Perfect Happiness through Perfect Alignment?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Hey all,

I have been toying with this concept on my own a while and decided to reach out and see what others thought of it.

For most of us, our heart and our head occasionally disagree on how we should act. Sometimes it’s the decision to stay in a relationship with a person you know you really should just leave, but can’t bring yourself to do it because you love him or her, or don’t want to lose everything you’ve worked so hard for, or just don’t have the willpower to make the hard choice.

Sometimes it’s the decision to lie, cheat, or steal, at your own direct benefit, despite knowing it’s against your own moral code.

Sometimes it’s simply the decision to put off work you know should be done right now, or eat bad food and skip the gym despite knowing it takes you farther away from the physique you want.

Our logic and our emotions become conflicted. Your emotions are telling you “Take the easy way out - it’s worth it, it will feel good!” Your logic is telling you “Make the right decision, right now, or you know you will come to be unhappy about it later.” No matter which way you go, it is impossible to avoid some form of displeasure from this choice. You must either face the pain of being deprived of what you want, or the difficulty of having to eventually deal with the future problems you are creating for yourself.
What I am suggesting is a perfect alignment of logic and emotion. To remove this conflict entirely. To reach a point where THE ONLY THING YOU WANT is that which you KNOW IS THE BEST THING FOR YOU. You will decide only to eat healthy, wholesome food, because you know that is what is in your own best interest. You will eat unhealthy garbage ONLY when you can in admit in full honesty and truth that is in your own best interest at the time. You will NOT desire to repeatedly eat bad food despite knowing that it is not in your own best interest.

You will NOT desire to remain with that person who is rude, disrespectful, and unworthy of your time, regardless of how much he or she means to you or how hard you have worked to get her.

The key distinction here is that I am NOT talking about the ability to make the hard choices in life. The ones where we say “I don’t want to do this, but I will do it because I know it is the best thing for me.”

I am talking about REMOVING THE CHOICE ENTIRELY. To ONLY think, “I want this precisely because I know it is the best thing for me. I do not want any other alternative, because I know they are not in my own best interest.”

What if the only thing you really, truly desired was to do ONLY that which would bring you the best, most complete happiness you could achieve in life? Could there be any downside to such a life?
I have mostly come here with questions rather than answers.

Who amongst us lives this way? I feel I am approaching such a mindset, but in all honesty I don’t really understand how or why it is happening. I feel a strong desire to make the best choice I can make, and feel no sense of loss or displeasure at what I must expend to get there. As a result, I feel impervious to harm, and secure in the knowledge that I have done, and will continue to do, the best thing I could have done, simply because I desired to do so.

If there is anyone who has gone through a process of reaching this point, or has simply naturally lived life this your whole life, I would love to hear more about your thought process.

If there are any established philosophies, religions, or teachings designed to help one reach this style of thought, I would love to be made aware of them.

2

Pretty much all of them.

3

The perfect alignment is probably Chaotic Good. You can bust a few bad guy heads without worrying about whether they’re actually breaking any law, yet still retain some degree of heroic standing with the community. Of course, this means you cannot play a Paladin, Druid, Bard, or Assassin under First Edition rules…

4

Yeah, good luck with that, sugar. I’m a girl who only wants what is *bad *for her.

5

You know - and I say this only partially in jest - the more women I get to know, the more I find that that really is a common desire amongst the lot of ya.

6

If drugs didn’t feel good, you couldn’t get much money selling drugs.

Tris

7

Out of curiosity, how old are you?

I think it has to do with the disconnect between immediate gratification and long-term gratification. As you grow older you naturally form the brain connections / executive functions involved in long-term planning, so to some degree it is normal that one is more likely to consider long- and medium-term consequences of decisions and not just the short-term ones (which is commonly all young people care about). They typically say these connections aren’t fully developed until at least age 25.

Of course, it never really gets easy to eschew short-term gratification for the long-term. It just gets slightly easier.

8

You make a good point. I hadn’t really thought of it that way. Guess it depends on how you define “best interest.”

I would think it not in the best interest of a gay man to deny his sexuality, to live a chaste or fraudulent existence, solely out of fear of eternal damnation. That sounds torturous and miserable. Of course, a staunch Catholic would disagree, saying it’s exactly what is in his best interest.

But in this case, the individual does not make his decisions out of pure desire, but rather out of fear. So I feel that it is somewhat similar, but not quite the same.

Religion calls for the individual to do something that is painful or difficult in order to be rewarded for it later. I am searching for a system that removes that negative aspect of the decision-making process. To eliminate the necessity of eithermaking the hard choice or suffering the consequences. Wishful thinking, perhaps?
And I don’t know enough about any other religion to comment.
In checking out some philosophies, Egoism seems fairly close. Hedonism and utilitarianism are related, and of course many others offer entirely different ideas.

9

I’m 23, so you’re more or less right on target.

Would love to believe this is just a natural part of the aging process. The amount of fat, unhappy, lazy ‘adults’ I see all around me everyday seems to suggest otherwise. The kind that make me scream, “Why are you so unhappy with your life but do NOTHING to fix your situation???”

Looks more like something you either have to work for or are born with.

I feel like for some people, it’s always been easy and always will be. It just comes naturally.

I am not sure if they are thinking “There are other things I’d rather be doing right now, but I will do this because I know I should,” or “I want to do this precisely because I know I should do it.” I am trying to find a way to realize the latter.

10

I’ve been trying an approach like this lately, with mixed results.

My approach is a little less philosophical. I’ve been focusing on a few goals- career and personal- and just doggedly plodding towards them with little attention to whatever emotions or urges I’m feeling beyond just enough journaling to keep those emotions flowing out rather than staying in and getting weird. The name of the game is breaking things down into steps, and just hacking away at it until you get to the next step, whether you “want” to or not. The whole thing is somewhat impersonal, and my “happiness” is kind of beside the point. Right now, I’m just about getting things done.

I’ve set some high standards- zero procrastination on important tasks, up early every day despite not having work until night, zero flakiness either to myself or to others. If I say I am going to do something or decide to do something, it gets done. No exceptions.

I really do think this is the difference in mindset between “ultra-high achievers” and the rest of us. Most of us waste a lot of time and energy in our lives, but extremely effective people maximize the amount of their emotional and physical energy that gets put in to their goals.

I’ve been doing it for a month, and it is amazing. I’m overachieving in school, I found a new apartment that is in my dream neighborhood, huge, and much cheaper than my last one. I have no doubts I will find a job within the timeframe I’ve given myself. I am just checking things off the list like crazy.

But, the downside is that it is no fun. My days have few ups or downs. It’s just…work. Plodding through. There are good times, of course. But they seem kind of beside the point. They don’t really matter the way they used to.

I doubt it’s sustainable for me in the long run, but I’m going to keep it up as long as I can and hopefully lay some good foundations for whatever comes next.

11

I’m as atheist as you can get, but what makes you think that it would be an issue for a gay Catholic solely out of fear of damnation? Especially since Catholics aren’t that focused on damnation.

The internal conflict is as likely to be caused by the impossibility to reconcile his desires with his concepts about what is right and wrong, or with his love of god.

12

Well, this is pretty much in line with a variety of similar viewpoints in psychology, such as Freudianism and transactional analysis. The basic idea is that although we refer to people as “individuals” (i.e., incapable of being divided), in fact each person has at least two different “sub-personalities” each with its own imperative. There’s the “id”, “child”, or “subconscious”, which we’re born with and is basically irrational… it wants what it wants when it wants it, regardless of the constraints of reality. Then there’s the “ego” or “adult” or “conscious”, which develops as we grow; it’s logical and deals with reality. A large part of “adjustment” consists of figuring out a way to reconcile the conflicting imperatives. Some people simply suppress one or the other, becoming either out-of-control loonies (all id) or tight-asses (no id). Some remain in endless conflict, using up a lot pf psychic energy bouncing back and forth… neurotics, or in extreme cases, multiple personalities. And the lucky ones manage to genuinely integrate the two, allowing them to work as a team; these people live with zest but also common sense. That’s not to say they’re perfectly happy – I don’t think that’s the nature of humans. You can never get to where you have no problems; you can only get to where you have an effective way of dealing with your problems.

13

A short version (I’ve heard variations applied to work, living style, etc.): if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.

14

I get what you’re saying man. I’ve been exactly there myself, and it’s part of the reason I began searching for the kind of mindset I posted above.

I’ve spent months at a time doing nothing but working, cleaning, organizing, working out, getting to bed on time, taking great care of myself, eating healthy, taking care of all those little projects I knew I should be doing but had been putting off forever, really getting my life and all of my affairs in order. Doing all the little things you feel you “should” be doing but put off for some reason or another.

I got a ton done. I felt great physically. But I just felt unfulfilled in life, as if I were missing some vital activity or piece of my life that made it really hard to go on without.

So I’m trying to find a way to balance the two, not procrastinate, not waste time, get everything done that I need to but still take time to ‘waste’ an entire night doing nothing but drinking and playing videogames.

I think you’re onto something though with simply choosing whatever it is you feel you ‘should’ be doing right now and focusing intently on doing it, and nothing else, so that you’re not wasting a single moment of your life.

15

Eight years of Catholic elementary school. Apparently we didn’t receive the same kind of teaching in that regard.

Wasn’t that one of the main reasons for the initial proliferation of religions like Catholicism? Social control - keep people in line through the threat of eternal damnation. Based on everything I’ve read and been taught, that seems the most likely cause.

16

Right. That is, in a way, exactly what I’m going for. To know that there will always be things that hurt you, but to be content in the knowledge that you will respond to anything that happens in only the most appropriate way possible. To not force yourself to do it because you know it is right, but because you want to.