Hey, great post! I also find the relationship between these three factors of success, altruism, and happiness fascinating. On P(successful | happy) vs P(successful | unhappy), I mostly think this is a wash—examples come to mind easily in both camps. I do think though that the people in the successful and unhappy camp really grips our minds, perhaps because of how counterintuitive it is. Also, a person who is really successful and unhappy can be a wild card and court a lot of drama/controversy and attention (media and interpersonally) making a person of that combination seem more common through availability heuristic. But if I actually start listing out hyper-successful people as an exercise and ballpark their happiness, I think most aren’t at least particularly unhappy.
Even so, there are clear examples of P(successful | unhappy) along with mechanisms that seem plausible—insecurity and feelings of not being good enough that drive both the unhappiness and success. But I think the majority of ambition and desire to effect change in the world is almost always something other than unhappiness. Sometimes unhappiness adds a little to it or can be believed to be the fuel, but personally, as I’ve become more accepting of myself, I haven’t lost any ambition; I’ve just had more degrees of freedom and agency to exercise it.
I think this holds true for other people who are successful and unhappy. Ambition seems almost genetic, some people just have that engine and work ethic. I’d suspect that even if you removed the unhappiness, most of their work ethic would persist, and thus their success would persist. Not only that, as you stated in the article, you can replace the ways of motivating yourself that make you unhappy with intrinsic motivation and love for your work.
Additionally, there are huge negative effects of having unhappiness drive your success: anxious short-sighted decision making, inefficient energy use from stress, and sometimes burnout that completely capsizes a person. Some people succeed despite these costs, but they might be more successful if they resolved those psychological issues. They can maintain their drive through intrinsic motivation instead and let go of the downsides.
If we add altruism into the equation though, P(success and altruism | happy) vs P(success and altruism | unhappy), I think it becomes a clear win for the happiness camp. This is especially true for the vast majority of people who don’t have philosophical commitments to altruism. The natural orientation of someone who is mentally unwell and unhappy is to tend to those wounds first (and often hurt other people in the process—“hurt people hurt people”). Also, I think the sentiment, “you can’t pour from an empty cup” is true. On the other hand, when I’m happy (and I think this generalizes) it’s natural to have the desire and energy reserves to make others happy too.
>> Signaling Beyond the caveats you made, I think there’s another insightful question: do I want to be perceived as doing good, or actually do good? Even if it were true that people perceive you as lazier when you’re happy (which I strongly believe to not be true for most people), if the above premise holds that probability of higher success and altruism are higher given happiness, then we ought to prioritize actually being effective by being happy.
>> Feelings of Not Deserving Happiness
To be honest, I think this is really the meat of the article. Everything else I wrote seems like a fun intellectual exercise in comparison. I suspect this is what’s really driving this conversation in the first place, that is the base feeling of “not deserving happiness” gives rise to discourse that serves to intellectualize our way out of it. But as they say, you can’t reason yourself out of a position you didn’t reason yourself into in the first place. It’s trying to solve the problem at the wrong level.
You sort of expose the illusion of “deserve” with the questions you pose in this section. They all kind of show how ridiculous the question of “deserving” is. Like, is there some sort of success and contribution to society to happiness conversion rate I’m not aware of? This idea of deserving or not deserving happiness has no rational basis. These are feelings. How could a statement like that ever be true or untrue? I think we ought to want happiness for everybody!
Perhaps most convincing though is this bold claim: life is better when you’re happy. So uh, why not be happy?
Additionally, I think figuring out how to make people happy is an extremely important problem, and to help our loved ones and strangers, the experience and wisdom gained from getting to that happy place in our own lives is crucial.
Again though, these are all intellectual lines of reasoning, when at the end of the day, I think strong feelings of not deserving happiness will prevent any of them from landing. The emotion should be dealt with more directly on an emotional level.
I would love to hear your thoughts on my thoughts!
Hey, great post! I also find the relationship between these three factors of success, altruism, and happiness fascinating. On P(successful | happy) vs P(successful | unhappy), I mostly think this is a wash—examples come to mind easily in both camps. I do think though that the people in the successful and unhappy camp really grips our minds, perhaps because of how counterintuitive it is. Also, a person who is really successful and unhappy can be a wild card and court a lot of drama/controversy and attention (media and interpersonally) making a person of that combination seem more common through availability heuristic. But if I actually start listing out hyper-successful people as an exercise and ballpark their happiness, I think most aren’t at least particularly unhappy.
Even so, there are clear examples of P(successful | unhappy) along with mechanisms that seem plausible—insecurity and feelings of not being good enough that drive both the unhappiness and success. But I think the majority of ambition and desire to effect change in the world is almost always something other than unhappiness. Sometimes unhappiness adds a little to it or can be believed to be the fuel, but personally, as I’ve become more accepting of myself, I haven’t lost any ambition; I’ve just had more degrees of freedom and agency to exercise it.
I think this holds true for other people who are successful and unhappy. Ambition seems almost genetic, some people just have that engine and work ethic. I’d suspect that even if you removed the unhappiness, most of their work ethic would persist, and thus their success would persist. Not only that, as you stated in the article, you can replace the ways of motivating yourself that make you unhappy with intrinsic motivation and love for your work.
Additionally, there are huge negative effects of having unhappiness drive your success: anxious short-sighted decision making, inefficient energy use from stress, and sometimes burnout that completely capsizes a person. Some people succeed despite these costs, but they might be more successful if they resolved those psychological issues. They can maintain their drive through intrinsic motivation instead and let go of the downsides.
If we add altruism into the equation though, P(success and altruism | happy) vs P(success and altruism | unhappy), I think it becomes a clear win for the happiness camp. This is especially true for the vast majority of people who don’t have philosophical commitments to altruism. The natural orientation of someone who is mentally unwell and unhappy is to tend to those wounds first (and often hurt other people in the process—“hurt people hurt people”). Also, I think the sentiment, “you can’t pour from an empty cup” is true. On the other hand, when I’m happy (and I think this generalizes) it’s natural to have the desire and energy reserves to make others happy too.
>> Signaling
Beyond the caveats you made, I think there’s another insightful question: do I want to be perceived as doing good, or actually do good? Even if it were true that people perceive you as lazier when you’re happy (which I strongly believe to not be true for most people), if the above premise holds that probability of higher success and altruism are higher given happiness, then we ought to prioritize actually being effective by being happy.
>> Feelings of Not Deserving Happiness
To be honest, I think this is really the meat of the article. Everything else I wrote seems like a fun intellectual exercise in comparison. I suspect this is what’s really driving this conversation in the first place, that is the base feeling of “not deserving happiness” gives rise to discourse that serves to intellectualize our way out of it. But as they say, you can’t reason yourself out of a position you didn’t reason yourself into in the first place. It’s trying to solve the problem at the wrong level.
You sort of expose the illusion of “deserve” with the questions you pose in this section. They all kind of show how ridiculous the question of “deserving” is. Like, is there some sort of success and contribution to society to happiness conversion rate I’m not aware of? This idea of deserving or not deserving happiness has no rational basis. These are feelings. How could a statement like that ever be true or untrue? I think we ought to want happiness for everybody!
Perhaps most convincing though is this bold claim: life is better when you’re happy. So uh, why not be happy?
Additionally, I think figuring out how to make people happy is an extremely important problem, and to help our loved ones and strangers, the experience and wisdom gained from getting to that happy place in our own lives is crucial.
Again though, these are all intellectual lines of reasoning, when at the end of the day, I think strong feelings of not deserving happiness will prevent any of them from landing. The emotion should be dealt with more directly on an emotional level.
I would love to hear your thoughts on my thoughts!