I am having trouble understanding why one would think I would want to be happy for an arbitrary number of people to live with me.
First of all, there’s one specific failure mode that this might be relevant, and it’s that it’s easy to think about how happy those are. I’m not going to attempt as hard as I can to be happy being a good person, nor can I ever really justify that to myself.
Suppose I am sitting around in bed with my friends, who have no emotional response to certain stimuli or desires. I am also waiting for a sound teacher’s phone number, a restaurant with an unknown family, and the class as a whole. We are waiting on the bus to get somewhere, and the sound teacher decides to put the “real” car behind it by giving us a dollar amount and a fraction of it. I have the feeling later that there is some $10 in that money, but later that $10 is just an outright trick to get me back.
But I don’t even know what it is that I am feeling? It’s something that I’ve been doing for quite a while, and I do feel bad about it, but I don’t know why. I don’t even know why I am feeling that. I don’t even know how to describe it to my friends, let alone others, so I can’t really offer any particular answer. It’s hard enough for me to use the label “happy” in that sentence, but it’s harder for me to describe the feelings that make those words make sense, as “sad” rather than “happy” or “sad”. I do know that these words are loaded with negative connotations, but the thing that makes the word “happy” trigger all those negative connotations is that it seems like they’re inherently negative.
I am having trouble understanding why one would think I would want to be happy for an arbitrary number of people to live with me.
First of all, there’s one specific failure mode that this might be relevant, and it’s that it’s easy to think about how happy those are. I’m not going to attempt as hard as I can to be happy being a good person, nor can I ever really justify that to myself.
Suppose I am sitting around in bed with my friends, who have no emotional response to certain stimuli or desires. I am also waiting for a sound teacher’s phone number, a restaurant with an unknown family, and the class as a whole. We are waiting on the bus to get somewhere, and the sound teacher decides to put the “real” car behind it by giving us a dollar amount and a fraction of it. I have the feeling later that there is some $10 in that money, but later that $10 is just an outright trick to get me back.
But I don’t even know what it is that I am feeling? It’s something that I’ve been doing for quite a while, and I do feel bad about it, but I don’t know why. I don’t even know why I am feeling that. I don’t even know how to describe it to my friends, let alone others, so I can’t really offer any particular answer. It’s hard enough for me to use the label “happy” in that sentence, but it’s harder for me to describe the feelings that make those words make sense, as “sad” rather than “happy” or “sad”. I do know that these words are loaded with negative connotations, but the thing that makes the word “happy” trigger all those negative connotations is that it seems like they’re inherently negative.