The Thinking Meat Project

How to be happy though hominid

Here’s an interesting article from The Times Online about happiness: what it is, and why it’s hard for us humans to find it. There are several interesting points here. I liked the distinction between the feeling of taking pleasure in something and the judgment that your life is satisfying, even if your emotions are not positive at the moment. Life can’t always be pleasant so that we feel happy all the time, but maybe you can still “be happy” most of the time in the sense that you’re basically satisfied with your life.

Another useful distinction is between wanting and enjoying; the neurochemistry behind these two states differs so that we wind up wanting things that don’t make us happy. In addition to discussing brain chemistry, the article talks about which parts of the brain are involved in different emotions; the positive emotions are associated with more recent brain structures while the negative emotions come from more ancient parts of the brain. Interestingly, only two of the six universal emotions recognized across all cultures are not negative, and one of those is neutral rather than positive (the six are joy, surprise, disgust, anger, fear, and sadness). From an evolutionary point of view, it makes some sense that humans are more alert to the negative than the positive. The negative emotions warn us of dangers and prompt particular actions, so they were crucial to survival and dealing with environmental threats (predators, harsh climate, etc.). People sometimes like to glorify the way we humans are always reaching for something beyond our grasp (”Excelsior!” as the young man in Longfellow’s poem cried) and you can understand how wanting to always find something better might have helped us as a species, but it does not always make for comfortable living.

It seems like time and nature might have dealt us a difficult hand, but some researchers are trying to find ways that humans can be happier anyway. There’s some discussion of current approaches to cultivating happiness, including a web site where you can sign up and get happiness exercises for $10 a month, and a little bit about national differences in happiness levels. It also talks a bit about differences between men and women; women experience (or at least report) more and stronger emotions than men do across the board, both positive and negative, with the exception of anger. This is sort of a footnote to this article, but it will be interesting to see if further research in this area reveals why this might be so.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-100-1793873-531,00.html

At one point this article says that money doesn’t seem to “add much” to happiness because happiness levels in Britain (where this particular newspaper is based) haven’t risen with income, and lottery winners, after the first flush of happiness, are about as happy as they were before they won. It’s probably more accurate, though, to say that above a certain level, money doesn’t do much to make you happier; if you have chronic worries about whether you and your family will have food and shelter and medical care, I suspect happiness by any definition is difficult. And if you’re bright enough to benefit from a college education but poor enough that you can’t afford to go, I can’t help thinking that you might be happier if you had the money to go to college rather than working at an unsatisfactory job for the rest of your life, although the sad fact is that the two are not mutually exclusive these days. Also, I have read elsewhere that within a country, richer people tend to be happier, so comparative wealth does seem to make some difference even if absolute wealth doesn’t. I read this in an essay in Daedalus by Robert Frank (an economist at Cornell) last year about why happiness doesn’t rise with income levels in a country even though richer people are happier. The essay suggested that we in wealthier societies often choose to spend our money on things that don’t make us happier, even though there are other ways we could use it that would make us happier. To quote:

Considerable evidence suggests that if we use an increase in our incomes, as many of us do, simply to buy bigger houses and more expensive cars, then we do not end up any happier than before. But if we use an increase in our incomes to buy more of certain inconspicuous goods–such as freedom from a long commute or a stressful job–then the evidence paints a very different picture. The less we spend on conspicuous consumption goods, the better we can afford to alleviate congestion; and the more time we can devote to family and friends, to exercise, sleep, travel, and other restorative activities. On the best available evidence, reallocating our time and money in these and similar ways would result in healthier, longer– and happier–lives.

This essay made some excellent points and I found it an extremely interesting critique of the way people in this country live and what our lifestyle does to us.

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=6&tid=14403