In my last post, I discussed a simple mathematical model of happiness. I made quite a few assumptions in building the model, and I thought I’d revisit one of them. In my model, people traveled through a world with one spatial dimension, and were either happy or sad depending upon their location and the time. It was quite a simple model, but it still yielded what I believe to be reasonable advice – listen to other people’s experiences and try to use that information to form a more complete picture of the world, in order to make yourself happier.
The strategy I proposed in the last post was to simply maximize the sum of the happiness you experience at each individual moment. Let’s call this the SumOfHappinesses strategy. Is that a reasonable strategy? Despite my last post, I argue that it actually is not a good strategy to pursue. My reasoning follows.
Suppose you live in a universe where you have 100 coins, and you have a device which flips them all at the same time. You’ll be very happy if they all come up ‘heads’. As happy as you possibly could be. That happiness will last you for the rest of your life, too. In this universe, What do you do? The SumOfHappinesses strategy says to keep on flipping as often as you can, in order to maximize your happiness.
Think about this for a second, though. You spend your life doing nothing but flipping coins? I don’t care how happy it makes you, waiting your whole life for one extremely unlikely event to occur can’t be worth it. Every time the event doesn’t occur, you’ll get upset, and most likely you’ll never reach the event. The odds of all coins coming up heads are 1 in 2100, which is about one in 1.26 x 1030 . If you flipped the coins ten times a second, nonstop, for the age of the entire universe you’d still be very very unlikely to ever reach that ultimate happiness event.
You might argue that I’ve created an absurd universe – who would really be that happy if they flipped 100 heads in a row? It turns out that there are plenty of things that happen in the real world that are similar to my coin-flipping example. The lottery is one thing that comes to mind – even if you could get one free lottery ticket each day, it wouldn’t be worth it to go out and pick the thing up, because your probability of winning is so small.
What are some other examples? Becoming famous works perfectly here. Let’s suppose your goal is to become the next rock superstar. You’d have to practice really hard, meet the right people, and be extraordinarily lucky. If you put all your life’s effort and energy into becoming a rock star, the overwhelming probability is that you’ll end your life no more famous than you began. The same is true in any other field that has ’super stars’ which is pretty much every field I can think of.
Does this mean you shouldn’t “shoot for the top?” Absolutely not – it just means you shouldn’t make “getting to the top” your only source of happiness. If you like playing guitar, then by all means shoot for stardom, but make sure you don’t forget to derive happiness from your daily practicing. If you focus only on the goal and not the process of getting there, you’re going to be unhappy. No matter how happy extremely unlikely events could make you, the fact that they’re extremely unlikely means that they’re really not worth pursuing unless you enjoy the act of pursuing them.