Happiness is a reward from our ancestors
Happiness is a reward from our ancestors
Long-term happiness only comes to those who emulate their successful ancestors
I wrote about it before: Evolutionary psychology can be used to cure depression: I did so in my youth. The other side of this logic is that evolutionary psychology can be used to reach happiness.
Everybody does not agree about that. I recently learned about a blog called Everything is Bullshit, written by psychologist David Pinsof. That was a nice title, I thought. I also believe a lot of things are bullshit. After some reading and commenting, I started to get the impression that I'm disagreeing a bit with the blog's basic premises. I believe that the reason why so much bullshit can pass, is that essentially, there are things that are not bullshit. If almost everything actually was bullshit, making people believe in things would have been much more difficult. Judging from his posts until now, David Pinsof seems to have a more Machiavellian view of humanity: Basically, humans are status-seeking primates, and everything that doesn't acknowledge that fact is bullshit.
One thing David Pinsof says is bullshit is the notion of happiness. Scientifically, the only thing that can make people happy is positive surprises, he writes. I have seen that idea at Astral Codex Ten too, although less categorically: People get happy when they win the lottery. But a month later they have gotten used to being rich and are back at their usual happiness levels. Is there nothing else than happy surprises that can make people feel good?
Long-term and short-term
I think that the happiness question is one of few occasions where non-English speakers have an advantage over native English-speakers. In Swedish there are different words for long-term happiness and short-term happiness. Someone happy in the moment is called glad. That is the straight opposite to sad. Someone happy in the longer-term is called lycklig. And we are not just some millions of weirdos in the northernmost of Europe. The Germans are froh when they are happy in the short term and glücklich when they are happy in the long term (if I got this wrong, please correct me Germans. I only learned German in school).
The closest equivalent for short-term happiness I can find in the English language is joy. But it can't be used the same way as glad in Swedish and froh in German. Most of all, it is not used as an adjective to describe the state of mind of a person.
For that reason, I think it is easier for English-speakers than for speakers of Swedish or German to get the idea that long-term happiness is not a thing. Those languages have a specific word for it, and that word might be there for a reason.
Still, English-speakers definitely use the word happiness in its long term meaning too. For example, when they talk about a happy marriage, they don't mean a marriage full of happy surprises. They mean a marriage where the two parties are feeling satisfied with their lives together. But I think that the lack of linguistic distinctions between happiness(long term) and happiness(short term) in the English language makes it easier to get the two meanings mixed up compared to in languages with a different word for each phenomenon.
Pleasing the ancestors
I'm not totally against the surprise theory of happiness. I think it explains short-term happiness well. Short-term happiness, or joy, is about happy surprises, just as they say. When something is going better than we expected, that high feeling arrives. More in some people than in others, but most people can probably feel a bit of it.
But I think that long-term happiness is entirely something else. It is a calm and stable feeling of being on the right track. Long-term happiness is the lack of a persistent itch that says do things differently!. I'm convinced that happiness evolved in humans and other animals in order to tell individuals that they were doing things right and should continue doing what they are doing.
The basic assumption is simple: Individuals who felt good when they were doing things that made them survive and procreate did more of those things. This is not just the case for humans. A cat who felt good while chasing mice was probably more successful than a cat who felt bad while chasing mice. An elephant cow who felt good in a herd of other elephant cows was probably more successful than an elephant cow who was content alone with a calf.
That low-intense feeling of well-being we call happiness is certainly much older than humans. But humans have evolved a specifically human blueprint for happiness. Like most evolution, it suffers from a time-lag. We don't get happy from doing what makes people reproductively successful today. We get happy from doing what made people reproductively successful in history.
Total happiness equals death
I once half-read a book called The Geography of Bliss, written by a man who traveled around the world to study happiness and unhappiness. The book was not very good. But it had one high-light: The writer checked into a super luxury hotel in the United Arab Emirates. The more the staff tried to please his senses, the more he got the feeling of being dead. He checked out earlier than planned, because he couldn't bear the feeling of being locked into a gigantic coffin.
I understood him perfectly. Happiness is a keep it up signal. Unhappiness is an itch for change. What happens if we get hundred percent satisfied with everything? Then we don't want to change anything at all, which means we are mentally dead.
The luxury-hotel-turned-coffin analogy leads us towards a conclusion: Long-term happiness is not about total satisfaction, sensory or other.
A question of confidence
Instead, I think happiness is a sign of subconscious confidence. Our minds have an advanced, inherited sense for what is right and wrong in evolutionary terms. I think our subconscious minds make a kind of calculation: All in all, are we heading in the right direction for evolutionary success? Or are we stuck in something we should take the first possible opportunity to get out of? As long as the subconscious mind feels confident that we are on the right path, we feel happy. Otherwise, we don't.
The confidence analogy shows why seeking happiness for the sake of happiness is as meaningless as seeking confidence for the sake of confidence. If, for example, you would build a house, you might not feel confident that the roof will resist rain and snow. The good way to handle such fears is to learn about state-of-the-art roof construction. The bad way to handle such fears is to take a mindfulness class where you learn how to feel confidence in the face of the unknown.
Confidence mostly doesn't come because we actively try to feel confident. It comes because we get a reason to feel confident that seems valid to us. It is the same with long-term happiness. It comes because our out-of-date minds find reason enough to feel confident in our ways of life.
I'm sure there are people who can never feel enough confidence, either consciously or subconsciously. Just like there are people who are wrongly wired and feel physical pain for no apparent reason, there are people who are wrongly wired and feel psychological pain for no reason. In those cases, medication and mindfulness classes are the only solution. But I believe that most people are wired in an evolutionarily logical way. Most people will feel long-term happiness if they only find some way to emulate what were once good evolutionary strategies. In order to achieve that pleasant feeling of being on the right path, we need to win the confidence of the minds of our ancestors.
If Meditation would solve any problem you would not need to meditate everyday and change would be permanent.
It gives short relief by pausing chronic unhappiness letting body reset, the same way closing eyes and covering with palms give relief to whole day strained eyes muscles.
Happiness should come with no effort, as seeing.
Pulling to one side, pushing away opposite creates a pendulum swing. We strain tired muscles even more and rest less.
Our body isn't aware if we are dumb or not. It doesn't stop us from things never being problems in nature.
What we are adapted to comes naturally.
But in civilization, we get used to unnatural things and we build tolerance to doing things wrong and thoughtlessly. In the end nothing punishes us for it anymore. We don't rebalance to golden middle, we instead use cheat codes, seeking a magic pill or prostetic. Pain lost it's sense either.
Whole Buddhism was about getting permanently detached, nonexistent, still, non-thinking, non-feeling, blissfully dead.
But if millions meditate all the time then by chance or of bordom some one guy will get things right.
Taoism and Stoicism did too.
Probably rationalism born from "fighting animal nature" was the same process. Accepting actual reality and following what effectively works. Pain is part of gain.
Pain is the gain. Both in building muscles and in building memory. Despite the old and the new religions something can't be born from nothingness.
Science and nature give hints:
We behave the same as gas molecules.
We are stuck in groups in our little containers. Each bordering other in one interconnected system.
When other box weights on our, external pressure forces it to shrink, lowering space. Both should find a point of balance as pressure of gas in our box eventually rises so high it pars external pressure.
Constant addition of external pressure is like that constant straining of muscles, chronic fatigue state, decreasing living space, sense of never ending growth of expectations, breeding anxiety.
You can expand the box volume if you decrease the external pressure, giving each molecule more space.
If it will be constantly growing it will be your state of happiness - long term good positive trajectory ( if expected trajectory fails to continue and everyone acted as if it was sure thing - that's what causes ferment and revolutions).
But it can grow different ways too.
You can add more gas (children?) and as sum of unit movements hitting walls will increase, pressure will increase.
You can also heat up the gas in the box. Existing molecules will move with more energy, faster, hitting walls more often, each energising other.
If it's too much box can blow up or expands.
Simple thermodynamics in a system.
Molecules leaving box create the sense of more space and a fake, because external to individual unit, sense of positive trajectory, as long as it lasts. But it inevitably means less summed pressure in the box and in flexible system results in natural expansion of other boxes with higher internal pressure taking away space.
This meditation thing, to me, seems like cooling down gas in the box. Then molecules move less, each pressures other molecule and the box walls less.
But pressure in box lowers as well..
If walls are strong enough other boxes and their molecules can't expand into our box territory but if are flexible or doesn't exist and our molecules hibernate instead of being enough heathen up... well... pantarei
re: the roof metaphor, let us say that the roof was vital to our existence, and indeed having a strong roof was a big evolutionary advantage. In which case, why would our mind want us to ever feel content/fulfilled/happy with its status? It seems like, evolutionarily, the advantage would be to make us constantly worry about it, monitor it incessantly and vigilantly maintain it to prevent leaks.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I'm not sure that long-term happiness is really in evolution's best interests. I view it more of, evolution sets us up to think that "if we achieve X, we will be happy" and then moves the football when we do (hedonic treadmill). When I feel long-term happy, I feel like it is more of a state that I wrested from evolution/nature.