Criteria: the goal benefits you now and over time, the goal benefits other goals. Bonus: the goal makes you a lot of money and benefits family/friends/others. Additional bonus: fits your aptitude (e.g. IQ and Big 5)
“If you don’t erect a hierarchical structure with something to aim at, you will have no positive emotion. This is what provides your life with meaning. What should your goal be? It’s not arbitrary. There are only a couple playable games that are sustainable. Perhaps it’d be nice if the goal is one that others will enable and even help you to play; a goal that enables you and HELPS you pursue other goals; a goal that helps you NOW and OVER TIME.”
“In order to have any positive meaning in your life, you have to have identified a goal and you have to be working towards it. The circuitry that generates the positive emotion that people really like is only activated when you are proceeding towards a goal you value. If you have no goal you value, you won’t have positive emotion. It gives you the sense of being actively engaged in something worthwhile. WRT positive emotion that is generated by reward: one is associated with satiation (consummatory), the other which is incentive reward is what constantly keeps you moving forward.”
You will be happier if you make quite a bit of progress towards a really important goal. What is an important goal? it’s not obvious. You’re in this class, listening to information, need to listen to it so you can do well on assignment, do well in the class, finish your degree, find a place in world, become financially stable, start a family, have a life...all part of being a good person. That is a **hierarchy** of goals. You might say being a good person is the top of that hierarchy. When you do things that serve that ultimate purpose, you will find those more meaningful. That meaning is a consequence of engaging in this exploratory circuit.
This isn’t hedonism and it isn’t about being happy. This is much more complicated than that. It’s not just generation of positive emotion in immediate future. The problem with the hedonic route is that what makes you happy in the next minute may not make you happy in the next hour. To pursue that something that makes you happy in the immediate present risks hedonism in medium and long term. This is why alcoholism is a problem (hedonism). It certainly is a happy win…but over what period of time? Who is happy? How about the consequences for your family?”
Prolonged dopamine signalling in striatum signals proximity and value of distant rewards:
“Predictions about future rewarding events have a powerful influence on behaviour. The phasic spike activity of dopamine-containing neurons, and corresponding dopamine transients in the striatum, are thought to underlie these predictions, encoding positive and negative reward prediction errors. However, many behaviours are directed towards distant goals, for which transient signals may fail to provide sustained drive. Here we report an extended mode of reward-predictive dopamine signalling in the striatum that emerged as rats moved towards distant goals. These dopamine signals, which were detected with fast-scan cyclic voltammetry (FSCV), gradually increased or--in rare instances--decreased as the animals navigated mazes to reach remote rewards, rather than having phasic or steady tonic profiles. These dopamine increases (ramps) scaled flexibly with both the distance and size of the rewards. During learning, these dopamine signals showed spatial preferences for goals in different locations and readily changed in magnitude to reflect changing values of the distant rewards. Such prolonged dopamine signalling could provide sustained motivational drive, a control mechanism that may be important for normal behaviour and that can be impaired in a range of neurologic and neuropsychiatric disorders.”
Three Forms of Meaning and the Management of Complexity:
"The third form of meaning is not to be found in slavish allegiance to a system of beliefs, nor to specific position in a given dominance hierarchy, nor to incautious and wanton exposure to chaos. It is to be found on the border of chaos and order, Yin and Yang, as the Taoists have always insisted. It is to be found in the voluntary pursuit of interest, that subtle prodding by the orienting complex, which turns our heads involuntary towards the most informative places in our experiential fields, and lets us see the glimmers of redemptive chaos shining through the damaged structure of our current schemas. That glimmer is the star that has always guided us, the star that signifies the birth of the hero, and, when followed, is the guardian angel who ensures that the path we trod is meaningful enough so that we can bear the burden of mortal limitation without resentment, arrogance, corruption and malevolence. Life is not the constant shrinking away from the terror of death, hiding behind an easily pierced curtain of beliefs. Life is the forthright challenging of the insufficiencies that confront us, and the powerful, life-affirming existential meaning that such pursuit instinctively produces. It is that which keeps the spectre of mortality at bay, while we work diligently, creatively, at work whose meaning is so powerful and self-evident that the burden of existence seems well worth bearing. Terror management, be damned! The path of the eternal hero beckons, and it is the doomed and dangerous fool who turns his back on it.
Consider the game, once again – and then, the game of games. The best player is not necessarily he or she who wins a given game, or even a sequence of games. The best player is he who plays such that the game continues, and expands, so that he and others have the greatest chance to play and to excel. When a child is told to be a good sport, this is how he is instructed to behave. The precise rules comprising the meta-game, “be a good sport,” may yet be implicit, in large part, too complex to be fully formulated. This does not mean they do not exist. We dream continuously of the individual who will manifest that pattern most successfully, and search for him – or her – everywhere. What is the best way to successfully play the largest number of games? The answer is not simply computable. Over time different modes of playing emerge, in the attempt to seek the solution. Each individual wants to be maximally valued. Pure aggression is one possible solution. The physically dominant individual can force others to value him as a player. Sufficient display of negative emotion can have the same effect: someone may be invited on multiple occasions into different games by appealing to the sympathy of the other players. These are not optimal solutions, however. Even among chimps, rule of the merely strong is unstable (De Waal, 1989b). Rule of the weak, likewise, breeds resentment: social animals want reciprocity, and will not give continually. Such behaviour is too costly and easily manipulated. Multiple modes of potential playing compete for predominance during childhood. Such competition, and cooperation, extends in a more sophisticated manner, across adult being. What is the victor among those multiple modes, across many individuals?”
“To the degree that you formulate a detailed and profound personal vision, including strategies for implementation, you lend to your endeavors all the motivational forces of those ideals. I am not speaking metaphysically, we know exactly how this works neurophysiological.
Most of the positive emotion that people feel is not associated with the accomplishment of a goal. It is associated with the pursuit of a goal. That means: no goal, no positive emotion. This also implies that the higher and more elevated the goal, the more emotional power there is in the realization that you’re moving towards it. So, one of the things you want to do is to formulate, a, what I would say, profound metaphysical vision that is practical.
Your vision is about your career path, friendships, intimate relationships, your family, activities outside work, your mental and physical health, your character. You need to think about all those things and you need to integrate them into a vision of who you could be.
Then it has to be a vision that speaks to you. The vision says something like ‘if I could be this and have this then that would fully justify my conditions of existence’. Your vision has to be sufficiently compelling. You have to be able to believe in it. That lends to all of your endeavors the power of that vision. It also makes you less anxious. Because one of the reasons that people get anxious is because they’re uncertain, and one of the ways out of uncertainty is to define your pathway forwards. “
The Routines That Keep Us Sane:
“Flaubert complained while writing Madame Bovary—the work anchors each individual day. It also ties the days together into what Eudora Welty called “one long sustained effort.” For her part, Welty was less interested in creating the perfect daily routine than in achieving that larger sense of flow. “It’s the act of being totally absorbed, I think, which seems to give you direction,” she said. “The work teaches you about the work ahead, and that teaches you what’s ahead, and so on. That’s the reason you don’t want to drop the thread of it. It is a lovely way to be.”