Thinking too much?

An interesting topic that I have come across several times recently with others is thought and how much one should think when it comes to daily life. More often than not the advocacy seems to point in the direction of not thinking so much, because thinking too much takes away from happiness. People seem to believe that not putting too much thought into life will bring greater rewards simply because happiness is a greater reward than anything else we can strive for, and this is achieved by not stressing ourselves out too hard about our actions. On the other hand the advocacy by others seems to lean towards morality as a priority, because this will bring the greatest happiness in the long-term. In this case we should think hard about being moral, because the outcome will be more beneficial and bring long-term happiness. I have written in the past about happiness and without going into to much detail I will sum up the idea that happiness can come in two forms. The first kind is happiness as a state of mind that comes and goes. The second is happiness as a way of life when we do the right actions out of habit and regularly throughout life. These people will have more happiness states throughout life. If we look at both of these definitions and look at both of the arguments for thought we can see that happiness as a state of mind that comes and goes may be reached easiest by not thinking too hard about short term actions in everyday life. Happiness as a way of life lines up well with thinking hard about moral long-term investments. Happiness in the short term also seems to line up with investments in people better than things, and happiness as a way of life seems to line up better with investing in things instead of people. We cannot be very happy without people and they should always be included in our everyday lives, but they come and go in our lives when their interests are no longer ours, but if we invest in ourselves, skills, and things enough we will be flexible to be what people might want as we go through life. Therefore, we should always be seeking out new friends, but they will not care much for what we have to offer if we never invest in ourselves much and only invest in seeking to treat others good with the little we have accomplished.

This also seems to line up with conservative and liberal mentalities in many ways. Happiness when we picture a conservative is someone strong, self sufficient, stoic, and puts deontological morals above all else, because the proper means will bring about the happy ends. The liberal we see more physically weak yet friendly, gregarious, cooperative, and caring about the people connected to the community they live in. This lines up well with international political thought where the weak will combine forces to balance against the strong. The liberal is a utilitarian opposed to the deontological conservative. The actions they perform now may not be the happy ones, but they do not want to think too hard about the now. They just want to exist in the proper cooperative and caring community that will bring about the right ends where less stressful thought needs to take place. The conservative sees the proper means as the individual doing the moral act to bring about happy ends, and the liberal sees the happy community existing interdependently as the right means for functioning utility ends. Both would claim that their means would bring about the ends that make a good society. The down side of the conservative is that morality in some cases is even more important than happiness. If they convinced themselves there was a moral way to die that would kill everyone around them. So, not all moral means will bring about happy or good ends. The down side of the liberal is that they are too trusting in their desire to care about others, and this can cause them to get taken advantage of, and on the same token they lack self investment sometimes and can only offer their good will and basic body.

What is the proper way to think and therefore bring about happiness the most often? I would argue that both have some good and bad ideas, and it is not wise to practice either way of thinking all the time, but there are proper times to think certain ways. Starting with the pros of the conservative we will find that self-investment is very important, because if we do not build up our skills and resources nobody will care when we have nothing to offer but good will and our basic body with no extensions. On the downside many conservatives do this more out of a fear that people will try and harm them or take their stuff, so they want to build themselves up at a safe distance. These things and ideas we invest in become habits, and should be thought very hard about through conscious struggle. The reason is because whenever we master a skill it eventually becomes more and more subconscious till we no longer struggle with it and then becomes a habit. At this point we should be phasing into new struggles. We want good habits that are productive and have the ability to provide for people we care about. Those people can be anywhere from a household to a community we live in. These hard thought out actions are investments that will benefit us in the long term. Nobody will ever understand us as well as we understand ourselves when it comes to an investment, but others close to us will understand better than us sometimes if our investments are actually bringing about real productivity and benefit when they see us. This is why friends are important to pointing out our flaws, so we can adjust our investments and recalculate for the long term. A self-investment is like watching paint dry. The results take a long time, but when people finally see them they are blown away by the hard work and conscious struggle we put into an action a little each day. The more investments and conscious struggles we have each day in our lives, the more we diversify our portfolio and the happier we can be with ourselves. The proper means will bring about the proper ends when we put hard thought into our actions.

As for the liberal version of happiness it involves not thinking so hard about our actions because this is stressful, boring, and we do not want to be robots. Liberals in this sense are cool and not a drag to be around, and of course funny unlike those uptight conservatives. Liberals are also more likely to invest in people with the skills they have compared to the conservative who develops their skills out of protection of assets from others and rarely shares. Think of the prisoner’s dilemma when you think of a liberal, and realize that cooperation makes us all better off. Even if person A and person B do not each individually have the same skills as the hard working conservative, they can combine their skills to create a larger benefit. For example, person A and B have level 4 skills for a particular project. Conservative X has level 6 skills but will not cooperate with a team and believes he or she works better alone. When we combine A and B let us say it creates level 12 social benefit for both of them. The conservative may invest 6 and get 8 back when they happen to have an unintended interaction, and these interactions occur far less, so the liberals have more social benefit to go around because cooperation has a multiplying affect. The down side of the liberal of course is they may not invest much in themselves at times, or they may free ride thinking others in the group will take care of creating social benefits for them and others to keep the community strong. The point to be made here is that life is about people in the long-term. Investing in ourselves is worthless unless others can benefit from it in some way. On the same token, investing in ourselves purely for others is ignorant, because people may not appreciate our hard work, and if we do something that benefits ourselves primarily at least we have something we can be proud of for our own sake. That means the self-investments are important and we should benefit from these before anyone else, but if these investments do not benefit others too at some point later on in a social manner they are worthless, because nobody cares about a man who can lift a thousand pounds that lives in a cave. As far as liberal thought goes, it would appear they have something going for them when it comes to daily interaction with people. These interactions should not be too hard thought about. This is play versus work and self-investment. If we develop our personal skills well in our own time we will develop good reflexes when it comes to providing those skills in real time. People unlike things and ideas however, are not predictable most of the time. We may have an entire plan to bring a girl flowers with a vision of her being very flattered and then when we act it out in real time she does not care one bit. Unlike personal skills in things, interactions with people are about reflexes that we reflect on after a situation occurs, and the natural instinct is to do the opposite of what did not work the time before, but every situation is different and what may not have worked before may work with someone else the next time. How do we know which reflexes are proper? The answer is we really do not. That is why not thinking too hard about our interactions with people daily is a good thing. We can really stress ourselves out and racket our brain over how to talk to someone the next time due to a prior interaction with him or her to correct a past mistake. We cannot help but dream about what might happen in an interaction, but it is best to remind ourselves we are dreaming and to just jump into a situation. The more we jump into social situations the more we learn to build social reflexes. The best way to get good at these is just doing it.

One more thing to add is how can we best combine these two methods of thought into daily life? One of my favorite methods of interpreting text that I have read was by Stanley Fish who is a writer of the New York Times. Some methods involve the individual as the sole interpreter, but Fish realizes that we belong in communities. The way we interpret a text comes about due to the fact we belong to certain communities we talk about a text with, and that in turn shapes our outlook of the world. Who is our community? Our community in a sense is always changing as we move through life. It is organic and shapes to the new environments we move through as we change to adapt to new ways of living. At any given time however, there is a small group of people we are very closely tied to that we can usually count on one hand. This community is our core community. It is the community we use to interpret the world through and it is interconnected to other communities. In a sense we are individuals that want to self invest, but we are also part of this core group and want to invest in each other. If we strengthen this group we strengthen our environment. These are the people we want to cooperate with and build our reflexes through so when we enter other groups temporarily in the future we have better social skills than the lone ranger. At the same time people who are not part of this group should not be too important to us beyond staying on neutral yet friendly relations. We do not have time to get to know everyone, but it makes sense to be pleasant to others in your secondary community. So, we want to think hard on investing in ourselves and think little about social interactions with our community, but we do want to think hard about long-term investments in our core community. A family is a good example of people who will be close to us for a long time. It would be wise to invest in bettering them as people and bettering their skills as individuals for the group. A family can be anyone we live with or are close too and are not necessarily a blood relation. We can think hard about our core community the way we would ourselves because they are a part of us, and therefore a part of our investment, but everyone else is a social reflex we want to build. A core community does not happen overnight, just like any other investment we make in ourselves and is also like watching paint dry. Therefore, we cannot just invest in anyone who seems to care about us. We should only invest in people that manage to prove they can provide us with what we want in our lives over time. Then we can think hard about how to benefit them in our lives as well.