But do you have an eigenvalue of One?

What if we model our internal state, our measure of what emotions we feel at any given point in time, mathematically? What if we put numbers to indicate what we feel and maybe try to gain some insight out of it? A train of thought I stumbled upon lowkey blew my mind today.

Let's say following the theory of having six basic emotions, the emotional state of a person is one of these six states, denoting one of happy,sad,disgust,anger,surprise,fear.

You'd want a person to be stable in the midst of chaos, an ability to keep their calm in the presence of the enormous uncertainties of life. I'd argue the goal in life is to not remain in a perpetual state of happiness. Let's face it, that's simply not plausible (or perhaps it is, I've been so fascinated by the limits of meditation and the neuroplasticity of the mind to get you to a place of biss). The goal rather is, to be able to get oneself back to a state of happiness, no matter what the initial state is, and do that in reasonably quick time. The idea is to have some form of "convergence" towards a stable and steady state. This looks like doing state transitions on a Markov Chain. The surprising part here is, every human gets to decide their transition probability matrix. You can use tools from therapy, from philosophy, meditate, do whatever it takes to make for a higher probability of transitioning from any state to any other. That's where the magic lies. Thus, I'd argue that the goal, in this stochastic system we call life, is to design oneself a transition matrix that ensures stability and convergence of this Markov Chain.

It's a well studied mathematical fact that the TPM should have an eigenvalue of one for convergence of a Markov Chain. Perhaps that's the goal, rather a part of reaching the goal, in life? Trying to get an eigenvalue of one? In a very nerdy extrapolation, this made me wonder about what this could mean in the context of love and relationships. Your ideal partner, having emotional stability, would have a leading eigenvalue of one. The One perhaps has an eigenvalue of one? Not sure if this is me overworking all my braincells to come to a conclusion that seemingly blew my mind, but it's atleast not an exercise in futility to connect seemingly disparate ideas to develop a framework for life. I can only read philosophy (of course I don't have enough experience or wisdom to contribute to a structure generic enough for life), but perhaps modelling stuff mathematically helps me contribute in my own head to a structure for life.

So the real question is not if you're perpetually happy. The real question is, do you have an eigenvalue of one?