Humans are driven by one thing; moving to a better mental state now.
A simple example is when feeling hungry, it's a bad feeling, you see food, you move to food, you eat food and you're feeling better.
Things were sometimes more complicated, if you have a child and not enough food for both of you, depending on which pain is currently worse you decide whether to eat, feed your child, or split the food. All to get to the best possible mental state.
Taking things up a notch, you're smart and you learned that you can store future happiness, and that also puts you in a better mental state, so if the uncertainty of the future give you more pain, you decide to store the food for the future because that pain is bringing down your mental state the most.
Then you find a few banana trees, you settle there and eat bananas, your food worries are gone. But that's not good for you, if you only eat bananas and nothing else you may not survive, so brain has a new trick and once you have abundance of something, its effect on you decreases over time.
So you move because the pain is back, you have to find a different type of food to be back to a good mental state.
Back then life was simple, you respond to your biological needs, they give you pain to motivate you to survive and help your offspring survive.
But, intelligent humans want more, how can they reach the best mental state and stay there?
We learned farming, built shelters, and did everything we could to put away all the things that make us feel bad.
In the new life of abundance some people won the game, their brain didn't really give them much more trouble, good house, healthy family, good food, maybe a few issues here and there but overall the mental state is always good.
But for most this was not the case, having everything and nothing to seek that is challenging them is causing pain, they try to look for things that are challenging. Everything within reach? How about extra luxury stuff. That's how some people end up buying a watch for tens of thousands when they can learn about the time for free.
They have abundance of everything and they are not in a good mental state, they have money as a store of value, but exchanging it for basic stuff does not convert it into a better mental state because they have too much of these already, the next thing that makes them happy is the one that is above their usual budget, because that poses a challenge and overcoming it feels good.
And another challenge is that the now version of you is the version that decides what to do, regardless of whether future you agrees or not.
Maybe there's some worry now about the future, but now you only cares about the mental state now, if the future impacts the current mental state then it is taken into consideration.
Whenever taking a one way door leads the now you to happiness, they take it.
For example, sign a contract to be with another person forever, this contract is called marriage.
The now you, is committing the future you to a decision because they feel good about it, every future version of the now you has to live with that decision.
Over time, these decisions pile up and lead to less happiness, your younger self abused your body and health now you're suffering.
And even if you take care of future you, your body will inevitably deteriorate and reduce the quality of life.
But is feeling bad that bad, isn't it ok to feel a little bit bad sometimes, why fight it?
That's right, feeling bad is not the end of the world, actually feeling good in the past can be a bad thing.
For example, would you be happier if a few years ago you were the happiest person in the world? or if you were having the worst time of your life?
If you're feeling better than you were before, that makes you feel even better, and if you you're feeling worse that you used to feel, that makes you feel even worse.
The people who understand this very well are game designers, games deal directly with your mental state. they understand how your brain works and they trick it to always feel good.
They do that by providing constant rewrads and improvements. Because we feel better by making linear progress.
If life is a game, we are trying to provide players with everything from level 1, and then they comlpain that the game is boring, so we rebuild the game and provide more things throughout the levels.
But because we're not thinking of it from the game design perspective, it's not always a linear progress, your life can improve, then become worse, then go all over the place.
You spend your time obtaining things that then make you feel bad to maintain them.
You make friends that leave you, use you, forget you, or be there when you don't want them.
You commit the future you to things they don't want just to feel better now.
What's the solution? design your game with linear progress, think of future you before making any commitment.
make life as simple as possible, to have the least number of pains to deal with.
Then design linear improvement plan, do things that make look forward to next day, next month next year and next ten years and say I can't wait for that time to come.
And avoid building a big spike in past happiness.
Like if you buy something that will make you very happy now and have no or negative effect on you in a year, that's a bad spike, because next year you will remember it and feel bad, always make future you happy. Constant progress.
For example, FIRE movement is about working as hard as possible today, saving money to retire early.
You don't have to FIRE or like this way of life but that's an example, you feel the worst at the beginning. Because you have nothing at all, but you start saving every day is better because you got closer to your goal.
And far in the future, you get the reward of all the pain you had in the past, and it's not a spike, you keep that reward forever because you get financial freedom until you die.
Having kids can be a good constant progress too, you have a crying slab of meat at the beginning that doesn't communicate with you at all and makes your life much harder.
The crying slab of meat grows up and starts connecting with you, your system naturally makes you feel better when your offspring are feeling better so your brain is not working against you for once.
This can backfire if your offspring hate you or something bad happen to them, it's a risk bigger than the financial freedom goal, also having a child usually comes with life long bond with your significant other, that may backfire as well.
It's not easy to design your progress game, but just knowing that this is the path to a better life is a good start.
And knowing that everyone everywhere is motivated by feeling better now explains everything going on with the world.
Like why autism is increasing in children?
Because entertainment became very easy to obtain that children who are exposed to that much entertainment are not finding much value in learning communication and engaging with others.
And when they're 7 and parents start cutting off entertainment because they can't live a normal life it becomes too late because it's hard to feel that a raw potato is tasty after having gourmet food for years.
Or why people pay 10 thousand dollars for a bag. Because they're out of options and they need to convert that money into happiness, everything below that is too attainable already to feel good.
Also, we don't know initially what feels good or bad, we have some base weights but we start building experiences and using them to calculate the perceived value.
For example when a kid sees something colorful and bright they walk towards it, they see the edge of the bed and they fall over, because they can't simulate the negative value of falling yet and factor it in with the positive value of reaching the bright thing.
I don't expect this to be read by anyone, mainly because there are other things with more perceived mental reward.
People put a lot of effort into making their messages more rewarding, putting it in a video, or adding photos to the article to keep people engaged, I don't want to win this comptetion, it just feels good to put my understanding of life out there.
When would this be worth reading for the masses? when people start talking about it and you feel like you may miss out on what everyone else is saying and that bad feeling makes it rewarding enough to go through this.
But in today's world of abundance of entertainment maybe even that is not enough to motivate some people to read a wall of text.
Whenever anyone or anything cracks the code and provides endless happiness we call it addictive and shun it.
Things like drugs cause a huge spike that makes everything else not worth it afterwards. It is the happiness that you had in the past that makes now feel worse.
Also entertainment like TikTok mostly has no future value, so the better you feel the worse it makes you feel afterwards when you're no longer exposed to it.
This does not fully answer how to find happiness, but it explains the way to get it, and that happiness "spike" is bad, continous progress is good.
I don't want to see you around because that's a big liability, so you take care of yourself, I'll take care of mine. Bye.