Being happy is a bad (modern) life goal

Summary: Our emotions guide our actions towards a good life, but feelings don't constitute the good life. Modern life manipulates our emotions in unprecedented ways, misguiding our actions.

Hospital

It's 7 am. I've barely woken up yet, but my wife's ready. We're at the hospital, and given my level of anxiety, you'd think I'm the one who's about to go into surgery. I give her a kiss of goodbye and wave as the two nurses carry her hospital bed out of the room.

The hours go by slowly, and it's past dinner time when the phone rings; the doctor wants to see me. The surgery was successful, but she'll recover in the ICU for the night. He'd later tell us that the past grueling 11 hours were among the top 3 most challenging surgeries in his career.

But she's free from endometriosis now.

The role of emotions

We're confused about the proper role of emotions in our lives.

Positive emotions such as happiness, pleasure, and tranquility feel good, and we tend to pursue them. Negative emotions such as pain, suffering, and anxiety feel bad, and we tend to avoid them.

That positive emotion feels good is intuitive but worth emphasizing: good feelings feel good by definition. Feeling good is both an emotion and a value, something we tend to value and find worth pursuing.

But valuing good feelings in themselves is a mistake.

Emotions don't exist to be felt in a vacuum. They are guides for our actions. We feel a particular way to act as we do to pursue and avoid those feelings.

Our feelings shape our behavior.

Recovery

Discharged. After a few days filled with a handful of Harry Potter books and surprisingly good hospital meals of rice, beans, and yuca, we head back home.

Feels good to go home, she says. Yes, she's happy to be heading towards the house where we've lived together for the past several years, but the best part is not feeling the gloominess of the artificially lit hospital room cramped by medical devices. The part about not having to breathe through an N95 mask for days helps.

We're just a few blocks away on the drive home now. I'm at the wheel, a needed exception since she has to avoid heavy machinery for another few days. She tenses her body up as we get close to a speed bump.

The speed bump comes by ..and goes by, but there's no pain anymore. The surgery worked. The pain is gone.

She starts crying.

Guides to action

Emotions give us signals about what's happening. We feel different feelings as events happen around us and within us.

We feel happy, sad, angry, fearful, anxious, frustrated, tranquil, and disappointed because life is happening to us and our emotions tell us how it's going.

Those feelings not only change how we feel, but they also change how we act. If I'm angry about a particular situation, I'll react in a way, but if I'm sad, I'll act a different way. If I were happy instead, I'd do something else.

Those different actions lead to different results. Acting angry, sad, or happy about a situation each has a different impact on the world and thus in life from that point on.

Emotions guide us toward the proper action for the situation, and they are an indispensable guide in telling us what is happening, how we feel, and what to do about it.

Anesthesia

The doctors knew it would be a complicated surgery, but there's only so much you can learn through the priciest ultrasounds and MRIs. This was going to be one of those I'll know when I see situations. What they saw wasn't pretty.

"OK, we're ready. Now count back from 10 to 1", the anesthesiologist says in Portuguese for the thousandth time in his life. "10, ... 9, ... 8, ............"

Three surgeons: a gastroenterologist, a gynecologist, and a 4-handed robot that cost the hospital several million dollars get ready to work.

The five small incisions on her abdomen masquerade the degree of slashing and cauterization happening inside. The TV overhead the heart rate monitors show everybody in the room the feed of the robot's internal cameras as a constant reminder of that delusion.

One last focus of endometriosis left to remove, and she'll be entirely free. "She's been under for 11 hours; we gotta wake her up. There's no time to continue" commands the anesthesiologist.

That last focus of endometriosis stays, almost as a reminder that complete control of nature eludes us.

Emotional delusions

Emotional delusions: Emotions we feel by interacting with modern human-made inventions.

If someone cuts our stomach, we'll feel pain. Pain is a negative feeling that we try to avoid. Therefore, cutting our stomach is something we'll try to avoid.

This particular link of the emotion of pain to a judgment of it being harmful to an action to avoid it has been honed over 300,000 years on us homo sapiens alone.

Our modern world has countless technological innovations, such as surgery, where we cut a person to heal rather than to hurt.

We invented surgery before we invented anesthesia. Back then, we'd have to resist the pain when undergoing surgery even if we knew that this pain was not something to avoid.

Surgery causes an emotional delusion: our pain tells us the cut is harmful because the pain doesn't know the difference between life-saving surgery and getting stabbed. Avoiding the surgery to avoid the pain would be a misguided action.

Given our limited control over our emotions, we undergo anesthesia to ignore the pain of being cut during the surgery.

Anesthesia is an emotional delusion that attempts to align how we should feel under surgery with how we do, not to feel pain since the cut is not something to avoid.

The emotions of a person under surgery and anesthesia are being played and manipulated by all these modern human inventions.

Like much of modern life.

A new life

She wakes up and takes a big stretch in bed. "Ahhh...!" she moans, still getting used to stretching and not feeling any abdominal pain.

Oh, and the cramps are gone. She can't believe the cramps are gone.

She left the hospital a month ago, so she's now cleared to go to the gym. The weights and machines feel familiar, and she greets them with a smile as she does the regulars at the gym. The painful post-workout abdominal soreness she used to feel, it turns out, wasn't caused by the workouts either.

Evening comes; I've wrapped up work for the day, so we head to the living room. I fire up Netflix. The last season of Grey's Anatomy is out, but I wonder if we are ready for all the crying and, well, all the surgery.

Let's watch something more light-hearted, like Friends.

Happy

We feel good about smoking and drinking soda and feel bad about exercising and getting our blood drawn. Like a dog pursuing a car and afraid of the vacuum cleaner, modern situations can lead our emotions to misguide us, what I call emotional delusions.

Despite emotional delusions, emotions are necessary to guide our actions. Emotions are a crucial guide to processing complexity, assessing situations, and making good decisions.

Unlike the primitive situations in which our emotions were honed over hundreds of thousands of years, countless human-made modern factors confuse our feelings, misguiding our actions.

This modern inability to trust how we feel to guide our actions prevents us from pursuing any goal of being happy defined by how we feel without subjecting us to act in misguided ways.