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.

What is it like to be a happy bat? Grey headed flying fox (Pteropus poliocephalus) preparing to take off, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, Wikimedia Commons.