For links to other essays in this series, see the bottom of this post.
The previous set of essays explored the question, "how to choose happiness?" From a practical standpoint, we noted that positive psychology probably gives the most immediate prescriptions and starting point, provided that you take two premises as a given: 1) that you have chosen to work towards being happier, and 2) implicitly you think increasing your own well being is a sufficient end in itself (whatever the reasons may be).1
However, it is not the job of positive psychology to give answers to questions like "why happiness," nor does it make prescriptions of how to make very personal judgments of how to balance the pursuit of the different facets of well-being. The simplest answer is "more of all of them!" But life is not always that simple, and the responses and answers that we explored when asking the questions "how and why not choose happiness?" revealed many complexities and tensions.
I'm interested in dissecting these tensions, understanding when and why things don't feel right, and figuring out how to dissolve (feelings of) the questions. These tensions gesture at basic forces within us that we all answer to, consciously or unconsciously. To be snazzy, I'll call these "Forces of the Soul," and cover them over the next few posts.
Before proceeding it is helpful to clarify some words as I intend to use them.
Part 1: disambiguating "you"
The topic of what the "self" (or non-self!) is or who "you" are is a rich topic that can easily span books upon books. Buddhism, for example, gives interesting accounts of emptiness, anatman, and conventional understandings of the self. Given widely varying context-dependent conceptions of what "you" or "yourself" refers to (i.e. is it just your consciousness? your identities? your history? your body? your soul?), I won't pin down a definitive definition.
But I don't think it's too controversial to at least say that we all recognize we have conscious and unconscious aspects of our behavior. I'll call the conscious experience "you," much in the same colloquial way I would address you in person, or you as a person reading this. In contrast, I call the unconscious mechanisms and actions, "your brain," (e.g. reflexes and habits) and the unconscious part that feels and sometimes even wills, "your soul." Consider experiences where "you don't know why you feel a certain way." Clearly, this kind of statement gestures at two kinds of entities, one that knows and one that feels. What I refer to as the "soul" is that feeling part of you. It’s just a literary device, because I like how it sounds. My use of the word “soul” is not meant to be a metaphysical claim.
Part 2: needs versus forces
For a while I initially called this upcoming series of essays "Needs of the Soul." Part of it was that I do think these processes underlie human flourishing (and withering) and ways that the soul seeks to be nourished (or feels hungry), and in that sense are needs. In contrast, calling something a “force” feels more clinical and doesn't convey this warm and fuzzy view (although “soul” kind of does).
However, the more I thought about it the more nervous I became about the word “need.” One concern is practical: if scientists struggle with something as physically grounded as food nutrition, how can I as some rando sitting on a couch reasonably give a complete account of nutrition for the soul? Besides, many other better thinkers have written about well-being and the good life.
My primary concern, however, was I realized I had been seduced by the rhetorical power of the word “need.” (Indeed, in other settings one may want to lean into that rhetorical power). One of the allures of the word “need” is that it often rings so true it halts further inquiry. It feels like the answer, but further scrutiny leaves one with many more questions.
An illustration: consider the statement “exercise is a need.” Seems obviously true, but is it the “exercise” that is the need, or simply a “healthy and strong body” that is the need? In contrast, saying “exercise is a force/process for strengthening the body” is much more precise and measured.2
To call something a “need” unconsciously invokes subtle felt reasoning and emotional justifications, when those feelings and emotions are what I want to investigate with fresh eyes! To call something a “need” is often the first step in declaring a natural and inviolable desired state of affairs, and in justifying action. To call something a force recognizes an imperative but also simultaneously recognizes that one can resist it, deflect it, sidestep it, or work with it — it invites one to pause and analyze.
The result of all these concerns? “Forces of the Soul” that move us,3 forces that we harness, for better or for worse.4 This is my take on finding a middle ground of understanding how and why we act, without prematurely jumping to conclusions of how we “should” act (i.e. being captured by seductively powerful statements like "the purpose of life is to satisfy our need for love, joy, etc..."). It'll be worth revisiting this framework sometime in the future with the benefit of hindsight to see what it describes well and what it misses.
Essays In This Series
The first force: anticipation and pattern
The second force: agency
The third force: connection and rootedness
Putting everything together: balance and beyond
Insofar as one believes positive psychology's account of "well-being" as a complete account of everything that a person might reasonably want to choose (see Seligman's definition), it might even be impossible (by pedantic definition) to choose (when uncoerced) or strive for anything else other than well-being.
Nutrition provides some other great analogies on how calling something a “need” and “force” give different perspectives and can be complementary. For instance, one can reasonably say “one needs food,” but the situation gets much trickier when the question becomes “what foods does one need?” The word “need” is intrinsically context-dependent and only makes sense with a certain end point in mind — e.g. the food one needs to stay minimally alive is different than the food one needs to be a high functioning athlete. Even if we have a specific goal in mind, say being an athlete, simply saying “protein” is a nutritional need is far from a sufficient account of flourishing, for how much protein does one need? What kinds of protein? To extend the analogy, what I want to ask are questions like, “What are the roles and dynamics at play that govern how proteins affect (i.e. “apply force to”) our lives?” In short, calling something a “force” instead of a “need” is to highlight dynamics and be a constant reminder to inquire more. At the same time, if someone is not interested in analysis and just wants to know what to have for dinner, the “force/dynamics” perspective may be TMI. In this case, telling them “you need to eat more protein” is probably sufficient shorthand.
One might say that we respond to forces, or that these forces compel us to action. It occurs to me that, in different words, this may be related to what Schopenhauer coined as the "will," and his famous phrase that “a man can do as he wills, but can not will as he wills.” I like the rhetorical power of “will” but also find it a bit too wishy washy for precise thinking.
Another motivation that prompted me to use the more “neutral”/less normative terminology of “force” instead of “need” was the recognition that some perspectives on life, say nondual awakening or dzogchen (as described by vividness), to some extent advocate for views that directly challenge if we have fundamental spiritual “needs” at all. In my understanding, these alternative approaches kind of bypass a lot of conventional ways of framing problems in life. I.e. the answer to "I can't find my purpose in life" is something like... "What if you didn’t feel the need to search? Then you have no problem!" If we take this viewpoint, then what I'm going to put forth over the next few posts are forces that we feel, but don't necessarily need to follow, and hence aren't “needs.”