How to Be Happy

Intro to the Option Method

I was writing a maundering post about the complexities of giving advice, and whether I, not really knowing you, could ever give advice that would be really appropriate to your situation, to your goals and desires. I was going to talk about the “advice economy” and the Ouroboros-like nature of productivity advice in particular, where the efficacy of the advice is verified mainly by reference to the voluminousness of the author’s advice-giving. I was going to talk about how most advice, whatever else it might do, corroborates the blinkering and self-perpetuating idea that life is a thing to be solved by myriad strategies. I was going to say that genuine education and growth requires something very different from advice.

Then I had a couple conversations with friends that reminded me I actually have some dope advice, that I think lots of people could directly benefit from.

What follows is an attempt to distill and describe a process I’ve found for working with my own emotional system. The overall aim of the process is to be happier—whatever that means for you. I could put that differently: the point of the process is to identify emotional, embodied beliefs that facilitate feeling “bad” in particular circumstances, in response to particular triggers, and to question, in a genuine, open, intelligent, embodied way, whether or not feeling bad in response to these things is actually necessary. But what’s left at the end of that is just happiness.

I have become extremely fond of this process and the view it implies because it’s simple, it’s direct, and it gets at what I see to be the real structure of existential unhappiness. Shortly after I first encountered it, I became directly aware of a thing I was doing that was making my life into an infinite marshmallow test, and I was finally able to just… eat the marshmallow. I still sometimes return to marshmallow-test mind, but less and less, and this method is one of the ways I untrap myself.

What I’m adapting/summarizing here is something called the Option Method, which was created by a psychotherapist from New Jersey named Bruce Di Marsico (1942-1995). Di Marsico nearly became a Catholic priest, but switched to psychotherapy and developed this system for, as he phrased it, questioning people’s unhappiness. You can read a bit more about him on this sweetly retro website, and there are more links in the Further Reading section below.

This stuff was introduced to me by Aryeh Nielsen, a fellow and much more experienced Vajrayana practitioner I know through Evolving Ground. The story I got is that fifteen years ago Aryeh became good friends with Di Marsico’s widow, embraced and adopted Option with great enthusiasm, and compiled a three-volume collection of Di Marsico’s talks and writings, which includes some high-quality commentary in which he puts Di Marsico’s stuff in conversation with biology and Jamesian pragmatism. Aryeh is a remarkable synthesizer and sifter-through-the-inevitable-garbage of spiritual traditions, and a very fun guy to talk to (I recommend his Substack), and over a series of Discord exchanges and Zoom calls he initiated me and a few other people into his particular take on the method, which he calls Option Mysticism.

Option Method is not Vajrayana, but it’s highly consonant with Vajrayana and its methods for liberating efficacious energy by liberating desire from habitual responses, and its core attitude of enjoyable usefulness. I doubt I would have been sufficiently open to OM if I hadn’t already been committed to tantric practice and view. Don’t be blinkered like me! I think this method is powerful and interesting in its own right. Anyway if you want the straight sauce from Bruce Di Marsico, check the “further reading” section toward the end of the post.

Okay. Let’s back up a bit.

There are two basic ways of thinking about the Option Method: as a view, and as a method of inquiry. It’s possible to approach it from either angle and I think there are good things to be had from both. A loose consensus seemed to form in our discussion group that the view was something of a spiritual revelation, while the method Bruce Di Marsico offered was not that effective for internalizing the view. But the method has worked really well for me, so I don’t know.

This might seem like an odd use of the term view. What I mean by it is a way of looking, a way of structuring experience—a theory, we could say, though not in the strict scientific sense. There is, for instance, a commonly held view that our thoughts and feelings take place mostly outside of conscious awareness. There is a view that some “thoughts” are the whisperings of demons tempting us to sin. There is a view that the world is purely deterministic and the individual will has no control over anything that happens. I’m not interested here in which of these views are true, in the sense that they would accurately map an objectively verifiable reality (this vision of truth is also a view, by the way). I’m interested in the experiential and practical effects of taking on one view over another. I’m also assuming that it’s fully possible to switch one view out for another and see what it’s like—because, well, it is.

One way to descibe the Option Method view is that being unhappy is completely unnecessary. Another way would be to say that unhappiness is merely believing that unhappiness is good and necessary.

These are simple statements with many possible misinterpretations. I think it’ll be simplest to describe the method first, because it clarifies the view somewhat naturally.

But First a Note on Language

I don’t love the word happiness. It means too many things and it’s been used to sell me too much.

Same for desire. It gives me the approximate feeling-tone of the adult section of Hot Topic. It’s also deeply colored by its association with words like sin and temptation (in the Christian tradition) or suffering and dissatisfaction (in the Buddhist).

Wanting is preferable, a nice solid Germanic word—it’s what Di Marsico uses and what I’ll use—but it still seems to bear in it a forlorn sense of lack and absence, of “want.”

I’ll argue that all the baggage around these words is helpful for this process. It’s an important part of what the method is designed to question—the necessity of a strict relationship between unhappiness and sadness, for instance, and between unhappiness and not getting what we want. There are questions here: How do we actually want to feel about these concepts? How do we want them to live in us? How do we want to use them, as opposed to being used by them? Do we in fact want to steer by them at all?

Grossness is useful too. My pragmatic suggestion is to view the key words, in this context, as feeling-shovels. The language is designed to elicit and activate patterns of somatic response, so that you can work with those patterns and allow them to adjust to present circumstances. If it isn’t stirring feelings, the process is really of no use, and your edge for the moment may lie elsewhere. (See the further reading section below for a suggestion about this.)

I like to think of questions like these as magical spells. In certain fantasy universes (and real-life traditions I guess) there are words that have to be uttered with a certain intuitive authenticity, or else they misfire or don’t do anything at all. When the spell does work, there’s no mistaking it. But it often takes time for a magician to learn the felt difference between authentic spellcasting and empty repetition.

Word clouds can also be helpful. Some replacements I like for happiness are freedom, radiance, luminosity, luminous radiance, flow, and love.

Some synonyms I like for feeling bad are beating myself up, punishing myself, rejecting the situation, and being worried about. I don’t much like “suffering” because I have a hard time locating it as a felt experience, but you may be different.

Again, you’re trying to find the language that stirs up feeling—gut clenches, butterflies, rivulets of nebulous sensation, pulsations, heat—which will probably be the language you’d use in talking to a close friend or confidant.

Suggested Attitude

You are an inestimably intrepid spelunker into the deep cave of the bodymind! It is pitch dark and you have no flashlight, meaning you have to go entirely by feel! Vague formations take shape beneath your hands. A cool wind brushes your cheek. You don’t know exactly where you are, but everything seems vaguely familiar.

One tool available to you here in the dark is making sounds (questions) and listening to the resonances (feelings) that echo back, getting a sense of what’s in front of you that way. Since you’ve been in this cave before, you already know some of the paths, though maybe it’s been a while since you were last down here.

Curiosity! Exploration! Adventure! There is nowhere in particular you have to get to, and nothing in particular you have to bring with you back to the surface. You might find something, you might find nothing, but either way, there is plenty to appreciate about the exploration itself.

You can leave and come back to the cave at any time, for any reason. (But in my experience, the process tends to create its own natural endpoints.)

Safety Note

By the way, the cave is heavily boobytrapped. You laid all the traps yourself, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be dangerous.

If you have zero experience intentionally engaging with your own emotional system, you might be surprised by just how opportunistic it can be. Things can get intense must faster than expected, old memories and emotional patterns can appear that might be very uncomfortable to experience. You might activate patterns that lead you to behave in ways you don’t like or regret later or that just feel really bad.

Now think about me for a second. I’m a guy sitting here typing about a process that’s been helpful and transformative for him. I really, really don’t want this offering to be a burden to you or to cause you serious and lasting distress. I would hate that. It’s the opposite of my intention. Please, for my sake, gauge your readiness carefully and be gentle with yourself. Be incredibly gentle, as gentle as you would be with a small child who is depending on you for love. Try to be in touch with the fact that questioning your own unhappiness is an act of love—not punishment, not correction—of yourself and of everyone you’re connected with.

Also, there isn’t any real rush, right? Your unhappiness has lasted this long. It will still be there weeks or months or years from now.

Now We Question Your Unhappiness

This is a very basic and incomplete template, to be adjusted however you find useful. Better to get the spirit of it and improvise your own version than to follow it exactly.

The process involves asking these questions, in the order that they seem appropriate.

1. Am I completely happy right now? (The answer may be yes. Seriously. The answer can always be yes. If so, I suggest you stop applying a method and enjoy your perfect happiness.)

2. If not, what am I unhappy about?

3. Do I need to be unhappy about x? / Would I need to feel bad if x happened?

4. Why do I/would I need to feel bad/be unhappy about x?

5. What would happen if I didn’t feel bad/unhappy about x?

6. What would it mean not to feel bad/unhappy about x?

7. What would it say about me if I didn’t feel bad/unhappy about x?

8. What would it be like to be perfectly happy while x was true?

9. And for each answer you get: Is that true? / Would that really happen? / Do I really care about that? / Do I really need to be unhappy about that?

Basically, you keep questioning your reasons for being unhappy, very gently but also rigorously, patiently. The inquiry might become complicated, might spool out in more directions than you can keep in your memory; that’s fine. You don’t have to explore every loop. Just keep moving in a direction that feels interesting. Keyword feels.

You’ll do this until you come to one of two possibilities:

1. You find that you don’t actually need to feel bad about x.

2. You find that beneath the fear of feeling bad, there is something you want or care about, and feeling bad about x is a way of getting closer to this thing, making sure it doesn’t move further away, and/or making sure you continue to care about it.

If you come to 1, cool! You don’t have to feel bad about that anymore. Relax and enjoy what that’s like.

If you come to 2, also cool! You’ve found a desire. Take a minute to feel it directly, if that’s available. You could even try to invite this bodily experience of desire to intensify, and see what that’s like.

Or you could ask a few more questions. Let’s call the thing we want y:

You could ask: “Do I actually care about y?” (Important: You’re not trying to dismiss the desire or talk yourself out of it. You’re just checking again to see if it’s there. No need to force anything. If it’s there, you’ll feel it. If it isn’t, something might feel slightly off. Remember, the answer is a feeling, not a thought.)

• If the answer that comes back feels like no, I don’t actually care about it, you can say, “Then, if I don’t care about that, do I still need to feel bad about x?” (The answer could be no, or it could be “yes, because of this other reason I haven’t mentioned yet,” in which case, you can go back to 3 above.)

• If the answer that comes back feels like I want it, but I know I shouldn’t want it, you can return to question 3 above. (“Should” is always a synonym for “I would need to feel bad,” or the slightly more complicated “I would need to feel bad if I didn’t feel bad.” So you can question that.)

• If the answer is I really don’t know whether I want it or not, it’s okay to sit with that uncertainty for a while, and see what (if anything) shifts. Or, you could table it for later and return to any of the questions above.

• If the answer that comes back feels like yes, I really do want that, you can ask firstly: “Do I want that for its own sake, or because it would bring me closer to something else?”

  • If the answer is I want it for something else, try to find out what thing is, and move the inquiry there.

  • If the answer is I want it for its own sake, congratulations: you’ve spelunked all the way down to the center of the earth. Take some time to delight in the feeling of being in touch with what you want. Then, if you still want to, you can ask, “Okay, knowing that I want y, and feeling that I want it, is feeling bad about x still necessary? Does feeling bad about x still seem helpful? Does it help me get y?” (Basically, returning to question 3 above.)

That’s pretty much it as far as the practical steps.

Notice there are really just two main prongs here to work along. One is finding self-justifying wants. You question why you want the things you want, until you find that you can’t give a secondary reason anymore. “I don’t know—I guess I just want it for its own sake.” That’s a self-justifying want. Congratulations: you’ve found uncontrovertible evidence that you’re alive.

The other prong is questioning the reasons for being unhappy. This is asking whether feeling bad is either necessary or useful for honoring, achieving, and carrying out your absurd, beautiful, mysterious self-justifying desire. And then you keep questioning them, until you find a desire.

So yeah, there’s sort of only one prong. Hmmm.

Disambiguation

The point of this inquiry is not to make you more productive or smarter or cooler or a better lover or a better citizen or a self-help person or a wise person or a hot person or an equanimous person. It is to produce greater alignment with what actually excites and attracts you, as opposed to what you’ve been convinced (or have convinced yourself) should excite you.

If you’re worried, say, that being completely happy would make you less interested in making art, and that’s a problem because you really want to make art, then another way of saying this is that complete happiness for you includes cultivating the conditions for art-making.

If you’re worried that being completely happy would mean you’d spend the whole day in bed, and that’s a problem because you have other things you want to do with your life, then complete happiness for you includes doing those other things.

If you’re worried that being completely happy would make you unaffected by other people’s suffering, and that’s a problem because you want to feel connected with other people, then… I think you get the pattern.

And if you feel that being completely happy will lead you to commit murder, and that the idea that you’d feel bad about killing someone is the only thing that keeps you from that, then why don’t you just commit murder? If going around murdering really is your fullest happiness, what good is this rule doing you?

But Why Should This Have Any Effect; Or, Isn’t It Just a Linguistic Shell Game?

It is extremely easy for this to become a linguistic shell game. That’s why I keep bringing up bodily sensation.

Here’s a way of modeling what’s going on that I find useful. The pedophiliac self-help guru of Donnie Darko was, unfortunately, onto something. A great deal of life does come down to a choice between love and fear. These aren’t forces out in the world that we have to choose or mediate between. These are two distinct though interdependent systems we have in us for steering ourselves through situations of staggering complexity.

“You can’t just lump things into two categories; things aren’t that simple.”

That’s already inaccurate though, because fear doesn’t exactly steer. At its most extreme, fear is an emergency shutdown mechanism, which seemed to evolve into being in some animals because there were certain specific situations in the wild where shutting down and doing nothing afforded the best chance of survival. Situations like “I just ran twenty days to escape a coyote and now I must rest” or, “actually, I’m getting eaten by the coyote and I should just conserve my energy in case he gets distracted and I can limp away.”

At its less extreme end, fear provides short-term urgency to get away from threats. This awayness impulse sacrifices precision for immediacy. As Malcolm Ocean has neatly put it, the great limitation of awayness is that it can’t aim. It just sends you off in some direction where the thing you’re escaping isn’t.

Love, on the other hand—let’s call it wanting for our purposes—can steer quite well, quite precisely, directly towards the wanted situation. It does this so well that we barely notice the millions of times a day that it happens.

Unfortunately, wanting is not a reliable way of steering other people. They always seem to have their own ideas about what they want to do, it’s very frustrating. Fear isn’t great at steering other people either, but it is cheap—the only cost is violence or its threat—and you can at least corral them into a semblance of order by setting up enough fear-inducing pressures around them to send them along the track you want them to follow.

The main people we want to corral are children. They seem to need it in order to be protected from a world that is also trying to steer them, often in harmful directions. But the more you corral a child, the more you teach them that corralling is necessary—even that it’s good basic strategy.

Corralling “works,” sort of, but it’s exhausting. And constantly mediating between feared outcomes means we can never get further from one without getting uncomfortably close to another. This uneasy wobbling goes by the name ambivalence.

The other problem with fear is how famously sticky it is. Memories of fear-inducing events are extremely salient and they stay with us in some cases for the rest of our lives. The memories can be so salient that they inspire fear all by themselves, inciting us to establish elaborate security systems for keeping them out of our awareness.

The “options” that the Option Method seeks to reclaim are choices about whether or not we want to continue corralling ourselves in particular, context-activated ways. The “beliefs” the Option Method questions could be thought of as beliefs about internal psychophysical strategy. For any given desire, there is something that selects between using the fear-system—which can be very motivating in bursts, but can’t aim and ultimately wears us out (and feels terrible when it’s happening)—versus relying on the unimpeded wanting-system, which needs no secondary motivation because it already is motivation, and which can aim, and feels good, and also, incidentally, allows us to occasionally move away from the things we want, or even honestly fail to get them, without spiraling into self-loathing. The crucial insight here is that reliance on the fear-system was always enacted by the more existentially primary wanting-system, which was only using the fear-system initially to prolong and extend its capacities. At the most existential level, organisms engineer the fear of annihilation because they desire so intensely to go on living. They don’t go on living in order to continue fearing death.

Of course, there’s no need to buy this particular picture to engage in the self-inquiry. The method doesn’t by itself do anything to rejigger our systems and it doesn’t by itself force us to stop corralling ourselves. All it really does, which is all that really can be “done,” is invite us to raise our heads and actually look at where precisely the yipping dogs that surround us are standing, how many of them there are, whether they’re as big as we’ve been imagining, and the larger field they’re keeping us from—and to decide afresh on the basis of what we see this time.

What I find beautiful and liberatory about this method, and what distinguishes it from more pessimistic approaches like (sometimes) psychoanalysis, is that it assumes that simply looking in this way really can have an effect, and therefore that we actually do have a say in how happy we are. More than a say—the stance here is that we are the only ones with the power to make ourselves anxious and unhappy, and that we do it actively and repeatedly not because we like it and not because it works well for us, but because we anticipate and fear that it will happen. We anticipate it because we think it has to happen, because we don’t actually see that it’s us terrorizing ourselves from a few recursive layers out. Because at some point we picked up the mistaken belief that this was the only or best way to get what we wanted; which is also the mistaken and internally incoherent belief that perfect happiness requires delaying perfect happiness, again and again, until some imagined moment which (by design) never actually arrives.

Another Invitation

The only way out of a bad theory is to falsify it. And the way to honestly falsify a theory is to try your best to prove it. Maybe now you’re feeling like this all sounds intriguing, and maybe you’ll try these questions sometime, but you still have the suspicion that granting yourself perfect happiness would be dangerous, or boring, or self-nullifying, or any number of other things you don’t want. Maybe you’d just like to put off questioning until tomorrow when you have more energy or time.

You are, of course, completely free to do that. You could also stick to the scaffolding I provided above.

But there is this other, more direct approach I’d like to suggest. This is to try and prove, once and for all, that your reservations about happiness are true. How would you do this? What would be the experiment? How could you know?

When I asked myself this question a while ago, I could think of only one truly reliable test: by giving myself permission to be perfectly happy, without obstacle or reservation, now, in this moment. To see if any of the outcomes I feared actually came about. To leap directly into perfect happiness, and see if it was really so bad.

You could set a timer if that helps. Five minutes. Five minutes to put off putting it off. You can always resume putting it off later, right?

This is the extraordinarily simple question at the heart of the Option Method, the question all the other ones work down to, the question people sometimes seem to go their whole lives never truly asking: Why not now? What’s wrong with now? What about now?

Not a thought experiment. In deadly seriousness I am asking you, you, sitting there reading these words in the unchosen middle of your ongoingness: What happens when you skip to the end?

So Yeah

This is the first time I’ve ever tried sharing anything resembling a method or practice instructions with an audience. I’m curious about how it’s working and whether there’s anything I could do to make it clearer or more accessible. Anything that doesn’t make sense, that rings false, and above all any results of applying the method—I’d be grateful to know.

I was highly primed for something like the Option Method when I found it, and it initiated a series of intense epiphanies and emotional releases. I remember walking down the sidewalk in my neighborhood on a spring day earlier this year and suddenly bursting into tears—tears of happiness and of shock. I couldn’t believe that I had subjected myself to so much internal punishment for so long, that it was no longer necessary, that it had never been necessary, and that its necessity had simply vanished the moment I deeply questioned it. I felt as if I’d broken out of a prison I’d expected to spend the rest of my life in, just by noticing that the bars were made of cardboard.

But it took me a few months and regular conversations with other people who were also engaging with this material for it to fully come alive and feel accessible, and to find out how to use it as a tool. Support is really important in these pursuits, and I’m extremely open to answering questions about this from anybody or pointing to further resources.

Whatever else you do with this material, however it strikes you and however willing or able you are to make use of it—don’t make it a reason to feel bad.

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Further Reading/Listening/Notes:

• This talk by Bruce Di Marsico on “wanting” is a good way in. https://choosehappiness.net/wp-cms/2009/on-desiring/ More audio talks here: https://choosehappiness.net/audio/.

• Here’s the first volume of The Myth of Unhappiness, the three-volume book series Aryeh Nielsen put together. The extremely small set of words Bruce Di Marsico uses makes for an interesting reading experience, and the texts are useful for exploring the convoluted structures that can arise around wanting and for exploring the most common beliefs about happiness. The collection also has more in-depth discussions of the method and how to use it in dialogue (as opposed to self-dialogue). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12413292-the-option-method

• “Towardsness & Awayness Motivation are fundamentally asymmetric,” by Malcolm Ocean. Mentioned above. https://malcolmocean.com/2022/02/towardsness-awayness-motivation-arent-symmetrical/

• I suspect that the most common obstacle to applying any of this will be that for many people it is very difficult to locate sensations and emotional shifts in their body. Five years ago I would have found such a suggestion frustratingly opaque and scientifically dubious. Now I know that it’s a genuine capacity that can be developed, with endlessly fascinating ripple effects. There are many ways to do this work, but in my opinion the simplest and probably fastest way for most people will be to establish a regular practice of opening awareness meditation. A great introduction to that (by one of my teachers, Charlie Awbery) can be found here: https://www.evolvingground.org/opening-awareness.

• For the tantra-curious, this post by David Chapman (and the longer series it’s a part of) could be suggestive of the connections between what I’ve described here and Vajrayana attitude and methods. https://vividness.live/your-self-is-not-a-spiritual-obstacle.

• [Update: I’ve also shared an example of my own application of the method here: https://andrewblevins.substack.com/p/sample-problem.]