What sort of life would you have to have so that you could bear your suffering nobly? That's a good question to ask yourself. Now, and so we have people just write for 15 minutes.
If you could have what you wanted needed, what might that look like? And there's an instruction there too, is do it badly. Because what the hell do you know? And besides, your vision's going to change as you progress through your life.
And so you're not going to get it done perfectly, but that's okay. Get it down. Get a rough first draft down, right? Get a rough approximation of who you could be if you got your act together.
Not who other people think you should be, you know? Although that might enter into it, because you don't want to be completely... You can't be who you are properly and ignore the fact that you're embedded in a social context. And so you have to take the fact that there are other people into account.
And it doesn't mean be who your parents think you should be either, even though that's another source of information that you might want to consider. It's a deeper question. It's like, what would actually motivate you?
And you might think, well I could never have that. It's like, that's not the question that's being addressed here. Although I would say, There's no sense floating off into some kind of impossible juvenile fantasy.
We're making an assumption that you're taking the question seriously, and that you're going to remain within the bounds of what you regard as sanely reasonable. So that's the first part. Second part was the opposite of that.
It's like, okay, now you've specified a goal. The goal is, in some sense, both your character and your life. And you've specified that rather vaguely. You only had 15 minutes to write about it.
And that's a good thing, because now you have something to move toward. Now, I could tell you this, technically. This is an interesting thing to know.
People say they want to be happy. That's not true, by the way. If you investigate what people mean when they say they want to be happy, they say, I just want to be happy. It's a very funny phrase. What do you mean, just?
There isn't anything harder than that. So you can't just say, just. I just. That's all you want.
You just want to be happy all the time. That's all it would take. It's like good luck with that. That's not going to happen.
So you can get rid of the just. And then I want to be happy. Well, maybe.
Actually, what people really mean when they say that is they don't want to suffer and be miserable. So really what they mean is they don't want to experience excess negative emotion. And you can find that out if you carefully question people and carefully analyze the answers. You find out they're actually more concerned about avoiding the catastrophic negative than living in a world of hedonistic delight. Now, you also find that while avoiding the catastrophic tragedy, they wouldn't mind having a little bit of hedonistic delight.
And so some happiness is interleaved in there. Then you might ask yourself, to the degree that people do want hedonistic delight when they're being happy, what does happy mean? And you might think, well, happy means getting what you want. Happy is how you feel after Christmas dinner.
It's like, no, that's a sleep. Right? That's content and asleep.
Now that's a form of contentment, but it isn't really what people mean when they say that they want to be happy. The happiness that people refer to when they talk about happiness has more to do with enthusiasm. And enthusiasm is an interesting word because it means it's entheos. It means to be inspired. Inspired is in spirit.
It means to be imbued with the spirit. Well, enthusiastic is to be imbued with the spirit of God, interestingly enough. And we'll return to that.
When do you experience the positive emotion that's associated with happiness? The answer is, not when you've attained a goal, but when you're pursuing one. So you're set up, your positive emotion is associated with movement forward.
You could say that your positive emotion is the psychological equivalent of forward movement, just as your negative emotion is the psychological equivalent of freezing or retreating. And so your emotions are very tightly tied to your action. Freeze, retreat, negative.
Advance towards a goal, positive. No goal, no positive emotion. Now, if you don't remember anything else from tonight, that's a good thing to remember.
No goal, no positive emotion. A corollary of that as well is no goal, confusion. So no goal not only means no positive emotion, it also means confusion, and confusion means anxiety and dread.
And so a life without a goal is confusing and hopeless. And that begs the question what should the goal be and that's partly what we're trying to establish You wrote for 15 minutes you try to develop a vision for your life Now you have something to move toward That sets up the precondition for potential positive emotion and happiness What else do you need to motivate you well how about negative emotion So what do you do with that? Well negative emotion can stop you.
You might think, well I'd like to get a better job but I'm afraid of, I'm afraid of putting myself out in the job market. I'm afraid of being evaluated. I'm afraid that if I tried something more difficult I might fail. Then you have your negative emotion opposing you, right?
It's anxiety is stopping you. And fair enough, because there are things to be anxious about. But what if you could get your negative emotion behind you, pushing you instead of stopping you? Sometimes in my clinical practice I would have clients who hated their job.
They're laboring under the thumb of a tyrant. And maybe that was partly because they'd turned themselves into slaves. But it didn't matter.
They were laboring under the thumb of a tyrant. They needed to make a move, laterally or up. They needed to make a move. And they were often afraid to. And they had their reasons.
They didn't want to. Contemplate their resumes. They didn't want to open up their CVs.
They didn't want to face the inadequacies of their past. They were afraid of being evaluated. They were afraid of being rejected. They didn't know how to negotiate. They didn't know how to conduct themselves in an interview.
They were afraid of losing the security they'd already built up. They had their fears, and they were real, and those fears stopped them. But they'd come to me and say, oh my god, you know, I'm so miserable, my life is so miserable, and we'd take that apart, and one of the reasons was because they were laboring under the thumb of a tyrant, and then we'd talk that through, and they'd say, well, I'm afraid to make a change, and I'd say, that's okay, that's understandable. How afraid are you not of not making a change? Let's make a little vision of that.
You're 35, you hate your job. What's the consequence? You're not motivated, you don't want to get out of bed in the morning, you're starting to get depressed, you're getting bitter, you're getting resentful, you're getting cynical, you're amotivated at work, you're not doing a very good job, and you're starting to shrink.
Now play that out for 10 years. You don't change it, you don't fix it. And what happens? Well, it's not like it's gonna get better of its own accord. What's gonna happen to you?
Well, for sure, at minimum, what's gonna happen to you is you're gonna be in the same situation, but ten years older. And if you can't get out of that situation now, what the hell makes you think you're gonna get out of it in ten years? You're ten years older you're ten years more bitter you're ten years more cynical Maybe by that time your marriage is collapsed because who the hell wants to live with you You you're even more of a slave than you were because you've labored another ten years under the thumb of the tyrant and step backwards Every time you're asked to so you got smaller and smaller as the tyrant got bigger and bigger It's like Think about that, and that means imagine it.
Imagine that, okay? Now that's the situation. You're stuck where you are, but it's 10 years from now.
And when I say think of that, I mean imagine that. It's like, really play it out. It's like, you know how miserable you are now?
You're afraid of making the necessary changes, but you know how miserable you are now? Just imagine how miserable you could be in 10 years. And in all likelihood, what you'll find is that you're way more afraid of that than you are of whatever's stopping you in the present.
It's really useful to know what your own particular brand of hell might be. And so one of the things we do in this writing exercise is have people do the reverse. Like, okay, so imagine now, five years from now, you've let whatever temptations you're particularly susceptible to have the upper hand, and they've augured you into the ground. You know, one person's an alcoholic, another person's a criminal, another person's living on the street, someone else is like skirting the edges of prostitution, somebody else is narcissistic and bitter.
Somebody else is depressed and anxious. You know where you would fall off the edge of the earth if you fell off in whatever direction you're prone to fall off? Everyone knows that, but we avoid that. You know, that's rule three.
Do not hide things in the fog. Is that the rule? Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.
Yeah, well, we often won't allow ourselves to imagine the catastrophe that we're pursuing. Let's say through inaction. That's a good thing to fix.
So now you say, well you think for 15 minutes, that's not very long, about who you could be and what you could have if you could have what you wanted, if you were who you could be. And then you think about what sort of hell you could produce for yourself if you didn't do that, and that's not a bad polarity. It's like, I'm going to get away from that, and I'm going to move towards that.
And then you have your negative emotion working for you. And your positive emotion working for you, and that's a good gradient, and that's a great gradient emotionally because as I said You don't experience positive emotion except in relationship to a goal And if you got a nice gradient on your goal pursuit And that's going to increase the degree to which you feel positive emotion and positive emotion by the way isn't just about being happy That's the most trivial part of it in some sense. Positive emotion allows you to focus.
It's the soul of concentration. It's the essence of enthusiastic motivation. When you say, I really want to do that, that statement is predicated on the existence of positive emotion.
It's the fact that the goal... beckons to you that makes you say, I want to do that. And you know how much easier it is to do something you want to do than to do something you don't want to do.
And that ease is actually a consequence of the activation of the system that governs positive emotion. And you might ask yourself, well, how powerful a system is that? And I would say, well, almost all of the drugs of abuse that people are most prone to abusing are abused because they activate the positive emotion system.
So cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin is also a painkiller, but it has a psychomotor stimulant element. That's the technical term for the The pharmacological effect of pharmacological agents on the positive emotion system, psychomotor stimulation, psychomotor because it's associated with movement forward. Cocaine is such a powerful drug because it makes you feel like you're doing something worthwhile.
That's the system it hyperactivates. And so, it's a... Primary system of motivation, it's as old as forward movement itself.
It's a cardinal source of meaning, and it only manifests itself in relationship to a goal.