I’m just reading this for random reasons either for the first time or for the first time that I have a response. I think what I see differently from you is not happiness but motivation. And that at the time I wrote this, I believe your process of making decisions was more future-oriented than mine was. (I believe I have converged towards you in how my motivation works in the ten years since I wrote this.) When I wrote the above, my past was clinging to me in many ways that were adverse to happiness. (Trauma) What I wasn’t quite saying in my previous comment, is that I was at the time (like many other people I know) holding onto trauma in stupid ways because I needed to hold onto it to make it feel like that part of my life had a reason to have happened that wasn’t purely just worthless-badness happens. Holding onto trauma was a core part of my identity and was a core part of many other people’s identities. On the silliest extreme of people holding onto trauma are the people who keep playing games that they expect to keep losing with the hope of eventually winning in a way that makes all their past losses up to them. (Before 2016, being a Cubs fan was a particularly lighthearted example of people behaving this way; whereas, gambling addictions are a much less lighthearted one. Many gambling addicts are deeply aware that their hope to one day recover all they’ve lost through continuing to gamble is not founded in reality. I’ve never been a gambling addict. But I’ve had several relationships where I was holding onto the baseless hope that someone would change or that someone’s true colors were never the colors that actually came out, etc. and I think that’s more or less psychologically the same thing as a very potent gambling addiction. I think the psychological mechanism of staying in an abusive relationship is almost exactly the same as the psychological mechanism of being addicted to playing slots, but much, much stronger because abusive people are like intelligent slot machines that are studying you to make you maximally addicted to interacting with them. My overall thesis is that the brain has an enormous number of traits that I would say seem more like bugs to me than like features and that I believe your article is a much more accurate description of how human motivation should work than an accurarate explanation of how human motivation does work.) And I used silly examples to express this because I didn’t want to talk about any of the real ones.
I’m just reading this for random reasons either for the first time or for the first time that I have a response. I think what I see differently from you is not happiness but motivation. And that at the time I wrote this, I believe your process of making decisions was more future-oriented than mine was. (I believe I have converged towards you in how my motivation works in the ten years since I wrote this.) When I wrote the above, my past was clinging to me in many ways that were adverse to happiness. (Trauma) What I wasn’t quite saying in my previous comment, is that I was at the time (like many other people I know) holding onto trauma in stupid ways because I needed to hold onto it to make it feel like that part of my life had a reason to have happened that wasn’t purely just worthless-badness happens. Holding onto trauma was a core part of my identity and was a core part of many other people’s identities. On the silliest extreme of people holding onto trauma are the people who keep playing games that they expect to keep losing with the hope of eventually winning in a way that makes all their past losses up to them. (Before 2016, being a Cubs fan was a particularly lighthearted example of people behaving this way; whereas, gambling addictions are a much less lighthearted one. Many gambling addicts are deeply aware that their hope to one day recover all they’ve lost through continuing to gamble is not founded in reality. I’ve never been a gambling addict. But I’ve had several relationships where I was holding onto the baseless hope that someone would change or that someone’s true colors were never the colors that actually came out, etc. and I think that’s more or less psychologically the same thing as a very potent gambling addiction. I think the psychological mechanism of staying in an abusive relationship is almost exactly the same as the psychological mechanism of being addicted to playing slots, but much, much stronger because abusive people are like intelligent slot machines that are studying you to make you maximally addicted to interacting with them. My overall thesis is that the brain has an enormous number of traits that I would say seem more like bugs to me than like features and that I believe your article is a much more accurate description of how human motivation should work than an accurarate explanation of how human motivation does work.) And I used silly examples to express this because I didn’t want to talk about any of the real ones.