Happiness is optional

A lot has been said about happiness and how central it is to life, to work, relationships and so on. Maybe, but at least in one sense nothing could be further from the truth. Happiness is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for getting things done, because it's not actually what motivates us. When we're making a decision, it's not based on our happiness now, but the happiness we expect. To put it another way, it's not reward, it's the expectation of reward.

This might seem like an arbitrary distinction, but actually it's a very important one. A reward is an actual thing with an actual value, but to get an expected reward that value has to make its way through our statistical processing and ends up as an estimation. Actual reward can't be faked, but expected reward can. Your statistical processing can be wrong, and often is in very predictable ways. Worst of all, those predictable failures can be exploited to motivate you without providing any actual reward.

Sometimes that can be useful, because when your predictive system isn't sophisticated enough to see the value in something, you can trick yourself into doing it anyway. Other times, though, those tricks are used against you in the form of easy distractions or systems designed to motivate you for someone else's benefit. This can be as simple as random rewards in video games or as complex as notification systems and endless-scrolling novelty-optimised information feeds.

All of which is to say it's perfectly possible, even easy, to do things for no reward, or for an expectation of a reward that doesn't exist. And it's equally possible to do something that doesn't make you happy, and even to do it quite well. But the fact that happiness is optional doesn't mean you should ignore it. In fact, the opposite. You can't take it for granted; just because you're motivated to do something doesn't mean you're enjoying it, and just because you're doing things doesn't mean you're happy.

Being able to function without happiness means that if you want it then you have to make a particular effort to build it into what you do. Your systems have to be designed to motivate you, but also to give you genuine rewards for that motivation. You need to ask not just "will I enjoy this when it's done?", but "am I enjoying it now?" You can work without happiness, but it's not exactly a pleasant way to be, and if you spend too long without designing happiness into things, there's a risk you'll forget how.