February 25. Continuing on positive emotions, this subreddit post disagrees
with my statement that nobody would consciously avoid feeling good. Clearly
this subject is less straightforward than I thought, because it’s hard to
separate “feeling good” from the stuff that you feel good about, from social
displays of feeling good, and from the whole internal ecology of how you feel.
When I think about my personal perspective, it’s mainly about motivation:
feeling good about doing things. That’s why, despite high grades and test
scores, I didn’t get into an elite college, and never passed an interview for
a salaried job, because everyone could tell I wasn’t really into it. I failed
at homesteading because tasks that I valued in an abstract way turned out to
feel like chores. I’m constantly trying to 1) find stuff that I feel like
doing, or 2) hack my own perspective so that I feel like doing stuff, or if
both of those fail, 3) force myself to do stuff, which is exhausting. So
that’s the context from which I don’t understand why someone would avoid
feeling good if they have the option.
And Noah comments:
Happiness is not a meaningful state without something to compare it to.
If there was no suffering, we would have no word to describe happiness,
it would simply be the natural state of things. It would be invisible to
us I imagine, like the background space of our awareness.
That sounds wonderful! And it reminds me of the Christian idea, that the fall
of man happened through knowledge of good and evil. This never occurred to me,
but maybe the principle that you can’t have something without also having its
opposite, is only true on a cognitive level.
