Month: February 2022

Progress and Meaning

Progress & Meaning

Posted on by jabittan
“A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens. For Harari, human evolution over the two million or so years that homo Sapiens has been a species and our cultural evolution during that same time do not seem to have made modern humans happier than ancient humans. In particular, Harari would argue that humans today may be more likely to feel a sense of meaningless in their lives relative to ancient humans. As the quote above testifies, a comfortable but meaningless life can be worse in some substantial ways than a brutal but meaningful life.
 
 
For Harari this is important to think about because as a collective humans have been engaged in vague questions of progress for thousands of years. But the progress humans have made hasn’t really been productive in terms of increasing human happiness. Sure we are better off in terms of wellness and comfort, but that isn’t quite the same thing as actual happiness or having a sense of meaning and purpose in ones life. It is quite possible that a tech worker who spends all day in a home office, watches TV, and only occasionally interacts with close friends is far more comfortable and better entertained than a forager 20,000 years ago, but they may feel like there is no real purpose for their life. They may feel that they don’t have any close connections or individuals who depend on them and whose lives they matter to. A forager from 20,000 years ago may have been stressed by a challenging and deadly environment and may not have had enough to eat, but they probably had a very close group of kin that they could rely on for support and and meaning.
 
 
“Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose,” Harari writes. Progress has not been undertaken with the goal of making people happier. Individual products and advancements are certainly marketed that way, but the end result doesn’t actually seem to be more happiness. Often, the end result is that we end up with more things we don’t really like or need. Things that take our time away from meaningful connections and engagements that make our lives actually worth living. Progress happens simply because we choose to allow it to happen, not because we are all looking around and consciously choosing progress with clear macro explanations for how progress makes lives for our species more meaningful, happier, and more worth living. Cars enabled faster transportation, but we ended up moving out to suburbs and adopted long soul crushing commutes. Social media promised to bring us closer together with friends, but left us isolated and jealous. Television promised to entertain us, but it took us away from real entertainment with actual people in the real world. Not all advances have this false profit characteristic, but many advances appear to make us happier, and for various reasons do the opposite.
 
 
To find meaning in the world is not the same as to find comfort and happiness. To find meaning is to engage with the world in pursuits that help improve the world for ourselves and others. It may be through our work, it may be through leisure activities with others, and it may be found through other means. No matter how we find meaning and pursue progress, it is clear that all progress doesn’t bring all humans meaning and happiness.
Neither Too Miserable Nor Too Happy

Neither Too Miserable Nor Too Happy

Posted on by jabittan
Our bodies and brains seem to always keep us wanting more. A new job, a new house, a new sexual partner all seem to be able to bring us pleasure, excitement, and joy, but those pleasant feelings soon fade and the things we like tend to become our new baseline. The house we loved when we moved in becomes normal and we don’t appreciate it as much after a few years. We settle into our job and can become bored or uninterested. Our love for our partner may go from red hot to cool.
 
 
There are evolutionary explanations for why our brains and bodies seem to respond in this way. If we became complacent in our current lives and living standards, we might not push for more and might not make new discoveries, work for new thing and improved status, and might not try to have more sex with more partners. Failing to make new discoveries means that our entire tribe doesn’t advance and could get wiped out by a neighboring tribe that did make a new discovery. Failing to try to do more and become a more impressive person means we don’t improve our social status, and don’t get as many mates, so our genes don’t get passed along. And settling for just one sexual partner means we have fewer chances to procreate, again decreasing the chance that our genes are successfully passed along.
 
 
“Perhaps it’s not surprising, then,” writes Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens, “that evolution has molded us to be neither too miserable nor too happy. It enables us to enjoy a momentary rush of pleasant sensations, but these never last forever.”
 
 
Harari is not the first to make such an observation. This observation is part of the core of Stoic thinking. Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations wrote about the ways in which we always want more and how we lose our value in the things we have that become ordinary to us. Stoic thinking encourages that we reflect on this reality and work to avoid becoming unhappy with things that are truly great and spectacular. Stoics suggest that we practice focusing on our gratitude at having such things, rather than focus on what more we could have. There will always be more we could strive for, and our brains and bodies will always push us to have more, but that doesn’t mean it will make us any happier. Our biology is destined, thanks to evolution, to keep us from being too miserable and too happy, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find a valuable place where we accept this reality and enjoy our lives, appreciate what and who we are, and strive to be great, without overreaching and becoming unhappy with what we have.
Animal Happiness

Animal Happiness

Posted on by jabittan
Do you ever think about the happiness of animals? If you have a pet, then you probably think about their happiness all the time. My wife and I have a dog and we go out of our way to ensure she gets walks, has some entertaining things to play with when we are working, and gets to socialize with other dogs. She may not be human, but we still care about her happiness.
 
 
But I almost never think about the happiness of other animals. There is a commercial that says that good milk comes from happy cows, and that happy cows come from California. But I don’t ever actually think about whether dairy cows are happy. I almost never think about whether factory farmed chickens are happy, or if any other animal raised for slaughter and human consumption is happy. But some people, like Peter Singer and Yuval Noah Harari think I should.
 
 
In his book Sapiens, Harari writes, “when evaluating global happiness, it is wrong to count the happiness of only the upper classes, of Europeans, or of men. Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.” Perhaps we should be thinking about whether other animals on the planet are happy, and whether our actions make them less happy. Perhaps there is nothing inherently special about humans that makes us more deserving of life and happiness than any other sentient animal and creature, and perhaps we should think about that when we think about factory farming and animal suffering.
 
 
We clearly care about our pets and see them as members of our families, complete with many emotions that we experience ourselves. We see a consciousness and an ability to experience the world in the minds of our pets, but we still think of them and other animals as less than ourselves. This is how we have ended up with a factory farming system that creates short, brutal lives for animals that the animals themselves may not find to be worth living. We have created systems with huge amounts of suffering, and if we think about global happiness, the unhappiness of factory farmed animals, Singer and Harari would argue, should be part of the equation. I don’t personally think about animal happiness too often, but I do think Harari is correct. I do think we should think about life and work to make it better – or at least not cause life to deliberately suffer – whether it is human or not.
Are we Happy?

Are We Happy?

Posted on by jabittan
In the book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari asks a simple question that I had never paused to ask prior to reading his book. Are we happier than humans of the past? Are we happier than the humans who fought and lived through WWII or WWI? Are we happier than the humans alive when Christopher Columbus set sail in 1492? Are we happier than the ancient Romans? Are we happier than humans living 20,000 years ago? Are we happier than the first homo Sapiens?
“Historians seldom ask such questions,” Harari writes, “…yet these are the most important questions one can ask of history.” These questions are important, Harari argues, because most of the organization and progress of our lives is in one way or another geared around increasing human happiness. If history is not exploring the happiness of humans, than each step in human cultural evolution is a step that may not serve humans for the best. It also means that our ideas and views of how the world should be organized to help expand human happiness and flourishing may be based on incorrect judgements of happiness.
Happiness is difficult to measure and quantify. We are not actually all that good at thinking about our own happiness. Daniel Kahneman suggests that we have an experiencing self, which is our active conscious self, and a remembering self, which pauses to think back on our lives. Those two selves experience happiness differently. Getting beyond just ourselves and measuring the happiness of others is even more difficult, especially when those others lived 30,000 years ago.
So instead of measuring happiness we measure progress. We measure electrical devices, time spent in leisure activities, energy used to heat or cool homes, rates of sex, rates of violence, and other proxies for human happiness or unhappiness. These measures are probably a good way to estimate happiness, but we can see that they don’t tell the whole story. It is also possible for societies and collectives to become focused on a single measure, and drive toward that measure as if it were a goal that should be achieved to produce more happiness. Sometimes efforts to increase GDP, access to electricity, and other noble sounding efforts produce more of one thing at the expense of other things that contribute to human happiness. In the end, pursuing progress may not be an avenue for pursuing happiness
When we think about human progress, about our lives and where we want to head, and about what we think is best for society we should consider happiness. We should consider whether we are happier than humans in the past and think about whether the things we strive for are the things that are most likely to bring happiness to ourselves and others. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t have progress in our lives, that cultural evolution is bad, or that happiness is all that matters, but we shouldn’t assume we will always progress in ways that will make us happier just progress it increases our technological capabilities or brings us more resources.
Nuclear Deterrence

Nuclear Deterrence

Posted on by jabittan
In the recent Marvel movie Eternals (I don’t recommend watching it) a brainy character helps the United States develop nuclear weapons which are used in WWII against Japan. The character later is at the bomb site and cries when he sees what his technology enabled. The idea within the short clip is that humans are not worthy of saving, and our development and use of nuclear weapons is evidence of how awful humans are.
 
 
But it raises an interesting question. Are nuclear weapons really our worst mistake? Some may argue that nuclear weapons our greatest tool for peace. Perhaps both can be true at the same time.
 
 
Robert Oppenheimer said that he had become death when the first nuclear weapons were used, but since that time no more nuclear weapons have been used in war. We have had tons of fears related to nuclear weapons and fallout, but we haven’t had any dirty bombs set off in major port cities, haven’t had any nuclear weapons used by a rogue state, and haven’t had any terrorists threaten to unleash a stolen nuclear weapon. Perhaps our timeframe is still too short, but nuclear weapons seem to have had a more positive effect on the world than we might think.
 
 
In his book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes, “the Nobel Peace Prize to end all peace prizes should have been given to Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow architects of the atomic bomb. Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into collective suicide, and made it impossible to seek world domination by force of arms.” In other words, nuclear deterrence has saved a lot of lives. Mutually assured destruction prevents massive wars.
 
 
I think we should still be concerned about nuclear weapons. I don’t exactly find it comforting knowing how many thousands of nuclear weapons are possessed by the United States and Russia. I think there is still a danger that a nuclear war could break out and end all human life – even if that possibility is exceptionally small. I do think Harari is correct, however. I think the nuclear deterrents have played a huge role in creating a safer world. I think they have reduced the chances that a major country invades another major country. I don’t think they are the only reason we haven’t had a great power war, but I think they play an important role. Even a victory won from using nuclear weapons would likely be repugnant to the victors, and I think that pressure, along with mutually assured destruction, has made the price of war too high for major conflicts on the scale of the past World Wars to take place. Oppenheimer’s bomb may have killed hundreds of thousands and may have been one of the lowest points of human history, but without it, perhaps millions more have been killed in war and perhaps many more would still be killed in war today.