Mental Health and Extrinsic Goals

Are you looking for psychological research that you can immediately and directly use to improve your own life? Jonathan Hari has described important research by Tim Kasser. The article in the LA Times is "We know junk food makes us sick. Are ‘junk values’ making us depressed?" The research explored what happens when we are primarily motivated by extrinsic goals rather than intrinsic goals.

Imagine you play the piano. If you play it in the morning because it gives you joy, that is an intrinsic motive — you aren’t doing it to get anything else out of it; you are doing it simply because that experience is worth doing, in and of itself. Now imagine you play the piano to impress your parents, or in a dive bar you hate to pay the rent, or to seduce somebody into sleeping with you. That would be an extrinsic motive — you aren’t doing it because you think the experience is worthwhile; you are doing it to get something out of it.

Kasser found that people who are motivated primarily by intrinsic goals are much happier than those motivated by extrinsic goals.

People who achieved their extrinsic goals didn’t experience any increase in day-to-day happiness. None. Your promotion? Your fancy car? The new iPhone? The expensive necklace? They won’t improve your happiness at all.

But people who achieved their intrinsic goals did become significantly happier, and less depressed and anxious. As they worked at it and felt they became, say, a better friend, they became more satisfied with life. Being a better dad? Dancing for the sheer joy of it? Helping another person, just because it’s the right thing to do? They do significantly boost your happiness.

Kasser discovered that people whose lives were dominated by extrinsic values had a worse time in almost every respect. They felt sicker, and they were angrier. They experienced less joy, and more despair. They had worse relationships, and they were more insecure. [T]he more materialistic and extrinsically motivated you become, the more depressed you will be. . . .

Junk food looks like food, but it doesn’t meet our underlying nutritional needs. In a similar way, junk values don’t meet our underlying psychological needs — to have meaning and connection in our lives. Extrinsic values are KFC for the soul. Yet our culture constantly pushes us to live extrinsically.

Hari discussed Kasser's research with Joe Rogan in 2018:

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“The News” Has Become Two Head-Butting Religions

Matt Taibbi explains that the modern version of "news" is religion. All honest people know this. That is why so many smart people of all political persuasions lament that there is far too much "fake news," many of them telling me that they now longer watch "the news." Taibbi's article: "The News is America's New Religion, and We're in a Religious War - When political narrative replaces faith, truth becomes heresy." Here's an excerpt:

News in America used to be fun to talk about, fun to joke about, interesting to think about. Now it’s an interminable bummer, because the press business has taken on characteristics of that other institution where talking, joking, and thinking aren’t allowed: church. We have two denominations, both as fact-averse as real churches, as is shown in polls about, say, pandemic attitudes, where Americans across the board consistently show they know less than they think.

Surveys found a third of Republicans think the asymptomatic don’t transmit Covid-19, or that the disease kills fewer people than the flu or car crashes. But Democrats also test out atrociously, with 41% thinking Covid-19 patients end up hospitalized over half the time — the real number is 1%-5% — while also wildly overestimating dangers to children, the percentage of Covid deaths under the age of 65, the efficacy of masks, and other issues.

This is the result of narrative-driven coverage that focuses huge amounts of resources on the wrongness of the rival faith. Blue audiences love stories about the deathbed recantations of red-state Covid deniers, some of which are real, some more dubious. A typical Fox story, meanwhile, might involve a woman who passed out and crashed into a telephone pole while wearing a mask alone in her car. Tales of each other’s stupidity are the new national religion, and especially among erstwhile liberals, we take them more seriously than any religion has been taken in the smart set in a long, long time.

BTW, check out the video in Taibbi's article for a reminder of how networks used to report the news.

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One Suggestion for Hacking a Path out of the Wokeness Thicket

I'm feeling sad today, perhaps because I read too much "news." I struggle when I try to identify any institution that is functioning well. Perhaps the court system is the best example of an (imperfect) functioning institution, although the elephant in the room is that those who don't have the money to hire good lawyers are almost always fucked over by those who have lawyers. Okay . . . but when both sides have good lawyers, the system seems to work fairly well fairly often.

Some of our newly dysfunctional institutions have been captured by Woke ideology, resulting in a thick atmosphere of fear in which smart people intentionally say untrue things so that they don't get yelled at by the mob, which can result in suspension and job loss. It's a terrible situation in many institutions, especially in news media and colleges. I base this on personal stories I've heard from several self-censoring professors who are afraid to engage in a free exchange of ideas in the classroom. I've reported many of these problems at this website over the past two years.

When I feel this sort of melancholy, I actively seek out good news, and I usually find some reason to be hopeful. Today, it comes from one of my favorite writers and thinkers, Jonathan Haidt, who participated in a discussion group at Heterodox Academy (I was one of many HxA members attending). It was a long discussion and there were many speakers. Here's an excerpt from Haidt's presentation:

It's the climate of fear. I'm actually starting a new book on this. It's called Life After Babble: How we lost the Ability to Think Well Together. The core idea is that social media, made reputational destruction democratized, incentivized and freed from accountability. And that's what happened in 2014. And that's why we've had a climate of fear since 2014. So you're right to be afraid.

But here's what I've learned in the last couple years: almost everybody is reasonable. Leaders are the ones who get shot with little darts. Whenever they you know, it's as though they're physically getting shot with darts. And so they all came very quickly. But those who hold out, those who don't cave-- if you just wait a week--it's a hurricane inside of a hall of mirrors, and it blows on to something else a week or two later. So the people who stand up to it and don't bend a knee and don't bow down, they end up looking very, very good. So what I'm trying to develop is the idea that every field needs high professional standards, and a big part of that is depoliticization is not being on a team not fighting for politics, but living up to your standard as a professor doing research. You're a scholar, and what I hope we can develop an HxA is this notion of very high professional standards. If you're a true professional, you live your standards, and then you should be unafraid. We're not there yet, but I think that's that's where I think we can get to very quickly.

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The Consequences of Not Belonging to any Political Tribe

What is it like to not feel part of any political tribe? Mostly, it is to be dismayed to hear lies from the right and then lies of the left. It is to have a seat near the net of the tennis court, looking to the left, then the right, over and over, as lies are zinged back and forth. The party in power now, the Democrats, are certainly doing their part, whether it be immigration, COVID, Russia-Trump, abolishing the police will keep cities safer. And now there is the Democrat claim about Biden's economic package:

They are insisting that their plans, which are still in flux but amount to a call for some $4 trillion in spending over two bills, have no real costs at all—or that the costs should not be factored in, because they are "unfair and absurd."

As if $4 trillion will not risk massive inflation. As if $4 trillion will be completely paid for.

I'm not taking a position on whether parts of these packages make sense for the U.S. My concern is that the risks of these packages are being actively suppressed. I have very little respect for Joe Manchin, but I think he's correct when he claims that the current proposal amounts to "fiscal insanity." We are not having any meaningful national conversation about what is really in these bills and the extent of economic risk of committing $3.5 trillion to those things.  This, from the remorseless political party that threw the working class overboard decades ago.

This is simply the most recent example of a system that is completely broken with no hope of repair. It's a system where big corrupt campaign money and ideology drive the decisions, where inconvenient truths are ignored and suppressed and where most voters line up in ignorance to cheer their respective teams.

In four years, we might see the Republicans taken over, with their own brand of fiscal and ideological insanity. I truly see no end in sight.

This is the sort of thing that led George Carlin to indicate that he no longer had "a stake in the outcome."  I wish I could claim that everything is going well for our country, but I can't.

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