Meaning Archives - Page 12 of 16

More than Happy

March 31, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

Those who pursue happiness tend to focus on feeling good and getting what they want in the short-term (satisfying drives). Happy people report less stress or worry. Animals can be happy, too. It’s been said that what sets humans apart from the animals is the pursuit of meaning. People who are more focused on meaning than on happiness are invested in something outside themselves. They tend to experience more stress and anxiety than happy people do, but the rub is that even when they are suffering, the people who have created meaning in their lives report a higher level of satisfaction than those who don’t have meaning in their lives.

Whether we aim for short-term rewards or keep our eyes on the long-term prize, all of us have two different decision-making systems, both of which are involved each time we have to make a decision or choice. System 1, which is more primitive, is associated with immediate gratification. It responds to sensory stimuli and directly involves the limbic system and our basic emotions. System 2 involves the prefrontal cortex and is responsible for long-range thinking and planning.

The Rowdy Couple Downstairs

Think of the brain as a two-story bungalow. The bottom or first floor got built first and contains a young and rowdy couple. They play loud music, throw wild parties and are up at all hours. Later a second-story extension got built on top and an older and more practical couple moved in. They like to tend the garden and pay off their mortgage. At times, the two couples agree about how the household should be run but, with such differences in values, there are plenty of disagreements. –Piers Steel, Ph.D.

If you don’t have something meaningful on which you are focused, most of your decisions are likely to be in the hands of the rowdy couple on the first floor. Even if you decide there’s something you want that requires foregoing immediate gratification, you may struggle with following through.

The reality is that even though so many people are in pursuit of it—especially in places like the U.S.—happiness can be elusive. For one thing, happiness is an emotion, and by its nature, transient. For another pursuing personal happiness is associated with selfishness and being a “taker,” while pursuing or creating meaning is associated with being a “giver.”

If you focus on creating meaning in your life, you are likely to be more satisfied. Happiness may or may not be a byproduct. If you focus on pursuing happiness, you will presumably be happy, but less satisfied. If it’s the pursuit of meaning that makes us uniquely human, then pursing happiness doesn’t seem like the best path for humans to be on.

Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to “be happy.” –Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

What Gets in the Way

March 28, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

What keeps us from achieving the things we want or even set out to achieve? Science writer David DiSalvo (What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite) seems to like why questions—which I’m on record as opposing. He wrote an article for Forbes titled “The 10 Reasons Why We Fail,” which he describes as reflections on falling short—more precisely, why we fail despite ourselves.

Two of his reasons—the first and last, as it happens—really resonate for me based on my own experience and the experiences of friends and acquaintances.

You Don’t Believe You Can Do It

Luke: I can’t believe it.
Yoda: That is why you fail.

The crucial part of Yoda’s dialogue with Luke is “believe.” The human brain is a powerful problem-solving and prediction making machine, and it operates via a multitude of feedback loops. What matters most in the feedback loop dynamic is input—what goes into the loop that begins the analysis-evaluation-action process, which ultimately results in an outcome. Here’s the kicker: if your input shuttle for achieving a goal lacks the critical, emotionally relevant component of belief, then the feedback loop is drained of octane from the start. Another way to say that is—why would you expect a convincingly successful outcome when you haven’t convinced yourself that it’s possible?

Believing you can do something is a precursor to intentionally changing or initiating a habit. If you start out believing you can’t do it, you will more than likely fulfill that prophecy.

You’re Confused about What to Do

Of all of these 10 ideas, this one is to me the most difficult because it plagues me almost constantly. Gearing up the cerebral feedback loop for achievement is one thing, but without a sense of focus and direction, all of that energy isn’t going to yield very much in the end. My experience has been that sometimes you have to let the energy flow for a while without too firm a sense of direction and see if focus emerges organically. Once it does, you can then nurture it into a more structured method for getting where you want to go.

Confusion abounds, especially when people think they ought to know what to do and where to go, but don’t. There are several ways to prime the pump to gain some clarity about what to do next. Often, however, we and our brains are so frantically busy going in whatever direction we’re going that we can’t slow down enough to realize we don’t actually know what the heck we’re doing.

Got Change for a Paradigm?

March 24, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 2 Comments

A little something to trip on–I mean think about. Best viewed when wide awake, possibly after ingesting caffeine.

The Mirroring Mind

Created by Jason Silva in collaboration with CITIZEN. Follow Jason on twitter @JASONSILVA

This video is a non-commercial work created to inspire, made for educational purposes, inspired by the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter explored in the magnificent book GODEL, ESCHER, BACH: An Eternal Golden Braid. Learn more: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach

and

Awe Is Good for You

According to recent research, Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being.

Who We Are

March 21, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Each time we interact, we change each other’s brains, and each time we respond to a thought or emotion, we change our own. –Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald, Pictures of the Mind

Don’t Ask Me Why

March 17, 2013 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Why on car — Why (Photo credit: openpad)

Although I’m kind of a knowledge junkie, I’ve always argued for the limits of human understanding. I’ve been railing against the pointlessness of trying to figure out why something happened or why someone or something is the way it is for decades. Of course, I fall into the very same trap myself. My personality is such that I expect things and people to be and behave logically or at least to stay out of my way. Talk about an exercise in futility.

My assertion has always been, though, that the reason there’s no point in trying to figure out the why of someone or something is that since we never, ever have all the information, we can never, ever get a complete answer. It’s a bit of a fool’s game to believe we can answer why questions with convincing certainty.

[W]hen you explain a why, you have to be in some framework that you allow something to be true. Otherwise, you’re perpetually asking why. –Richard Feynman

That doesn’t stop us from doing it. We think that when we know the why of something, we then understand it. And if we understand something, we can accept it or at least know how to deal with it. It’s as if the why is even more important than the what. When it comes to people and why they are the way they are or do the things they do, why questions most often go to backgrounds or motivations. Given that we don’t even know what our own motivations are for doing what we do, thinking we can know someone else’s motivation is more than hubris—it’s delusional.

But, again, we all do this. Asking why questions is very compelling. It seems to be a built-in mechanism that operates first and foremost to explain ourselves to ourselves. Asking and answering why questions helps us construct and maintain a consistent personal narrative—a sense of personal identity. It also operates to explain the external world to us.

Good Enough for Government Work

But another problem with why questions, in addition to the fact that our answers are always incomplete at best, if not wholly erroneous, is that once we get an answer that seems satisfying, we close the door on that particular line of inquiry. Once we get a good-enough answer, the cause and effect link is cemented into place. Occasionally someone might say about something, “Well, that’s as good an explanation as any,” but we could say that about the vast majority of our explanations: one is probably just as good as another. Yet we believe in whatever answers we’ve arrived at, and we proceed as if they are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So to an extent we do create our own reality, and this is how we do it, through constructing and maintaining a very flawed and false sense of certainty about ourselves and the world around us.

We abhor uncertainty, so any explanation, even a wrong or partial one, is better than none at all.

I’ve been trying to pay attention to this process of explaining everything to myself. It’s exhausting. What a relief when I just admit I don’t know why something or someone is the way it is (or I am the way I am), and I don’t need to come up with an explanation. There’s a surprising amount of freedom in not having an explanation.

What questions seem to be a lot more open-ended than why questions. They cast a wider net, and they tend to focus more on the here and now. I wonder if asking what questions might be a way of training our attention on the present and away from restlessly searching for facile explanations just so we can maintain a comfortable and consistent narrative.