The Happiness Treadmill

The pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right, says the Declaration of Independence in its list of self-evident truths. The greatest happiness of the greatest number wrote Jeremy Bentham, is the foundation of morality. To say that everyone wants to be happy sounds trite, almost circular, but it raises a profound question about our makeup. What is this thing that people strive for?

At first happiness might seem like just desserts for biological fitness (more accurately, the states that would have led to fitness in the environment in which we evolved). We are happier when we are healthy, well-fed, comfortable, safe, prosperous, knowledgeable, respected, non-celibate, and loved. Compared to their opposites, these objects of striving are conducive to reproduction. The function of happiness would be to mobilize the mind to seek the keys to Darwinian fitness. When we are unhappy, we work for the things that make us happy, when we are happy, we keep the status quo.

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How do we know what can reasonably be attained? A good source of information is that other people have attained. If they can get it, perhaps so can you. Through the ages, observers of the human condition have pointed out the tragedy; People are happy when they feel better off than their neighbors, unhappy when they feel worse off.

But, O! how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man's eyes! - William Shakespeare (As You Like it,)

Happiness, n. An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of others. Ambrose Bierce

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail. - Gore Vidal

When does A hunchback rejoice? When he sees one with a larger hump _ Yiddish saying

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Dinesh ^club

People today are safer, healthier, better fed, and longer-lived than at any time in history. Yet we don't spend our lives walking on air, and presumably our ancestors were not chronically glum. It is not reactionary to point out that many of the poor in today's Western nations live in conditions that yesterday's aristocrats could no have dreamed of. People in different classes and countries are often content with their lot until they compare themselves to the more affluent. The amount of violence in a society is more closely related to its inequality than to its poverty. In the second half of the twentieth century, the discontent of the Third World, and later the Second, have been attributed to their glimpses through the mass media of the First.

The other major clue to the attainable is how well of you are now. What you have now is attainable, by definition, and chances are you can do at least a little bit better. Evolutionary theory predicts that a man's reach should exceed his grasp, but not by much. Here we have the second tragedy of happiness: people adapt to their circumstances, good or bad, the way their eyes adapt to sun or darkness. From that neutral point, improvement is happiness, loss is misery. .........

The futility of striving has led many dark souls to deny that happiness is possible. For the show-business personality Oscar Levant, "Happiness is not something you experience, it's something you remember." Freud said that the goal of psychotherapy was "to transform hysterical misery into common unhappiness." A colleague, consulting with me by email about a troubled graduate student, wrote, "sometimes I wish I was a young then I remember that wasn't so great either."

But here the curmudgeons are only partly right. People do come to feel the same across as astonishing range of good and bad fortunes. But the baseline that people adapt to, on average, is not miserybut satisfaction. (The exact baseline differs from person to person and is largely inherited.) The psychologists David Myes and Ed Diener have found that about eighty percent of people in the industrialized world report that they are at least (fairly satisfied with life," and about thirty percent say they are "very happy" (As far we can tell, the reports are sincere.) The percentages are the same for all ages, for both sexes, for blacks and whites, and over four decases of economic growth. As Myers and Diener remark, "Compared with 1957, Americans have as many cars per person -- plus microwave ovens, color TVs, VCRs. air conditioners, answering machines, and $ 12 billion worth of new brand name athletic hoes a year. So, are Americans happier than they were in 1957? They are not."

9 years ago. Edited 2 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

Within an industrialized country, money buys only a little happiness: the correlation between wealth and satisfaction is positive but small. Lottery winners, after their jolt of happiness has subsided, return to their former emotional state. On the brighter side, so do people who have suffered terrible losses, such as paraplegics and survivors of the Holocaust.

These findings do no necessarily contradict the singer Sophie Tucker when she said, "I have been poor and I have been rich. Rich is better" In India and Bangladesh, wealth predicts happiness much better than it does in the West. Among twenty-four Western European and American nations, the higher the gross national product per capita, the happier the citizens (though there are many explanations) Myers and Diener point out that wealth is like health: not having makes you miserable, but having it does not guarantee happiness.

The tragedy of happiness ha a third act. There are twice as many negative emotion (fear, grief, anxiety, and so on) as positive ones, and losses are more keenly felt than equivalent gains. The tennis star Jimmy Connors once summed up the human condition: "I hate to lose more than I like to win." The asymmetry has been confirmed in the lab by showing that people will take a bigger gamble to avoid a sure loss than to improve on a sure gain, and by showing that people's mood plummets more when imagining a loss in their lives (for example, in course grades, or in relationships with the opposite sex) than it rises when imagining an equivalent gain. The psychologist Timothy Ketelaar notes that happiness tracks the effects of resources on biological fitness. As things get better, increases in fitness show diminishing returns: more food is better, but only up to a point. But as things get worse, decreases in fitness can take you out of the game: not enough food, and you're dead. There are many ways to become infinitely worse off (from an infection,m starvation, getting eaten, a fall, ad infinitum) and not many to become vastly better off. That makes prospective losses more worthy of attention than gains; there are more things that make us unhappy than things that make us happy.

9 years ago. Edited 2 months ago.

Dinesh ^club

Donald Campbell, an early evolutionary psychologist who studied the psychology of pleasure, described humans as being on a "hedonic treadmill' where gains in well being leave us no happier in the long run. Indeed, the study of happiness often sounds like a sermon for traditional values. The numbers show that it is not the rich, privileged, robust, or good looking who are happy; it is those who have spouses, friends, religion, and challenging, meaningful work. The findings can be overstated, because they apply to averages, not individuals, and because cause and effect are hard to tease apart: being married might make you happy, but being happy might help you get and stay married. But Campbell echoed millennia of wise men and women when he summed up the research: "The direct pursuit of happiness is a recipe for an unhappy life." ~ Pages 391 /393

9 years ago. Edited 2 months ago.

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