went up on the big five from one year ago to today (very significant investment in a practice program + retreat over the year).