smile when you put on your socks, smile when you have no socks to put on

I recently started reading Gilead, which is a letter that (fictional) Reverend Ames writes on his deathbed to his son, reflecting on some stories from his life, and some principles he wants his son to live by. One thing that struck me is how cheerful Ames is about his life, including difficult circumstances (e.g., times he was starving, or almost died) from his past and difficult people from his past.

One way to live life is to try to find goodness, beauty, and humor in all situations: great situations, simple everyday situations, and situations that went some way you disprefer. There’s a lot to recommend this approach, but first it’s worth addressing some concerns with this approach:

1. Is it “lying” to act as if you enjoy “mundane” activities such as putting on your socks?
2. Perhaps there is a maximum amount of joy that you can express, and adopting an attitude of finding joy in everything makes the difference in joy between peak experiences and average experiences smaller, thus making peak experiences less special.
3. If you try to find more joy in all activities, then you might get worse at discriminating which activities are good.
4. If you try to find more joy in all activities you might trick yourself into thinking that an activity will be enjoyable when it really won’t be (despite your trying to hack yourself into believing that it will be).
5. Trying to find more joy in all activities might let other people take advantage of you / treat you poorly without you extracting yourself from the situation.
6. Trying to find the good parts of people that you interact with might make you overly forgiving (?) / might make you trust people who are liable to betray you.

My thoughts on these worries:

1. No it’s not lying. You can just actually just enjoy things like this.
2. Not too worried about this. We’re just adding to our utility function, not changing the ordering of world states much. I don’t think having a moat around the best experiences is very valuable.
3. I’m pretty confident you’ll get more utility with my “be happy with situations, rather than searching for happy situations” approach. And think the hit to discrimination won’t be too large.
4. This is a very real concern! Try to mitigate it by verbalizing your opp cost and being excited about that too. And by having good memory. And by being decisive.
5. This is pretty similar to 4. An additional piece of advice is to have clear boundaries.
6. I think it’s not so terrible to be a bit lenient with other people. “Somebody has to start. Somebody has to step forward and do what is right, because it is right. If nobody starts, then others cannot follow.” But do please try to decouple your joy from your epistemics here and be somewhat cognizant of opp cost.

Open question: how should you go about being generally more happy about things, without messing up your appraisals of things (e.g., being too trusting of people).

How to practice the “smile more” approach

One can start by just smiling at the simple things in life. I also enjoy sharing excitement with others. Remember that this day was very much not inevitable. You are not entitled to it. What a blessing that you could experience it!

Do not be embarrassed to smile, to be happy. Remember how important and valuable it is!

Focus more on what you can give, not what you can get. Relatedly, don’t feel entitled. Feel lucky.

Times when things don’t go according to plan are a particularly important time to smile. But how can one smile in such a situation?

• Sometimes the plan wasn’t important. If you’re walking around and it starts raining, is there any reason the rain is actually bad? Perhaps the rain is just a good memory that you’ll share with your friend, or with yourself. You could view the rain as an opportunity to signal to yourself that the activity you were engaged in is important to you.
• Perhaps you can embody the sentiment from Forgive for Good — book review: the sentiment I’m pointing to being: while things not going according to plan here is inconvenient, it’s a chance to reconnect with your positive intent and reaffirm your will to achieve it.
• Sometimes, you should just laugh by fiat. Perhaps there is nothing funny about the situation. But, it might not be productive to be too grim about this, and laughter can be an effective signal that it is time to move on.
• See a time when things don’t go according to plan as an opportunity practicing virtue in a hard situation.

Sometimes you should not smile

I think it’s generally bad to smile too much at a funeral. However, something directionally similar is to celebrate the wonderful parts of your lost friend’s life at their funeral, to tell this person’s story (speaker for the dead style perhaps) and appreciate this story (bad parts included). Overall, it’s still going to be devastating, and the advice in the rest of this post doesn’t really apply to situations like this.