Some folks are born into a good life

Other get it anyway, anyhow

Me? Well I lost my money and I lost my wife

But them things don't seem to matter much to me now

I hear she's got a house up in Fairview

And a style she's trying to maintain

Well if she wants to see me

You can tell her that I'm easily found

Tell her there's a spot out 'neath Abram's Bridge

Tell her there's that darkness on the edge of town

That there's a darkness on the edge of town

There’s a darkness on the edge of town

Well, everybody's got a secret, Sonny

Something that they just can't face

Some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it

They carry it with them every step that they take

'Til someday they just cut it loose

Cut it loose or let it drag 'em down

Where no one asks any questions

Or looks too long in your face

In the darkness on the edge of town

‘ If she wants to see me, tell her I’m easily found…’

She/we are seeking satisfaction of motivations. She was seeking to satisfy some negative motivations via Springsteen and he’s pointing out that it’s easy to satisfy those motivations; ‘there’s a spot out beneath Abrams bridge…’

Why does ‘Mary’ love Pete, but not Paul or Harry? Because Pete generates the delicious feelings we call love in her and they don’t. Apparently the name of the primary ‘love’ bio chemical/hormone is 'oxytocin', but what’s relevant is it’s that which Mary appreciates and wants to retain.

How her brain understands her feelings, and why those feelings exist as they do, is up to her brain. It can concoct whatever model/rationalisation it wants to, but it’s just guessing about something that has nothing to do with it. It’s like trying to explain a taste.

The Tao that can be explained

Is not the Tao.

Why do we value love, of the romantic variety, above almost anything else? Because it feels great, and if we can keep it for the rest of our lives then we’ve gone a long way towards feeling happy until we die, or our partner dies. Added up, life long love is not a mere pint of deliciousness, but a tanker full. Of course we value that, and will ‘crawl over broken glass’ to get it, because it’s so valuable. We’ll put our ‘best foot forward’, be the most lovely, considerate person in town to get it. At least initially.

Once we do get it, if we do, we’ll then adapt to it, take it for granted somewhat, and switch our focus and energy to satisfying other motivations that are queued up. Completely normal, time doesn’t stand still and there are numerous other motivations - survival, for example - that also need to be juggled.

The specific pure romantic love flavour tends to fade, but is replaced by different, hopefully still very pleasant, flavours. Respect, for example. We still call the new blend ‘love’, but it’s different.

Point being; underneath it’s all bio chemicals. We’re feeling something and those somethings are ‘invisible’ bio chemicals.

‘I am the hunter of the invisible game’

Some people understand this, and accept this, making their actual objective/s much easier to achieve. It creates a different mentality; 'I’m feeling uncomfortable' and not 'he/she is making me feel uncomfortable'. He/she is just doing as he/she does, I’m the one generating ugly flavours in response. The problem is not other peoples actions, it’s my response to them.

Instead of having just the one tool in our toolbox - changing our environment to better satisfy our motivations - we also have another one; we can also change our motivations so we’re responding differently. We feel no lack - no painful craving - if we no longer want that something. If we feel we lack nothing we have everything we want and if we have everything we want we are, by definition, very happy.

Don’t move the mountain

Move yourself

Taoist Truism

When flexible, we can mix and match. We can change our secondary motivations, and we can change our environment, to some degree, to achieve a satisfactory match.

Regardless of how successful we are in this endeavour, the fact remains the flavours are generated in us. Pete loves black coffee, Paul hates it. It’s not the black coffee, it’s our response to it. Paul can, if he wanted, make himself drink back coffee and he’ll soon come to enjoy it, but he may not understand this, may not realise how flexible he is and thus not be flexible at all.

Working against this flexibility is our ego which derives its pleasure from status thereby promoting the illusion of solidity. Regardless of how we happen to define good/better/superior we have to believe those values are the objectively true set for our status to be objectively true. If we want to be good, some others have to be bad, not just different. If we’re personally all that’s good and noble then it’s not for us to change is it? The universe needs to change to match our wants, to satisfy our current motivations. We seek to move the mountain.

Not surprisingly, given we’re not God, moving ourselves tends to be the most fruitful strategy.

Strength is fantasy, time is illusion

I feel you breathing, the rest is confusion

Your skin touches mine, what else to explain?

I am the hunter of the invisible game.

Springsteen; Hunter of the Invisible Game.

An unfortunate side effect of early, intensive and prolonged education is not just the relentless nailing in of that particular set of cultural values via which we then seek to obtain status. Once they’ve rusted in, it can be hard to ever get those nails out, but perhaps more damaging is the constant suppression of what the child actually would prefer to be doing. Continually have those circuits overridden eventually leads the child to become somewhat disconnected from their innate instinctual motivations.

We’ve come a long way

Things changing day by day

But tell me

Where do the children play?

Increasingly, they don’t and then they forget how to. If we believe life is about hard work, so it will inevitably be.

Once upon a time, in the coal mines, horses were used to cart the coal up from deep below and new born foals were hitched to their mums cart so up and down they’d also go. The foal grows up and ‘wants’ to live in that mine trudging back and forth. Good for the mine owner, not so good for the horse.

I come from down in the valley

Where, when you’re young

They bring u up to do

Just as your Daddy done.

Springsteen; 'The River'.

The world is as it is. More people, less resources, increased competition. It is what it is and societies do what they have to do to keep their workforce competitive and productive. Sure, but the individual can step back and decide if that’s really how they want to spend the moments they have. What are we actually seeking? The answer is a happy life. What is happiness ? It’s an experience, it’s something we feel. What are those somethings?

Most people get what they prioritise.

Unless you're pursuing something with extremely low odds, then it's rare to not attain it (in due time) if you genuinely make it a priority.

People's daily and weekly schedules clearly display their priorities.

Zuby

We prioritise - orientate towards - according to the balance of power within our ‘basket of motivations’ and, yes, wanting to be a good person is a motivation. As ‘good’ is subjective we’re only ever a good person to that group that shares our values which, naturally enough, tends to be our in -group. If tragedy befalls us, they might shed tears, but the rest of the world doesn’t care, even if they know about it. Of course, we’d all be a dysfunctional wailing ball of tears and pain if we did have empathy for everyone. Amongst that avalanche of ugly flavours there might well be a few splashes of pleasant ones- that good/superior people are hypersensitive like me- but that's scant compensation. In reality, no one is that hypersensitive, though if we’re rewarded for ‘being’ hypersensitive we might well pretend we are. We all have filters as we simply couldn’t advance our own interests without them. Life forms that can’t act in their own interests simply don’t exist, or at least not for long.

Naturally enough, our first priority is survival. If we have a sabre toothed tiger stalking us, or no food on the table, we’ve got other priorities much more important than our level of happiness. Sure, but beyond survival mode we get to decide our priorities, or at least we do if we have our autonomy. Springsteen left school at 16 so perhaps he escaped becoming too heavily programmed.

We busted out of class

Had to get away from those fools

Learnt more from a 3 minute record

Than we ever learnt in school.

Like soldiers on a stormy night

With a vow to defend

No retreat baby

No surrender

But also he’s an extreme example. His sweet spot is way further along the spectrum from the spots that would snugly fit the vast majority of people. Having to go so far is not a plus, it’s a negative, as he’d be the first to point out. There's obviously millions of materially poor people, living in shacks, who live lives averaging a significantly higher level of happiness than most millionaires. Indeed, when we lack the material buffer, events matter. There's victories, and celebrations, in the mundane. The mundane isn't mundane, and they simply don't have the opportunity to accumulate layers of emotionally suffocating secondary motivations.

Though intellectualisation may make for a brilliant academic record in high school, in adult life it must be tempered by a more flexible defence system - one the lets instinctual pleasure peek through.

George Vaillant MD Adaptation to life

We can't thrive on a diet of labels and meanings. But we can't know from where within what we're feeling arises from. It's all just a blur of pleasure and pain. Just a mix of flavours. Our brain can guess, but it can't know.

I want to run, I want to hide

I wanna tear down the walls that hold me inside

I wanna reach out and touch the flame

Where the streets have no name

I wanna feel sunlight on my face

See that dust cloud disappear without a trace

I wanna take shelter from the poison rain

Where the streets have no name.

U2. 'Where the streets have no name'

Beyond something like a stubbed toe, what we’re feeling is generated within. The vast bulk of the delicious feelings, that together we call happiness, flow from our emotions, from our emotional instincts. If we want to be happy, we have to nourish them which means reducing the motivations competing against our emotional motivations.

We’re orientated in a particular direction and that orientation is determined by the balance of power in our ‘basket of motivations’. In practice, we might go this way for a time, then that way, so we’re actually going in circles. But the point is our steps are determined by our motivations only some of which are innate and hardwired in.

To get to emotionally abundant fields we must be heading to where those fields are. As status abundant fields are in a very different direction we want our emotional motivations to be winning the tug of war against our ego motivations.

It’s not a binary, either or, proposition as our ego is something like a pet dog that will be happy enough following along behind. The difference is whether we’re being dragged by our dog to where it wants to go, or if it’s trained and follows behind our emotional motivations.

Throw survival motivations into the mix and it naturally gets more complicated, especially because our survival and ego motivations tend to team up and pull in the same direction. A promotion, for example, satisfies both.

This life thing, and its challenges, are not necessarily straight forward, but why would it be?

Such is the game of life and we figure it out, learn to play it well, or we don’t.