This is a fairly simple concept: the more things you find acceptable to enjoy or partake in, the more likely you are to find something that pleases you and, thus, the more likely you are to be happy consistently.
For instance, consider two women, Amy and Bonnie, searching for a skirt in the same mall. Amy is a bit conservative and is only willing to get a skirt that goes past her knees and is either black or brown . On the other hand, Bonnie will wear any skirt at all, including ones that are shorter than knee-length. Obviously, if they both go to the same mall, Bonnie has a much greater chance of finding a skirt she wants. By deciding that she must be conservative, Amy had already excluded a portion of the available skirts in the mall, thus decreasing her chances for finding an acceptable skirt.
Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with dressing conservatively, but the point is that Amy is making this tradeoff and its not always clear that we understand and carefully contemplate the trade we are making. Some criteria are indubitably worth limiting our range of acceptability, but other concerns we have can be superflous and only complicate our lives for miniscule benefits.
Obviously, limiting our food intake to only contain non-rotting food is a good standard: it keeps us healthy and ensures happiness in the form of not being sick and/or dying from food poisoning.
However, sometimes we enforce constraints on acceptability only to fuel our egos. Its not entirely clear to me how boycotting Guitar Hero/Rockband-type games because they’re not “real instruments” improves your life: it only limits the range of acceptable recreational activities you can participate. The benefit of imposing this limitation is a cheap and shallow one, it makes you feel superior to any people who do partake in the activities you reject. That “happiness” has no substance, it is bitter and harmful to your character. We must tear down as many of these arbitrary boundaries as we possibly can to maximize our happiness.
The Guitar Hero/Rockband standard seems menial, but how many of our preferences follow the same pattern?
Overall, the concept is this: try to change your preferences to accept as many things as you can without risking your health or any absolutely vital part of your life.
this mentality is vital to growth. we should always strive to be learning. whether its some academic endeavor, better techniques for our day to day operations, or an entirely new phenomenon to expand our understanding of the universe, learning must be the goal. there is no one that can claim to have all the perfect answers to life’s problems, thus we must keep our minds open to the solutions we can extract from our daily experiences in order to have a more pleasant experience. we must always search for the best ways to do whatever we must do.
not every situation will offer you some new bit of information on how to do something or handle a situation, but if you do not keep this mentality ALWAYS, then it is very likely you will skip past many situations where there is a valuable lesson for you. i cannot stress the importance of ALWAYS enough. a republican might assume that a conversation with a democrat will not yield any solutions for the republican because the person providing solutions is democratic, but that is not the mentality most conducive towards seeking the best solutions to life’s problems.
there are many times where properties of a situation will lead you to believe that you have all the knowledge ascertainable from the situation and have the best way of handling a situation. we cannot excuse these situations from our journey for knowledge. life is not without its anomalies: often times, a rookie will teach a veteran something, a child will call something previously unnoticed to his parent’s attention, an idiot will be correct, a genius will be wrong, etc.
there is always the chance that something new will be brought to us and if we go around with some pointless pride or tradition causing us to ignore the opinions/thoughts/ways of others, we will not grow as individuals and not get the most out of our existence.
the most important thing to note is that there is NO benefit whatsoever from assuming we always know the best solution for a problem. people often become so entrenched in their own ways and the diminution of pride that we fail to actually consider all the solutions we are presented with.
for instance, the person we hate most, for whatever reason, might say something true and useful in the middle of a heated argument. however, our mind is set to make them look stupid so it works on a way to make their insightful and accurate statement look wrong and so a chain of thought is launched to find the specific path to the dissolution of that statement. here’s the thing guys, the mind gets what it wants. it is a ridiculously efficient problem-solving machine and will make solutions even when they don’t actually exist. its why people can find clues to support their conspiracy theories, why religious fanatics can see signs from God, etc. the point is that your brain will find a way to make this insightful and correct statement wrong, thus the only way to prevent that is to earnestly investigate the issue. that, i argue, is achieved by always being open to learning. to know that even though this statement is coming from someone i despise, i should test its validity from a completely neutral stance.
life on earth is short and if you don’t believe in an afterlife (like me), your main focus should be to enjoy your time here on earth. there are, of course, some guidelines we should try and follow in our pursuit of happiness.
focusing on happiness isn’t to say that you should always just do what makes you happy at the moment. you have to think about the big picture and favor long-term happiness over the short-term happiness induced by immediate fulfillment of our desires. it is very rare that what is immediately pleasing at the moment will result in long-term happiness as well.
this concept is the driving rationale for any practice in society where we invest in the present, to reap benefits in the future i.e. going to college to have a career we enjoy for the rest of our lives, etc. this concept extends into the realm of morality.
whatever we do in our life, we will have to live with in the future. there is no absolute morality everyone can agree with, but you better make sure that your future self will be able to agree with the decisions you are currently making.
while it is true that the mind will often expand its range of morally acceptable actions to span immoral acts we’ve committed as a cheap reconciliation, that is not how we should live our lives. our morals are the ideas we have on acceptable behavior in a situation before we are ourselves entrenched in that situation. once we are in the situation, our judgment becomes clouded, skewed towards realizing the needs and desires we have for the outcome of a situation.