If it makes me happy…

In a workshop I attended recently, the trainer made an interesting point that being a little selfish and taking care of our own needs first will actually enable us to help others better. Around the same time, I also read this very interesting post on the conversational gambit. Extremely helpful for those of us who aren’t good at going from zero to conversations quickly. Put simply, ask a question. The one that stuck with me was “When were you happiest?” I directed the question inwards and got some answers. Then I upped it to “What will make me happy?” That was complex, but something I heard recently gave me some direction.

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. … I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Joseph Campbell

Since I can reasonably equate being happy with the feeling of “being alive”, what does it take? The easy answer is enjoying what I do. And there are at least a couple of things – books, travel – that fall in that territory. But I don’t think self image is out of bounds for even these. Status-seeking is built in quite deep. The self image demands acknowledgement. The corollary of this is where I found the friction. The difference between merit and value.

Market outcomes have nothing to do with rewarding merit. Merit involves a moral judgement about what people deserve, whereas value is simply a measure of what consumers are willing to pay for the goods and services sellers have to offer ~ Friedrich Hayek via The Tyranny of Merit

— manu prasad (@manuscrypts) March 4, 2021

While in an earlier era, prestige would broadly follow “good work”, social media has made it an arms race. I can focus on merit all I want, but I cannot insist that the market (social media) value it. That means I have to package the “merit” into something relevant for the market if I want validation. And if I didn’t seek validation of some sort, why should I post anything on social media? But is there an end to this validation-seeking? It’s dopamine, after all! Slipper slope.

So I am now thinking what would make me happier – embracing irrelevance, finding more things where I wouldn’t care about validation, or reconciling these conflicting forces. I have to admit, the latter made me think of this –

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

J Krishnamurti