The Happiness Equation
Jun 6, 12:45 AM
As I sit here in my government funded solitary confinement (also known as my office) I begin to think about what life is all about.
I’m going to say that things aren’t the best they have ever been in my life. Apart from hating my job and everything about the institution that employs me, I’ve also lost a lot of my friends to international adventures while I still live at home in debt to my mum. Also my dog has arthritis.
So with all of that I started thinking about the eternal quest for happiness that us homo sapiens strive so passionately for and fail so frequently at. Now perhaps it was a stroke of genius on my behalf, a spontaneous burst of creativity that had been building underneath the mundane office work flooding my mind. Or perhaps more likely some of this mundane office work that sits at the peripheral of my thoughts sunk into my subconscious and reacted with some latent inspiration. Regardless of the cause, the result was the idea that our pursuit of happiness is nothing but a highly complex and dynamic mathematical problem.
Essentially we aim to optimise our happiness, given the current resources we have and subject to the constraints imposed on us.
The equation would be enormous and impossible to solve as each measurement would be subjective and thus constantly changing. Not to mention that what makes us happy one day may not the next (e.g. alcohol and loud club music at night, water and silence in the morning). These issues aside, could one simplify? Could you say extract the 10 most consistent “Happiness inducers” and the 10 most consistent “Happiness reducers” and get at least a guide to what you have to do to be as happy as possible?
Probably not. But the thought was impressive enough for me to search whether anyone else had, had a similar view to this. It turned out someone had. In fact they had written a scientific paper on the issue and examined it in more depth than my idle Friday afternoon thoughts could even contemplate.
The ingenious man goes by the name of Fernando G. Lobo (no I’m not making this up). Not only did he think that the search for happiness was an optimisation issue he proposed that genetic algorithms could provide an insight into how it could be analysed.
“…what people usually do in life is mostly small variations of what they have done in the past. In many ways, what we do today is not much different from what we did yesterday, and that sounds a lot like a mutation kind of exploration way of life.”
A truly evolutionary look at the pursuit of happiness (not the movie… though that did make me happy)
“Humans seem to have a way of naturally eliminating things that lead to suffering and keeping things that lead to happiness.”
Just like natural selection in evolution individuals keep the traits and actions that make them happy and discard those that make them unhappy. Unfortunately what this can mean is we are often moving towards what will make us happier…without looking at what will make us the happiest! A dramatic change requires a significant mutation. These mutations in our lives are few, yet they have the biggest impact.
So after all of that what conclusion did I come to? That a lot of decision that I’ve made throughout my life have been incremental steps towards happiness and I have struggled to step back and look at the big picture.
I need a change. I need to optimise my happiness. I need a better computer to figure this out for me.
Fernando G. Lobo’s paper: A philosophical essay on life and its connections with genetic algorithms
Filed under: Ramblings