people in this thread debating all the different nuances and subtypes of hedonism and which they fit and Iāll just let you know I am all of them
Conversation
If you donāt know him, checkout . Reading his post on improving opioids when I was like 25 made me want to cry
Had my first opioids at 12 and I freaked out and told the doctor why arenāt more people tweaking this to be safer and make everyone happy, he yelled at me
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I feel like thereās this big weird joke going on where like obviously everyone should be happy / high well-being but like everyone pretends we shouldnāt work on it directly for some reason we should work on 50,000 other unrelated projects instead and hope they make us happy
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And then people say you shouldnāt try to be happy, even though the happy outliers pretty much all tried to be happy then did things know to make you happy then it worked and theyāre like yeah do that. But the not-super-happy are like yeah the way to be happy is to try not to be
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i continue to think that you are completely wrong about happiness fwiw
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wrong in goal (we shouldnāt aim to be happy), mechanism (not trying to be happy is the key to being happy), or both?
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i think people very visibly and very obviously want things other than happiness and that fixating on happiness is a philosophical mistake, but admittedly it depends a lot on the precise referent of āhappinessā
i think a thing people def want is to *not be chronically unhappy*
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Yeah Iām referring to a huge cluster of feelings. But I think if people can get to spending 95% of their time in that cluster they would be psyched, and I think itās possible today and certainly in theory. I donāt mean a single blissed-out feeling
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It reminds me of core transformation actually. Iāll be like what do I want oh I want a pizza, oh but whatās the deeper want under that, etc recursively. When Iām at the deeper want (and really feel the felt-sense) my desire for pizza goes to zero in like 5 seconds
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for those who havenāt done CT, the deeper want may be blissful joy, or to go on a walk to pizza place and feel free, or to socialize and pizza is an excuse. Itās usually just one, and when I click to that one the pizza becomes a hollow shell. At least IME
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okay yeah i would not use āhappinessā to describe a core state, i think this is likely to lead to a lot of confusion. i think the referent for āhappinessā for most people is not a core state but is more like an addiction