With that in mind, here are the four ways I know of for getting more enjoyment from a positive moment without changing the circumstances of that moment:

1) Gratitude. Think about the fact that you have this nice thing, that there is a possible world where you don’t have it, and aim to feel thankful for having it. For instance, if you’re enjoying a cup of tea, you can remind yourself how nice it is to have tea whenever you want, and how much more difficult it was to acquire tea hundreds of years ago.

2) Presence. Try to pay as much attention to the present moment as you can. For instance, rather than being 20% focused on what you’ll be doing later, or having stray thoughts about something else while you’re sipping your tea, focus fully on the experience of your tea.

3) Focus. Narrow your focus from this full moment to the very best aspects of this moment. For instance, focus on the tiny spot in your mouth where the tea tastes most delicious.

4) Acceptance. Stop resisting *everything* that’s imperfect about this moment. If we pay close attention, we can usually find something about any moment that feels imperfect, and it’s that desire for things to be different and that label assigned to aspects of this experience (that things aren’t what you want) that you’re letting go of. Relax all judgment and accept every last detail about this moment without wanting any aspect of it whatsoever to change. When your brain labels something as imperfect, or you notice a desire for something about this moment to change, note the thought or desire and let it go. For instance, fully accept that your face is slightly itchy, that you’re seated in a slightly awkward position, and that your tea tastes exactly as it does, without wanting those aspects of this moment to be any different. One way to do this is to think of this moment as a perfect snapshot of a moment in your life – and you want that snapshot to be exactly as it is to capture this exact moment, not a snapshot of a different moment.

Are there any other approaches to enhancing positive moments that I’m missing here?

This piece was first written on December 24, 2025, and first appeared on my website on January 12, 2026.

While I think there are very serious concerns that advancing technologies, and AI in particular, raise (such as lack of control over these systems with could be a tremendous threat, reduction of agency, and the potential for extreme concentration of power), if we can keep these technologies well under control and pointed at the betterment of humanity (a big if) I don’t think they have to destroy meaning. Here’s why:

While some people do derive a lot of their sense of self-worth from their work (such as myself), and such people could be especially hard hit if they are replaced by technology, there are, thankfully, many things that humans intrinsically value, and therefore, lots of potential sources of meaning. By seeking and then (at least to a reasonable degree) creating what we intrinsically value, we create meaning.

So let’s have a quick look at different human intrinsic values (i.e., things people value for their own sake, not as a means to an end) and how advancing technology, such as AI, may impact each of them:

—

Spirituality and purity: there are no reasons I see that technology would have to interfere with spirituality, religion, or attempts to act purely. So these values could continue being a source of meaning.

Truth and learning: if anything, really effective technology can accelerate the search for truth and our ability to learn. At the same time, technology gone wrong could make the truth harder to discern (e.g., if technology facilitates misinformation outcompeting accurate information).

Achievement: this one could be hard hit by technology insofar as it’s related to doing things that eventually AI may do better than all of us. At the same time, humans find a lot of value in achievements regardless of non-human performance. For instance, people compete in sprints (even though cheetahs could easily outrun us) and find value in achievement in chess (despite AI being able to easily beat the best human). A lot of people also value personal achievement – merely doing the best you can, or improving to do better than your own previous results.

Freedom: while technology could impair freedom (e.g., if it concentrates power into the hands of certain actors, they might choose to limit freedom), there is also potential for technology to expand freedom a lot by allowing us to do many things that weren’t possible before, either because we didn’t know how to do them or because they were too costly before.

Pleasure, non-suffering, longevity: there is no fundamental tension between technology and these values, and technology may be able to improve these by reducing sources of suffering (such as disease), increasing lifespans, and making pleasure more easily accessible.

Happiness (as distinct from pleasure and non-suffering): This is a tricky one, because technology can cut both ways here. For instance, while it’s likely social media has increased some kinds of pleasure, it may well have reduced overall happiness for some people by making them more disconnected or impacting the way they see the world.

Caring, reputation, respect, loyalty, and virtue: these don’t have to be impacted by technology; we could continue valuing these in our relationships with others, even in a world where AI has replaced most work. The main threats I see here from technology are the ways that social media can cause people to spend less face-to-face time together, and the way that AI friends or “relationship” partners could take the place of human relationships.

Justice and fairness: this could go either way. Technology could concentrate power in a way that makes these worse or systematize bias. On the other hand, if the benefits of technology are distributed widely, they could create increased abundance. Technology also has the potential, if harnessed correctly, to reduce (currently commonplace) human bias.

Diversity: globalization tends to reduce diversity, and so technology could accelerate that trend. On the other hand, giving people more freedom through technology could end up increasing forms of diversity (such as how people choose to live their lives).

Protection: technology has the ability to make us safer, so while we may experience more protection (for ourselves and our loved ones), it also could mean that our own role of protecting others is reduced, which could reduce the meaning derived from providing protection. On the other hand, if technology is not developed thoughtfully, the world could feel increasingly chaotic and even become more unsafe, so protection could become even more important.

Nature: technology has a track record of destroying nature, so that trend may continue. However, it’s possible that with sufficiently advanced technology, that trend will go the opposite direction (e.g., cheap green energy makes it easier to protect nature). Technology often destroys nature either as a means to accelerate or as a side effect of acceleration, but sufficiently advanced technology may reduce that effect.

Beauty: technology has the possibility of increasing beauty in the world (making it easier to create and experience beauty), but also runs the risk of filling the world with generic slop.

Overall, while advancing technology may have a negative impact on some things that humans intrinsically value, as long as we don’t destroy the world with these technologies and avoid allowing extreme concentration of power from them, other intrinsic values may not be impacted or even be benefited by technology. As long as we can seek and (to a reasonable degree) create what we intrinsically value, there are sources of meaning available.

This piece was first written on November 16, 2025, and first appeared on my website on December 22, 2025.

Can a chosen definition be “wrong”? No. If you choose a definition, then you can define a sound or series of characters to mean whatever you want them to mean. For instance, if you wanted, you could declare that whenever you say “phloop,” you mean one of those little paper umbrellas that are sometimes found in Piña coladas. That would be weird, but it wouldn’t be “wrong.” But we suggest that there are at least seven ways a definition can be “lousy.” 

By understanding what makes a good definition and what makes a lousy one, you can better formulate your ideas, and you can better spot mistakes in other people’s arguments. For instance, you might be in a situation where you’re trying to define the essence of an idea you came up with or characterize the unique career role that you’ve designed for yourself. Alternatively, you might be struggling to understand a definition that someone else is using, and you want to diagnose why exactly you’re finding it confusing. The words we use are crucial to the success of the interactions we have, and it is very handy to be able to pinpoint when a particular word is making a conversation more confusing than it needs to be. So, here are the things that we think make for lousy definitions! 

1. Miscommunication

If you decide the word “dog” refers to cats, people are going to be very confused.

Similarly, if you’re talking to someone who uses the word “racism” to mean X (say, “an explicitly held and endorsed belief that some racial groups are inferior to others”), and you use it to mean Y (say, “any form of negative generalization or attitude to a racial group, whether it’s implicit or explicit”), your conversation is probably not going to go as well as you would like until you identify that difference in usage. For these reasons, good definitions shouldn’t reuse terms that people are already familiar with or have multiple meanings associated with them. A good way to avoid the latter is to clarify upfront what you mean when you’re using a particular definition if the other person might not know what you mean when using that word.

2. Irrelevance

If you define a “dooooog” to be a dog with more than five legs, you’re not going to find it to be useful for much of anything. Dogs like that probably do exist, but they are not something almost anyone ever needs to refer to. We want our definitions to aim toward the things we are likely to want to reference.

For instance, someone bothered to define the word “Rasceta” to mean the crease commonly found going across a person’s wrist. Presumably, there is some subculture where that is a useful word, but very few people will ever need to know that definition. 

3. Unnaturalness

If you define “dogephant” to include all dogs smaller than 10 pounds AND all elephants more than 8000 pounds, you have not “carved reality at the joints.” Because of mixing things that aren’t clearly alike, using this definition makes communicating more muddled than it needs to be.

Another instance of this phenomenon is our use of the word “selfish.” Sometimes people define the word “selfish” in such a way that it includes both “stealing money from someone” and “sacrificing your own life to save the life of ten others because you feel such a strong emotion of compassion for those people;” it’s about doing things that make you feel “good.” An alternate reading of “selfish” might be much more negative: it’s about taking actions which benefit you at the cost of other peoples’ wellbeing.

4. Opinionatedness

If you define “dogmor” to be “those dog-loving morons who somehow are convinced that dogs are better than cats,” then the definition imports both a debatable opinion and an emotional slant into its meaning, causing usage of this word to be infected with either or both of these things.

For example, the word “sissy” not only suggests that someone — usually a boy or man — embodies feminine qualities but carries with it a negative, insulting connotation. If your aim is to make certain people feel bad, then this might be a good strategy to take, though you might be being a jerk, and that approach doesn’t make for clear, unbiased communication.

5. Ambiguity

If by “dogdog” you mean anything that a dog can like, then your word is (1) hard to use and (2) hard to think about; dogs like a large range of things, and individual dogs also have distinct preferences!

The word “problematic” (when used without clarification) is another (problematic) example of a definition: the problem being referred to could be of many different types and could range from quite objective to just the idiosyncratic, subjective opinion of the writer.

6. Inefficiency 

If you define “doglegs” to be anything with the legs of a dog, and “dogface” to be anything with the face of a dog, etc., then you can talk about walking your dog by saying, “I just got back from walking a creature with doglegs, dogface, dogfur, dogheart, …” But this is a ridiculously inefficient way to talk about your dog! Some definitions make communication substantially more efficient since they compress lots of information you commonly want to express into a small package.

Consider a different instance of this: it is possible to talk about calculus without having a word that means “the derivative” (e.g., by always referring to “limits of functions”), but this is going to be a painful and inefficient way to think and communicate. The word derivative makes ideas in calculus much easier to talk about. 

7. Lack of precision

If you define “floofster” to be any animal with fur, then you will not be communicating very precisely when you say, “I pet my floofster this morning.” You may be saying something true (and rather adorable), but someone will not know if you were petting a dog, a cat, or something more exotic like a lizard wearing a fur coat! Ideally, we want our definitions to focus on just those items or concepts we are trying to communicate.

Similarly, if you say to your friend, “I’m feeling bad,” the ambiguity of the word “bad” makes it harder for them to understand what you’re going through. If you say, “I have a headache,” then it will be easier for your friend to help you. Even better, if true, would be to say, “I have a migraine.” 

So, no chosen definition can be “wrong,” but plenty of definitions are “lousy.” To prevent lousy definitions, you should choose definitions that:

(1) allow clear communication, 

(2) refer specifically to the things of interest, 

(3) carve reality at the joints, 

(4) don’t sneak in debatable opinions/slants, 

(5) are relatively unambiguous, 

(6) express more information in fewer words, and 

(7) allow us to be more exact and specific with our words. 

We hope you found this helpful!

This piece first appeared on the Clearer Thinking blog on March 2, 2021, and was published on this site on December 16, 2022.

Epictetus, born ~50AD, was a disabled man born into slavery in Phrygia (present-day Turkey). Nothing that he wrote down survives; we know about him only through the words of other scholars. But he was so wise that his ideas reverberate through society today. This article summarizes some parts of his incredible life and the impact that he had on the world:

Epictetus’s Life

Epictetus walked with a limp, a disability he may have had from birth, from when his leg was broken deliberately by his enslaver, or from a later medical condition (stories on this differ). He was passionate about philosophy from a young age. His enslaver, who had previously been a slave himself, let Epictetus study Stoic philosophy. Epictetus obtained his freedom in adulthood and taught philosophy in Rome. But the Roman emperor then banished all philosophers from the city. At that point, Epictetus moved to Epirus, Greece, where he founded a school of philosophy.

Epictetus’s Impact

The reason we know about his ideas is due to his most famous pupil, Arrian, who wrote in the prologue to Discourses of Epictetus: “whatever I heard him say I used to write down, word for word, as best I could, endeavoring to preserve it.” Arrian said Epictetus “induce[ed] his listener to feel just what [he] wanted him to feel.” 

People who cited Epictetus’ ideas in their writing include:

• Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius
• Voltaire, who described him as someone “whom one almost despairs of imitating”
• Author Tom Wolfe (the book, Enchiridion of Epictetus is referenced in “A Man in Full”)
• Novelist James Joyce
• Herodes Atticus who called him “the greatest of the Stoics”

Additionally, Albert Ellis (1913 – 2007) credited Epictetus with providing a foundation for his system of psychotherapy, underlining the prevailing relevance of Epictetus’s observations about the people of ancient Greece. Ellis’ theory (rational emotive behavior therapy, R.E.B.T.) eventually became a major part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the most evidenced-based therapy for treating mental disorders today.

Epictetus’s Ideas

Epictetus was part of the Stoic school of philosophy, which is about letting go of negative emotions like fear and jealousy and being calm – or “stoic” – in the face of suffering. 

Here are some of the most insightful quotes attributed to Epictetus, organized by topic. You’ve probably heard some of these ideas expressed by famous people alive today. Well, Epictetus said these things almost two THOUSAND years before them. Let that sink in for a moment before reading on. (We’ve edited some quotes for clarity – you can find most of the originals on Goodreads.) 

Epictetus on challenges

• “There’s one way to happiness, and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”
• “The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.”

Epictetus on relationships

• “Keep company only with those who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.”
• “Anyone capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed.”
• “If evil be said of you, and it’s true, correct yourself; if it’s a lie, laugh at it.”
• “It is a fact of life that other people, even people who love you, will not necessarily agree with your ideas, understand you, or share your enthusiasms.”
• “If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, ‘He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.'”

Epictetus on self-improvement

• “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”
• “He who laughs at himself never runs out of things to laugh at.”
• “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
• “How long will you wait before you demand the best for yourself?”
• “No person is free who is not a master of themself.”
• “Don’t just say you’ve read books. Show through them you have learned to think better, to be more discriminating and reflective. Books are the training weights of the mind… it’s a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.”

Epictetus on meaning

• “Seek not the good in external things; seek it in yourselves.”
• “Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.”
• “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.”
• “Who is rich? He who is content.”

Epictetus on wisdom

• “Small-minded people blame others. Average people blame themselves. The wise see all blame as foolishness.”
• “He is a wise person who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those he has.”
• “Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.”

Epictetus’s story is very inspiring, and it is a nice reminder that many of our experiences – and the wisdom that can guide us through these experiences – are shared by people who are geographically, culturally, and temporally distant from us. 

Below is my attempt to list all human needs ranked according to their typical importance (from most important to least). Thanks for the idea, Maslow!

I’m defining a “need” here as something non-replaceable (i.e., you can’t just substitute it for something else), which, if substantially unsatisfied, would inhibit well-being for the vast majority of people.

You might say that you “need an iced tea” on a hot day, but it could be easily replaceable with lemonade or iced coffee, so iced tea is not a “need” in the sense that I mean. On the other hand, water (if you haven’t had any in a couple of days) really is irreplaceable, and a lack of it greatly reduces well-being. I’m using well-being here in a broad sense, to include everything from not dying to not feeling miserable to feeling happy.

Someone might say, “I need X if I’m going to achieve Y,” but that’s also not the sort of need I mean here (unless Y is “well-being” and X is something non-fungible).

My organizational scheme is to place needs into five levels, from highest to lowest average importance:

NEEDS

Level I: Immediate Survival

Level II: Extended Survival

Level III: Mental Health

Level IV: Relationships

Level V: Satisfaction

Immediate Survival needs come first because if you don’t satisfy them, you will quickly die. So all other needs usually take a back seat. Extended Survival needs are usually next in importance when they are not met (most of the time) because if you don’t satisfy them, you eventually die. The categories after that are harder to rank strictly, but in acute states of poor mental health, it is a lot harder to focus on relationships and higher forms of satisfaction, so I place mental health third. After that, I put relationships because they seem to create stronger needs for most people most of the time than the final level (satisfaction needs).

Beyond Level V there is another level, “Intrinsic Values,” but I do not include them as “needs,” per se, because while they are things people want, they differ a lot from person to person, and having them be poorly met often is not sufficient to inhibit well-being. For instance, someone may have an intrinsic value of people all around the world being happy, but they may not have their own day-to-day well-being limited by the lack of happiness of strangers around the world.

Note that it is definitely possible to attain higher-level needs while not having all the lower-level needs met. For instance, someone who is a prisoner could build meaningful relationships with other prisoners despite not having privacy or enough food to eat.

While most people have all or almost all of the needs listed below, the degree to which people experience the needs differs. Hence the order here should be taken as only very approximate. Moreover, some people fully lack some of these needs, especially items later in the list, so these should not be thought of as universal.

An additional factor is that how much people seek a need depends both on the importance of that need and on the perceived difficulty of satisfying it. For instance, someone who has not had any water in a day will likely be very focused on finding water if they believe it is attainable, but if they believe it is not attainable, they may be focused on other (higher up) needs.

List of Human Needs

Level I: Immediate Survival

1. Oxygen – an open airway (between our lungs and the outside world) and a constant supply of air that is at least 19.5% oxygen (and partial pressure of oxygen of less than 1.4 atm)

2. Functioning – freedom from severe/acute injury, bodily damage, and organ failure

3. Safety – no immediate threats from the environment, including from dangerous human or nonhuman animals

4. Temperature – protection from hypothermia or hyperthermia (i.e., one’s core body temperature needs to stay within 95-104 degrees Fahrenheit at all times)

5. Hydration -at least a few liters of water every three days

Level II: Extended Survival

6. Noncontamination – no more than trace quantities of poisons, radiation, and toxins

7. Lack of infection – the absence of severe infection with dangerous viruses, bacteria, fungi, protozoans, helminths, and prions

8. Dryness – a sufficiently dry environment at least every few days (or else our skin will macerate)

9. Sleep – at least ~28 hours of sleep per week

10. Energy – at least ~25,000 calories every three weeks

11. Macronutrients – sufficient quantities of the three macronutrients each month (varieties of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins) plus fiber

12. Macrominerals – sufficient quantities of the essential macrominerals every so often (sodium, chloride, potassium, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, sulfur)

13. Microminerals – at least a tiny bit of the microminerals every so often (which probably include iron, zinc, iodine, selenium, copper, manganese, fluoride, chromium, molybdenum, nickel, silicon, vanadium, cobalt).

14. Vitamins – sufficient quantities of the 13 essential vitamins every few months (vitamins A, C, D, E, K, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B12, Folate)

Note: these nutrients/minerals/vitamins may not all be truly essential for survival, and there could be other nutrients, vitamins, or minerals that are essential that science doesn’t yet know about or that I just haven’t heard of.

Level III: Mental Health

15. Comfort – freedom from intense pain or discomfort (e.g., due to a pinched nerve, migraine, having to pee extremely badly, or a kidney stone)

16. Urge Satiation – freedom from an intense addiction or urge that can’t be satiated (e.g., a heroin user who is in the throes of a very strong urge to use again or someone who is very hungry when there is food just out of reach that they can’t get to)

17. Rest – the ability to stop exerting yourself once you have been engaged in a strenuous physical or mental activity for a long time

18. Cleanliness – a body and environment that doesn’t feel extremely dirty, contaminated, or infested

19. Understanding – not being confused about what is happening around you and being able to make sense of events.

20. Choice – the ability to make choices about what we do and don’t do (including freedom from imprisonment, enslavement, and extreme coercion or control)

21. Calmness – the sense that most of the time we, and the things that matter to us, are sufficiently safe (or else we are likely to have chronic anxiety)

22. Self-esteem – the sense that we have value and are capable of doing things that are worth doing

23. Hope – the sense that there will be value that we can create in the future and that the future will contain at least some good things (or else we are likely to be depressed)

24. Privacy – the ability to do things without being monitored and to have time to yourself without other people there (e.g., when showering, using the bathroom, or just when wanting to be alone)

Level IV: Relationships

25. Trust – a sense that the people in our immediate environment will not manipulate us, trick us, steal from us, use us, or hurt us.

26. Social interaction – social interaction with people we like and care about, and the sense that there are people who like and care about us

27. Community – the sense that we are accepted socially in at least one community, and ideally also that we are valued and have a role to play in that community

28. Sex – at least one partner we can engage in sexual activity with

29. Romantic love – a romantic partner we have a strong emotional bond with, who loves us and whom we love

30. Non-romantic love – family members or friends that love us and that we love back

31. Children – either children of our own, a partner we plan to have children with, or children of our relatives to help care for. Note: not everyone feels a need to have children, though many people do.

Level V: Satisfaction

32. Stimulation – sufficiently novel stimuli to keep us interested, or engaging tasks that bring us into a flow state (or else we become bored)

33. Enjoyment – the availability of activities that we enjoy

34. Meaning – goals, relationships, causes, or activities that feel important or meaningful to us, or that we feel we “live for” (or else our lives lack a sense of purpose and meaning)

35. Authenticity – the ability and confidence to behave as our authentic self without facing severe negative consequences

INTRINSIC VALUES

Beyond needs (i.e., non-fungible inhibitors to well-being), there are “intrinsic values,” which are things you desire for their own sake (not as a means to other ends) and which you would want even if they brought you nothing else. By definition, the things we intrinsically value, we want there to be more of.

Some intrinsic values are things we want for ourselves, others we want for our friends, family, or community, and still others we want for the world or universe.

Intrinsic values can be organized into something like 22 categories. Our categorization of them includes longevity, legacy, reputation, virtue, loyalty, justice, fairness, diversity, respect, caring, protection, nature, beauty, purity, spirituality, truth, learning, achievement, and freedom. Normally I would also include happiness, pleasure, and non-suffering in that list, but those bleed into needs, and so I would leave them out in this case to make the distinction between needs and intrinsic values clearer.

To learn more about your own intrinsic values, you can take our Intrinsic Values Test.

This essay was first written on July 28, 2021, and first appeared on this site on September 16, 2022.

1. one is profound (but probably false or nonsense)

2. the other meaning is trivial or obvious (but true)

These paired meanings can trick our brains into thinking that the idea is both profound and true: we experience the profoundness of one meaning while experiencing the truth of the other meaning. These are phrases that exploit the odd nature of our minds.

Some examples are (arguably):

• “Love is just a word.”

• “Everything happens for a reason.”

• “There is no ‘I’ in team.”

• “Beauty is only skin deep.”

I’d like to propose a new term: “deepiful.”

A deepiful is a statement that seems trivial or dumb but which has genuinely profound consequences!

A deepiful is the opposite of a deepity (since a deepity is dumb but sounds profound, whereas a deepiful is profound but sounds dumb!).

Here are some examples.

Deepiful 1: if each of a system’s states is equally likely, and we group them into categories (e.g., “mixed up” states vs. “organized” states), then the things that actually happen will (obviously) tend to be from categories containing more states.

This is totally trivial in a sense, yet it’s the basis of entropy!

Deepiful 2: if some organisms are more successful at passing down their genetic material than others, then organisms similar to them will grow in relative numbers.

This is also trivial, yet it’s the basis of natural selection!

Deepiful 3: if you define new words for things and use the shortest words for the most commonly said things, you’ll be able to communicate using fewer letters. Keep going, and you’ll have the shortest way of saying things.

Another trivially true statement, yet it’s the core of information theory!

Deepiful 4: if you have a bunch of dots on a piece of paper, you can draw with a pencil from left to right to connect them together in an endless variety of ways!

This is obvious, and a young child can easily see that this is true, and yet it’s the basis of the concept of overfitting in machine learning!

This piece was first written on September 18, 2020, and first appeared on this site on April 22, 2022.

happiness =

   social-acceptance
+ self-acceptance
+ meaning
+ hope
+ pleasure
+ efficacy
+ resilience
+ optimism

– physical-wants
– pain
– anxiety
– loss and depression

Positives

social-acceptance = human interaction with the sort of people you want to interact with in the form of warm and trusting relationships, and the gut-level feeling that this group accepts you, likes you, and respects you

Interventions: exposure therapy if you have social anxiety, avoiding mean people, social skills training, getting direct feedback on how to be a better friend, meeting a wide range of people in a wide variety of social circles, leaving a social circle that treats you badly

–

self-acceptance = believing you are not fundamentally bad or worthless, that you are worthy of love and respect, not feeling excessively guilty about your past actions, etc.

Interventions: self-compassion training

–

meaning = feeling on a gut level that your life has meaning or significance, that actions you take have the ability to influence what happens, and that the world in general is not meaningless

Interventions: working on a project that you find deeply important for a cause much bigger than yourself, cognitive behavioral therapy or antidepressants if you think you may be depressed and haven’t tried them yet

–

hope = feeling on a gut level that there will be good things in the future and that your future is not doomed

Interventions: mapping out plans for your future, applying problem solving techniques to problems that you feel are hopeless, life coaching

–

pleasure = for instance, eating delicious food, listening to beautiful music, play, doing work you find fun, etc.

Interventions: spending money on pleasurable experiences rather than things, engaging in pleasurable experiences at the maximal rate you can afford without them getting dull or routine, trying a wide variety of activities to see which you most enjoy

–

efficacy = the belief that you have the capability to achieve the things that you want to achieve, and the feeling that you are actively achieving worthwhile things (whether in work, in hobbies, or in your social life)

Interventions: if possible, choosing work where you get a consistent feeling of accomplishment, taking on side projects or hobbies that give you a feeling of accomplishment, training each week at a skill that you can watch yourself improving at, looking for small achievements that you can hit easily and then building up slowly to more and more difficult ones

–

resilience = the ability to recover quickly from setbacks, failures, and bad conditions

–

optimism = a mindset where you see the best in things, interpret ambiguous events positively, see the silver lining in bad things, etc.

Negatives

physical-wants = hunger, thirst, sleep deprivation, the need for warmth, etc.

–

pain = injuries, illnesses, physical environments, or social treatment that causes consistent substantial pain

Interventions: avoiding repetitive stress injury by using good typing practices, avoiding chronic back pain by learning to have good sitting posture, leaving abusive relationships

–

anxiety = constantly worrying about, or ruminating or obsessing over what will happen or did happen (e.g., from uncertainty about basic security like clean water, nourishing food, reliable shelter, or safety from physical danger, or worrying about social rejection or fear of failure), or regular triggers of intense fear

Interventions: regularly doing intense exercise, cognitive behavioral therapy or antidepressants if you think you may have an anxiety disorder, Exposure and Response Prevention if you think you may have obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), Prolonged Exposure Therapy if you think you might have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

–

loss and depression = having something you value taken away from you, or knowing that you will lose something you value in the near future

Please note: if you have been feeling a lot of sadness, or you worry that you might be depressed, I recommend seeing a professional and checking out our app UpLift.

If you like this essay, you may also like The Fourier transform of happiness and Ten theories for how to achieve true happiness (and useful resources for you to try them out).