I like to view life as one giant happiness optimization problem. (That's how you can tell I'm an engineer).
Pretty much all problems are taken care of this way. Time working/salary ratio? Too much to do/boredom? Just keep optimizing.
I do make a bit of an exception. If helping someone else makes them happier at the expense of some of my own, I'll go ahead and (try) to do it. Normally, helping someone else makes me happy too, but occasionally there's times where the kindest thing to do isn't the most enjoyable.
I personally find that trying to optimize too much leaves me stuck in crummy local maxima. By the time you're attempting to use mathematics and modeling to determine the maximum return for happiness, you've lost sight of the bigger picture.
The difficult thing about that is that your first sentence said "I like to view life as one [...] problem". If detaching and letting go is so important to enjoying life, considering it a problem only makes that more difficult. You can't solve a problem and let go at the the time. Or, well, I know some people who can, but they've solved the problem long ago already.
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I like to view life as one giant happiness optimization problem. (That's how you can tell I'm an engineer).
Pretty much all problems are taken care of this way. Time working/salary ratio? Too much to do/boredom? Just keep optimizing.
I do make a bit of an exception. If helping someone else makes them happier at the expense of some of my own, I'll go ahead and (try) to do it. Normally, helping someone else makes me happy too, but occasionally there's times where the kindest thing to do isn't the most enjoyable.
I personally find that trying to optimize too much leaves me stuck in crummy local maxima. By the time you're attempting to use mathematics and modeling to determine the maximum return for happiness, you've lost sight of the bigger picture.
The difficult thing about that is that your first sentence said "I like to view life as one [...] problem". If detaching and letting go is so important to enjoying life, considering it a problem only makes that more difficult. You can't solve a problem and let go at the the time. Or, well, I know some people who can, but they've solved the problem long ago already.
Doesn't that make you unhappy? Because there's always something can be better in your life, and you're always in a mindset of lack.
No, the pursuit of happiness produces happiness itself. It's self-reinforcing.