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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i think another very common pattern that e.g. romeo stevens has talked about is people using unhappiness as a stick to get themselves to do things, e.g. āiām not allowed to be happy until i finish all my work,ā and that it would be better for such patterns to not be there
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i think this for reasons that donāt ground out in happiness per se. when people allow themselves to be happy more human flourishing happens. but happiness as such is not the point, imo
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honestly i canāt tell if we actually disagree or where we do because each word only poorly describes the underlying thing, and when I only have like 70% confidence in every word error compounds quickly
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you might have a better idea of where we disagree than I do, and if so Iād appreciate if you could clarify it, but I also get if that just sounds like a lot of work
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the reference to CT helped clarify your position, i think i get what you mean now and i am very confused about core states myself but iāll repeat that i think āhappinessā is a confusing word to refer to core states and i would personally use a different one
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i suspect if you write a lot of tweets about āhappinessā you will reliably cause people to think that your position is something simpler and worse than it is