Sitting on a “happy chair” forever?
At the start of one of my undergraduate philosophy classes, my professor started with a thought experiment. It went like this — if there exists a “happy chair”, which you could sit in and just experience happiness and forget about all pains, sorrows, frustrations, etc. would you like to sit in this chair forever, until death?
My class had around 30 people, and not a single person signed up for the chair.
The options from the thought experiment, clearly, are not about some high-tech chair vs. our mundane life. It’s about a guaranteed, forever, stream of happiness that’s void of us taking any actions, making any decisions, experiencing any life events, versus the option of living our lives with uncertainty, making decisions, experiencing whatever comes our way that would take us to peaks and troughs, euphoria and pain.
I was surprised that no one in my class signed up for the chair. Maybe my classmates were too shy to raise their hand, or their lives were too pain-free anyway so there’s really no point to sign up, or they were unaware or mis-calculated the level of pain ahead in their lives. Or, they were ready to face whatever comes their way, and believed that particular life with its ups and downs was more meaningful or exciting than the one provided by the chair.
For me personally, I probably wanted real-life experiences back then. I enjoy feeling deeply, so the idea of sitting in a chair and experiencing happiness forever wasn’t appealing.
However, the society is progressing in a way where the decisions seem to be made by people who would prefer the chair or would prefer other people to sit in that chair. We can now sit in the comfort of our home and get lots of things down by clicking a few buttons with our thumb on our phones. If I’m hungry, I can order food delivery; I’d be able to choose from a multitude of cuisines and just wait in my chair for the food to arrive. If I were bored, I could watch Netflix or TikTok, where entertainment is delivered right to my eyes, so that my brain is stimulated and no longer feeling boredom.
It’s too bad that we can’t seem to gain muscles and obtain a toned body by just sitting in a chair, but the amount of things we can now just get done with us sitting in a chair is abundant. We now have plenty of ways to keep our minds stimulated, so that we can keep feeling “happy” without doing much. Ohhh, and there are actually people who go through plastic surgeries to remove fat from their body for aesthetics.
I’ve been really puzzled. If the world is growing towards the “happy chair” direction, then I’d naturally assume that most of my classmates would have chosen the happy chair over real-life experiences a decade ago. Maybe my classmates were just not a representative bunch of the overall population; maybe our living experiences have become more painful in the last decade, so many people have changed their mind; maybe the change towards the chair was not driven by the masses, but a powerful few, who forced the change upon us. There can be many explanations.
What I do know is that the change was NOT forced upon us by a powerful few. No one forced us to click on DoorDash, Deliveroo, UberEats, etc.. We have the option to cook, which is often cheaper anyway, but it’s time-consuming and takes effort. If we’d like our mind to be entertained, we could also sit on a chair and reason with ourselves, like what I’m doing now, and attempt to arrive at the root cause of a problem, but people prefer Netflix, because thinking hard takes effort.
I think the problem is effort. Ben has often complained that humans have become lazy and people are too drawn to convenience. Even though I’ve found some of his opinions too extreme, he’s probably not wrong on this one. Convenience means low effort. Effort requires us actively doing things, and convenience removes the doing and often provides us with the same immediate, tangible results.
“Immediate, tangible results” might be the real issue. Ordering food or cooking at home? For a person who only cares about being fed and good taste, assuming this person isn’t short on money, food delivery is the clear winner. Both being fed and savoury stimulation are immediate, tangible results. What aren’t tangible results? Our slowly deteriorating health, the satisfaction from making our own meal, the creativity and decision making when making the meal, the ability to endure hunger …. there are a lot more I can’t think of immediately.
Unlike Ben, I like taking a more balanced approach when it comes to utilising convenience and shortcuts. Meanwhile, I also see how convenience is gradually corrupting our principles. My classmates knew that the life off the chair is more worthy of living, and I believe most people would choose the same if they were facing the same question. However, when they are presented a simple choice, DoorDash vs. cooking, Netflix vs. thinking/writing, the option that brings us towards the "happy chair" wins.
This corruption of our principles doesn’t happen overnight. It’s been happening gradually with many “technological advancements” that are making our lives “easier”. I wonder if we continue down this path, maybe decades later, when my classmates and I were to face the same thought experiment, we’d realise that we had been living on the "happy chair” because of our small choices over time.
If we get to that point, maybe we’d never be able to get of the chair, because the amount of effort for moving off the chair is grand, much grander than the little choices we now make day-to-day.