Natural Happiness - Synthetic Happiness
- In 2,000,000 years our brains have tripled in size, adding the frontal lobe which includes the prefrontal cortex
- The prefrontal cortex is an “experience simulator,” an adaptation as important as opposable thumbs and language, allowing us to consciously judge outcomes of imagined scenarios based on available information
- Our “experience simulator” often misleads us regarding the happiness obtained through a specific course of action or events
- A year after winning the lottery and becoming paraplegic people are, on average, equally happy
- We have a “psychological immune system” which operates unconsciously and maintains a homeostatic level of happiness largely irrespective of our specific circumstances
- At the age of 78 innocent man on release after decades in prison exclaims “It was a glorious experience, I wouldn’t change a thing!”
- Pete Best is “Happier than he would have been if he stayed in the Beatles”
- We believe natural happiness is superior to synthetic happiness
- Free Choice Paradigm - Can’t have the one you want, want the one you have
- Free choice is the friend of natural happiness, enemy of synthetic happiness.
- Our ability to experience both natural and synthetic happiness is destroyed through free choice by over-deliberation between two objects of desire, creating a situation of far happiness less than if choices are finalized by circumstances beyond control
- Studies on amnesiacs prove synthetic happiness is absolutely as real as manufactured happiness
Ending with the beautiful:
- “We have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience”
Which we don’t intimately know because people who believe happiness is inborn and does not come exclusively from outside through status, power, money, sex appeal, etc. DO NOT RAVENOUSLY CONSUME!
1 year ago · 6 notes
