That feeling when you get phasic bursting of dopamine neurons in the Ventral Tegmental Area
Speculations about feelings of well-being and how to more reliably have them
Things this piece talks about
How my horrible start to 2020 unfolded into the best year ever (that I wouldn't want to experience again)1
Why being 'happy' isn't the same as having sustained desirable steady-state mood conditions
Do more of the things you love is probably not as worthwhile as doing more of the things you'd rather not
The value of being in the moment is not about the moment being good, bad or having any other quality
If you prefer to keep feeling ambiently meh without knowing why, don't read this one.
There's a narrated version in the subscriber-only section (not as an additional email annoyance this time).
Post status
Inspired by some sciencey stuff I won't pretend to understand but which chimes with personal experience.
Speculative. Happiness is mostly a state that arises as a result of things being better than predicted and wellbeing is a more desirable state predicated on not predicting anything.
Inspired by comment chatter in this Astral Codex Ten piece. You should read it if you're interested in the neuroscience of feeling good.
It was November, chill, sodden and drizzling. I was shifting heavy rocks by hand. They were tipped in a corner of the small field here after the demolition of a garden wall when the house was renovated. The builder had been going to rebuild it, but then he couldn't.2 So I had a big pile of buried rocks and no need for the wall anyway. What I did need was somewhere to put cuttings from the project to create a wildflower meadow.
I felt amazing. Day after day, amid the physical discomfort of this task. This was how I spent the autumn of 2020, toiling in the meadow, scything, cutting, lifting, getting cold and wet, feeling amazing.
A year later it was time to get the meadow ready for winter again. I looked forward to it all summer. Having anticipated feeling amazing again I toiled with puzzlement. Why don't I feel amazing, like last year?
My OH and Youna (the Best Dog - RC passim) went backpacking last year and had a wonderful week. She loved it so much that she couldn't wait to hit the trail again and so, a while later, she did. As she put it afterwards I wasn't really feeling it.
For both of us an experience of strongly elevated mood was not replicable by recreating the original condition.
Sure, there's something in the idea that novelty is a sharper, crisper sensation (either good or bad) and that familiarity tends to dial down our response to things. But there's another interesting way to think of this.
Audio readout
(Please note that, as ever, there’s swearing)
We have something to do and we tend to anticipate what it will be like. We predict its affective valence. Probably largely unconsciously.
I am going to do x and this has a predicted valence of 6, where 1 is horrible and 10 is fantastic.
I am doing x and it feels 6. Fine.
I am doing x and it feels 5. Sigh.
I am doing x and I predicted nothing about it. It feels 6. Great.
Last time I did x it felt 8. So now I'm doing x and it feels 6. What's wrong? Disappointing. There is nothing materially different about doing x this time so what could possibly be wrong?
Nothing. Nothing at all. You just undershot the target vibe, is all.
Maybe addiction works this way too. You try a thing and it's amazing. Later it isn't so amazing, so you increase the dose or frequency to chase the original vibe. Obviously there is a wealth of underlying physiological activity going on as well, but psychologically this seems to make sense in the context of ambient expectation and effect.
What was going on in the autumn of 2020 for me was a consistent overshoot against expectations.
The year had started like this.
<Insert world's tiniest violin>
In January, a few days after my birthday, me and my OH of 7 years broke up3
There was a global pandemic coming down the tracks
Would I lose my work? As a contractor there would be no furlough scheme for me
How could I navigate French bureaucracy without my fluent OH?
I was lost, anxious and depressed
Then things just kept feeling better and better.
I was alone, which I love. Locked down, which was exciting and fun (in my comfortable and agreeable rural circumstances), the pandemic meant good business for my work clients which meant I was economically secure for the time being, I was saving travel and subsistence money thanks to the French/UK border closure, I was doing therapy with a genius called Alyson who was mysteriously rewiring my brain (although she insisted it was all my own doing) and I started meditation practice. My debut concert as an electronica 'artist' even passed off with no fuck-ups.
What unfolded was the best year of my life. Capped off by quitting a severe Twitter habit (something I've subsequently realised was a sign of better mental health, rather than the cause of it - although there is certainly a feedback loop effect there).
Looking back, apart from rewiring my brain to be less anxious and ambiently sad all the time (which had been the bullshit mood habit of a lifetime) and developing a few survival skills through necessity, there wasn't really much about what I was doing or what was happening that would account for the massively elevated sense of well-being that filled each day.
Not talking about the faux happy mania that afflicts people with bipolar disorder. It was a calm feeling of it feels fucking great to be me, right now, right here, doing these ordinary things. Day after day.
It's taken a long time to realise that this quality flowed from an unconscious prediction that life was going to be really hard for a while. And when it wasn't, boom!
In a sense, it probably wasn't as wonderful a time as I experienced it then or have framed it since, in and of itself.
The salient quality it had was being better than anticipated.
Maybe this is what happiness is.
The absence of prediction or anticipation.
It would be easy to think of this idea in a banal way by suggesting that it's always better to meter your expectations but that is not the point here.
Which is where meditation and the concept of being in the moment comes in. And how it seems to me that it isn't commonly that well understood.
Things that become fashionable tend to be talked about a lot by people who don't know much about them. I'm often as guilty as the next person for this. But here I claim a modicum of domain area knowledge, with which to assert that being in the moment is a widely misunderstood concept.
Part of my response to the sense of personal crisis, 34 months ago, was to begin a daily meditation practice. Being dispositionally curious, volatile and anxious the appeal was that it might be intrinsically interesting and help dial down my typical negative responses to various stimuli.
There's a lot to say about my meditation experience, to date, but not here. Apart from to say that it's frustrating, hard and disappointing at the beginning, but pretty good if you stick with it.
What a meditation session never does is make you feel better than you did before you started it. I'm guessing that this is why most people who casually approach it quickly give up. Or they mistake feeling more relaxed as the point of it and keep doing it for that, when a brisk walk would work just as well and benefit your cardiovascular system more. Anyway...
The relevant aspect here is this notion that readily trips off people's tongues of being in the moment.
My guess is that most of us initially believe this to mean extracting more positive value from the precise set of circumstances that one is in right now.
I think that's mistaken.
Being in the moment might be shit, but still beneficial. And here's why;
As I learned by wondering why 2020 was my best year ever, the subjective feeling of well-being arises from prediction error. I thought life was going down the pan and when it didn't, that was intensely nice.
The point of being in the moment is to remove prediction. To stop looking forward or back.
Read that sentence again, because it's the takeaway.
You are neither anticipating feeling a certain way at some point moments ahead, or further into the future, nor attempting to capture or recreate some vibe from the past, moments or longer ago.
It's neither leaning forward nor back.
And it's leaning forward or back that causes frustration, disappointment and myriad other crappy vibes we all experience much of the time. Especially leaning forward, because that exposes you to prediction error.
[As an amusing aside, this is also how other crap stuff often comes about, like accidents around the house caused by not paying sufficient attention. Next time you drop something or stub your toe, think about your mental state at the time. I'm willing to bet it was leaning forward toward some future point, even if that point was just moments ahead. My best friend coined the term 'lurching' for this behaviour, which I like a lot.]
I know next to nothing about Stoicism, but suspect that this is part of the benefits of a stoical practice too.
[Delete paragraph about stoical practice based on reading two articles and something on Wikipedia. Yes, it seems plausibly related].
Noticing the role of prediction (it's typically unconscious prediction, remember) it suddenly seems to apply all over the place.
I've lost count of the times I was committed to doing something I really didn't feel like doing, when the time came, then experiencing an unmistakeable feeling of well-being when I got into it. I've also lost count of the times I was really looking forward to something that just turned out to be a bit meh. I went to see Elbow five times on one tour, the experience of which became annoyingly old annoyingly quickly.4
Hence it may well be worth favouring more of the activities you don't anticipate with relish. Not because those activities will be great. They may well be crap. But you're exposing yourself to the chance of benefiting from a negative prediction error and I will attest that this feels fucking great when it happens.
I'll never be a Zen master and I'll never stop predicting a positive or negative mental state in relation to plans, obligations and such. I'm not even going to try. But there seems to be some value in the idea that feelings of well-being are relative to prior predictions.
This is why I'm not mad on the notion of 'happiness' as a thing to seek and hold. Sure, it works ok to describe a discrete moment where things are way better than during your steady state. But that means you can't be happy all the time.
This is much more widely understood. Only this morning Moe Aloha writes in Primordial People
"Do not wish away the challenging chapters of life. Without them, we would never be able to contrast them against the periods of joy when they eventually return"
People in the comments love that. Indeed, to have meaning, feelings are inevitably relative.
But prediction errors seem to play an outsize part in the valence of any particular moment.
Perhaps dialling down those predictions is a skill worth developing. Perhaps by being more often in the moment.
Note: the headline here was intended to be provocative and kind of fun. I've already forgotten what phasic bursting of dopamine neurons in the Ventral Tegmental Area means, apart from having something to do with predictions, feelings and brain stuff. But I do recommend reading the discussion under that article.
Quote of the week
Though overt censorship is often spoken of as the leading threat to open discourse, the more subtle threat arises from the voluntary limitation of one’s own speech that creates a spiral of silence. As John Stuart Mill recognized in his masterwork, On Liberty, it is not the iron fist of state repression but rather the velvet glove of society’s seduction that constitutes the real problem.
Professor Glenn Loury in the Journal of Free Black Thought
I wouldn't want to experience 2020 again because the bad feelings at the start were really bad. It's one thing for everything to turn out so much better than you expected, but quite another to actually wish to repeat such an experience. Even though it was a really great time.
My builder, Stéphane, died from cancer just after I moved in. I think of him often, in the beautiful space he created for me.
For readers who like a happy ending, we reconvened as a couple 17 months later
Incidentally, I am unable to listen to Elbow since all the centrist mums and dads suddenly loved them, thanks to a massive hit single. A story for another day.