The Paradoxical Effects of Pursuing Positive Emotion (2013) [pdf]
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Re: The Paradoxical Effects of Pursuing Positive Emotion (2013) [pdf]
#2This is interesting, because I was just thinking the other day how easily I can summon various emotions. I can think about my family and the people I love, and feel happiness and warmth. I can think about the cruel things humans have done to each other and feel despair. I can think about people I have lost and feel sad.
I actually find it quite easy to choose the emotion I want to feel.
I guess the difference is that I am not 'pursuing' positive emotion so much as summoning it by my thinking.
Re: The Paradoxical Effects of Pursuing Positive Emotion (2013) [pdf]
#3Don't push for happiness - JP https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPETcaQ3Z2o
Re: The Paradoxical Effects of Pursuing Positive Emotion (2013) [pdf]
#4Desires themselves are imbued with negative affect. As Naval Ravikant tweeted, "Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want." More fundamentally, I think the very mechanism of how desires work is through negative hedonic tone. Contemplating and actually fulfilling the desire is associated with positive hedonic tone. The gradient between the negative hedonic tone of the desire and the positive hedonic tone of its fulfillment is how motivation emerges.
Long-term meditation is often associated with a lessening of the influence of desire, and greater happiness.
Re: The Paradoxical Effects of Pursuing Positive Emotion (2013) [pdf]
#5This is the way I think about it: Happiness is an excellent experience, but a terrible goal.
Re: The Paradoxical Effects of Pursuing Positive Emotion (2013) [pdf]
#6People think thinking positive thoughts is hard (and you should strive to be positive).
But thinking negative thoughts when you are positive is equally hard as its counterpart.
Trying to not go in the path your mind is directed towards is the difficulty - mind doesn’t care about + or -, just whether or not the emotional response is appropriate (according to its learned/perceived set of beliefs and circumstances).
Re: The Paradoxical Effects of Pursuing Positive Emotion (2013) [pdf]
#7What's interesting is that part of this report is that the monitoring of one's emotional state causes unhappiness. I can't say I fully agree with this statement- if someone has constant emotional patterns that are negative, it's important to recognize them and understand them and then behave around them. eg. Someone who is abused with explosive yelling as a child may feel unhappiness and fear at projected assumptions that someone is angry with them. Without understanding and monitoring one's responses, it becomes difficult to understand the difference between reasonable and unreasonable emotional responses.
Re: The Paradoxical Effects of Pursuing Positive Emotion (2013) [pdf]
#8From this, I immediately wonder if having the pursuit of happiness listed up front as an unalienable right in the US Declaration of Independence, has therefore led to less people being actually happy.
Re: The Paradoxical Effects of Pursuing Positive Emotion (2013) [pdf]
#9People think thinking positive thoughts is hard (and you should strive to be positive). But thinking negative thoughts when you are positive is equally hard as its counterpart. Trying to not go in the path your mind is directed towards is the difficulty - mind doesn’t care about + or -, just whether or not the emotional response is appropriate (according to its learned/perceived set of beliefs and circumstances).
I find that practicing cynicism, starting with myself and working outward, has been the thing that has led to more of a positive outlook than I have ever previously attained. I was angry and depressed for decades until I stopped taking firstly, myself and secondly, the rest of society, so damn seriously.
We have created a fiction called 'the human'. And we have then endowed it with all the best qualities from our myths, legends and stories. We then spend the rest of our time attacking ourselves and those around us, for not measuring up to something that was never actually real in the first place.
Re: The Paradoxical Effects of Pursuing Positive Emotion (2013) [pdf]
#10Desires themselves are imbued with negative affect. As Naval Ravikant tweeted, "Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want." More fundamentally, I think the very mechanism of how desires work is through negative hedonic tone. Contemplating and actually fulfilling the desire is associated with positive hedonic tone. The gradient between the negative hedonic tone of the d…
I agree. There is also a learned mindset; to treat desire as a lack or as a vision of fulfillment.
Personally, I think the role of meditation and happiness is in creating emotional/cognitive distance between one's self and the observed desires, not the lessening of desires, per se. Though it depends on one's path, I suppose.