Central points of life, is multiple and variable

Life is complex, especially psychological life.

The most important problems and solutions for life quality, change significantly between people.

It makes it very hard to give any advice, as the most important point differs significantly.

Moreover, certain issues show opposite effects.
Self control, for example, can be destructive, when one is addicted to control and his trouble is being stressed out of control searching.

So some people need to have more self control, while others need to learn to relinquish control.


Others need money, or friends, or to have more fun, more change or more stability, or endless other things.


Are there generalized focal points about happiness and life management?

Reverse imitation of yourself

When you see a mistake, you can get smarter by way of reverse imitation. Learn to do the opposite.

This apply to our own mistakes. We can take notice and decide to do the opposite.

It requires stamina and wit.
Stamina, to accept that we did a mistake. And instead of self-defending, getting smarter for next time.

Wit. 1) maybe it is not a mistake. It is tricky to know which actions are smart and which are not. Sometimes, what seems stupid has some reason.
2) Not every mistake has to be avoided. Our ability to act wisely is limited, and we ought to "manage" ourselves in a smart way. Not just correcting every mistake. Sometimes it is overwhelming.

localized vs. generalized views of causations

Looking local means that you say "I am not eating now, because I am scheduled to eat later"

Generalized outlook looks at why I am not thinking about changing my plans, why I am not considering eating now and later, and so on.
It will be lack of openness, laziness, not willing to reconsider plans etc.

The local cause is easy to argue about and change.
The generalized cause is way more complex. Harder to understand, and much harder to argue about change.

You can convince a person to change his local plans. But saying that his rigidity is not good, is harder to show (maybe he is better off staying rigid and planned and so on. The value of a trait for a specific person is not easy to gauge).

When you look at life as a whole is indeed hard to decide what is good as a trait. Very hard to think about which constellation of customs etc. is best.

But this is actually a reason to favor local outlook. Because in the local one can easily decide, and manage his life for the better. Still, generalized understanding is relevant. One cannot ignore it. Only the small scale strategy has its value, which does not permit us to be stupid of the facet called global outlook. I only guess that the generalized aspect is generally less crucial than it seems and functionally it is good to focus on the local (without totally forgetting the general).


Generalized is less known. We may know more on local relationships than on global and complex ones.
Thinking about generalized stuff takes more energy. Emotionally, any generalized thinking is way more taxing. Thinking about oneself in a generalized way (self reflecting) is linked to a variety of negative side effects (see "the curse of the self" for a review about these effects)

PS. see Wegner and vallacher research on "Action Identification". Every activity can be looked at from a very generalized view (I want to be a millionaire) to the very local (I got to write this letter (in the check)). They say that too generalized a view is many times less functional than focusing on the lower level. It is after all the very small steps about which we go to concentrate many times in order to get things done.

Personal biasing of what happniess is. And it maybe rational

DIfferent people define happiness differently.
Some of it maybe because personal experience differs, and for every person and situation there are different aspects of life people concentrate about. And different ways people think about themselves.

It can be rational for some to concentrate on pleasures of the mind. If that is where they can find happiness or where they feel comfortable about.
Others feel comfortable only alone. They concentrate of these things.

Others concentrate on doing the right thing.

These tendencies may be mistaken or right. But they maybe practically the right way to manage life and getting the best of it for the individual person.

PS. Much more subtleties can be found in details of emotional attention, and various aspects of self and experiences people do have.

Improving life by changing and eliminating goals.

The common question people ask is how do I achieve my given goals.

But sometimes the better route for a good life is having other goals.

Sometimes giving up on certain goals can make life better.


Many of our goals are unconscious. Knowing these goals and sometimes changing them is even a bigger challenge.


Sometimes, pursuing the goals "the way we want them" is plainly irrational.
Even not by our own standards. It is many times either stubbornness, or lack of thinking. But there are more emotional and cognitive structures that cause us to get stuck with only certain goals and ways to do things.

Certainly, we sometimes want the things that are good for us. We may not always know the exact way they are good for us. But the heart knows things the mind does not.
Sometimes it is the idiosyncrasy way of things that gives them special taste.

But the idea stays.

1) Changing goals can be the way to improve life.
2) Our goals and the good life are not always compatible.


PS. Some believe that the fact that we want something makes it worthy of pursuit.
This sounds tautological for me. Especially when we see people pursue goals that are quite clearly destructive.
I do not believe that personal goals are above reason and criticism (criticism in the common sense meaning). Our goals are not exempt from being stupid.


Update. I see there is research showing that disengagement from unattainable goals is linked ot better health and well-being.

Nozick's experience machine

Robert Nozick holds that people want real experience and not the subjective one.

I used to think he is entirely mistaken. It just sounds bad. It depends on how you phrase the question + most people cannot realistically understand the question.

Now I have two more points.
1) In line with the idea that many of our intuitions are rational as general decisions rules (Gigerenzer "ecological rationality" and "simple heuristics that make us smart").
Possibly we have a strong intuition against false deals and fake stuff. The whole experience machine sounds like cheating. If taken to its logical conclusion, it is a good deal when taken seriously, but most people are following their thinking rules, yielding a strong no. Would they be able to truly comprehend it they would have liked it.


2) Goals are another fancy issue. Do we want to feel good? or do we want status, sex and food?
It sounds contradictory, but human motivation need not be defined in feeling good. Humans seem to have in fact multiple motivations, and not all of them are always compatible, nor can we say that people know how to trade off between different goals.
If the evolutionary embedded goals are specific, we can understand why people refuse the experience machine. We have in mind the embedded goal of food not of its experience.

Does it imply that it is not experience that matters? surely not. Because it is quite possible that in a sense people prefer the good experience to the real stuff.
In a sense the want to feel good has better rational justifications, and is more coherent when looking at life, than when taking the various goals themselves seriously.


[PS. goals as means: Sometimes, these goals bring the good life indirectly, as when being immersed in an "important" task makes a person happy. He must truly believe in the essentially valuableness of the goal in order to have the experience.

If goals are means for the good life, than they will tell us to refuse the experience machine, but it will be misleading. Since they are means and the experience of the machine is the very end.]



Some will say that it is not good, since we need a way to determine what people want. How will we determine preferences, wants and goals, if people are so unreliable?
The question is mis-defined. Because it is very possible that we do not have a way to ascertain what people want. Maybe people themselves do not know.

This is also not contradictory to the idea that we should use certain rules for practical purposes, because even without knowing "really" and "for sure", we may take the rules that seem best for us.

But I believe that if we want to know what people want we got to look at the variety of people actions AND related thoughts. Analyzing actions and preferences in light of what people think and know when they decide and act. This is very subtle and unreliable. Smart skeptics will say impossible. But we have a glimpse.

Ego, stubbornness and what we want from life

I found myself to be quite stubborn and caring for my ego.
I wondered who should about these things.

OK. First of all these are psychological realities. This is how we function, no matter whether it is utilitarian, smart or not.

These have also utilitarian functions. Some derive utility from their very ego and being stubborn.

There are indirect positives of these. We all have lots of experiences and knowledge about ourselves that others lack. Being stubborn may mean caring for oneself with one's intimate knowledge.


BUT! our goal in life is having a good life. Which means that foregoing stubbornness can be very smart at times. Ego is irrelevant for its own sake.

This is a huge challenge. Especially if you are stubborn with a huge ego.