Everyone optimizes happiness all the time, they are also Yak-shaving, and that's why we can't have nice things.<p>Item: you are an evolved system. Ergo, "happiness" is a non-specific proxy for your unconscious estimate of the degree of present and future ease and success at living and reproducing.<p>You are always optimizing for "happiness" by definition, four and a half billion years of evolution has seen to that. You are the direct descendant of untold millions of successful reproducers.<p>(As an aside, for FIRE folks who find themselves bored or unsatisfied, the blindingly obvious answer is that your unconscious estimate takes into account the conditions of other people around you. Just because things are good for you doesn't mean you're done. "No man is an island." and all that, eh? The solution is equally obvious: help other people, make the world a better place.)<p>Item: your brain is easily programmed. Due to the ad hoc nature of our upbringings we acquire models of the world that are wildly inconsistent (above the level of basic physical phenomenon.) We are following quasi-random programs. That's the reason why we work so hard and get such poor results: we are using lousy programs.<p>Fortunately, it's easy to re-program your brain. In fact there are specific algorithms and techniques. I'd like to call attention to the "Core Transformation" technique particularly. ( <a href="https://www.coretransformation.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.coretransformation.org/</a> I have no affiliation with them BTW) It's an algorithm for "popping the why stack" (cf. "Five Whys" <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys</a> ) Without going into a long spiel about it, the basic idea is that behaviors are motivated by a chain of intentions, a series of indirections.<p><pre><code> Behavior -> A -> B -> C -> Happiness
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You do FOO to get A which achieves B which in turn does C which engenders Happiness. (There can be more or fewer steps in between.) What these folks found is that all behaviors eventually wind up at one of five "core states": Beingness, Oneness, Bliss, Okayness, Happiness (I think I remembered them correctly, but maybe not, check the website.)<p>The fascinating thing about these "core states" is that they are not dependent on anything else. (The idea that they are is part of the "lousy programming".) They are not contingent. You can access them at any time, in any location or condition.<p>As you can imagine, going directly for the "core states" rather than through a chain of indirection brings a lot of simplicity and grace to life. Everything else comes together effortlessly, fulfilling the evolutionary mandate of happiness: present and future ease and success at living.