Your preferences will get in the way of your happiness

In your moment to moment life, it’s easy to confuse preferences with requirements.

Here’s an example:

I’m vegetarian. That’s a preference based on my moral view of the world. Some of my friends are celiac. They eat gluten free to avoid a whole suite of ailments and issues. That’s a requirement.

Often, requirements aren’t just a you thing – they take a community to act upon. If someone can’t manage stairs, they can’t go around installing ramps and elevators everywhere themselves. Childcare is best done as a communal act. When my dad needed a hand after a few major surgeries, we helped out.

Requirements highlight the interdependence all around us. They bind people together.

A whole lot of suffering comes from the world bumping into a preference that you cling to and treat as a requirement. You hold onto the requirement and, worse case, find new ways to keep it steady.

You try to avoid discomfort and, in the process, you give up freedom.

To help avoid that, let’s look at how:

• Preferences can masquerade as requirements.
• Giving up your preferences frees you up to help yourself and others.

Pref v req

Requirements emerge from your physical or cognitive reality. They’re things you need to be in the world. If you break a leg, you need aids to get around. That’s a requirement.

Preferences reflect your mental model for how the world would be if you had your druthers (and that model may be more or less accurate).

If you cling to your preferences, you can close up and reject the moment when the moment doesn’t align with them. You hold onto the preference rather than accepting the world as-is and rolling on forward.

In his book The untethered soul, Mark Singer describes the process like so:

Most people don’t dare give themselves that choice [between being happy or not happy] because they think it’s not under their control. Someone might say, “Well, of course I want to be happy, but my wife left me.” In other words, they want to be happy, but not if their wife leaves them. But that wasn’t the question. The question was, very simply, “Do you want to be happy or not?” If you keep it that simple, you will see that it really is under your control. It’s just that you have a deep seated set of preferences that gets in the way.

According to Singer, your preferences (among other things) are “ways of bringing the infinite universe down to the finite where you can feel a sense of control.” Your mind can’t handle the “infinite universe”, so it creates a mental model it can handle.

He continues:

This mental model has become your reality. You must now struggle day and night to make the world fit your model, and you label everything that doesn’t fit as wrong, bad, or unfair.

Your preferences are a key way of managing that struggle – even if it they just hold you back long term.

He brings it back to the idea that you’re “the awareness that’s aware” of the preference. And, if you can stay in connection with that, you can let go of the preference that keeps you rigid – keeps you from experiencing the moment with grace.

That sense of being “the awareness that’s aware” is mindfulness. And tapping into that helps is go from “being free” to “helping other people become free”.

The greater challenge here, though, is the “confusing preferences for requirements” thing. Getting that muddled up for yourself holds you back from your own happiness. Confusing it in others – say, interpreting someone’s requirements as a preference you can safely ignore because, hey, it’s not your preference – means you can actively make someone’s life harder.

This is where I like Simone de Beauvoir’s view of freedom. In her book The ethics of ambiguity, one of the ways she defines freedom is as the ability to fulfil your own potential, free of artificial limitations or restrictions:

Just as life is identified with the will-to-live, freedom always appears as a movement of liberation. It is only by prolonging itself through the freedom of others that it manages to surpass death itself and to realize itself as an indefinite unity.

Freedom, to de Beauvoir, isn’t doing whatever you want, willy-nilly. It’s a commitment to growth and fulfilment. If you’re free, you can self-actualise.

So the preference vs requirements thing is clear, yeah? If you ignore – or inhibit – someone’s requirements, you risk inhibiting their freedom.

Freedom isn’t having all your preferences met. Freedom is having the requirements you need filled actually filled so you can reach your potential.

Mindfulness is the way

Mindfulness helps us respond to the moment on its own terms – independent of any preconceived ideas, assumptions and, yup, preferences. There will be times when the needs of the moment and our preferences align. That’s cool. And when they don’t, that’s cool too.

You don’t gain much by clinging to your preferences when they’re not right for the moment.

This doesn’t mean you become inert or docile, of course. It just helps you “deal with things as events taking place on planet earth – not as personal problems”.

In the book Zen and the art of saving the planet, the late Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn lays out three domains of truth:

1. The historical dimension: “where there is suffering, injustice, inequality, exploitation, and so on”. This is where we live day to day.
2. The ultimate dimension: the realm of peace, freedom and joy. The place “where we don’t have to do anything”, which we can reach at any moment.
3. The action dimension: “the realm of bodhisattvas”.

Nhat Hahn describes bodhisattvas as “a living being (sattva) who has woken up (bodhi)”. He argues that “anyone with happiness, mindfulness, peace, understanding and love can be called a bodhisattva”.

The key part, however, is “a deep aspiration to help others”. Having peace in your heart doesn’t mean you’re untroubled – you just “know how to handle” those troubles. You’re aware of them. And, rather than surrender to your personal preferences or comfort, you act.

Nhat Hanh continues:

Once you know what is going on, you’re motivated by a desire to do something to relieve the suffering – both in you and around you… This is the attitude of bodhisattvas: to practice meditation not only for yourselves, but for the world, to relieve the suffering. And, when others suffer less, you suffer less. When you suffer less, they suffer less. That is interbeing. There is no separation between yourself and others. You do not live just for yourself; you live for other people.

Where do your preferences belong if you’re living like that? If they’re anywhere, they’re in the conventional domain. They’re labels, ideas, shorthand for things. And they lead to suffering if you cling to them if they’re not met.

So. Here’s the challenge:

• Meditate on your preferences. Learn what they are.
• When you notice yourself being pulled towards something, ask yourself if it’s a preference. How important is it to you? Why?
• When you feel yourself holding onto something, or closing yourself off from something, notice the feeling. Become aware of it in your body. Help yourself let it go.

Act for others

It’s like I wrote about last week: don’t accept a more comfortable form of suffering. Don’t chase comfort that keeps you stuck.

This is another slice of that. If you hold onto preferences as if they’re rock solid, an indelible truth, you’ll find yourself trying to ramrod a narrow view of the world to keep yourself comfortable – not because its what the moment needs.

Because everyone has preferences, right? They’re as real as any other thought (not very). But there’s still much work to be done to make the world a better, more vibrant place.

A whole lot of fair, just requirements aren’t being met. Just think what you could accomplish if you aren’t sweating a preference or two.

You might even end up happy.