You Are The Captain Of Your Soul. Autonomy Solves The Puzzle

autonomy life satisfaction man standing on mountain with sun

Photo: Pablo Heimplatz, Unsplash

A “Kid In A Candy Shop” Eventually Gets Existential Diabetes:

The problem with junk food is that it can look pretty attractive and get pretty addictive.

You have a little bit just for fun, and next thing you know you’re obese and hating yourself.

Leading a life that way with your actions can turn out just the same.

So then if The Pleasure Principle is supposed to rule everything that’s alive and aware,

Why does the “feel good right now” series of life-choices turn that into a contradiction?

An SFU research team set-out to find out why and where it ultimately leads…

The Short Answer:

Freud thought The Pleasure Principle explains most of human behavior.
But maybe there’s something wrong with it?
Maybe spending your life getting wasted in Cabo isn’t really paradise?
So Canadian researchers ran a study on life-satisfaction.
The test-metrics were: Relatedness, Competence and Autonomy from SDT.
General levels of positive and negative emotion were also reported from the same prior 4 week window.
Weirdly-enough all subjects from 18-80 found that Relatedness & Competence didn’t score high.
They were almost indistinguishable from plain-old levels of positive or negative emotion.
In-fact, life-satisfaction tended to come first and then the positive feelings followed.
Autonomy turns-out to be the main factor associated with life-satisfaction.
On the opposite side of that, The Whitehall Study shows that lack of autonomy leads to 2x greater incidence of heart-disease.
Even for subjects as young as 20 and controlled for things like smoking & drinking.
If you could define it, Autonomy would look something like Authenticity + Action.
And if you follow that, it could lead to Meaning, which is associated with all different kinds of better health outcomes.
Even the authors of the study suggest that choosing to do hard things like going to the gym counts as autonomy, because comes from that voluntary choice.
Albert Camus & Mark Manson strongly argue that choosing the strife & effort you’re willing to put up with on the way to your goals is way better than just setting goals.
Also weirdly, people who choose to go on vacation, but then just sit and “do nothing” instead of the standard Tourist Decathlon of excursions & souvenir shops end up more satisfied.
And at opposite extremes of Autonomy, both Viktor Frankl and George Washington have proven the power of voluntary authentic choice, no matter how unreal the situation.
Viktor refused to be reduced to nothing.
George refused to be inflated to everything.
The best confirmation of this study is that even Aristotle was teaching +/- the exact same thing 2400 years ago.

Read on to find out the details…

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The Hidden Trap Of Endless Mai-Tais On The Beach:

So the popular version of success usually contains a few silly ideas.

Work, save, invest, maybe trade or build a company, get rich, buy expensive things.

Then retire early to Margaritaville and spend the rest of your life getting wasted.

But some entrepreneurs can’t stop creating companies.

And that might not be as much of a sickness as it sounds.

Canadian Teams Test Core Trio Of Self-Determination Theory:

So in a study of more than 1200 UK & Canadian adults aged 18-80, researchers from Simon Fraser University looked at Life-Satisfaction.

All of them were given surveys based on the core-principles of Self-Determination Theory.

The three building blocks there are:
1) Relatedness. Ie: High-quality social networks, connectedness, and belonging
2) Compentence. Ie: Being knowledgeable and affective.
3) Autonomy.

They were also surveyed on general positive and negative emotions in different parts of their life.

And after examining the last 4 weeks of their lives for these answers, the result turned out to be strange.

Even though it’s associated with better health and longer-life, Relatedness did not score highest on life-satisfaction!

Positive Feelings Are Not As Simple Or Straightforward As You Thought:

After untangling and filtering the results, a few other things became clear.

Feelings of relatedness & competence were more-or-less interchangeable with any old feelings of positive emotion.

They didn’t even predict life-satisfaction.

The team found that positive-emotion didn’t predict life-satisfaction, either.

It seemed to run only one way in that regard.

People who had life satisfaction already, seemed to have more positive and less negative.

But running things the other way around did not produce the same result.

So, “Just Stay Positive” may not be as nuanced a piece of advice as it may seem.

Autonomy. The Last Inch Of Humanity Makes All The Difference:

Nope. After all that, it turns out Autonomy was the one factor consistently associated with life-satisfaction.

Positive emotion may come later, but autonomy beforehand was the best indicator.

Now, any of our Founding Fathers from the recently-passed July Fourth holiday would agree with that.

They might even say it’s obvious.

But we might try looking into a blacker-mirror for some help.

The Whitehall Study. A Long Black Infarction Of The Soul:

The Whitehall Study was a look at British civil servants and their health.

What it found was 2x increased-levels of Heart-Disease risk for people who had lower rank, more long-term unresolvable Stress,

And … Less autonomy.

This held for subjects as young as 20, and did so even when controlled for things like smoking & drinking.

So there’s your key negative reference point to bookend this SFU work.

And it’s not the only one to say Stress Is A Killer.

The Authenticity + Action That Can Lead To Many Great Outcomes:

And here’s where we depart from the study to tie in some other evidence.

Because if we think in ways similar to those who fought for our independence 250 years ago and ask a good question,

It’s probably: “What is Autonomy?”

Come up with your own guess that might include throwing tea in a harbor,

But the basics are probably something like Autonomy = Authenticity + Action.

It’s a good question to ask, because if you follow it, you might just end-up at Meaning.

And that tends to be associated with all kinds of health benefits.

Starting out with some great ones like:
1) Lower Stress
and
2) Less Inflammation

-The rest of which, you can catch over in the Meaning Superpost.

The Freaky Truth Of Choosing Your Own Work, Frustration, & Suffering:

Quite-weirdly, one of the main study authors even agrees with a pretty old idea in philosophy.

He said that even something as painful & effortful as going to the gym could still increase life-satisfaction.

Because it relies on voluntary choices that are based in autonomy.

Both Albert Camus and Mark Manson take that idea further.

Albert advises us in the area of meaningful work and chosen-suffering that, “You have to imagine Sisyphyus as happy.”

And Mark suggests that we shouldn’t just think of goals and desires in life, but to identify and decide-on just how much of, and what type of pain, suffering, and crap we’re willing to put up with in order to get where we want to go.

Authentic But Weird Choices Even Work On Vacation? WHAT?!?:

The power of autonomy goes so far, it has freaky results in, “Vacation By Diagnosis“.

For instance, the people who go someplace and then do almost nothing are the ones who report the highest satisfaction.

No group-excursions, no souvenir shops, no coerced-consumption, barely any photos, no red double-decker tour buses.

Imagine your balcony in Antibes. Doing nothing but staring at the Mediterranean and Just Being for two weeks.

Even with the potentially topless beaches just a stone’s throw away…

Viktor And George. The Polar-Extremes Of Core Autonomy:

Although some of you actually are in Antibes right now, I thought it might be interesting to note two much more serious examples.

Both Viktor Frankl and George Washington showed what cast-iron Autonomy was at different extremes.

At one, you have Viktor at the complete “crush depth” of the soul,

Where everything you could possibly imagine had been taken away, yet he still found his famous insight:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms-to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

George Faces The Megalomania-Insanity Of Zero Human Constraints:

On the other hand, George Washington was pressured from every possible quarter to become America’s king at the end of The Revolution.

But that invites a very Fate-like riddle:

What kind of monster does a person become when every single human constraint is removed and they instead face an infinite vacuum?

Napoleon? Stalin? … -Mad King Ludwig?

George looked into that void and found what both Albert and Mark have been hinting-at.

Voluntary-sacrifice.

Where Viktor discovered, “I cannot be reduced to nothing.” George refused to end the war by restarting the problems that caused it.

He found, unlike Napoleon, “I cannot be inflated into being everything.”

And that Authenticity + Action had him refuse unanimous demands to be made king, thus forfeiting an entire empire.

Twice.

Even Supergenius Aristotle Said Hedonism Is Just “Empty Calories”:

PS: That all puts George, Viktor, Mark, and the SFU team in some very good company.

Because, “The man who figured-out everything”, Aristotle himself said pretty much the exact same thing:

~You cannot achieve Authenticity+Action (Flourishing) by chasing pleasures you didn’t choose, for reasons you didn’t examine, toward someone else’s cartoon of happiness; and without an ounce of unvarnished sincerity.(Hedonism)

-Just a short 2400 years ago.

Sounds like the study figured that out, too.