It seemed to me that “actually trying”—aiming the full force of your being at the solution of a problem you care about—is self-evidently motivating and requires zero extra justification if you care about the problem.
This is basically my mindset as well. In situations where I would ask “Why is nobody actually trying?” it would mean something like “I wish everyone else would care about this outcome as much as I do.” If people aren’t optimizing for results, they could be optimizing for appearance of effort (which would in some circumstances look like optimizing for pain), or they could be optimizing for something else entirely, such as enjoying themselves, personal growth, or impressing a particular person or group.
The specific “happiness means you’re not trying hard enough” mentally is not one I remember encountering, though I also haven’t had that concept available as a hypothesis, and my prior was against it since it seemed so obviously confused, so maybe I just didn’t recognize it when I saw it.
This is basically my mindset as well. In situations where I would ask “Why is nobody actually trying?” it would mean something like “I wish everyone else would care about this outcome as much as I do.” If people aren’t optimizing for results, they could be optimizing for appearance of effort (which would in some circumstances look like optimizing for pain), or they could be optimizing for something else entirely, such as enjoying themselves, personal growth, or impressing a particular person or group.
The specific “happiness means you’re not trying hard enough” mentally is not one I remember encountering, though I also haven’t had that concept available as a hypothesis, and my prior was against it since it seemed so obviously confused, so maybe I just didn’t recognize it when I saw it.