Rational Predictive Happiness: You’re Not Broken. Your Future Just Looks Like Hell.
- Dick Gariepy
- 17 minutes ago
- 14 min read
An Original Hypothesis On The Nature And Meaning Of The Concept "Happiness"
By Dick Gariepy | Big Thinky Ouchey
"When the future stops making promises, the present stops making sense."
You’re Not Choosing Misery, You’re Just Paying Attention
For most of my life, I’ve struggled to feel happy. I was diagnosed with depression young. I spent years on antidepressants. I cycled through therapists, counsellors, psychiatrists. None of them really helped. Some said I wasn’t trying hard enough to be happy, as if joy were a matter of effort, and misery, a kind of laziness.
But I wanted to be happy. Desperately. I looked at other people and it seemed effortless for them. They smiled without thinking. They laughed without working at it. Meanwhile, I was in pain, and being told that the pain was somehow my fault.
Flash forward to my career at Apple. In a performance review, the only criticism I received was: you don’t smile enough. Not that I wasn’t competent. Not that I wasn’t productive. Just that I didn’t project the brand. And at Apple, the brand is sacred. Smiling wasn’t a suggestion, it was a performance requirement. Not smiling cost me promotions, opportunities, and support.
And I remember thinking, If you want me to smile, how about giving me something to smile about?
That’s when it clicked: maybe happiness isn’t a disposition. Maybe it’s not an internal state I was failing to reach. Maybe it’s rational. Maybe I wasn’t smiling because my brain couldn’t find a reason to. And maybe I wasn’t happy for the same reason.
That idea became a question. And that question became a model.
What if happiness isn’t about how you feel in the moment, but about what you believe is coming? What if your ability to experience joy depends less on gratitude and more on whether you believe your future is livable?
This is the foundation of the Rational Predicted Happiness (RPH) model.
RPH doesn’t ask, Are you happy now? It asks, Do you believe there’s something worth being happy about later? It measures whether you think your life contains credible, repeatable reasons to feel joy. And if it doesn’t, then unhappiness isn’t a failure. It’s a forecast.
That belief—that depression might be less about brain chemistry and more about future plausibility—was only strengthened at a recent talk I attended, hosted by the Mathison Centre and the Canadian Mental Health Association. One of the doctors repeatedly referred to the behaviours of people with depression and addiction as "dysfunctional." The term was used casually, as if self-evident. But dysfunctional to whom? From what vantage point? And according to whose definition of function?
From the perspective of someone suffering, what’s labeled as dysfunction is often survival. If you’re in pain and a substance numbs that pain when no one else will help, that’s not irrational—that’s adaptive. It may not be sustainable, but it’s functional. It does the job. And yet, instead of examining the context that produces this behaviour—the lack of relief, the absence of alternatives—these systems pathologize the person trying to cope.
Even more troubling was the room’s response when I asked what I thought was a foundational question:
"If depression keeps us from experiencing happiness, then what is happiness? Not “what causes happiness,” not “what makes us feel good,” but what does it actually mean to be happy?"
The panel laughed. They treated the question as a joke. But to me, it cut to the center of the problem. If we can’t define what happiness is, how can we possibly claim to be treating its absence? How can we look at someone and call them "dysfunctional" when we haven’t agreed on what functional is?
This experience reinforced what I already suspected: our systems don’t actually understand happiness. They understand compliance. They understand visibility. But they don’t know how to ask whether someone’s life contains any reason to feel good—not abstractly, but concretely. They mistake survival for health. And they mistake emotional numbing for success.
That’s why this model matters.
Your Brain’s Weather Report, With Instruments Exposed
Happiness is not pleasure wearing a tux. Suffering is not pain that forgot its safe word.That is the first break with pop‑psych lore we need.
From Raw Sensation to Emotional Currency
Start with the daily ledger: every sensation lands somewhere on a –10 to +10 grid.
Dolors (–10 to –1) are the debits—nausea, shame‑spirals, the sharp edge of a dental probe.
Hedons (+1 to +10) are the credits—laughter, warm bread, that half‑second after a crush texts back.
Those points are inert until a second narrator—your predictive mind—asks a ruthless question: Will this matter tomorrow?
A backrub in a war zone earns fewer hedons than the same backrub on a quiet Sunday because context rewrites value. That rewriting is the job of RPH.
RPH in One Equation
RPH = Novelty × Probability × Efficacy
It looks bite‑size. It hides an ecosystem.
Variable | Street Translation | Why It Matters |
Novelty | "Did that just change my map of the universe?" | Brains chase pattern breaks because evolution rewarded curiosity. A rare delight or a rare trauma spikes the metric. |
Probability | "Will lightning strike twice?" | A single windfall tastes sweeter if you think more will come; a single disaster hurts less if you doubt a sequel. |
Efficacy | "Can I alter the rerun?" | Agency turbo‑charges pleasure and buffers pain. If you can repeat the good or shut down the bad, the emotional stakes rise. |
Multiply the three and you get a weight. The higher the weight, the louder that event cracks through the static.
Worked Example: Coffee, Conferences, Catastrophes
Morning espresso
Hedon score: +3.
Novelty: ordinary (0.2).
Probability: near certain (0.9).
Efficacy: full—barista is you (1).
RPH: 3 × 0.2 × 0.9 × 1 ≈ 0.54. A pleasant blip, soon forgotten.
Surprise job offer after years of rejection
Hedon score: +7.
Novelty: sky‑high (1).
Probability: who knows (0.3).
Efficacy: moderate—you control only your reply (0.6).
RPH: 7 × 1 × 0.3 × 0.6 ≈ 1.26. Narrower score than the raw pleasure suggests because doubt tempers the fantasy.
Fourth migraine this week, no treatment in sight
Dolor score: –6.
Novelty: zero; this is the new normal (0).
Probability: brutal certainty (1).
Efficacy: nonexistent (0).
RPH: –6 × 0 × 1 × 0 = 0. The pain is real, but suffering goes numb when hope is flat‑lined. That is why burnout feels like nothing and everything at once.
Why the Multiplication Trick Matters
RPH multiplies instead of adds because one zero detonates the whole line.No novelty, no emotional charge.No perceived control, no narrative tension.Hope, dread, and meaning hinge on the weakest link.
The Takeaway, Before We Zoom Out
Raw sensation is data; prediction is drama. RPH tracks the drama.It tells you whether tomorrow looks like a cliff or a launch pad—and why the same stimulus can feel like salvation on Monday and wallpaper on Friday.
Next we will test the model against therapy clichés, market propaganda, and the well‑intentioned tyranny of gratitude journals. Buckle in.
The Myths We Keep Petting After They Bite Us
If Rational Predicted Happiness feels subversive, blame the tired frameworks it’s elbowing out of the way. Most “science of happiness” models aren’t models at all. They’re theology with a Bluetooth headset—moral sermons wearing psychology cosplay.
Below, the usual suspects.
Hedonism: The Fitbit for Feelings
Hedonism whispers that a life is just a heap of nice moments. More hedons in the pile, more “happiness”—simple, seductive, and clinically false.
The research is brutal:
Hedonic treadmill – You adapt, reset, and chase again (Brickman & Campbell 1971).
Income and joy – Once rent is handled, extra cash barely budges long‑term mood (Frey & Stutzer 2002).
Comparative pleasure – A steak tastes divine until your neighbour buys wagyu (Ben‑Ze’ev 2000).
Pleasure fades because the brain is a skeptic with a short attention span. Hedonism promises a high‑yield bond; reality hands you a revolving credit line.
Life Satisfaction: Memoir As Metric
“Life satisfaction” asks you to rate your whole existence like a Netflix show. Sounds pragmatic until you realise you are summarising, not feeling. Daniel Kahneman calls this split experienced utility versus remembered utility—and shows they often disagree like drunk twins (Kahneman et al. 1997).
Frey flags a second problem: retrospective coherence. We invent tidy narratives that excuse misery if the morality feels right (Frey & Stutzer 2002). You can tick “satisfied” on a survey and still dread the alarm clock. A polished memory is not forward momentum.
Wellness Culture: Regulation Masquerading as Liberation
Mindfulness, CBT, the gratitude journal—some of it works. Regulation matters. The scam appears when coping tools rebrand themselves as emancipation.
Sara Ahmed charts how neoliberal culture moralises cheerfulness. A “good” citizen radiates positivity; dissent gets pathologised (Ahmed 2010).
OECD critique – Internal‑state metrics let policy‑makers wallpaper structural rot with smiley‑face infographics (Adler & Seligman 2016).
And yes, gratitude. Gratitude swaps discontent for compliance. It doesn’t add futures; it edits expectations. Meaningless job, but thanks for the roof. Gratitude tells you to cuddle the ceiling instead of asking why there’s no sky window. Novelty stays flat, efficacy stays flat, and the system keeps humming.
That is not healing. That is adaptation.
Why RPH Doesn’t Trip on These Traps
RPH skips the tally sheet and focuses on prediction. It doesn’t care how big the slice of cake is. It cares whether the cake hints at a bakery around the corner, whether you believe you can find it again, and whether you think the door will be open when you arrive. Novelty, probability, efficacy—three levers strong enough to throw the old models out of orbit.
Next we test how those levers behave in therapy clichés, policy pipelines, and that corporate wellness webinar you muted last week.
Efficacy, the Quiet Lever That Decides Whether Tomorrow Is Worth Tuesday
Efficacy is not hustle culture in a nicer jacket. It is the bone‑deep conviction that an action you take today might still be echoing in the room tomorrow. Nothing in the Rational Predicted Happiness model matters more—and nothing is harder for institutions to fake.
What Efficacy Really Is
Bandura called it self‑efficacy: belief in your own capacity to influence an event (Bandura 1977). RPH widens the aperture. Here, efficacy covers three nested circles:
Personal agency—Can I alter this outcome?
Relational agency—Can we move it together?
Systemic responsiveness—Will the structure even notice the shove?
The third circle is where breakdowns breed despair. A blocked feedback loop converts every effort into noise. Once you learn the system does not blink, motivation recodes itself as futility.
How Efficacy Gets Stripped—Slowly
Bureaucratic Humiliation
A single catastrophic event may gut you, but the real killer is slow bleed:
Six‑hour form—instant denial.
Hotline queue—auto‑disconnect.
“We value your feedback”—nothing.
Each micro‑failure is a tiny randomized trial proving that effort does not predict outcome. After the twentieth trial, even a rational mind concludes the correlation is zero.
Chronic Illness
Pain is one variable; informational collapse is another. Illness teaches that diet, sleep, stretch, prayer—none of it guarantees relief. As control variance shrinks, the brain downgrades its own agency score. Projects get mothballed not from boredom but from statistical realism.
Structural Abandonment
Poverty, racism, disability, sanism—the classics. Show up, get penalised. Advocate, face retaliation. The machine trains you to associate initiative with harm, then sells you self‑help manuals about resilience. It is emotional arbitrage, and you are the commodity.
Why Futility Feels Worse Than Pain
Seligman framed learned helplessness as a mood disorder (Seligman 1975); Sen reframed it as a capability deficit (Sen 1999). RPH restates it in physics: when efficacy hits zero, the product in Novelty × Probability × Efficacy hits zero too. The emotional waveform flat‑lines. Pain without vector. Pleasure without lift. A horizon clipped to the present pixel.
Re‑lighting the Feedback Loop
Mutual Aid as Proof of Concept
Nothing rewires agency faster than a task that actually budges—packing food boxes, organising rent strikes, sharing code. Collective friction is audible; people hear the wall move two centimetres and the mind updates its priors.
Recognition Therapy
One witness who says, “Yes, that happened,” can reboot an entire epistemic nervous system. Validation is not flattery. It is the restoration of causal grammar: I speak, the world replies.
Narrative Plausibility
Hope does not require certainty; it needs a non‑zero conditional probability. The tiniest causal chain—“If I email the doctor, pain might fall by ten percent”—is enough to keep the engine idling. Absent that, the mind powers down to conserve fuel.
Run Your Agency Audit
List three outcomes that matter.
For each, score:
Likelihood on a 0–1 scale.
Control on a 0–1 scale.
Support available on a 0–1 scale.
Multiply. Anything under 0.20 deserves structural intervention, not a motivational poster.
The point is not to chase a perfect 1.00; it is to prevent the zeros from clustering. One live wire in the circuit is enough to keep the lights on.
When people call you lazy, show them the math. No novelty, no probability, no efficacy, predictive happiness equals zero. That is not a flaw in character. That is simple arithmetic.
Success Is Loud, the Good Life Is Coherent
Success is a billboard. Salary in bold font, square footage in subscript, vacation photos looping like ads in Times Square. The crowd sees the lights and calls it living. Forecasting, however, works off a different map. It asks a private question: Does tomorrow still feel like mine?
Why External Metrics Feel Satisfying Until They Don’t
Social markers operate like credit scores—public, legible, and easily gamed. A mortgage proves you can service debt, not that you love coming home. A job title signals competence, not purpose. Research on subjective well‑being shows that extrinsic goals inflate quickly, then plateau (Ryan and Deci 2001). The brain clocks the upgrade, files it under routine, and hunts for the next signal. Novelty collapses, probability soars, efficacy stagnates. RPH predicts a flat emotional return.
My Own Audit at Apple
On paper I had cleared the hurdles: steady income, homeowner status, inner circle of friends. By workplace standards I was doing fine. Inside the metrics, though, I could not find myself. I had no voice in setting directions, no room to flag values that felt wrong, no credible path to alter the script. Novelty zeroed out, efficacy scraped the floor, probability felt locked. The forecast turned black even as the LinkedIn feed glowed.
Colleagues asked what was wrong. You have everything. What I lacked was agency, and agency is the hinge that lets meaning swing open. Without it, even pleasure sounds like static.
RPH Explains the “Successful but Empty” Phenomenon
Picture someone with the deluxe package: high wage, modern condo, quarterly yoga retreat, fully loaded benefits plan. If each day cues up as predictable, low‑variance, and immune to personal influence, the Rational Predicted Happiness score tanks. Hedons exist, but they do not translate into happiness because they arrive pre‑packaged, not self‑authored. Structure turns into scaffolded confinement, comfort into anesthetic.
Pleasure without novelty breeds numbness.Routine without agency becomes a cage.Security without alignment yields existential drift.
Forecast vs Five‑Year Plan
A five‑year plan is a staircase someone else designed. Forecasting asks whether the next step lands on ground you recognise. The test is simple:
Does this path still surprise you in ways that matter?
Do you believe the next milestone is reachable, not merely assigned?
Can you name an action, however small, that might change the odds?
If those answers dim, the glow of success cannot compensate. You risk forecasting a slow departure from your own life.
The Good Life as Responsive Trajectory
RPH suggests you track not the size of the reward but the elasticity of the system. A good life is one where inputs shift outcomes and outcomes echo your values. That may include money, but money is ballast, not compass. Autonomy, competence, relatedness—what Self‑Determination Theory calls the psychological nutrients—restore efficacy, push novelty, and keep probability contingent rather than fixed.
So ask the harder question: What future still feels alive to me, and what am I doing today that actually bends the road in that direction? If you cannot locate novelty, probability, or efficacy in the picture, you are not living badly, you are forecasting an exit. Success is the gossip about your life; coherence is the life itself.
Why the Model Matters More Than Your Mindset
The Rational Predicted Happiness model was never meant to cheer you up. Its job is to calibrate you, to help you feel in proportion to reality rather than in obedience to optimism.
We live inside institutions that outsource their own collapse to individual psychology. Burnout? Try breathing apps. Poverty? Manifest abundance. Anxiety? Practice gratitude until the roof stops leaking. Every fix assumes the structure is sound and the person is faulty.
RPH inverts the interrogation.It does not ask, “How can I think happier thoughts?”It asks, “Given the data at hand, does hope make statistical sense?”When the honest answer is no, the model stamps that verdict as rational, not pathological.
Most wellness programmes pathologise the failure to thrive. Exhausted? You mismanaged energy. Sad? You forgot your gratitude journal. Anxious? You need to visualise calm seas. Each prescription implies that the environment is neutral and that adaptation is your civic duty. RPH looks at the same scene and replies, “What if the environment is corrosive and your distress is the smoke alarm?”
Seen this way, suffering can be informative. If novelty has disappeared, probability feels thin, and efficacy collapsed weeks ago, why would delight appear on schedule? Your forecast is bleak because your situational variables predict bleakness. That is not a glitch in cognition; it is accurate modelling.
Clarity beats comfort. The model does not hug, soothe, or reframe. It tells you why the alarms are shrieking so you can stop accusing yourself of weakness. Once self‑blame is off the table, attention can pivot outward: What systems are starving novelty? Who is pricing probability out of reach? Where did efficacy leak away and who benefits from the leak?
That pivot is liberation, a small one, but real. It replaces self‑gaslighting with situational analysis. Pain remains, yet shame lifts. You discover that nothing is “wrong” with your emotional instruments; they are simply honest. And honesty, even when it hurts, is easier to carry than the lie that your brain is broken.
This Model Refuses to Help You Play Nice With Abuse
Most therapeutic toolkits worship a single idol: restored function. The intake forms never ask, "Is your life remotely just?" They ask, "Can you clock back in on Monday?" "Will you stop crying in the break room?" "Can you smile at clients again?"
RPH has zero interest in rehabbing your market utility. It will not coach you through wage theft, housing roulette, medical gaslighting, or that low‑grade soul fatigue that comes from bending yourself around somebody else’s bottom line. It will not teach you to breathe through disrespect. It will not bless resilience that only serves the grind.
Instead, the model hands you a translation key for the dread already humming in your bones. Misery, it says, is not a software glitch. Hopelessness is an environmental hazard report. Something outside you is setting the forecast to storm, and your barometer is working exactly as designed.
How Mood Gets Weaponised
In polite culture, contentment is the tax we pay for belonging.
Anger triggers security.
Numbness flags you as ungrateful.
Skepticism about the future gets you filed under "negative influence."
Refuse the smile and suddenly you are the problem. Solutions arrive: meditation apps, gratitude challenges, mandatory positivity seminars. All with the subtext, "Change your feelings so we don't have to change the conditions."
RPH breaks that lens. It treats despair as data. Novelty flatlined? Probability negligible? Efficacy crushed to dust? Then of course hope has left the building. Your forecast is honest. Calling that honesty a disorder is institutional gaslighting.
Radical, Not Just Descriptive
Once you swap the question "Why am I like this?" for "Why does the world insist I be fine with this?" self‑indictment loses its grip. The spotlight flips: away from your neurotransmitters, onto the structure that keeps drafting you into unpaid emotional labor.
That flip is subversion. It uninstalls the reflex to blame yourself and installs a habit of blaming the conditions that require sedation to seem livable. The model will not make you easier to manage. It will make you harder to lie to. And in a culture that feeds on compliance, that is already a jailbreak.
Hope Is a Calculation, It Cannot Be Faked.
If you have ever been told to “look on the bright side” while the bright side was clearly a mirage, this model is your sworn affidavit.If someone labelled you “too negative” as the bank changed the locks, RPH is your forensic report.
The model has no interest in how glossy your résumé looks or how many privilege boxes you tick. It keeps one ledger only:
Do you see any plausible reason to move toward tomorrow?
If your honest answer is no, you are not defective. You are observant.
Sometimes hopelessness is not a crisis of spirit. It is a correct reading of the data. In a culture that worships optimism, accuracy becomes a liability. Admit the forecast is broken and watch how quickly people pivot from cheering you up to shutting you down. You become the killjoy, the “drain,” the one who refuses to vibe.
But your instrument panel is fine. It is simply loud.Your unhappiness comes with source notes.Your despair cites its references.You are not choosing misery; you are responding to circumstances that make joy statistically implausible. No gratitude spreadsheet will rewrite a forecast that plainly says, Nothing good grows here.
So, no—this model will not cheer you up.It will, however, stop you from indicting yourself for feeling precisely what the evidence supports.It will arm you for arguments with your psychiatrist.It will explain why the most “well‑adjusted” people you know are medicated, delusional, or named Chad.It is built for the rest of us—the ones gas‑lit by wellness culture, ghosted by policy, and told that burnout is merely an attitude problem.
RPH is not a pep‑talk. It is a taxonomy of despair.And from that taxonomy, an honest emotional politics might finally grow.
🎵Thick Thought Thumper Of The Week: I'LL SMILE WHEN THERE'S A REASON 🎵
Works Cited
Bandura, Albert. “Self‑Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change.” Psychological Review, vol. 84, 1977, pp. 191‑215.
Ben‑Ze’ev, Aaron. The Subtlety of Emotions. MIT Press, 2000.
Brickman, Philip, and Donald T. Campbell. “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society.” Adaptation‑Level Theory, edited by M. H. Appley, Academic Press, 1971, pp. 287‑302.
Frey, Bruno S., and Alois Stutzer. Happiness and Economics: How the Economy and Institutions Affect Human Well‑Being. Princeton UP, 2002.
Kahneman, Daniel, et al. “Back to Bentham? Explorations of Experienced Utility.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 112, no. 2, 1997, pp. 375‑405.
Ryan, Richard M., and Edward L. Deci. “On Happiness and Human Potentials: A Review of Research on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Well‑Being.” Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 52, 2001, pp. 141‑66.
Seligman, Martin E. P. Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death. Freeman, 1975.
Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. Knopf, 1999.
Adler, Alfred, and Martin Seligman. Facilitating Happiness: Policy and Practice. OECD, 2016.
Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Duke UP, 2010.