This is Your Brain on Bullsh*t - David Pinsof

A desire for happiness is not what is driving our behavior. It is a terrible way to predict our behavior. It is a naive way of thinking about human psychology that will lead you into a morass of confusion, contradiction, and infinite regress. Why?

Hmm. Well, uh, I wrote a very long po- post on this called Happiness is Bullshit, and then I wrote a sequel to that post called, uh, Happiness Really is Bullshit. No, I'm just joking. It was Happiness is Bullshit Revisited. People really get hung up on this. I think it's one of the biggest confusions we have about how the mind works, is that we have this really misguided idea that what we're pursuing in life is inside of our heads. That is a really weird and implausible idea from an evolutionary perspective, that we would be animals that are driven to seek stuff inside of our heads makes no sense. It makes way more sense that we would be driven to seek stuff out there in the world, you know, like food, sex, status, praise, inclusion in groups, all this stuff that would have correlated with biological fitness in ancestral environments. These are the sorts of things that would make sense for a primate like us to want. It makes no sense for us to want something inside of our heads. Now, the common response to this argument is that, oh, well, happiness, uh, sort of motivates us to go out and get what we want. It's sort of like the carrot that's dangling in front of us, and we need happiness to, to motivate us to get out, to go out and get the, get the stuff in the world, right? This view also makes no sense because as soon as you posit that we need happiness to motivate us, well, there's a awkward follow-up question, which is how does evolution get us to want happiness? If you need happiness to get us to want stuff, then how does evolution get us to want happiness? Does it have to give us happiness when we get happiness, and then happiness when we get happiness when we get happiness? Like I said, we have entered an infinite regress. Uh, this whole way of thinking that we need some, uh, internal goodie to motivate us is just wildly implausible. Uh, it, it, uh, contradicts a wealth of research in social beh- and behavioral sciences a- and, and neuroscience. Uh, we don't need happiness to, to be motivated. Our nervous system is directly wired up to our hearts, to our physiology, to our lungs, to our muscles. It can just motivate us to go out and get the stuff directly. We don't need happiness to motivate us any more than a thermostat needs to feel happy when it gets your home at the right temperature. Right? We have thermostats inside our bodies that motivate us to shiver when we're cold and sweat when we're hot and s- and seek blankets when we're cold and to seek shade when we're hot. Uh, those inner thermostats don't need happiness just, uh, any more than the thermostats in our home need happiness. So, uh, there are many reasons why, uh, uh, viewing human, uh, behavior as a pursuit of happiness is misguided. I go through lots of them in my post, but yeah, I think this is just a, uh, a wildly confused way of thinking about human psychology, about the mind. I think it is way more insightful to think about humanity as striving for things, for real things in the world that would have correlated with biological fitness in ancestral environments.