3 Anticipation matters. Anticipating future pain is itself painful, and anticipating pleasure is itself pleasant. Spend more time reliving happy memories and anticipating future pleasures, and spend less time anticipating future pains. [emphasis mine]
and this
4 Your brain generates reward signals when experienced value surpasses forecasted value. So: lower your expectations and your brain will be pleasantly surprised when things go well. Things going perfectly according to plan is not the norm, so don’t treat it as if it is.
How does one balance these recommendations? In my experience, when I anticipate future pleasures in cases where I am not certain of the outcome I tend to inadvertently boost my estimation of success or “get my hopes up”. Is the solution to only actively anticipate pleasure when my estimation of the probability of success is high to begin with? This is not an easy thing to do, and in fact 4. in general seems difficult.
Good question! One way to achieve both things is to spend time anticipating relatively certain future pleasures and also lower your expectations concerning how future complex (and thus uncertain) events will play out.
I have found that this can be hacked in innumerable ways. The simplest one might be the lottery hack: imagine vividly awesome things that’d happen conditional on something nearly impossible happening, and just hide that impossibility from your brain, for example using scope sensitivity. What’d you do if a mayor banks computer got a random bitflip giving you 2^20 dollars? What’d you do if you suddenly transformed into a magical unicorn with a purple tentacle?
Consider this, from The Neuroscience of Pleasure
and this
How does one balance these recommendations? In my experience, when I anticipate future pleasures in cases where I am not certain of the outcome I tend to inadvertently boost my estimation of success or “get my hopes up”. Is the solution to only actively anticipate pleasure when my estimation of the probability of success is high to begin with? This is not an easy thing to do, and in fact 4. in general seems difficult.
Good question! One way to achieve both things is to spend time anticipating relatively certain future pleasures and also lower your expectations concerning how future complex (and thus uncertain) events will play out.
Good point, but since an accurate model of the future is helpful, this may be a case where you should purchase your warm fuzzies separately.
(Since people tend to make overly optimistic plans, the two strategies might be similar in practice.)
I have found that this can be hacked in innumerable ways. The simplest one might be the lottery hack: imagine vividly awesome things that’d happen conditional on something nearly impossible happening, and just hide that impossibility from your brain, for example using scope sensitivity. What’d you do if a mayor banks computer got a random bitflip giving you 2^20 dollars? What’d you do if you suddenly transformed into a magical unicorn with a purple tentacle?