Happy with some parts of your life but not others?

It’s common for people to be happy with some parts of their lives but not others. Imagine a scientist who is happy with his science work but unhappy with some interpersonal problems he has in his family. Why does this happen? Why is he succeeding in one part of his life while failing in another? And what should he do about it?

Below I provide answers that are not standard knowledge in our culture. And below that I explain some standard knowledge in our culture and some flaws with it.

For most people, their mind is very compartmentalized. It takes work to integrate one’s mind and they haven’t done much of that work.

Imagine the scientist does very good work in his profession. He approaches problems in his profession in a calm and rational way. He studies the work of the experts in his field resulting in learning the best practices in the field. He implements those best practices in his professional life, resulting in doing pretty well at discovering the truth of whatever science problems he’s working on.

Consider that that scientist, like everyone else, built up parts of his mind much earlier in his life. He created policies (habits) during childhood that he still uses today, which are not compatible with the newer policies that he applies in his professional life. For example, sometimes he gets angry upon learning about an interpersonal problem that happened at home, but he never gets angry about problems in his science work.

If the scientist figured out how to apply his rational thinking methods that he learned in his profession to all parts of his life, he’d do much better. He’d be integrating his mind so that he applies his best thinking methods in all parts of his life, instead of using his best thinking methods for only some parts of his life and his bad thinking methods in the rest of his life. If he integrated his mind enough, he’d no longer be using his bad thinking methods.

So how does one integrate his mind so that he uses his best thinking methods in all parts of his life instead of just in some parts?

One thing you can do is this. Make a concerted effort to: (1) Identify your best thinking methods and why they are useful. (2) Identify which parts of your life that you don’t use those best thinking methods in. (3) Identify why your bad thinking methods don’t work well as compared to your good thinking methods. (4) Keep a written log of these things and review them often. Note that writing down one’s thoughts is a tool that is included as part of expert scientists’ best thinking methods. Einstein said, “My pencil and I are more clever than I.”

Another thing you could do to integrate your mind is to study the field directly by learning the best ideas that experts in the field already figured out — similar to how you (the scientist) do that in your field. The field goes by the name “philosophy”. Note that most stuff labeled as philosophy is not good. Note also that it’s much harder to figure out what’s good in the field of philosophy than compared to the field of science. In science, it’s relatively easy to objectively know when you’re wrong because you can check your theories against empirical evidence. But with philosophy, you can’t check your theories against empirical evidence. This is because it’s not possible for a philosophical theory to be contradicted by empirical evidence. Only scientific theories can be contradicted by empirical evidence. In philosophy, the only way to contradict a theory is by philosophical criticism.

In our current culture, a standard way of dealing with personal and interpersonal problems that one wants help with is to seek help from a psychologist. While that could be helpful, psychologists are not very good at what they do. The standard psychologist does not learn from philosophers, despite the fact that the work they do is philosophy work — psychology is a subfield of philosophy. Psychologists primarily only learn from other psychologists. This prevents them from learning from philosophy experts who are not labeled as “psychologists”.

Most scientists do a similar thing. They try to learn from other scientists but they don’t try to learn from philosophers, despite the fact that science is a subfield of philosophy. There is good work in the field of philosophy that applies to scientific thinking. If a scientist learned that stuff, he’d be a more effective scientist.