Class 1: Who Are You?

An exercise in happiness

For those of you who don’t know, I run a class for college students on…well, it’s complicated. Life skills, I guess you could call it. Not like home-ec, though there is going to be a cooking lecture. It’s things I wish someone had taught me in my 20s, so I hadn’t wasted so much time learning it all. I don’t think I’m going to be able to impart what I’ve learned in the same way a decade of mistakes might, but that’s okay. When you’re learning a sport, someone describing a technique won’t do much at first. You still won’t be able to correctly perform the technique, or have the deep intuition of when to execute it. But it does give you something to start working towards mastering instead of flailing around aimlessly, and I think that’s worthwhile.

I’ve always meant to write up some of these, just so I can send them to students after the fact. I don’t know how useful they’ll be if you’re not in your 20s. But I never promised any of this blog would be useful to anyone, so here we go¹.

Lecture one is an exercise to help figure out what makes you happy².

---

When it comes to understanding what makes you happy, high school students have the unique disadvantage of their lives being very structured. They spend the day in school, where their options are a constrained set of social interactions and an even more constrained set of academic actions. Outside of school are activities, but those are often limited by what’s available in the area and what parents are willing to drive you to / pay for.

As a result, students in high school don’t have a lot of room to explore. This isn’t to say that teenagers aren’t happy, or aren’t able to move towards things that do bring them joy. But looking at a menu of a hundred options and pinpoint which of those things has the precise set of ingredients that makes it the best for you is simply not a skill they’re practicing. A student might know they like band class, but there are a number of reasons why they might like it. A love of music, a desire to excel, the feeling of being part of a team can all contribute, and its not always easy to tell which one you’re drawn to. Knowing which of them you want is valuable information for arranging your life later on.

And maybe all this is wrong. Maybe teens have a good idea of what they want, and maybe my worry about this lack of self-awareness is because of my particular filter bubble. But this exercise has one other, major benefit: It gets people thinking about what makes them happy at all. I can’t really speak to how much the median person understands themselves. What I can say, from forty years of observation, is that if most people understand what makes them happy, the certainly aren’t bothering to use that information. And so enumerating the things that bring you joy, even if you don’t find anything surprising, is a good way to remember to actually act on those insights.

Is Happiness Everything?

Occasionally, when I run this lecture, I run into a few students who say something along the lines of “I don’t want to devote my life to being happy; I want to do <some other thing>.” Oftentimes, this other thing is something that produces positive feelings, but things on the colder side of the happiness spectrum: feelings of self-actualization, or pride, or achievement. The other times I get this complaint is if the thing has a long time horizon, where the intermediate steps aren’t likely to bring a lot of joy, but the final result will. If your goal is to spend a decade plotting revenge to experience the grim satisfaction of standing over your enemy’s corpse out of a sense of duty, I will allow that most people would not call that “chasing happiness.” But for the purposes of this exercise, we’re going to say it counts. We’re looking at the things that draw us forward, things where at some point, the positive feedback (hot, cold, intellectual, or physical) we’ll get from it outweighs the effort we put into it.

Getting to Know Ourselves

This exercise was stolen from Wait But Why’s article on How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You). It’s a good article, but after years of running people through the exercise described in the article, I’ve noticed a few flaws that I’d like to correct.

One thing I don’t want to change is the fact that it is the octopus stuff.

Wait but Why organizes the article around the fact that your brain can be viewed as an octopus, where each tentacle represents a specific facet of our goal system. I love everything about this weird octopus; it’s a cute mascot, and “this is pleasing my social tentacle” has become a fun shorthand among my friends. The thing that delights me most though, is the likely unintentional parallel to an actual octopus, where each tentacle has its own mini-brain that can feed back to the main octopus brain. Biologically speaking, it’s a pretty sound analogy.

Wait but Why posits five different tentacles, each representing a category of things that make you happy. The contents of the tentacles are the main things I want to change; I’m going to divide ‘things that make you happy’ into slightly different categories. Like all arbitrary categorizations, these aren’t real, but they are a helpful brainstorming aide.

The bins I use are:

Sensory: What feels good to your senses
Social: What we get out of how we relate to others
Moral: What we get out of helping others, enforcing norms, etc.
Personal: Your specific drives (this one is complicated, we’ll get into it)
Safety: Things to do with feeling secure and comfortable

My octopus is different from Wait But Why’s because mine has a hat

The first part of the exercise is to read the description of each of these tentacles and list what parts of them feel best for you. Some might not even be relevant; I’ve had a student raise his hand and ask if it was okay that he just didn’t care about helping other people. It’s fine to only have a few items down for some of these.

I’d recommend three different approaches to coming up with ideas. For one, feel free to write down things you know beyond a doubt that you like. If every time you eat a steak, you think “this is the best thing in the world,” you probably like steak. Not a lot of room to fool yourself on that one. But also think about times you felt happy, and think about what lay at the root of each of those. Finally, you can also think of things you’re being drawn towards. If you spend time fantasizing about winning the lottery, what do you imagine doing with the money? When you watch a movie and feel jealous of one of the characters, what do they have and you don’t?

So, for each category, read the section, set a timer for five minutes, and write down everything you can think of that makes you happy. (It doesn’t really need to be within the category either, those are just jumping off points. If you have an insight, write it).

Sensory

When I was younger, my mom would take us to museums, where we’d look at paintings or old objects or reproductions of habitats of long dead mammals. I found this practice baffling. It took me years to realize that I was supposed to be getting some sort of intrinsic joy out of seeing something beautiful. The same thing happened to me with animals; for decades I assumed that saying “aww what a cute kitty” was just a thing you were supposed to do, like a weird little ritual everyone performed for some inexplicable reason. As far as I can tell, these circuits aren’t terribly active for me³.

Some sensory experiences are just misses for certain people; others are really necessary for their health and well being. I don’t get a lot out of beautiful surroundings; if my sister doesn’t see a tree at least once a day I think she would die. The first thing to keep in mind for this section is that it’s okay to not give a shit about some of these categories, and equally okay to crave them.

So, go through your senses. Do you feel particularly satisfied with a good meal? How do you feel about art? This should be relatively straightforward, but there are a few special categories that our brains are hardwired to enjoy: nature, touch, and sex, so make sure to visit those.

Ready?

Go.

Social

While sensory pleasure tends to be a relatively narrow category, social expression encompasses enough different types of happiness that I wonder if it should be two categories (I suppose with the addition of morality, it already is). There’s high the energy types of happiness, oriented around laughing or goofing off with friends; there’s low energy contentment of staying up late at night exploring each other’s thoughts and feelings. Different people want different amounts of attention, or different roles in the group. I get a lot out of facilitating other people’s enjoyment and maintaining community, but some people hate that role.

Think about whether your favorite interactions are with strangers, or if you need to know someone well to get value out of them. The entire category of romance lives under this umbrella, so don’t neglect that. Power and status are big ones here too.

Whenever you’re ready.

Moral

In some ways an extension of social, moral is specific enough to merit its own category. The distinction, for me at least, is that the reward for actions in this tentacle tend to come a lot more from within. Having high status is great because everyone treats you with respect and listens to you; volunteering with a suicide hotline, you’re trading energy for the inborn satisfaction of getting to help someone.

Maybe this is just the social tentacle again. But a four tentacled octopus is basically a deer⁴, and I don’t like the idea of a happiness deer, so here we are.

For moral, there are three axes that jump out at me. Do you get the most out of helping individuals or groups? Do you need to see the results of your actions? And how close to you, socially are the people you’re helping? There’s other considerations here, but those are some ones to think about.

Go ahead and think about it.

Personal

This is just all the other stuff. Do you like to focus on physical tasks? Does performing well at something give you a rush? Feelings of purpose, and various non-social, non-physical passions might go under this category.

To give some examples, I enjoy passing tests. Teaching a class that goes well makes me glow, even if I had to do it anonymously. If I don’t get to do some form of storytelling, often, my body will start to crave it in an almost physical way. There are things I’ve created that I look at over and over, just because of how clever I was to create them.

Broad enough for you? Give it a shot.

Safety

I almost didn’t include this one, because in many ways, its a desire to be out of a state of danger. I’m rarely excited about the fact that I’m unlikely to be murdered, and as far as I know, after a certain point of stability, the average person sort of equilibrates on this front. Still, it’s probably worth thinking about how much value you get out of just having a peaceful, untroubled existence, since most pursuits involve some amount of risk.

See if this dredges anything up.

The Punchline

Okay, so you made a big list. Maybe some things on here surprised you, maybe they didn’t. The real value in the rest of the exercise is here.

Are the things you’re doing in life getting you the things on the lists you made? Are there any tentacles that are starved?

What could you pursue, right now, that might make you happier?

The Final Steps

Figuring out an effective way to pursue the things that make us happier is the point of the rest of the class, and I guess I’ll keep posting summaries.

For now, though, my advice is: Find something on that list you made and go experience it.

1. It’s also possible you’re already familiar with Wait But Why’s article on How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You). This exercise is based on the same set of ideas.

2. You’re welcome to do it, or not do it, or send it to someone, or whatever. It’s written as if you’re doing the exercise.

3. I have hyperphantasia, and if I had to guess, the fact that I can, whenever I want, fully replace my view of my surroundings with a forest, in some way contributes to not actually caring if I go to a forest.

4. If this is not obvious to you, I’m not going to explain it. You’ll have to contemplate it, like a koan.