How to be happier: What mid 20th Century German Ontology has to say about the effect of decision making on wellbeing.

Heidegger, presumably acting authentically.

You are lazy:

The brain is a lazy organ. It lies all the time, cuts corners, takes shortcuts and then tells us a lot of horseshit that it’s doing a stand up job. Which we believe. I’ll give you an example: Let’s say you’re stuck for a babysitter and I tell you I know two people at the kindergarten I use who do childminding in the evening who might be able help. One of them is Barry who drives a lorry and the other is Sarah who’s a librarian. Which would you be more drawn to before you asked for more information?  Be honest, it’s just in your head. What assumptions are you making about lorry driving and librarian stereotypes that you’re unfairly applying to these individuals? What about people called Barry? What if Barry was the librarian and Sarah the lorry driver? Would you even bother asking for more information or would you just rely on the lovely satisfying feeling that the stereotypes were probably accurate? We all do this sort of thing all the time, it’s how we get by, otherwise we’d have to make pro-con lists about everything. It’s the brain clicking the top of the Google list and saying “yeah, that’ll do, whatever”. The error isn’t that it does it, a lot of the time it’s a useful shortcut, the error is when we don’t think to ask more questions in situations when we should probably find out more.

Mid 20th century German ontology is hard but might be relevant:

I am a lazy man. This fact and the ones in the paragraph above contributed to me not putting more effort into Martin Heidegger when I first came across him. And possibly the Nazi thing, but I won’t go into that here. Heidegger was a mid 20th century German philosopher who spent a lot of his (and everyone else’s) time talking about ontology, the study of the nature of being; what it means to exist and what can be said to exist. The main reason I didn’t put more effort in was that his stuff is almost completely impenetrable and so, using a brief mental shortcut, I assumed he must be either a massive bullshitter or completely mad, with anyone professing to have made sense of him being liars or charlatans (feel free to judge me at the end). Many years later however, I find myself returning to his version of the concept of “The dasein” which I think is worth a revisit given the advances in neuropsychology over the last two or three decades, especially where the areas of study of wellbeing and decision making are concerned.

Emotions are essential for quick decisions:

There’s a huge emotional component in how we make decisions. People with lesions to the area of the brain known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (at the front, behind the nose) lose this component. Although they remain intellectually unchanged, they find themselves greatly impaired when it comes to making the simplest choices, having to rationally weigh up lists of pros and cons each time. The nature of this change makes sense if you consider that this is the sort of thing that emotions are actually for. Before we could think rationally and have what we think of as a “self”, we were creatures of instinct and it was emotion that the brain used to communicate the benefit of judgement and memory, of past experience to the body. It still does, of course, but now we have our rational brain to convince us that that is the important bit. That noiseless, wordless scream you hear in the middle of your head just as you make the decision to lock your keys in the boot of your car is this older part of your brain trying to give the rational you a bit of parental guidance. In all probability, this development of “self” or “consciousness” went hand in hand with the development of language; while we were learning to talk to others, we were also learning to talk to ourselves.

Making decisions makes you happier:

How we make decisions and equally importantly, our perception of how we make decisions has a bearing on our wellbeing and happiness. Apart from the obvious in that it is our decision making that guides us through the world, it is also vital in what sort of perception we have of that world and also our place within it. When we act proactively within the world it makes us feel more engaged, more part of everything and this, for reasons which remain a mystery, makes us feel more positive. Can you smell something? I think it might be ontology. I think we are the sum of our decisions and how happy we are (whatever that means) is dependent on our perception of their process and outcome. In a little while, you will as well.

I warned you:

Before Heidegger, the dasein (literally there being, or being there) was just used to denote human existence. Heidegger’s version probably followed from the concept of “being in the world-ness” or das-in-der-welt-sein of the (confusingly) Japanese philosopher Okakura Kazuko in his Book of Tea (the philosophy, not the drink, be careful with that one). Heidegger defined his dasein as “that entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue”. Don’t worry about this, he goes on and on in this vein and it takes some wading through. For our purposes we just need to think about what he means when he starts talking about an “authentic” and “inauthentic” dasein. Again, don’t worry too much, as I’ll explain it in person language as I pull all this together (which I will) but as far as Heidegger defines it when I am, as a dasein, authentic, in the sense of my being, I can choose and win myself, and conversely when I am inauthentic, I can lose and never win myself. This only makes sense when you already know what it means, which you will in a bit.

In case you didn’t believe me that making decisions makes you happier:

That’s enough of that. It’s enough to say that that an authentic dasein is engaged and acting in the world, and an inauthentic dasein is merely reacting to it. Now, modern neuropsychology has told us that if there’s one thing you definitely need in order to ensure a sense of wellbeing, it’s a feeling that you have some sort of control over your environment. American POWs in the Vietnam war who survived much more psychologically intact than previous conflicts had a degree of control over an aspect of their lives. Debriefing made clear the importance of communication. In the words of now Senator, then Lieutenant Commander John McCain who was a prisoner from 1967-1973:

“The most important thing for survival is communication with someone, even if it’s only a wave or a wink, a tap on the wall, or to have a guy put his thumb up, it makes all the difference.”

A 1997 nursing home experiment (Rodin & Langer) demonstrated a significant improvement in health, activity, happiness and longevity in a group of residents who were given a greater degree of choice over movie night and cleaning day and the gift of a plant which was their responsibility to look after.

These are just brief examples, there are many more and they add up to a body of evidence supporting the view that emotion and the making of decisions are linked, and the relationship is symmetrical. There is a vital emotional component in the making of decisions, without which we have to grind through and rationalise every single choice, and in the other direction, so to speak, the making of even simple decisions gives us a feeling of control and engagement and makes us happier and healthier.

Your brain can’t be bothered thinking about most of your life:

When a complicated decision presents itself, but the brain perceives the stakes involved to be low, it can’t be bothered expending time and energy working through it, so takes another shortcut. It picks an easier question to think about where the answer feels sort of relevant and then lies and tells you: “There you go fella, job done.” As the consequences aren’t great one way or the other, most of the time you won’t notice.

To elaborate: some things are just great. There’s no two ways about it. Falling in love is great, winning money is great, the birth of a child is great. Conversely, some things are irretrievably sad. Falling out of love, the death of a loved one, losing money, all are a sad business. These emotional certainties however, tend to be relatively rare in life, they are nearer the tails of the curve. Most of what goes on in life is pretty ambiguous, emotionally speaking, events that we could feel either way about, depending on the context or the mood. Spilling a glass of water over the front of one’s trousers might be hilarious one day, annoying the next. The brain, being the lazy organ that it is, when asked the question “how do I feel about this?” about one of these 50/50 situations will not spend time assessing and weighing all the variables, what’s the point, the stakes are low, why expend the energy? What it does as a shortcut is substitutes an easier question, in this case: “how am I feeling now?” and uses whatever prevailing emotion that happens to be washing over you at the time as an answer to the first question (without telling you, of course). This substitution of an easier, vaguely related question for a hard one without telling you is something else your brain does all the time. Daniel Kahneman the godfather of the study of decision making gives the example of the question “How much money should you contribute to save an endangered species?” being replaced with the much easier question of “How much do I like dolphins?”. To answer the former question you would have to consider a cost-benefit analysis to the world of all endangered species and then think about what would have to be done (and the associated monetary cost) to improve their respective lots. The second question is much easier, but after cooking up a bodge to this you remain convinced you’ve answered the first.

The trouble with asking the inner you is the inner you is always grumpy:

There is a danger associated with doing this. We can have two experiences at the same time, the “real one” that is us relating to the outside world and also the one that is us relating to our inner landscape. We don’t, however, have two sets of emotions to deal with these separate worlds, emotions are a chemical thing going on in the brain and there’s only so much room. The danger comes from something the brain does which is actually quite clever. It uses its downtime to run daydream scenarios of potentially sticky situations which are likely to be on the horizon in order to evaluate options and try to predict the best course of action, in order to speed things up should one of these situations actually occur. The situations it picks to work on will tend to be negative in flavour. Being able to work out what to do in advance in negative situations will have more of a survival benefit than in positive ones. Thus, this mechanism is extremely useful for flipping through options as to what to do should you consider yourself likely to encounter a tiger/falling rocks/capsizing boat sort of situation. It’s still relevant to our modern lives and we will often catch ourselves daydreaming about what we might do or say if so and so says whatever awful thing our inner lawyer predicts they might  in an upcoming meeting, or when we get home. Thus, the prevailing emotional tone tends to default toward the negative when our foot is off the accelerator and the brain is on tickover. What this means to our present discussion is that left to its own devices the brain, when presented with an emotionally ambiguous low stakes situation and wondering what to feel about it will lazily check the prevailing tonal feeling and say “yeah, that’ll do”, even though this is probably a response to whatever completely unrelated (but most likely negative) scenario it was running in your internal landscape while on tickover.

The above is a  modern view, of how the brain works but it might also be considered to be a fair description of the thought patterns of an inauthentic dasein of Heidegger fame. I told you I’d pull all this together.

Be more authentic

It doesn’t have to be like this of course, you do have a choice. Letting these automated systems make the decisions about how you feel, while you make the often erroneous assumption that they probably know what they’re doing is like letting a grumpy butler answer your emails. There’s nothing stopping you pausing for a moment, turning off the autopilot and deciding things for yourself. It’s worth remembering that most events are pretty neutral so what you’re actually deciding is what you want to feel, and how strongly.

Picture this:

Let’s have an example. Imagine you’re walking; a fairly hypnotic activity, your brain is off the hook, when a mother in a hurry pushes a baby buggy into your path from a shop doorway. Now, while your brain was ticking over with nothing much to do beyond avoiding lampposts, what it was actually doing, without consulting you was running through a few scenarios. Specifically, in this case, your inner lawyer was testing the various approaches you might take should your spouse hate their birthday present: how hurt you should appear, what best strategy to employ to get across how much effort you’d put in and how unreasonable they’re being. 99 times out of a hundred, this situation won’t occur anyway, but just occasionally the birthday shit will hit the fan and pow! You’ve got just the right face ready without an instant’s thought: noble with quiet pain just under the surface, pitched perfectly. That’s what this mechanism is for. Actually it isn’t, it’s more for the “should I find myself fleeing from a bear would it be best to jump in a river or climb a tree” sort of thing, but the brain does its best in the world in which it finds itself.

Anyway, the pushchair is pushed out, you reflexively stop in your tracks, a trip is avoided. You then need to decide on a reaction to the event. You have any amount of options, ranging from picking up the buggy and beating the woman to death for this transgression to hugging her and telling her she’s the most special person you’ll meet today. Your choice will depend on your emotional response. If the situation was more extreme, things would be different. If she had been a lion or a giant spider there would be less ambiguity, but as it stands this is a grey area where there’s a choice to be made and the stakes are pretty low as regards any potential harm or reward which might be coming in your direction. If you leave your brain on automatic at this point, it will take the easiest route, it will check in memory for any similar situations and examine how these turned out. Some of these would have actually happened to you, some you might have been told about or seen happening to others, most, in this day and age you will have seen on television (this mechanism evolved before there was such a thing as making stuff up so it considers fiction as true experience. You might want to think about this while you’re sucking up horror films). Your decision in how to physically act however, will be strongly informed by your emotional response. Your brain, being left to its devices will take the laziest option. It will glance over its newspaper, grab what’s nearest and easiest from the shelf, which happens to be what’s washing around already: all that background negativity about your spouse hating their present. It’s a completely unrelated issue which doesn’t even exist, but if you act without taking the trouble to question your reasoning, those are the emotions which will drive your response, which will probably be along the lines of an angry “Watch where you’re going!” followed by half an hour brooding on the terrible woman and her awful child.

This is the response of someone not bothering to engage properly, blown on the winds of irrelevant emotional noise and programmed responses, essentially an automaton, someone who is not the true “author” of their response. As a decision making entity they are hardly even present, merely an algorithm with a voice. This I think, is what Heidegger meant by an inauthentic dasein.

Act like the person you like to think you are:

However, in the same situation, rather than letting your grumpy butler act for you, if you engage properly with the world about you, make the effort to come out of neutral and take a moment to assess and judge - as the person you like to think you are - how much or how little effect the buggy situation is really going to have on your day and how much hurt the mother really intended to do you, then you can make a more conscious decision about what you should be feeling and how strongly. This will give you a basis to formulate a more measured response. The person you like to think you are would probably just smile and say “Oops, no harm done” and probably even get a smile in reply (and everyone loves a smile).

You thus acted as the person you choose to be. You authored a response according to your values and judgement. It mattered that you were there and not someone else. Congratulations, you were an authentic dasein.

Be happier:

How does this make you happier? In two ways. First, you were acting and not just reacting and that aspect of control makes people feel more positive and less anxious. It’s the difference between having things just happen to you and feeling that you yourself had an effect. Even if sometimes it’s just a difference in perception, the difference will allow you to view an event more positively. Secondly, an experience happens in two ways. There is the actual event, which may just be a moment, and there is your remembered experience of it which may last the rest of your life. Thus if you’re acting authentically, you can have a more positive view of the event as it happens (and probably a more positive outcome) and lay down a much better memory of the experience as “something I did” rather than “something which happened to me”. Perception isn’t everything, but it’s what you look through to see everything.

It’s an effort to engage. A small one, but still an effort. It’s why we don’t think to do it most of the time, we just let our brains do their thing and don’t really notice that their thing may not be good enough and in any case makes most experiences more negative than they need to be. If you do make the effort, it’s very rewarding over time. It becomes a habit and eventually you become the sort of person who thinks like this. As the stoic Marcus Aurelius put it, with an admirably prescient grasp of recent discoveries concerning brain plasticity:

“Imbuitur enim cogitationibus animus”

And he was king of the world.

AA