How to find permanent happiness: Biohack your subjective experience
“It’s not a question of increasing your willpower. It’s a question of increasing your ability to do it.”
That's a ridiculous title, but it got your attention, didn't it? Here we are in June with several days of a hundred-degree weather in Boulder, Colorado. It's hard to be motivated in this heat, but that's what I want to talk about today: motivation. What motivates us to improve, feel better, be healthy?
Yuval Harari, the guy who wrote Sapiens, wrote another book called Homo Deus in which he comments that humans crave pleasant sensations. I'm sure we can all agree on that! He goes on to say that if we crave fleeting sensations that we can't hang onto, it follows that we'll always be searching for the next hit of pleasure, and the next, and the next, and so on.
To provide these sensations, the wellness industry creates treatments, drugs, and biohacks in an unending, ever-present stream.
In contrast, Harari suggests that for lasting happiness, humans need to slow down this pursuit of pleasant sensations, not speed it up.
How long will it last?
How do we capture sensations, then? We use our subjective experience. Our human nervous system is a sensitive, useful tool because we can direct ourselves to locate pleasant sensations using our awareness of what we feel. Luckily, this is a trainable skill.
Our subjectivity gives us preferences in food, people, temperature(!), aesthetics, hobbies, all kinds of things. We're not like a squirrel, with no opinion on our existence. A squirrel just is. Squirrels run an algorithm pre-programmed to collect food for the winter. The squirrel has no personal preference for how it executes that program.
For humans, the way we construct our experience is the single most important thing about our aliveness. In fact, Harari comments that 99% of our life decisions are made using the "highly refined algorithms of our emotions, sensations, and desires." (p. 102)
Believe it or not, biologists and philosophers have myriad thorny debates about the degree to which humans are:
just electronic impulses running unconscious algorithms, or
living from truly subjective experiences of hunger, fear, love, and so on.
I will set that aside for now. Let's assume we can construct our subjective experience.
Therefore, if we use subjective experience to know ourselves, why wouldn't we want to gain awareness about our emotions, sensations, and desires? It's because we want a quick fix, a biochemical way to solve stress and unhappiness. No one wants to honor the long apprenticeship to learning, growing, and becoming that humans are blessed with. We are not squirrels. We rely on subjective experience to inform our patterns, not unconscious algorithms. (I believe so, and so let's assume.)
The kicker is that it takes time to build up experience. I wish I could give you a salve and call it, "Zoe's quick-fix pink goo!" and guarantee that all your aches and pains and neuroses and frustrations will disappear in seven days or less. Sadly, no.
But you can rebuild your experience. There is not a neuroscientist in the world who would disagree with that, and if you don't believe me, get on the floor and do a Feldenkrais lesson—or twenty.
Evolution in three easy steps
One of the writers I like (Mark Manson) has a funny youtube video on how to become great at anything in three easy steps. He says,
Learn the fundamentals
Accept feedback
Iterate your process for 5,000 to 10,000 hours
You, too, can be great at anything! No sweat.
Moshe Feldenkrais also believed we can become great at anything. He believed we can move beyond our compulsive and neurotic reactions toward maximum spontaneity. We don't have to stay trapped in one option, and we don't have to run an unconscious algorithm, it demeans our humanity.
Instead, we can choose how we exist because we care, deeply and profoundly, about our lived experience. Each one of us cares about that. It's not the intellectual notion of being alive, but the felt sense of it, like the first sip of hot coffee, the piney scent of the mountains, or the smile of a friend.
How long does it take, really?
At some point, all Feldenkrais students ask me the question, "How long will this last?" and "How long will this take?" It will take lifetimes and an instant. It will last forever and it will disappear tomorrow. Both are true because of the nature of our subjective experience.
Again, we're not algorithms, we're not composed of a mechanical sequence of levers and pulleys. That would be an easy fix! We're composed of subjective experience, including a living, breathing, interpreting, sensing system with thousands of molecular and neurochemical changes every moment.
It all comes back to your motivation.
You were motivated to learn to walk, obviously. Are you motivated to continue to learn? What do you want to offer your nervous system today? Novelty is how we build new connections and gain subjective self-knowledge.
Is there a limit to learning? I honestly don't know. I do know that you can hack your sensations without tech or drugs or products. You already have a remarkable instrument, that app called the nervous system.
“When a person continues to use a stereotyped pattern of behaviour instead of one suitable to the present reality, the learning process has come to a standstill.”