The Tower of Happiness

How your self-projection determines your happiness level at any point in life

This is you at a very young age.

You wander through the world and everything is new and exciting. Your mind is looking at so many new things for the very first time and starts making connections among them.

As John Locke put it in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, our mind at first is a blank yet receptive slate upon which experience imprints knowledge, a tabula rasa later shaped by “sensations and reflections”, the two sources of all our ideas. As Locke explains, “our understandings derive all the materials of thinking from observations that we make of external objects that can be perceived through the senses (sensations), and of the internal operations of our minds, which we perceive by looking in at ourselves (reflection)”.

So you grow older and you keep walking around the world and these sensations and reflections keep bombarding your mind and provide you with what your brain needs in order to build your tastes, your personality and ultimately, your dreams.

There’s a certain point in life, oftentimes around your late teens or early twenties, at which you start looking beyond the internal and the external, into the future, deciding what you want to become based on the aggregate of your past experiences. In other words, you build a self-projection, an image of yourself in the future.

Having a self-projection is essentially synonymous with building a story about yourself in your mind. Stories have traditionally played a significant role in human society. As Amy Kind wrote in her book Persons and Personal Identity:

“We are told stories from the earliest days of our childhood, and throughout our lives we turn to them for entertainment, for comfort, and for edification. We compare people to the fictional characters we’ve grown up with, and we compare events to familiar fictional plotline. We see both ourselves and others in terms of the plot templates and character types we’ve known all our lives. Stories also help us to be dreamers, to embrace the possibilities that the world offers us. Our own lives are stories, and we ourselves are characters in them”.

Let me explain this with an example. When I was a child I used to spend a lot of time with my uncle, who at that time was to be an avid collector of classic cars. I can still remember the thrill I got by riding in those cars next to him, and how fascinated I was by him. In the years, the sensations and reflections elaborated by my mind that followed these particular experiences with my uncle have in part contributed to create an image of what I wanted to be when I grew up; I knew that, among other things that were the result of other experiences, I wanted to become a classic car collector.

But this was only one part of my self-projection. Through school, films, books, the people I met in life etc., I also started to elaborate other pictures in my mind and project an image of myself in the future that was the result of these.

Pierce Brosnan in James Bond gave me an image of the kind of gentleman I wanted to be in my thirties. My high school teachers helped me uncover my interest for critical thinking, which in turn developed into the image of someone pursuing a degree in philosophy. Paul Thomas Anderson’s and Quentin Tarantino’s movies spurred in me an interest for everything Americana, and combined with a photo exhibition of Garry Winogrand that I saw in NYC, I developed an image of myself driving around small town America, taking photos of people, and possibly having my photos published one day.

All these ‘sensations and reflections’ built my self-projection: the picture that I had constructed of myself with regard to who I wanted to become. And during the years that followed, I therefore committed to a number of actions that, ideally, would lead me to become the person that I self-projected in my mind at that time. For example, in order to fulfil the image of the classic car collector, I knew I had to get a good job in order to make enough money to be able to one day buy one of those cars. And in order to get a good job I knew I had to study hard and at a good university. And admission to such university required strong grades. And in turn a lot of studying during my high school years, etc. etc.

But why do we do this? Why do we chase our self-projection? Because we believe that’s where happiness resides. “Once I will become that image I have in my mind, I will be happy”.

So let’s pause for a second here to summarise.

Point 1: The books we read, the movies we watch, the family we are born in, the people we frequent, the experiences we make in life, (the accounts we follow on Instagram..sadly..) etc., all serve to build our personality, our dreams, an image of our self looking forward (i.e. our self-projection). Once I have elaborated my self-projection I will act in order to match it with reality, performing actions in order to achieve that image, convinced that is where happiness resides.

As it turns out, our ego doesn’t only want to build a self-projection of who we want to become. Given our optimistic nature, we are driven to build a positive self-projection, one in which we are depicted as a successful individual, someone who has achieved her passions, dreams, career goals, relationship goals etc.

More specifically, one in which we perceive ourselves as an important person.

Because after all, this is all we seek in life: a feeling of importance. Our ego doesn’t just want to build a self-projection; it wants to build a self-projection in which the main character of the story (i.e. you!) is admired, desired, and fawned upon — ideally, on a mass scale. We don’t envision ourselves as being disliked or ignored. We want to be relevant to people, we want to feel important.

This topic was vastly popularised by Daniel Carnegie’s 1936 bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People. Nevertheless, an array of philosophers before him elaborated on the topic. A few examples:

“Why is it, for instance, that an orator who knows that he has written a good speech, and has fixed it in his memory, and is bringing an attractive voice to the task, still feels anxious nonetheless? Because he is not content merely to practice his art. What else does he want, then? To receive praise from his audience” — Discourse 2.16, Discourses, Epictetus

‘‘Believe me, Socrates. You have only to look at humankind’s love of honour and you will be surprised at your absurdity regarding the matters I have just mentioned, unless you think about it and reflect how strongly people are affected by the desire to become famous and to lay up immortal glory for all time. For the sake of this they are prepared to run risks even more than for their children — spend their money, endure any kind of suffering, even die in the cause. [..] I think that it is for the sake of immortal fame and this kind of glorious reputation that everyone strives to the utmost, and the better they are the more they strive: for they desire what is immortal” — Discourse of Diotima to Socrates, Symposium, Plato

This is a topical point and I believe most of us don’t fully realize how achieving a feeling of importance is really the driver in everything we do.

We buy a Ferrari or a fancy classic car because we like the feeling that we get when driving it. We like when people turn to look at us. If all of a sudden all the human beings except you would go extinct (think Will Smith in the movie I Am Legend) you wouldn’t care about what car to drive.

Some people are in a relationship only because of the feeling of importance they get from it: all of a sudden that banker or NBA player looks more attractive because of his status and in turn the feeling of importance someone may derive from being exposed to their circle.

All else equal, we choose company X over company Y if company X has a more prestigious brand, because it makes us feel more important to work for company X, it elevates our status.

Academics don’t just want to share their thoughts and findings, they want to be published on renowned journals and get the recognition that comes from it.

Plastic surgery is a tool many people employ in order to resemble an idealized version of themselves, one in which people are attracted to.

When friends or couples clash that is many times as a consequence of the fact that one of the two is giving less attention to the other, and what is attention if not making someone feel important?

Club privies, VIP areas, backstage passes are popular because they allow people to feel more important than those standing in general admission or crammed on the dance floor.

When teenagers pick up smoking or drinking it is usually because they crave a feeling of importance and attention among their peers.

We post photos on Instagram because we like the feeling of importance we get when people hit that like button. If Instagram was to shut down tomorrow many influencers would rapidly sink into depression, as their main source of importance would disappear (also that’s the reason why Facebook first and Instagram later have become so popular…they give people a chance to feel…important!)

Most of us don’t look the same on social media as we do in real life and that is for a very simple reason: we are trying to project on social media our best self-projection!

Point 2: The self-projections we build in our mind tend to be positive ones in which we depict ourselves as having attained a feeling of importance

Now that we have uncovered two important points, we can get to the main question: that is, what determines our level of happiness at any given point in our lives?

We have established that we follow our self-projection because we believe that attaining that image will bring happiness to our lives.

As we go on in our daily lives and school and work and hobbies and relationships etc., we are constantly assessing our present reality against our ideal self-projection.

As we discussed in point 1, the actions that we put forward in our lives are motivated by the end goal we set in our mind as the result of our self-projection.

If my self-projection incorporates, among other things, that of a rich professional working in the United States, the moment I get admitted to that top business school in the US makes me happy, as it puts me closer to achieving that self-projection. The opposite is also true: if I get rejected from the school I would feel unhappy as I’m farther from that self-projection.

If my self-projection incorporates, among other things, that of an athlete finishing top 10 in a marathon, the moment I set a personal record during my training I feel happy because it puts me closer to achieving that self-projection of someone finishing the marathon within a certain time limit. If, however, I keep training and my time keeps getting worse, this will cause a state of unhappiness as I will start to think that I won’t achieve that time I had set for myself and in turn my self-projection.

If my self-projection incorporates, among other things, that of someone in a romantic relationship, the moment I meet and start dating someone who has all the characteristics I have always imagined in my ideal partner, I feel happy, and vice versa.

Our brain is constantly assessing how far or close our reality is to our self-projection, the idealised version of ourselves.

There is a continuum between happiness and unhappiness and the closer we are to our self-projection, at any given point in our life, the happier we feel and vice-versa.

We will call this continuum the Tower of Happiness.

When we are rejected from something we fall down the ‘Tower of Happiness’ because something or someone takes us farther from our idealized version of ourselves.

Point 3: Our happiness/unhappiness level at any point in our life depends on how close/far we feel from our self-projection

The final point of the equation is one that inevitably looms in our quest for self-realization: time.

When we are in our late teens/early twenties and start to develop our self-projection, we see a long time ahead of us in order to achieve that image. We live by the bias that ‘we are going to make it one day’. And as we set our mind to achieve goals we anticipate them, we are rewarded with a vicarious pleasure from imagining what it would be like to be that person we see in our mind. After all, us human beings are a naturally optimistic bunch…

As it turns out, the mind can’t distinguish between imagination and reality. When you have a thought, it triggers the same cascade of neurochemicals, regardless of whether you are thinking about the past, present, or future. In other words, your brain is stimulated the same way whether you are physically performing an action or simply visualizing it happen.

It pretty much works like this:

However, as time passes, we are inevitably brought to re-assess our self-projection with regard to the reality that we are in. Most of the time what happens is this.

And then this..

In other words, as time passes, the distance between the idealized version of our self and reality diminishes until there is very little room for anticipation. At one point, reality hits and we are forced to adjust our self-projection. Assuming that we possess full rationality, there comes a time when we realize that we are not going to become that self-projection. There is no more room to anticipate. That’s it, the reality we are in is what that self-projection has actually turned out to be.

Ouch! This hurts. You probably spent many years fighting and hoping to finally be that perfect image you had envisioned for so long in your head only to finally realize it is just not going to happen. Maybe you were not lucky enough. Or maybe you just set an overly optimistic self-projection. In fact, human beings are most of the time inherently unhappy not because of what happens to them, but because of their tendency to project oftentimes unrealistic and excessively optimistic images of themselves in the future.

In any case, being rational human beings we can’t allow our mind to just live with the fact that we failed at achieving that so cherished image. We need to rationalize and we need to move forward. It is just human nature. We therefore reshuffle our self-projection in order to rationalise. It looks something like this:

And using the same graph as before, what happens is this:

A new self-projection is created and we start chasing it again.

“Well, but what happens when someone actually becomes that self-projection?” asked my friend Armand the first time I told this story to him.

In other words, what happens in this case:

In this case I believe there are two situations that can follow:

Situation A: we feel happy as that self-projection was a genuine one, i.e. matching that image that we had set for our self is really what makes us happy. Congrats! You have hit the jackpot! But unfortunately for most people this is not going to last. As you celebrate your happiness your mind is starting already to build a new self-projection and you will soon start chasing it again.

Situation B: we feel empty and desolate; we have fulfilled our goals and become that self-projection but we don’t feel happy.

How is it possible that when we finally match the image that for so long we thought was the link to our long-dreamt happiness we feel a sense of hopelessness and disappointment instead?

Very often it can happen that what we thought was our genuine self-projection (i.e. the product of our genuine and true desires) is nothing but the plot society has built for us. As discussed at the beginning: movies, social media, the people we frequent etc. all contribute dramatically to building people’s egos, goals, self-projections. And unfortunately many times as a result we project an image that doesn’t really belong to us and when we reach such image we feel empty, lost and in turn unhappy — just the opposite of what we thought would have happened.

When people talk about ‘losing their identity’, or having an ‘identity crisis’, effectively they are talking about losing their self-projection. They don’t know what to aim for as what they had thought was going to make them happy turned out not to be so.

Point 4: Our happiness level is positively impacted by anticipating fulfilling the self-projection we have in our mind until reality hits and at that point there’s no more room for anticipation. Most of the time we rationalize, reshuffle our self-projection and start chasing it again.

Conclusion

It is the constant comparison of our real, current life status to our self-projection that determines our happiness level; the closer I feel to that image, the happier I will feel, and the opposite. But it is only when I finally reach my goals, image, self-projection that I can really assess and confirm (or disconfirm) if that image really led to happiness: was that self-projection genuinely mine? If yes, then I will experience a state of happiness and satisfaction (usually only temporary..); if not, I will experience an identity crisis, until, through the process of rationalization, I will build a new self-projection and start chasing it again.

When people say that happiness can only be achieved by being fully in the moment, what this essentially means is making the most with what we are and have NOW, without relying on fulfilling that self-projection to finally allow ourselves to be happy.

But is this really possible?