This is Your Brain on Bullsh*t - David Pinsof - #980

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
A desire for happiness is not what is driving our behavior. It is a terrible way to predict our behavior. It is a naive way of thinking about human psychology that will lead you into a morass of confusion, contradiction, and infinite regress. Why?

**David Pinsof** (0:14)
Hmm. Well, I wrote a very long post on this called, Happiness is Bullshit. And then I wrote a sequel to that post called, Happiness Really is Bullshit. No, I'm just joking. It was Happiness is Bullshit Revisited. People really get hung up on this. I think it's one of the biggest confusions we have about how the mind works, is that we have this really misguided idea that what we're pursuing in life is inside of our heads. That is a really weird and implausible idea from an evolutionary perspective, that we would be animals that are driven to seek stuff inside of our heads makes no sense. It makes way more sense that we would be driven to seek stuff out there in the world, you know, like food, sex, status, praise, inclusion in groups, all this stuff that would have correlated with biological fitness and ancestral environments. These are the sorts of things that would make sense for a primate like us to want. It makes no sense for us to want something inside of our heads. Now, the common response to this argument is that, oh, well, happiness sort of motivates us to go out and get what we want. It's sort of like the carrot that's dangling in front of us, and we need happiness to motivate us to go out and get the stuff in the world, right? This view also makes no sense because as soon as you posit that we need happiness to motivate us, well, there's an awkward follow-up question, which is how does evolution get us to want happiness? If you need happiness to get us to want stuff, then how does evolution get us to want happiness? Does it have to give us happiness when we get happiness? And then happiness when we get happiness when we get happiness? Like I said, we have entered an infinite regress. This whole way of thinking that we need some internal goody to motivate us is just wildly implausible. It contradicts a wealth of research in social and behavioral sciences and neuroscience. We don't need happiness to be motivated. Our nervous system is directly wired up to our hearts, to our physiology, to our lungs, to our muscles. It can just motivate us to go out and get the stuff directly. We don't need happiness to motivate us any more than a thermostat needs to feel happy when it gets your home at the right temperature. Right? We have thermostats inside our bodies that motivate us to shiver when we're cold and sweat when we're hot and seek blankets when we're cold and to seek shade when we're hot.
Those inner thermostats don't need happiness just any more than the thermostats in our home need happiness. So, there are many reasons why viewing human behavior as a pursuit of happiness is misguided. I go through lots of them in my post, but yeah, I think this is just a wildly confused way of thinking about human psychology, about the mind. I think it is way more insightful to think about humanity as striving for things, for real things in the world that would have correlated with biological fitness in ancestral environments.

**Chris Williamson** (3:17)
Do you completely discard with subjective internal states of well-being and our relationship to them, then?

**David Pinsof** (3:25)
No, I think those exist, but they're not what we think they are. So, what we think they are is just a carrot that's dangling in front of us that motivates us. What they actually are, are mechanisms. Happiness is a mechanism that evolved by natural selection to serve a very specific function. And as we discussed, that function cannot be to motivate us, because motivation doesn't need happiness, right? It serves a different function. And what is that function? Well, it's to recalibrate our expectations and motivations when something turns out to be better than we expected it to be. The sex is better than you thought it would be. The ice cream is better than you thought it would be. You tried cooking a Spanish paella and you thought it was going to suck, and it ends up being amazing. When mistakes like that get made, your brain has to do a lot of recalibrating. If I cook this amazing paella, I need to update my expectations about how good my cooking ability is, about my ability to cook Spanish cuisine, about the quality of paella, and it needs to reorient my motivations so that I'm more motivated to cook Spanish cuisine in the future. My brain has a lot of work to do when I'm wrong about reality in a positive way. All that work that my brain is doing, I think is what we call happiness.