The Secret to Happiness

"The Secret to Happiness: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it." - Dan Dennett


I just watched a TED talk by Dan Dennett, and found this piece of advice profound. [1]

Conversations between Pallavi and me often stray to the question of what we are going to do with our lives. For what are we working so hard now, sacrificing sleep, fun, and maybe a few years of our lives? We're eager to find the thing to justify our current madness, something we will wake up every day wanting to do, something we won't mind even when we no longer have summer vacations.

As much as I like Course 6 right now, I think I would eventually be bored as a software engineer. To be honest, I would rather write essays than computer programs. I see Professor Raman, who got his B.S. from MIT and M.S. from Berkeley in Electrical Engineering, then got his Ph.D in English Literature and became a literature professor at MIT, and understand where he's coming from. But computer science promises a steadier career, and besides, I am not training to be a writer and there are probably many out there better than me who struggle for jobs. I enjoy Computer Science, but it's not enough. I can't do a job that predominantly requires sitting by myself, coding in a cubicle. I am too much of an extrovert. I get my joy from meeting people, affecting people, making new connections.

Lately, I've been thinking about international development as a career focus. It is a cause more important than me. Though I would be satisfied by writing an iPhone app used by a thousand people, I would be more satisfied by bringing drinking water to a village of fifty that had none. Though I hate flying, I do want to see the world, and I'm eying the Peace Corps as an immediate post-graduation plan. My plans are all a few years down the line, and I know more than anyone how rapidly they change: a three-year schedule I wrote over winter break became obsolete two weeks into January. But it's still an important question to consider. A meaningful goal now gives me reason to continue my work.


[1] The rest of Dennett's talk is pretty amazing. (If it wasn't, his rather stylistically unpolished talk would have lost audience member's attention, and likely would not have garnered the hundred thousand views on Youtube. Instead, every time he speaks, he says something worth listening to.) He presents a view of ideas as "living" Darwinian entities, and proposes we consider their existence in a neutral way, much as we consider the existence of harmful viruses neutrally (we think they are bad, and find cures for them, but accept them scientifically as part of life).