Are we having fun yet?
On being and doing
There's a sneaky thing I've noticed about happiness.
You get a moment in which you realise 'I would change nothing about this moment'. Later you perform all the steps again that led to that end state and it doesn't arrive.
It's as if happiness creeps up when you aren't looking and only when you aren't looking.
It's like the replication crisis, except in your head.
We all have things that we like doing, because they are affective in some way. They produce sensations, emotions and such. Pursuits like eating, listening to music, looking at a vista you had to climb to reach, sex, a good book, stuff that is rooted in effort and goal pursuit. But, if you think about it, they don't make you happy.
In fact, I wonder if we confuse the relationship between the things we like and happiness in a chicken or egg first kind of way.
It's easy to think that doing such and such makes you happy, because you feel good doing them.
My suspicion now is that often you do them because you feel happy and then the feels get wrapped around the thing and you lose sight of how they relate.
This seems to be why doing the things you think make you happy doesn't always result in the good feels.
Since pondering this I've tried to figure out a pattern, so as to make good feels replicable on demand. Turns out it's a waste of time to keep doing the things you felt good doing last time you did them and expecting the same result. Maybe because the effect is predicated on how you felt before you did them.
Maybe this is why we get addicted to things. Just via an attribution error. I felt great last time I did this so I'll keep doing this.
It also works in reverse.
I had a weed habit in the 00s. Every night. To the point where I wouldn't feel fully awake until late afternoon, despite never touching weed during the day. Knowing it would be healthier to quit I scattered my stash to the wind, one afternoon on a blustery moor above Sheffield. I was quite scared at the prospect of having none of that familiar pleasant buzz that evening or for the coming weeks and months.
It was fine from the get go. There was no missing. What I'd thought of as an addiction wasn't, because there was no withdrawal experience. There's no mystery here. I quit weed because life circumstances were more ambiently agreeable than before so the urge to change my conscious state just lapsed.
By conscious state I do not mean feelings. I mean just the blank slate of being.
Dwelling in stillness, as I saw it referred to recently here.
Here's where convention dictates writing 'so I've got the answer - do *these* things to be happier than you are now'.
Like those YouTube videos entitled 'Stop playing scales like this' or skanky online ads with a picture of a banana that promise you digestive nirvana for the rest of your life.
Instead I'll share that I am lucky enough to have a place to dwell in stillness. And that's where often I’m happiest.
It's a small patch of land, enclosed by willow, hazel, hawthorn and blackberry referred to as the meadow.
The meadow is a place where I do all sorts, because it's a project to establish as many wildflowers and their pollinators as possible. A re-wilding project, which doesn't mean leaving it to run wild. It means quite strenuous intervention to encourage more biodiversity than you see in the arable farmland all around.
But it's also a place where I've learned to be. Do nothing and just allow the sense data to flow. Freely, rather than processed.
What I've learned there is that happiness isn't the presence of positive feelings. It's the forgetting of feelings and the absence of thought.
It's taking less notice of yourself and seeing that things just are. Noticing what you don't see or hear when you're locked in your head with your attention captured by feelings and thoughts.
I've concluded (on the still quite rare moments when I land at this point) that being happy is not an internal thing. It's the absence of internal things. Or it’s noticing internal things but not being moved or captured by them. So that the sudden idea about what to have for dinner tomorrow or what to write about here or what someone said about something yesterday has approximately the same valence as the sound of rustling leaves.
Unless you're going to be pernickety about sitting in the meadow representing something you're doing this suggests - at least to me - that nailing just being beats doing if you want to reach a point where there is nothing you would change about the moment.
It helps that there is no comms signal there, because I've also intuited that being tapped into roiling humanity regurgitating and recapitulating and informing and arguing and being 'entertained' makes happiness as a state of nothingness impossible.
Sometimes I’ll sit there and lean in to the experience. Like a good modern western citizen programmed for perpetual improvement of things. In those moments I'm seeking something. Grasping for the vibe.
It doesn't work that way. That really is doing something and it never results in stillness. My attention is flickering between the internal and external world and I intuit that this is why doing is unreliable as a way to affect in the direction of contentment.
There's a distinction to be made here, between doing and being.
This week I was feeling vaguely unsettled and irritated by a situation. Meadow management entails controlling the tangle of grasses that prevent the flowers becoming established that you (and the bees) want. It was time to do some scything. Sometime later time either stopped or raced - it doesn't matter really - but a moment came when I realised that the feels were such that nothing could possibly improve this experience. An hour had skipped past, unnoticed. An observer would have seen me doing. But I was being. There was no longer even a space for the feelings I'd begun with.
So doing can also be being. Who knew.
Me, actually, because I'd thought about it when my best friend visited and installed a gate here. He put 20+ hours into this project and I noticed his contentment. As the observer, at first I thought he was just doing. Being occupied. He wasn't, though. He was being. There's all sorts of kooky stuff you can say about this kind of thing, like being the embodiment of know-how, or achieving a state of flow and so forth. But there's little need. Perhaps you just have to notice what you are, to be happy. And then just be what you are.
It was formal meditation practice that led to an idea I have of just being an object in some space, inseparable from the space rather than observing it from somewhere. That's the vibe I'll often get when I spend the hour before dusk dwelling in the stillness of the meadow. Sorry, but I am the meadow when this works. And that's when I'm often happiest.
A fun thought experiment you can try, to test these notions for yourself, is to imagine you're on the proverbial deathbed right now. What happens after death has just been revealed and it's this. You will live on, in sound health, perpetually in a waking moment that you had this week. No, you will not be bored because this moment will renew itself constantly. You won't know that you're dead.
If you don’t choose, a random moment from your day will be allocated for all eternity.
In which moment will you choose to dwell?
Postscript: these thoughts are in the context of misgivings I have about our emerging technological and social utopia and the restlessness it requires for participation. But bringing all that in now would make this piece unwieldy. It's therefore to be continued.
A bit of housekeeping
Hello and welcome to the 60+ new readers who signed up over the past week. It's all been a bit one-way around here because I tend to allow comments only from paying subscribers and there aren't many of those. But I notice that when I can't comment on someone's newsletter because I'm not paying it can be a bit frustrating. So I'm opening comments to all comers this week.
Please say hello - either privately or in the comments - and I'll be interested to know why you came, where you're based and who else you read. Let's expose ourselves to the possibility of being a community.
Also, Rarely Certain seems to achieve a ratio of one paying subscriber to 15 sign-ups. That gives me a target to grow this newsletter. I recently lost my substantive income (thanks to the perfect storm currently wreaking havoc in the industrial sector I move in) so I'd like this writing to help to pay for more than the half a month's groceries it does at present. You can help, if you want, by sharing this post or recommending Rarely Certain to anyone you think might enjoy it. Can Rarely Certain reach 1,000 sign-ups by Christmas?
I think we are on the same page. Our interest in mindfulness helps I'm sure. A psychotherapist colleague from years ago would have clients who would say they just wanted to be happy. His response would be to ask them why they thought they should be happy. It stumped them! Happiness is a changeable thing as you rightly say. I think that some people are more able to experience happiness but it is often found in simple things. A kind deed, a shoulder to cry on helping others problem solve, an enjoyable conversation I'm happier that I used to be because I simplified life. I also have a tendency to reminisce about the past with happy memories/fantasies. With the world in such turmoil, we all need to find moments that take us away from the major stresses in the World today
Very interesting, thanks for sharing your thought process here.
It is especially interesting to me because I have a really hard time with what you describe, enjoying just being. I enjoy doing, interacting with the world, and find I can lose myself that way much more effectively. I do enjoy a bit of a sit, especially in the quiet evening when I can watch animals and the like, but I can't do it long without getting a little twitchy.
Even when doing something, if it is something that I have done enough that there is nothing to overcome I can't really enjoy it. It is fun while it is slightly difficult, and importantly those difficulties must be solvable via effort, but once it is routine it just doesn't do it for me.
Sorry to hear about your job loss. This have been pretty rough all over, some industries a lot more than others, and I hope things straighten out for you soon.