Can you ‘hack’ knowledge and happiness ??
In a sense, it is OK to do dumb things… If you do them quickly enough.
Random Wise Influencer
“Hack” Happiness – Shortcut #1
Have you tried a ‘happiness’ burger before?
I recently saw a post (apparently was going viral) titled : “How to Hack Happiness”. A guide in the form of a thread of tweets offered the final solution to humanity’s quests over thousands of years.
The details, however, are much more mundane than what you’d expect. The story has been repeated countless times on social media, and I’ve seen it and read it many times. Turns out that our genius friend was a (bio)chemist.
Because everything is easy, happiness is hormones. There are four of them relevant here to be more specific (Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, Endorphin). You can ‘trick’ or ‘get’ your body to produce them, and …hey presto – “You are now happy.”
[Note : the science behind some of these approximations is dubious at best, and these ‘chemicals’ are not that simple, nor is this a puzzle with four parts that you can put together… But this post is not about the (chemical) science so I’ll skip that discussion]
source: pointforfitness.com
Congratulations.
Here, we have a noble goal, and some scientific background (very small).. Still, I couldn’t but feel very unhappy to read this.
Happiness as meaningless tasks on a to-do list
So, Is happiness good mood?
If someone does these tasks daily, they will ‘hack happiness’?
Part of the problem here is the term ‘happiness’ and what it means to people. Many people live their lives in ‘pursuit of happiness’ (including Will Smith). What messages like this do, is many people to overlook the central task in the pursuit of happiness: dedication and effort, in exchange for running errands (eating food and petting a dog/baby).
Is this part of a bigger cultural trend to break things down till they mean nothing, so that we can spend time running limited tasks (meaningless?) while feeling happy about our ‘dubious’ achievements? (celebrating little wins is good, but what if someone builds a life around little wins?).
The trend to devoid the pursuit of happiness from the pursuit of meaning?
Point of caution: Get your life in order, and think about what you should do. Ultimately, this will be more fruitful than ‘hacking happiness’. You should exercise, relax, get things done, and connect with people though… but not as part of a happiness hack!
“How I read 52 books… in a month” – Hack Knowledge : Shortcut #2
The key idea here is effort and focus, and the below story is eerily similar to ‘hacking happiness’. The next genius, however, decided to ‘hack wisdom’.
So, the second idiot read 50 books in one month.
Yes that is what the ad says on social media. Ads are supposed to grab your attention, sometimes by using the elements of novelty and surprise. Sometimes ads will challenge your thoughts. What is happening here, though, is dangerous.
It is not the ad – the thing itself is dangerous.
“I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”.
Woody Allen
Intellectual products are supposed to have a higher level of moral integrity, or at least insight.
Turns out they are Audio-summaries of the books. So he listened to 52 (?) audio files, and that became “How I read …”. This is why book summaries are dangerous (granted, an idiot can make anything dangerous – I’ll admit to that).
Wisdom as meaningless tasks in a self-help checklist
Many of the books on that list probably deserve a few minutes of attention (max) and not more (I wouldn’t want to read many of them, no matter how short), but that is not the point. People shouldn’t read summaries assuming they’re reading the books – these are two totally different activities with different aims.
There are many other questions here: Who selects what you read? Why should you read that? and .. Are you really reading that?
A black-and-white picture and beard are a shortcut to (approximation of) wisdom in the same way that listening to 50 random audio files is a shortcut to (approximation of) gaining the knowledge of 50 books… in the same way that petting a dog-baby and getting ‘little wins’ is a shortcut to (approximation of) happiness.
I was encouraged to write about this because I’ve worked on a book-summaries project before. A big challenge was how to avoid the many problems of summaries, and some of that discussion is included in TGKM’s page (Link 👇👇).
On Effort, Dedication, and Insight
A lot has been said about happiness and attaining it (and the same goes for wisdom). These are not easy concepts to define… but to work on understanding them is part of life’s mission.
Shortcuts to things are all around us, and so are approximations. But frequently our (ab)use of shortcuts becomes simply a symptom of our inability to deal with the limitations and incompleteness in life.
Till we understand that better, less ‘hacking’ (literally & figuratively) will probably be a good thing… Try equanimity and calm effort instead.