6 ms·

My biggest problem with being happy with what I have is the lack of motivation to improve and better myself.

rneill 13y ago
This is a fairly common complaint with stoicism. Just because you're happy with what you have doesn't mean you can't also be intrinsically motivated to make life better for yourself and others. But it also leaves you in the wonderful state wherein you don't mind the outcome of your efforts because you were already happy with your state to begin with. It's a fuller appreciation of what you can control and what you can't and the in-between states where you can control your inputs but not the output. You start to set goals that focus only on the actions you have complete control over and don't worry about the outcomes you can't control.
- derefr 13y ago
  > Just because you're happy with what you have doesn't mean you can't also be intrinsically motivated to make life better for yourself and others. An important note: the clinical definition of Attention-Deficit Disorder is exactly "being unable to feel motivated, except under conditions of stress/fear/pain." A common self-medicating strategy for people unaware they have ADD, is to invite unhappiness and stress in order to derive motivation from it. If the only thing that can get you to start working on a project is the feeling of a looming deadline, you may want to get yourself checked.
  - JetSpiegel 13y ago
    That's just procrastination. Where do we draw the line?
    - npizzolato 13y ago
      Agreed 100%. Sometimes it feels like some people are trying to define every regular human action and emotion as some disease that needs to be medicated.
      - derefr 13y ago
        This is an instance of the Worst Argument In The World (http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html). Neurotransmitter imbalances (e.g. clinical depression, AD[H]D, anxiety disorders, etc.) are not diseases. This doesn't mean that people who have them are okay; it just means that thinking of them in terms of what you normally associate with the label 'disease' will lead your thoughts astray. Instead, neurotransmitter imbalances are genetic impairments. Like, say, nearsightedness. As with nearsightedness, neurotransmitter imbalances are just annoying natural features of some people's bodies. As with nearsightedness, it kind of sucks to be those people, but they don't generally know what they're missing, because they've always been that way. But, as with nearsightedness, prosthetics have been invented that "even the playing field" between those with and without the impairment. And, as with nearsightedness, it's readily apparent to those who use the prosthetic that they were impaired, because they now have access to experiences that they may have heard unimpaired people speaking of, but never previously got to experience for themselves. (And, as with nearsightedness, this has caused the genetic defects responsible for the impairment to spread rapidly through the population; because the impairment is no longer a disadvantage, there's no longer any evolutionary pressure to protect the genetic code responsible from mutating.) Try imagining telling someone with nearsightedness that they should just learn to cope with everything being fuzzy, instead of getting glasses. Imagine condemning the boom in contact-lens sales as "overmedication." It seems ridiculous, right?
        JetSpiegel 13y ago
        Surely for psychological impairments the line is blurred. Nearsighted is trivially diagnosable, and it's mainly a physical problem. ADHD is fuzzily defined and overdiagnosed. People can be different from one another. "Curing" someone from being active and unfocused has uncomfortable implications.
        derefr 13y ago
        Let me highlight the most important part of what I said: > And, as with nearsightedness, it's readily apparent to those who use the prosthetic that they were impaired, because they now have access to experiences that they may have heard unimpaired people speaking of, but never previously got to experience for themselves. The human body requires its internal chemicals to be maintained within certain ranges for various features to function. Each of these features is relevant to what would be called "the human experience"--things that are built into the generalized human utility-function to want, as terminal values. When you have a neurotransmitter imbalance to a degree that it becomes an impairment, it is so because it disables some of these features, and therefore bars one's access to these terminal values. In AD(H)D, the feature that gets impaired is the "sense of intrinsic motivation" generated by the dopamine system. The terminal values one loses access to are the feelings of striving, accomplishment, or pride in one's work; and, in more extreme cases, the feeling to hope that one will be able to improve one's lot in life by one's own hand. (When you know you can't motivate yourself to get a job, being jobless is a lot more depressing.) When you apply the appropriate prosthetic to the impairment--combined dopamine agonist/reuptake inhibitors, in this case--you gain access to this feature, and through it, the terminal values you were barred from. As with putting on glasses, if you have the impairment (everything is blurry), then it is very, very obvious that when everything comes into focus, that this is the way things were "meant" to be--not from some moral imperative, but just because the rest of your body was built to rely on this feature that was previously broken. With glasses, this means you suddenly stop bumping into things, and don't find yourself moving closer to people to see them. With normalized dopamine levels, this means you suddenly feel able to make yourself accomplish things you've always wanted to accomplish. If your dopamine is set to the correct range for your body, this doesn't "make you into a robot" or any of the things people talk about with various neuroaffective drugs. Inasmuch as that was ever true in clinical settings, it was from failure to identify the neurotransmitter which is in imbalance (i.e. treating a norepinephrine production deficiency with dopamine agonists). --- And now, a rant: Inasmuch as AD(H)D treatment is made out to be a problem in pop-culture, though, it does indeed come from "overdiagnosis"--if you give a drug to boost a neurotransmitter into a reference range to someone who is not impaired, you will of course boost that neurotransmitter out of the reference range it was already in. People who can see fine already will find glasses quite harmful to their vision. "Overdiagnosis" is a very strong word for what happens with AD(H)D, though. Population studies have been done, with random samples of adults brought in off the street given strict evaluations to test for AD(H)D--and as much as 3% of the population has scored far into the "impaired" range. (This is, coincidentally-enough, about the same percentage we see for all the other neurotransmitter-reference-range problems, e.g. clinical depression, giving merit to the genetic-drift hypothesis.) This number is far higher than the number of people actually diagnosed with AD(H)D. The stigma behind "overdiagnosis" has lead to underdiagnosis. The real problem, of course, is parents wanting to treat their children for neurotransmitter imbalances at all. Children do not have stable neurotransmitter reference ranges. Their brains produce random spurts of neurotransmitters at random times, just like their bodies produce random spurts of growth in random body parts. (This is why children have such vivid nightmares and fantasies: random spurts of serotonin will induce visual and auditory hallucinations, much as are found during an LSD trip; coupled with random spurts of adrenaline, these hallucinations can be quite stressful. It is also why they may not "feel tired" after being awake for many hours: due to random spurts of acetylcholine, their bodies can be effectively self-caffeinating. You can surmise how this applies to each other neurotransmitter as well.) AD(H)D is not a "childhood disease", any more than nearsightedness is. Both impairments tend to first reveal themselves, oddly-enough, when one is first asked in childhood to sit and stare at a blackboard--but this doesn't imply that the problem goes away when the blackboard does. In fact, it usually gets worse--but there is no longer a set of parents being sent report cards to indicate a problem which they might get it into their heads to "fix." So, when I say "get checked for AD(H)D," I'm intending that advice for adults. Children might certainly have AD(H)D already--if you have a neurotransmitter imbalance, it's almost always present from a very young age--but the rampage of random neurotransmitter releases during development will moot any sort of prosthetic, just like (no, not glasses this time!) a bone- or skull-plate to fix a break would be inadvisable for a child: their bones haven't finished growing or forming, and the plate would soon harm instead of help. Having said that, school systems must be designed around the fact that children will have various neurochemical imbalances--whether temporarily due to growth, or permanently, due to genetic problems--and around the fact that it is improper to expect the child to be treated for these before their neurology stabilizes. Grade-school must be an environment where a child is given the resources to succeed despite neurochemical imbalances. This calls for a radical restructuring, much moreso than the "radical" ideas one sees proffered on education around HN.
- derekp7 13y ago
  So the joy is in the traveling, not the destination, then?
bradleysmith 13y ago
I've found there are two particular thoughts that need to occur for the "motivation to improve and better myself" to manifest itself. 1) honest love for oneself; a belief that bettering oneself is not a completely selfish goal, but actually helps everyone and everything else in your life that you care about (insofar as you interact with them) 2) an honest belief that energy spent on self-improvement is effective; if I try to change myself in this way or that and am unsuccessful, it makes the next attempt much harder to get started. just my two cents.
tsax 13y ago
Interesting. For me, being happy starts positive reinforcement cycles that enable further learning and growth.
- dsaravel 13y ago
  I don't fell that being happy is worth it. If I needed no money and no attention, perhaps happiness shouldn't also be the next goal to achieve. See what I mean here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88jj6PSD7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88jj6PSD7w
ermintrude 13y ago
Wrong. Your biggest problem is believing you have to improve yourself.
- md224 13y ago
  Interesting that this was downvoted... I wonder if it was the tone or the content. While I don't think it's clear that this person's desire for self-improvement is their "biggest problem," I like that this comment points out a potential assumption in the grandparent comment: that improving ourselves is some kind of requirement or moral imperative. You could make a plausible argument that self-improvement allows one to accomplish more for others, and use this to connect self-improvement with moral obligations to the community. And you could simply have a deeply ingrained desire for self-improvement (Maslow's Hierarchy seems to suggest that this is a fundamental human need). However, I think it's good to acknowledge that this idea -- that we should improve ourselves -- is not prima facie necessary; it's simply another human desire.
  - ermintrude 13y ago
    Sorry it was perhaps a bit abrupt. Many people often feel that something's wrong with life or something is missing. A little voice in their heads comes up and says "maybe if I had X that'd fix it", or "maybe if I was Y I'd be happy". In fact, I'm coming to realise (as all the books I've read over the years have been saying) that it's the thinking that is the whole problem. In fact it's not a case of just intellectually accepting this idea that's important. We can go deeper. Where does the voice come from? What is this thing called "I" that is blindly followed? It would appear it is just another thought. The mind is just a stream of thoughts and "I" is just another one. It has no substance, no reality. It seems that the only thing that does exist is the present, so just ignore the past and future. The more you are able to ignore the voice in your head (and it's much easier when you see it has no reality) the more you start to tingle, literally. You (well I don't know about you, but I) feel amazing. Satisfied and replete. So to conclude, what I was getting at was that maintaining the belief that you need to "improve" somehow, or be "better" just adds more fuel to the fire and keeps the mind spinning, distracting us from the present and ever experiencing that fulfilling feeling.

This is a fairly common complaint with stoicism. Just because you're happy with what you have doesn't mean you can't also be intrinsically motivated to make life better for yourself and others. But it also leaves you in the wonderful state wherein you don't mind the outcome of your efforts because you were already happy with your state to begin with. It's a fuller appreciation of what you can control and what you can't and the in-between states where you can control your inputs but not the output. You start to set goals that focus only on the actions you have complete control over and don't worry about the outcomes you can't control.

derefr 13y ago
> Just because you're happy with what you have doesn't mean you can't also be intrinsically motivated to make life better for yourself and others. An important note: the clinical definition of Attention-Deficit Disorder is exactly "being unable to feel motivated, except under conditions of stress/fear/pain." A common self-medicating strategy for people unaware they have ADD, is to invite unhappiness and stress in order to derive motivation from it. If the only thing that can get you to start working on a project is the feeling of a looming deadline, you may want to get yourself checked.
- JetSpiegel 13y ago
  That's just procrastination. Where do we draw the line?
  - npizzolato 13y ago
    Agreed 100%. Sometimes it feels like some people are trying to define every regular human action and emotion as some disease that needs to be medicated.
    - derefr 13y ago
      This is an instance of the Worst Argument In The World (http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html http://squid314.livejournal.com/323694.html). Neurotransmitter imbalances (e.g. clinical depression, AD[H]D, anxiety disorders, etc.) are not diseases. This doesn't mean that people who have them are okay; it just means that thinking of them in terms of what you normally associate with the label 'disease' will lead your thoughts astray. Instead, neurotransmitter imbalances are genetic impairments. Like, say, nearsightedness. As with nearsightedness, neurotransmitter imbalances are just annoying natural features of some people's bodies. As with nearsightedness, it kind of sucks to be those people, but they don't generally know what they're missing, because they've always been that way. But, as with nearsightedness, prosthetics have been invented that "even the playing field" between those with and without the impairment. And, as with nearsightedness, it's readily apparent to those who use the prosthetic that they were impaired, because they now have access to experiences that they may have heard unimpaired people speaking of, but never previously got to experience for themselves. (And, as with nearsightedness, this has caused the genetic defects responsible for the impairment to spread rapidly through the population; because the impairment is no longer a disadvantage, there's no longer any evolutionary pressure to protect the genetic code responsible from mutating.) Try imagining telling someone with nearsightedness that they should just learn to cope with everything being fuzzy, instead of getting glasses. Imagine condemning the boom in contact-lens sales as "overmedication." It seems ridiculous, right?
      - JetSpiegel 13y ago
        Surely for psychological impairments the line is blurred. Nearsighted is trivially diagnosable, and it's mainly a physical problem. ADHD is fuzzily defined and overdiagnosed. People can be different from one another. "Curing" someone from being active and unfocused has uncomfortable implications.
        derefr 13y ago
        Let me highlight the most important part of what I said: > And, as with nearsightedness, it's readily apparent to those who use the prosthetic that they were impaired, because they now have access to experiences that they may have heard unimpaired people speaking of, but never previously got to experience for themselves. The human body requires its internal chemicals to be maintained within certain ranges for various features to function. Each of these features is relevant to what would be called "the human experience"--things that are built into the generalized human utility-function to want, as terminal values. When you have a neurotransmitter imbalance to a degree that it becomes an impairment, it is so because it disables some of these features, and therefore bars one's access to these terminal values. In AD(H)D, the feature that gets impaired is the "sense of intrinsic motivation" generated by the dopamine system. The terminal values one loses access to are the feelings of striving, accomplishment, or pride in one's work; and, in more extreme cases, the feeling to hope that one will be able to improve one's lot in life by one's own hand. (When you know you can't motivate yourself to get a job, being jobless is a lot more depressing.) When you apply the appropriate prosthetic to the impairment--combined dopamine agonist/reuptake inhibitors, in this case--you gain access to this feature, and through it, the terminal values you were barred from. As with putting on glasses, if you have the impairment (everything is blurry), then it is very, very obvious that when everything comes into focus, that this is the way things were "meant" to be--not from some moral imperative, but just because the rest of your body was built to rely on this feature that was previously broken. With glasses, this means you suddenly stop bumping into things, and don't find yourself moving closer to people to see them. With normalized dopamine levels, this means you suddenly feel able to make yourself accomplish things you've always wanted to accomplish. If your dopamine is set to the correct range for your body, this doesn't "make you into a robot" or any of the things people talk about with various neuroaffective drugs. Inasmuch as that was ever true in clinical settings, it was from failure to identify the neurotransmitter which is in imbalance (i.e. treating a norepinephrine production deficiency with dopamine agonists). --- And now, a rant: Inasmuch as AD(H)D treatment is made out to be a problem in pop-culture, though, it does indeed come from "overdiagnosis"--if you give a drug to boost a neurotransmitter into a reference range to someone who is not impaired, you will of course boost that neurotransmitter out of the reference range it was already in. People who can see fine already will find glasses quite harmful to their vision. "Overdiagnosis" is a very strong word for what happens with AD(H)D, though. Population studies have been done, with random samples of adults brought in off the street given strict evaluations to test for AD(H)D--and as much as 3% of the population has scored far into the "impaired" range. (This is, coincidentally-enough, about the same percentage we see for all the other neurotransmitter-reference-range problems, e.g. clinical depression, giving merit to the genetic-drift hypothesis.) This number is far higher than the number of people actually diagnosed with AD(H)D. The stigma behind "overdiagnosis" has lead to underdiagnosis. The real problem, of course, is parents wanting to treat their children for neurotransmitter imbalances at all. Children do not have stable neurotransmitter reference ranges. Their brains produce random spurts of neurotransmitters at random times, just like their bodies produce random spurts of growth in random body parts. (This is why children have such vivid nightmares and fantasies: random spurts of serotonin will induce visual and auditory hallucinations, much as are found during an LSD trip; coupled with random spurts of adrenaline, these hallucinations can be quite stressful. It is also why they may not "feel tired" after being awake for many hours: due to random spurts of acetylcholine, their bodies can be effectively self-caffeinating. You can surmise how this applies to each other neurotransmitter as well.) AD(H)D is not a "childhood disease", any more than nearsightedness is. Both impairments tend to first reveal themselves, oddly-enough, when one is first asked in childhood to sit and stare at a blackboard--but this doesn't imply that the problem goes away when the blackboard does. In fact, it usually gets worse--but there is no longer a set of parents being sent report cards to indicate a problem which they might get it into their heads to "fix." So, when I say "get checked for AD(H)D," I'm intending that advice for adults. Children might certainly have AD(H)D already--if you have a neurotransmitter imbalance, it's almost always present from a very young age--but the rampage of random neurotransmitter releases during development will moot any sort of prosthetic, just like (no, not glasses this time!) a bone- or skull-plate to fix a break would be inadvisable for a child: their bones haven't finished growing or forming, and the plate would soon harm instead of help. Having said that, school systems must be designed around the fact that children will have various neurochemical imbalances--whether temporarily due to growth, or permanently, due to genetic problems--and around the fact that it is improper to expect the child to be treated for these before their neurology stabilizes. Grade-school must be an environment where a child is given the resources to succeed despite neurochemical imbalances. This calls for a radical restructuring, much moreso than the "radical" ideas one sees proffered on education around HN.
derekp7 13y ago
So the joy is in the traveling, not the destination, then?

bradleysmith 13y ago

I've found there are two particular thoughts that need to occur for the "motivation to improve and better myself" to manifest itself. 1) honest love for oneself; a belief that bettering oneself is not a completely selfish goal, but actually helps everyone and everything else in your life that you care about (insofar as you interact with them) 2) an honest belief that energy spent on self-improvement is effective; if I try to change myself in this way or that and am unsuccessful, it makes the next attempt much harder to get started. just my two cents.

tsax 13y ago

Interesting. For me, being happy starts positive reinforcement cycles that enable further learning and growth.

dsaravel 13y ago
I don't fell that being happy is worth it. If I needed no money and no attention, perhaps happiness shouldn't also be the next goal to achieve. See what I mean here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88jj6PSD7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88jj6PSD7w

ermintrude 13y ago

Wrong. Your biggest problem is believing you have to improve yourself.

md224 13y ago
Interesting that this was downvoted... I wonder if it was the tone or the content. While I don't think it's clear that this person's desire for self-improvement is their "biggest problem," I like that this comment points out a potential assumption in the grandparent comment: that improving ourselves is some kind of requirement or moral imperative. You could make a plausible argument that self-improvement allows one to accomplish more for others, and use this to connect self-improvement with moral obligations to the community. And you could simply have a deeply ingrained desire for self-improvement (Maslow's Hierarchy seems to suggest that this is a fundamental human need). However, I think it's good to acknowledge that this idea -- that we should improve ourselves -- is not prima facie necessary; it's simply another human desire.
- ermintrude 13y ago
  Sorry it was perhaps a bit abrupt. Many people often feel that something's wrong with life or something is missing. A little voice in their heads comes up and says "maybe if I had X that'd fix it", or "maybe if I was Y I'd be happy". In fact, I'm coming to realise (as all the books I've read over the years have been saying) that it's the thinking that is the whole problem. In fact it's not a case of just intellectually accepting this idea that's important. We can go deeper. Where does the voice come from? What is this thing called "I" that is blindly followed? It would appear it is just another thought. The mind is just a stream of thoughts and "I" is just another one. It has no substance, no reality. It seems that the only thing that does exist is the present, so just ignore the past and future. The more you are able to ignore the voice in your head (and it's much easier when you see it has no reality) the more you start to tingle, literally. You (well I don't know about you, but I) feel amazing. Satisfied and replete. So to conclude, what I was getting at was that maintaining the belief that you need to "improve" somehow, or be "better" just adds more fuel to the fire and keeps the mind spinning, distracting us from the present and ever experiencing that fulfilling feeling.