Get Stupid, Get Happy

 Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Abe Lincoln -- or so they say [1] -- who was a man who struggled with depression his whole life.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

Gustave Flaubert.

Now that is some actionable advice. 

If you will, join me in a quest to be happier through being more stupid, more often. The idea is not to become dumb or selfish in essence, but to simulate it tactically. To train the brain to notice the small, stupid good. To build a daily practice of low-context pleasure fragments—raw inputs, not analysis. Not expression. Not narrative. Not even journaling. Just this:

1. Write happiness fragments throughout the day -- learned hypergraphia.

Tiny. Fast. No backstory. Mostly nouns. No commentary. Examples: 

Golden hour. 
Vanilla latte.
Shave. 
Cat in window.
Move boxes - done!


These are not metaphors, nor are they “writing prompts.” They are mood nudges. Bits of sensory happiness, working at the animal level.

2. Strip context. 

The more you explain, the more you fall back into the depressive machinery of meaning, including the possibility of grotesque insight seeking. Fragments must float.

This is why the "Lincoln" quote is wrong, or at least incomplete: one does not simply decide that positivity is a narrative or ideology one wants to believe in. Instead, you just keep experiencing little context-free moments inside of the belief. 

There is power in the contextless! And this is why all of the radicalized tribal identities are effective. For example, one thing that used to drive me crazy was how more MAGA people cared about innuendos that Soros (or any other part the Cabal) were doing something than actual proof of members of their side openly doing the exact thing they claimed was so bad. But a stream of memes over time is more potent than clear arguments about the same subject, as they drill into you and change your habits of looking... They didn’t need to convince us. They just needed to feed us contextless signals until we started finishing the story for them.

The bastards in charge could have set the algos in such a way to make us happy, and I posit they would have still had great engagement on their platforms. But it wouldn't have been maximally optimized. For that, they needed indignation. And while this led to great harms to sanity, public health, and democratic input, all of that was collateral damage. 

But the good news is that you can harness the power of contextlessness for your own uses. 


3. Post nowhere. Share with no one. 

This isn’t about performance. It sure as hell isn't about a vibe. It’s not a log of progress, or your journey. It’s guerrilla warfare against despair [2].

4. The selfishness experiment

I am less convinced that selfishness is that important for happiness, regardless of the Flaubert quote. Perhaps he means "self absorbed," although even then it is important to be clear that this means self-absorbed hedonistically, and in terms of status signaling, not reflection or abstraction. Also, the happy often do favors for others within their little groups. In my experience, cliquish is a better term than just selfish.  

Still, on the off chance I'm wrong, and selfishness is important to happiness, I am also going to log my wants for a while as well.

This leads to entries where I say I want some coffee, and then later I get that coffee. Which even then is living inside of the lesson that I often get what I want. 

Happiness is getting a bunch of singles and then making sure you keep score. 

[1] Lincoln almost certainly didn't say it. 

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/10/20/happy-minds/

...  currently there is no substantive evidence that Abraham Lincoln used this expression. It was attributed to him by Dr. Frank Crane about fifty years after his death. Oddly, Crane presented at least three different phrasings for the quotation. The words are usually credited to Lincoln, and QI [Quote Investigator] has not discovered any compelling alternative attributions

[2] Your mileage may vary on not sharing, though. I am meaning-rich, irony-trained, wounded by systems around me. If you don't feel there is anything fundamentally wrong here in the Matrix, then share away and work on those vibes... But if that's you, how did you get this far into the piece?