The first idea

I'm turning into a philosopher of unhappiness – it captures my imagination. Not the gothic, adolescent kind of unhappiness. I mean the difficult, nuanced kind about the huge task of unfolding potential, and potentials unrealised - partly because of our own limitations, and partly because each individual is the product of the whole of human progress. Meanwhile we live with making choices and their sacrifices, and inarticulate longings that echo down the ages.

What is 'potential'?

Bits and pieces of it surface in every blog, I didn't know it but all roads led to it.

The acorn always grows into an oak, but human beings - as the most sophisticated of all machines - can become anything. In nature I've noticed sophistication is measured not in strength but flexibility and versatility.

In terms of natural equipment that's the only advantage we've got – but what an advantage.

We are a blank slate, a book where everything is contained. Particular environments pull particular parts and combinations into existence. It's almost impossible to find universal values (the more multicultural my experience of the world, the more different I find cultures, and not all of them equal). But all the other possibilities are still there at the same time, shimmering like unread words in the book, like invisible ink undecoded.

Limitations of the age

We all suffer from our point in history, maybe it's one of the most insidious sufferings. Imagine if you had been born before writing was invented – you would have been and thought and done a fraction of what you could have today. Similarly a human from 3010 may look at us like worms struggling in the mud, seeing only a tiny sliver of sky.

Maybe we will have by then tools to dissect human behaviour or the brain, and human nature won't be a mystery or an art anymore.

The final thing about potential is it's inextricably linked to freedom. We have made major mistakes by not looking at freedom this way, because then we only consider 'freedom from' something, not what the 'freedom to' do something means.

Freedom to unfold potential – but who has studied what that involves? Just because you're free to compose music doesn't mean you know how. Freedom has two sides to it, one of which opens the door to fear, panic and cruelty.

Understanding the vastness of potential leads to the search for 'freedom to' – and the end of the myth that we know who we are just because the chains are removed. Maybe then we will understand those many, many who are still potentials unrealised because of the walls in their minds.

Happiness, potential

This blog seems to reflect my unfortunate personality: months of silence followed by ranting that no one understands. Even though I bang on about change, I’m really not sure anything has changed from the sad little person I was three years ago. Why did I come here? What did I achieve?

Instead I have pet theories about the most abstract things. Still I think understanding the abstract level can change the world. If you keep stepping back, eventually you’ll see the whole picture.

I’ve been thinking a lot about happiness and its discontents. Why is it the things we want the most can’t be pursued directly? Love is an example, happiness too. The ‘pursuit’ of happiness is really misleading.

Hunger for happiness in and of itself is what utopias are made of – and utopias always turn into dystopias. They are what Nietzche calls “the wretched contentment.”

Even people with the most simple dreams find, all the time, that happiness doesn’t lie at the end of their journey. The woman who has always wanted to be a housewife feels bored and dis-respected when she gets there, the person who pursues money and status eventually finds them empty. We are terrible at predicting what will make us happy.

If happiness was a solid object, which we are apt to think it is, like a gold bar, or a journey destination, we should be a lot better at predicting how to get it by now. It was the point of the whole of human progress.

But our failure so far just goes to show it’s totally wrong. What if happiness is only a byproduct of something else and has no substance of its own? Like a mist that retreats with the dawn, we can only ever experience it intermittently.

The problem is we are not really built for happiness. We have it the wrong way round. We don’t exist to experience nice emotions, emotions exist to pull us or push us towards things that help survival. They only point the way, like candy they’re awarded for good behaviour. Happiness is sweet but it’s shallow, and the time it’s in your mouth is short.

We are however built for the less glamorous task of integrating our potential. But this is really complex because the potential is completely open. If there’s one thing in common in all peoples it’s versatility and adaptability. As I said before our natures are really like Mutant of the X-Men. We are like machines with an inbuilt panel that can be re-programmed to make anything. That kind of power is on a whole different level to even the most powerful machine that only makes one thing.

Everywhere in nature, versatility has won over brute force. But it’s not obvious, it looks gentle and soft on the outside, it’s a secret weapon.

Integrating all its strands may be impossible, but the more you can include the more successful the individual, or culture, civilization. We weave our lives like a wide plait of multicoloured threads. Its patterns determine our direction. The smoother, wider, more inclusive the weaving the more comes back to us. But what this weaving means in practical terms is another post – or another 10 posts. It takes some figuring out.

Happiness is incidental to this process. It’s only a boomerang that you throw in one direction and hope it comes back from somewhere, you don’t know for sure. It’s only a possibility.

So my conclusion is: don’t pursue happiness. It sounds bleak but the message is not nihilistic. The message is that it’s natural to experience happiness only intermittently. Don’t sweat the lack of happiness, your task lies elsewhere. Your task is bigger than happiness, life would be too shallow if this candy was what we strived for.

It’s like my theory on meaninglessness. Everyone would be more relaxed if you knew it’s inevitable. The real, worthy object for your striving doesn’t lie in trying to destroy that feeling, it doesn’t lie in eliminating the lack of happiness. Instead we are meant to take the difficult path, that’s why the reward of happiness exists. And so, paradoxically, along the way happiness is likely to boomerang back to you – though that’s only a possibility.

Between this world and the next

The lifelong business of self creation involves two things: looking for new possibilities and bringing them into reality.

We are driven to create something new, and uniquely ours – this is evolution by design. We are innately creative.

In imagination we can consciously find new versions of ourselves. But there's a much greater, deeper pool of possibilities contained in the unconscious. To be the most that we can be, we search in these pools of potential and realise them through action. We move constantly between that murky world and the cold light of reality.

Self creation is difficult because it is balancing between two worlds: the imminent and the transcendent. It's all too easy to get lost in one or the other, and madness is the result.

Dreams

Artists for example live most of the time in potential, with neglected material lives. They explore the realms of possibility until they are lost. Madness in artists is no longer even a surprise.

There's an ingrained romantic myth that living in dreams is somehow more noble than being a materialist. The most famous Chinese novel, "Dream of the Red Chamber," is about the struggle between Taoism and Buddhism (on the side of transcendence), and Confucianism (realism). Like many dreamers the hero gives up the world to become a monk in the end.

But potential is only ever an empty promise until it is realised. It is a ‘nothing’ because nothing exists except in reality. It is a dead end.

Plato dealt in ideal forms – some greater truth out there we can neither see nor touch. Aristotle in contrast collected evidence of what he saw in the real world – and gave birth to science which changed our world beyond our wildest dreams.

There is a complex interplay between imagination and reality – they change each other.

Reality

The other example is interesting. Relentlessly materialistic people who spend their lives pursuing wealth and success are just as likely to be unhappy when they get there. This is a different kind of madness – that of never exploring alternatives.

Buddhists say this is the fault of endless desire, even when we get everything, we want more. Therefore they say desire is bad. But I think this is missing the point. Endless desire comes from our endless potential – which is simply a part of human nature.

Desire is the driving force of life and meeting its challenges with grace is the stuff of adulthood.

It's like a tug of war. We can get lost in either world, but for the pull of the other one pulling you back. It's strange how opposites melt into each other. Try to escape from reality through art or religion and you get lost in endless, empty potential. But try to cling to reality and you find it is itself a manifestation of endless potential.

The only real solution is to face endlessness directly.

This requires coming to terms with freedom and choice (more later), which is the only remedy to being lost.

Who am I?

Say there was a god that made the world in seven days, including all the animals, and then he made human beings. Each species gets to choose a gift. The cow chooses many stomachs to digest grass, and the big cats want physical strength and agility.

But man chooses something strange and abstract. He chooses adaptability and potential. He is a blank slate on which anything can be written, and from which anything can be formed.

Human nature is like Pandora's Box containing infinite potential, and its slow unpacking is the unfolding of human progress.

But how do these big ideas about human nature help with everyday life?

That's my roommate's complaint when I talk to her about philosophy. "Life is just about two things: finding a good career, and a nice family," she says, being a practical girl who works in finance.

It's simple according to her - but I despise simplicity, and here's why.

When you look at any self evident truth closely they slither and multiply, becoming impossible to pin down.

Finding the right career and the right partner, or even knowing what 'right' means, leads directly to the big, existential questions of who you are and what you're doing with life.

Our adaptability creates many solutions to any problem. If that Pandora's Box is full of mysterious creatures, our various potentials, life involves picking the things you want to unpack from the box.

If we are a blank slate then life is writing a narrative, bringing ideas into black and white from an infinite sea. It's creation of a story and of a person. We are self-creators
and it's our longest, biggest, most complex project.

'Who am I?' is our challenge, and our handiwork. We are all project managers.

Of course complex projects are never easy. It requires discipline, delayed gratification, big picture thinking, and persistence. Many try to escape from the task (more on neurotics later).

This project is also unavoidable because life must have meaning (more on why later).

The idea that human life is inherently suffering has been knocking about in religions since forever. Maybe it's related to this difficult, long, and unavoidable task hanging over our heads, and which comes with the package of human existence.

Imagine how traumatic birth is, but we are constantly being born. Existential self creation is one of the roots of suffering.

A related suffering is how we pick potentials to realise, and which potentials to forgo.

Complexity

I often define depth as 'sensitivity to complexity,' or what Keats terms 'negative capability.' It's a theme I'll return to again and again, because there's such a bias in conventional thought that the most profound truths are simple.

But why would you say that about human beings, when you wouldn't dream of saying it about space travel?

Yes, space travel.

I make this weird comparison because space travel is the most high complexity technical system we have. And human life is even more complex than that.

Take the Grant Study for example, an extraordinary longitudinal experiment that followed a group of 268 promising Harvard students from 1930 until they died. Their lives turned out to be utterly beyond prediction.

As one NYT columnist said in this article, "There is a complexity to human affairs before which science and analysis simply stands mute."

A good analogy is a PIN number. Just four digits and you can create millions of combinations that a supercomputer couldn't crack. But there are many more than four elements in the make up of a person – like background, physicality, temperament and random experiences.

Societies and economies are even bigger PIN numbers as they combine millions of hugely complex individuals. This is why stock markets, and history itself, is non-predictable.

But that's not all. A ball rolling down a hill has many forces acting on it, and yet science can tease out its basic course by separating and simplifying them all, then adding it back together.

This works well on the physical world, but human nature has the added dimension of free-will. There is a mysterious gap between cause and consequence in human actions that does not exist in the natural world. It's a gap for which, as yet, we have found no tools to investigate.

And it's this mysterious gap that defines human nature, and which I want to explore.