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
Hello M, my sense is that 'happiness' is a shibboleth of modernity (the consuming and leisure era). Hence my preference for 'I would not change anything about this moment' as a measure of those fleeting states of complete wellbeing. The absence of psychic perturbation, even of the pleasing kind.
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.
I might have written a bit more clearly on the blurred distinction between being and doing. I read your latest knife-crafting piece while I was working on this and it seemed to me that Doc Hammer's actual anvil is the meadow. Dwelling in stillness doesn't require being stationary, is how it seems to me now that I've thought about it.
As for the work, it only means no longer acquiring the material things I'd like but don't need.
Smoke weed about it. The list of things that you do to produce happiness is very similar to what I do: Climb to a vista, go swimming in a wild space that I had to hike to, read a good book, cook and eat good food w/ a cocktail, cook a fish that I caught and eat it, see live music... What I do to be the happiest is smoke weed and sing my own songs that no one else knows. One of my favorite authors is Jennifer Micheal Hecht. Her book The Happiness Myth (2007) is my favorite prose work by her. I came here from a recommendation of another Substack, but I can't remember who it was. This was an interesting read, thanks.
Thank you for this essay. My experiences, although few and far between, is that your description is essentially the same as mine. Good stuff to see in writing.
Very interesting read, and certainly something that resonates with recent experience and thoughts (my latest LinkedIn post is very much on the same wavelength, though the origin of the thinking is very different). From a language teacher's point of view, I can tell you I was always very surprised (and not in a good way) when talking to British kids about verbs they couldn't recognise "to be" as a verb. The explanation I was given is that the definition kids are given of a verb these days is an "action word", and as they don't consider "being" as an action, they can't recognise "I am" as a verb. I was always rather uncomfortable with this logic - language shapes minds, and a mind that cannot recognise being as an activity or an intention is well on track for chronic dissatisfaction.
That’s really interesting - and also pushes me back toward something else I’m wondering at the moment about language. We tend (I think) to see language as the product of culture. But I’ve been wondering whether culture may lie downstream from language.
One might intuit that this is part of the reason for rules around permitted speech - and the deliberate muddying of certain word definitions - to be pursued so vigorously by the postmodern leftish.
My wheelhouse indeed ;) just to feed your radical uncertainty, language is both the things you mentioned. The minute a baby is born they are immediately hit by a humongous linguistic train - thousands of years worth of what their ancestors ever thought worthy of codification. "It's a boy/girl!" we exclaim the minute they are out of the womb, without thinking that there are countless other bodily characteristics to that baby which we are not paying any attention to - because we don't have a word for a baby whose index finger is longer than the middle finger, because nobody thought the concept worthy of a word, because it's not societally salient - that feature is there but we just don't see it, and teach our children to not see it in turn. Because of a lack of a word to describe that characteristic, the feature itself becomes nearly invisible to the eye. This is in essence the counterargument, and what is known in linguistics as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (for if you ever are in a curious mood about it) - while language is a cultural product, it also shapes and to an extent constrains our perception of the natural world and our society, and even our thoughts and feelings. It's really difficult to think of something you don't have a word for, which is why discourse around certain cultural items (e.g. "schadenfreude", "bella figura", "vergüenza ajena") is largely absent in cultures that don't have a word for the concept and haven't adopted the foreign expressions. There is evidence that the absence of a word differentiating shades of colour prevents members of certain cultural groups from actually *seeing the difference* without significant effort (again, if you are in an inquisitive mood, look up studies on how the perception of "blue" is relatively recent for humans, and how there are cultural groups largely unable to differentiate blue from green because their language defines them as one and the same shade). Don't fall for the trap of thinking that language can completely prevent the formation of some thoughts, though - languages are said to differ largely in what they *have* to express rather than what they *can* express, i.e. they reflect the local societal obsessions about what needs to be conveyed in a conversation and the local tolerance for ambiguity/lack of specificity, guiding the speaker rather strongly towards a certain mindset - but the latter is less than watertight, or new concepts and expressions would never emerge. Studies on bilingual children have shown that they are largely better than their monolingual peers even at physical processes like e.g. driving a car or arranging things in space, the hypothesis being that their brain has by its nature the ability to recognise multiple structures and pathways to problem solving. In short, it's better if no man is an island, entire of itself. ;)
Flowing from a nascent interest in post liberal philosophy I note a gut-level horror at the prospect of further fetishising (as I tend now to see it) the individual identity à propos of that baby.
Thank goodness we aren’t there, yet, is my first thought.
It’s cool that you mention that idea that people without a word for ‘blue’ are unable to see blue. I went down that specific rabbit hole a while ago and it turns out to be one of those ‘sciency’ canards, like countless other low quality bits of work that didn’t replicate but entered intellectual mythology via the media. But it’s postmodern-friendly so that’s all right ☺️
Not quite as simple as "it didn't replicate, but it's post modern friendly so that's all right" my radically uncertain friend ;) as I said, language predisposes people to noticing things around their environment in different ways - it doesn't make you totally blind to colour distinctions you cannot name, but it does make it harder to make that distinction in the first place if you are not guided to it. This study is from 2021, and it takes a mixed cultural, environmental and biological approach to explaining the phenomenon of colexicalisation of green and blue and the relative "colour blindness":
"Taken together, these analyses demonstrate that no single explanatory factor explains the color lexicon. This finding resonates with the centuries of debate on this topic with myriad variables being proposed and opposed. Our results show that multiple environmental and cultural factors interact. Specifically, we found that a language is more likely to have a dedicated word for blue when it is spoken by a larger population, which resides at higher latitudes (where the incidence of UV-B radiation is lower), and near large bodies of standing water (in particular, lakes).
[Study limitations...]
Nevertheless, our results strongly support the view that the color vocabulary is shaped, at least in part, by environmental factors acting on individual speakers, generating biases that are amplified by the repeated use and transmission of language in communities of similarly affected individuals. This is akin to other cases of individual biases being amplified to shape cross-linguistic diversity, biases that can be either rooted in genetics or emerging due to environmental or cultural factors acting during the lifetime of individuals."
In short: we are influenced by our language as well as influence it back, and the reasons why our language makes us aware of certain things but not others are rooted as much in the environment/biology as in culture - its effect on our ability to perceive salient features is real, though not deterministic/permanent.
Here's where I realise that I haven't adequately explained that radical uncertainty isn't meant to be a scientific or rational truth heuristic. It's not meant to be about adversarial toing or froing to see who's right. It's meant to be about seeing who says or thinks what and why we say and think what we do, where it gets us and whether there's anywhere else to go where humans might flourish more than we do while constrained by norms that impel us to prove things.
Once I'd waded through that word salad about individual biases being amplified to shape cross-linguistic diversity etc enough times for my unscholarly brain to process it I realised that this paper seems to be saying that the way people report on their world differs from place to place.
Why it's written in the way it is - and why we feel the need to bat back & forth about it - is worthy itself of questioning.
I do understand what you mean and my comment wasn't meant to help establish who/what is right; if I gave that impression, it wasn't my intention. Rather, I wanted to support a more nuanced view of the matter at hand than "the perception of blue/green as linguistically driven is a sciency canard", simply because... It isn't. The linguistic driver of perception is just one of the many pieces of the puzzle we need if we want to understand our understanding of the world; that we might be uncomfortable with it playing into the hands of views we disapprove of has no bearing on its truth value or its importance in our journey as we feel for truth and meaning in semi darkness. But it's possible that I'm simply operating from a place of misunderstanding, in which case I apologise - I always feel such conversations run the risk of talking across purposes when they happen in a space like this, so this might well be what's happening here.
Hey Mike :) I subscribed to you this week because I recently downloaded Substack for “internet princess” aka Rayne Fisher Quann. She inspires me so much with her writing that I read all her entries and then became ravenous for more. That’s where you come in :) I’m pretty sure you were high on the recommendations list for “culture”.
Any way, I appreciate you turning the comments on, as I too have been frustrated by not being able to contribute to the MANY posts I’ve been consuming. (I’m also pretty sure I’m hoping to read read read so I can actually maybe someday find it in me to write write write)
This post struck me deeply because just yesterday I was writing about meditation and being and I wrote: “In those moments I just know in my knowing that I am the flowers, I am the trees, and so are you, and all the life and everything-ness all around us is the knowing and in those moments I am everything and nothing and happy.” So I cried when you wrote “I am the meadow” because I am the meadow, too.
I once asked my father, what made him happy? He replied that he didn't want pursue happiness, he wanted to find contentment. As I was in my 20's I couldn't understand this, wondering why he didn't want to be happy. Now that I am older I think I understand what he meant. Happiness is more of a transient state, where as contentedness has a greater longevity. I agree with what you say.
A favorite Zippy quote- are we having fun yet. For me, as for many, actively enjoying doing something, like walk, or a game, or a good talk, where I think about the action, makes me feel, later, that I was happy. The after action glow is a bit different, feeling content and comfy for awhile.
Are we having fun yet is the motto/admonition of Zippy the Pinhead who also pokes fun at all of our dreadful happiness suppressing certainties http://www.zippythepinhead.com
Meanwhile The Bright Teacher of Happiness made this admonition - "Always remember that your inherent heart-disposition wants and needs Infinite, Absolute, True, Eternal Happiness".
He also tells us that "Happiness is the now-and-forever Mystery that IS the Real Heart and the Only Real God of every one"
Love this image. Perhaps it's only a strange sense of detachment because modernity demands our attachment to fleeting things that generate 'value'. And then you discover what you really are, which is an animal in nature. Also, the elusivity can be disappointing but increases its affective power whenever it does arrive.
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
Hello M, my sense is that 'happiness' is a shibboleth of modernity (the consuming and leisure era). Hence my preference for 'I would not change anything about this moment' as a measure of those fleeting states of complete wellbeing. The absence of psychic perturbation, even of the pleasing kind.
Ah, spot on. You got this
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.
I might have written a bit more clearly on the blurred distinction between being and doing. I read your latest knife-crafting piece while I was working on this and it seemed to me that Doc Hammer's actual anvil is the meadow. Dwelling in stillness doesn't require being stationary, is how it seems to me now that I've thought about it.
As for the work, it only means no longer acquiring the material things I'd like but don't need.
Smoke weed about it. The list of things that you do to produce happiness is very similar to what I do: Climb to a vista, go swimming in a wild space that I had to hike to, read a good book, cook and eat good food w/ a cocktail, cook a fish that I caught and eat it, see live music... What I do to be the happiest is smoke weed and sing my own songs that no one else knows. One of my favorite authors is Jennifer Micheal Hecht. Her book The Happiness Myth (2007) is my favorite prose work by her. I came here from a recommendation of another Substack, but I can't remember who it was. This was an interesting read, thanks.
Hi Palamambron, thanks for the intro and the Hecht suggestion, which I’ve subsequently been reading about 👍
Thank you for this essay. My experiences, although few and far between, is that your description is essentially the same as mine. Good stuff to see in writing.
Very interesting read, and certainly something that resonates with recent experience and thoughts (my latest LinkedIn post is very much on the same wavelength, though the origin of the thinking is very different). From a language teacher's point of view, I can tell you I was always very surprised (and not in a good way) when talking to British kids about verbs they couldn't recognise "to be" as a verb. The explanation I was given is that the definition kids are given of a verb these days is an "action word", and as they don't consider "being" as an action, they can't recognise "I am" as a verb. I was always rather uncomfortable with this logic - language shapes minds, and a mind that cannot recognise being as an activity or an intention is well on track for chronic dissatisfaction.
That’s really interesting - and also pushes me back toward something else I’m wondering at the moment about language. We tend (I think) to see language as the product of culture. But I’ve been wondering whether culture may lie downstream from language.
One might intuit that this is part of the reason for rules around permitted speech - and the deliberate muddying of certain word definitions - to be pursued so vigorously by the postmodern leftish.
Confident that this is your wheelhouse…
My wheelhouse indeed ;) just to feed your radical uncertainty, language is both the things you mentioned. The minute a baby is born they are immediately hit by a humongous linguistic train - thousands of years worth of what their ancestors ever thought worthy of codification. "It's a boy/girl!" we exclaim the minute they are out of the womb, without thinking that there are countless other bodily characteristics to that baby which we are not paying any attention to - because we don't have a word for a baby whose index finger is longer than the middle finger, because nobody thought the concept worthy of a word, because it's not societally salient - that feature is there but we just don't see it, and teach our children to not see it in turn. Because of a lack of a word to describe that characteristic, the feature itself becomes nearly invisible to the eye. This is in essence the counterargument, and what is known in linguistics as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (for if you ever are in a curious mood about it) - while language is a cultural product, it also shapes and to an extent constrains our perception of the natural world and our society, and even our thoughts and feelings. It's really difficult to think of something you don't have a word for, which is why discourse around certain cultural items (e.g. "schadenfreude", "bella figura", "vergüenza ajena") is largely absent in cultures that don't have a word for the concept and haven't adopted the foreign expressions. There is evidence that the absence of a word differentiating shades of colour prevents members of certain cultural groups from actually *seeing the difference* without significant effort (again, if you are in an inquisitive mood, look up studies on how the perception of "blue" is relatively recent for humans, and how there are cultural groups largely unable to differentiate blue from green because their language defines them as one and the same shade). Don't fall for the trap of thinking that language can completely prevent the formation of some thoughts, though - languages are said to differ largely in what they *have* to express rather than what they *can* express, i.e. they reflect the local societal obsessions about what needs to be conveyed in a conversation and the local tolerance for ambiguity/lack of specificity, guiding the speaker rather strongly towards a certain mindset - but the latter is less than watertight, or new concepts and expressions would never emerge. Studies on bilingual children have shown that they are largely better than their monolingual peers even at physical processes like e.g. driving a car or arranging things in space, the hypothesis being that their brain has by its nature the ability to recognise multiple structures and pathways to problem solving. In short, it's better if no man is an island, entire of itself. ;)
Flowing from a nascent interest in post liberal philosophy I note a gut-level horror at the prospect of further fetishising (as I tend now to see it) the individual identity à propos of that baby.
Thank goodness we aren’t there, yet, is my first thought.
It’s cool that you mention that idea that people without a word for ‘blue’ are unable to see blue. I went down that specific rabbit hole a while ago and it turns out to be one of those ‘sciency’ canards, like countless other low quality bits of work that didn’t replicate but entered intellectual mythology via the media. But it’s postmodern-friendly so that’s all right ☺️
Not quite as simple as "it didn't replicate, but it's post modern friendly so that's all right" my radically uncertain friend ;) as I said, language predisposes people to noticing things around their environment in different ways - it doesn't make you totally blind to colour distinctions you cannot name, but it does make it harder to make that distinction in the first place if you are not guided to it. This study is from 2021, and it takes a mixed cultural, environmental and biological approach to explaining the phenomenon of colexicalisation of green and blue and the relative "colour blindness":
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-98550-3
Conclusions:
"Taken together, these analyses demonstrate that no single explanatory factor explains the color lexicon. This finding resonates with the centuries of debate on this topic with myriad variables being proposed and opposed. Our results show that multiple environmental and cultural factors interact. Specifically, we found that a language is more likely to have a dedicated word for blue when it is spoken by a larger population, which resides at higher latitudes (where the incidence of UV-B radiation is lower), and near large bodies of standing water (in particular, lakes).
[Study limitations...]
Nevertheless, our results strongly support the view that the color vocabulary is shaped, at least in part, by environmental factors acting on individual speakers, generating biases that are amplified by the repeated use and transmission of language in communities of similarly affected individuals. This is akin to other cases of individual biases being amplified to shape cross-linguistic diversity, biases that can be either rooted in genetics or emerging due to environmental or cultural factors acting during the lifetime of individuals."
In short: we are influenced by our language as well as influence it back, and the reasons why our language makes us aware of certain things but not others are rooted as much in the environment/biology as in culture - its effect on our ability to perceive salient features is real, though not deterministic/permanent.
Here's where I realise that I haven't adequately explained that radical uncertainty isn't meant to be a scientific or rational truth heuristic. It's not meant to be about adversarial toing or froing to see who's right. It's meant to be about seeing who says or thinks what and why we say and think what we do, where it gets us and whether there's anywhere else to go where humans might flourish more than we do while constrained by norms that impel us to prove things.
Once I'd waded through that word salad about individual biases being amplified to shape cross-linguistic diversity etc enough times for my unscholarly brain to process it I realised that this paper seems to be saying that the way people report on their world differs from place to place.
Why it's written in the way it is - and why we feel the need to bat back & forth about it - is worthy itself of questioning.
I do understand what you mean and my comment wasn't meant to help establish who/what is right; if I gave that impression, it wasn't my intention. Rather, I wanted to support a more nuanced view of the matter at hand than "the perception of blue/green as linguistically driven is a sciency canard", simply because... It isn't. The linguistic driver of perception is just one of the many pieces of the puzzle we need if we want to understand our understanding of the world; that we might be uncomfortable with it playing into the hands of views we disapprove of has no bearing on its truth value or its importance in our journey as we feel for truth and meaning in semi darkness. But it's possible that I'm simply operating from a place of misunderstanding, in which case I apologise - I always feel such conversations run the risk of talking across purposes when they happen in a space like this, so this might well be what's happening here.
Hey Mike :) I subscribed to you this week because I recently downloaded Substack for “internet princess” aka Rayne Fisher Quann. She inspires me so much with her writing that I read all her entries and then became ravenous for more. That’s where you come in :) I’m pretty sure you were high on the recommendations list for “culture”.
Any way, I appreciate you turning the comments on, as I too have been frustrated by not being able to contribute to the MANY posts I’ve been consuming. (I’m also pretty sure I’m hoping to read read read so I can actually maybe someday find it in me to write write write)
This post struck me deeply because just yesterday I was writing about meditation and being and I wrote: “In those moments I just know in my knowing that I am the flowers, I am the trees, and so are you, and all the life and everything-ness all around us is the knowing and in those moments I am everything and nothing and happy.” So I cried when you wrote “I am the meadow” because I am the meadow, too.
Hey Erica, that is perfect ... and a lovely synchronicity too.
Thanks for introducing yourself and - most of all - just for being here...
I once asked my father, what made him happy? He replied that he didn't want pursue happiness, he wanted to find contentment. As I was in my 20's I couldn't understand this, wondering why he didn't want to be happy. Now that I am older I think I understand what he meant. Happiness is more of a transient state, where as contentedness has a greater longevity. I agree with what you say.
Exactly this 👌
I very much like the way that commenters can exchange with others now. This adds an extra dynamic. I highly approve, should be encouraged +++
A favorite Zippy quote- are we having fun yet. For me, as for many, actively enjoying doing something, like walk, or a game, or a good talk, where I think about the action, makes me feel, later, that I was happy. The after action glow is a bit different, feeling content and comfy for awhile.
Are we having fun yet is the motto/admonition of Zippy the Pinhead who also pokes fun at all of our dreadful happiness suppressing certainties http://www.zippythepinhead.com
Meanwhile The Bright Teacher of Happiness made this admonition - "Always remember that your inherent heart-disposition wants and needs Infinite, Absolute, True, Eternal Happiness".
He also tells us that "Happiness is the now-and-forever Mystery that IS the Real Heart and the Only Real God of every one"
And wrote a beautiful book for children of all ages on how to incarnate such Happiness. http://www.beezones.com/beezones-main-stack/wwwhwwc.html
Should be http://beezones-main-stack/wwwhwwc.html
Love this image. Perhaps it's only a strange sense of detachment because modernity demands our attachment to fleeting things that generate 'value'. And then you discover what you really are, which is an animal in nature. Also, the elusivity can be disappointing but increases its affective power whenever it does arrive.
Let them scoff at the experience they can't see for themselves, is my advice.
I had to look that up and now I'm disappointed that it isn't an actual Chesterton book - haha!