Is caring less about your happiness the path to being happy?

In the past few days, I have been unusually anxious and restless, troubling thoughts entering my mind at an elevated rate. There is no particular reason for this. In fact, the last couple of weeks have been quite excellent, my academic workload has been moderate and I have spent a lot of time in the presence of great friends and engaged in various enjoyable activities. For the first time in my life, exercise is a fixed component of my daily routine and I have lots of time to read and write. Still, whenever I have times of increased leisure such as now, I can not just relax and do the things I enjoy. Instead, my brain constantly reminds itself, of how much time I am wasting, which extra classes I could take and how I might be falling behind my peers. It paints bleak scenarios of how my laziness and incompetence will make me fail at executing my plans and reaching my life goals.

Currently, I am reading Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit, a book discussing ethics and rationality. The first part concerns itself with indirectly individually self-defeating theories, which are theories for which it is “true that, if someone tries to achieve his theory-given aims, these aims will be, on the whole, worse achieved”. Parfit gives the example of the self-interest theory S, according to which one should always act in a way so that the outcome is best for oneself. Assume, for example, that you are traveling through the deep desert, your car breaks down and now you are stranded and at risk of death by exposure and starvation. Assume also, that every person always carries a perfect lie detector with which it is always possible to tell whether others are telling the truth. Your hopes to get rescued are diminishing by the minute, but, suddenly, a stranger comes along with her car. She does not care about you and states that, in fact, saving you would be a burden for her. You do not have any valuables on you but promise to reward her richly if she brings you to safety. However, this promise is a lie because, as soon as you are rescued and no longer in need of help, giving money to the stranger would go against your self-interest. No completely self-interested person would be able to keep that promise. The stranger, using her lie detector, recognizes this and drives away, leaving you to die. According to Parfit, the self-interest theory defeats itself, because adhering to it will produce outcomes that are worse than the outcomes that would be produced if you adhered to some other theory. Following a theory where you should act self-interested, except in cases where you have to keep a promise, would enable you to tell the truth to the stranger and make it out of the desert alive.

I will now try to apply this line of thought to another theory, which I will call the happiness theory H here: always do what makes you the happiest. If I always act according to H, this will frequently result in situations where I am unhappy because my H-related goals fail. If, for example, I try to win a chess tournament because I believe this will make me the happiness, getting defeated would certainly make me very unhappy. In this case, following another theory that does not have happiness as my highest goal, might result in greater happiness, rendering H self-defeating. Parfit presents a similar example of a writer, who knows that writing great books would make her the happiest, however, she sometimes overworks herself, leaving her depressed. At this point, I want to state that I am not sure if Parfitt is saying the exact same thing as me and if I am just blatantly copying his theory, but his writing is extraordinarily convoluted and there is always value in explaining something in a new way, so I will just continue. What solutions are there for you, the chess player? The obvious thing would be to practice a form of outcome indifference, where you do not care how the tournament goes so you can not be negatively affected by a lot. However, in practice, it seems extremely difficult to become unconcerned in the event of your loss and still gain happiness in the event of a win.

Another possible solution I could think of is dedicating yourself to a cause greater than you, such as helping people in extreme poverty, so you are not so affected if your own life does not go according to plan. In a way, this reasoning is perverse. You should not commit yourself to being good because it makes you happy, you should commit yourself to being good, because it is the right thing to do. Still, much smarter people than me have reached a similar conclusion. From Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl:

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same hold for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

I want to start applying this principle in my daily life a bit. Whenever I am sad because one of my projects does not go well, I need to remind myself that my happiness is of no great concern here, the only thing that matters is the effect my work will have on other people or the advancement of science.