Happiness Is a Path

Jordan Peterson during his 2017 Discovering Personalities lecture spoke about something that I found intriguing:

…Let’s say I wanted to get to the podium, and there’s a footstool in my way right there. I look at this part of the environment. I’m going to have slightly more negative emotion and slightly less positive emotion. …Let’s say I moved over here, and the footstool is no longer in my way. When I look at that, it’s going to make me slightly happier and slightly less possessed by negative emotion. That’s kind of a useful thing to know because one of the things that determines negative emotion, maybe a primary thing, is how cluttered up is the pathway to your goal.

So, even a footstool can cause minuscule, but somehow measurable, anxiety? I figured there must be an experiment for that somewhere. Such an experiment, I imagined, would consist of a podium on an empty stage and a subject positioned fifteen feet away, staring at it. The professor in charge of this experiment stands next to the subject, Rufus, a college student.

Pointing to the podium, the professor asks, “How do you feel about that podium, Rufus?”

“Cool, man. It looks great.”

The professor then calls out, “Okay, Melissa, we’re ready for the footstool.”

Melissa, a third-year grad student, appears with a footstool. Realizing at that precise moment she will never recover the 100 grand she spent on her education, she sullenly walks in front of the podium, carelessly drops the footstool, and saunters away.

“How do you perceive the podium now, Rufus?” the professor says.

The subject looks again and his eyes widen.

“Dude! The vibe’s different, but I can’t say how. That’s dark, man!”

I looked far and wide for such an experiment, but alas, I found nothing. I eventually learned that there were no footstool-in-front-of-the-podium trials. What Peterson did was draw a vivid picture of the effects of occlusion in the environment—a phenomenon well known to psychologists.

A major proponent of this theory was Jeffrey Gray and his work on Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (RST). He proposed that the hippocampal formation, a particular region in the brain, acts as a "comparator" that constantly checks what is happening against what is expected to happen. This system is highly sensitive to mismatching—situations where the environment fails to meet expectations.

This sensitivity is vital, since unexpected events can create terrible problems or, in extreme cases, threaten survival. When the comparator detects a match, no change in behavior is needed; everything has happened as expected. However, when a mismatch or an "occluded pathway" is detected—read: a footstool in front of a podium—the Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS) is activated.

First, according to the BIS, the subject "freezes" to prevent further movement into potentially dangerous territory. While stalled, the subject identifies the nature of the obstacle. If the world is not what the subject expects, this “unexplored territory" creates anxiety. This is the slightly unsettling vibe our youthful college student experienced. Dark, indeed!

So here you are, stuck behind an occlusion. Research shows there is considerable biological expense in drumming up the will to overcome obstacles. In short, "order" (the non-occluded path) is physiologically cheap because it allows a person to do things they have always done, which requires low energy. On the other hand, "chaos" (the occluded path) is expensive because it demands high levels of cognitive and physiological work.

The best thing to do, then, is to find a clear path, no matter how basic. The brain chemistry behind the "path" is dopamine, which, contrary to common knowledge, is not the reward itself. Rather, the reward it brings fuels the pursuit. Dopamine promotes "plasticity," a personality factor comprising extraversion, openness, and engaged intellect. When the brain sees a clear path to something it wants, it releases dopamine to provide the energy and positive mood needed to keep going. This explains why people who are "striving" and "hardworking" often feel more alive during the process of working toward a goal than they do once the goal is reached.

This is where the genius of breaking down seemingly insurmountable obstacles comes into play. By shattering a big, unpleasant task into smaller ones, a path is instantly created. Not only is each task simpler and requires less work, but the tasks follow a sequential order: Task A must be completed before Task B. The moments between tasks—or “cravings,” as Atomic Habits author James Clear describes them—create the anticipation that triggers dopamine. This, in turn, generates the psychic energy and enthusiasm needed to do the work. It’s not just a set of easier tasks; it is a self-contained vector of tasks powered by motivation.

So, what does all this have to do with happiness? We can ask Thomas Jefferson, since he immortalized the phrase “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence. Although unaware of the biochemical circus going on in our brains, he instinctively knew that happiness was an active endeavor. Happiness is not just about achieving desired goals, but the addition of the interweaved anticipation of future events. Like our test subject, Rufus, we all have some metaphorical footstool in the way ruining “the vibe,” but our internal chemistry is designed to reward the climb, making the footstool necessary for the very happiness we’re after.