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A huge happiness and positive thinking industry, estimated to be worth US$11 billion a year,
has helped to create the fantasy that happiness is a realistic goal.
Chasing the happiness dream is a very American concept, exported to the
rest of the world through popular culture. Indeed, “the pursuit of
happiness” is one of the US’s “unalienable rights”. Unfortunately, this
has helped to create an expectation that real life stubbornly refuses to
deliver.
Because even when all our material and biological needs are
satisfied, a state of sustained happiness will still remain a
theoretical and elusive goal, as Abd-al-Rahman III, Caliph of Córdoba in
the tenth century, discovered. He was one of the most powerful men of
his time, who enjoyed military and cultural achievements, as well as the
earthly pleasures of his two harems. Towards the end of his life,
however, he decided to count the exact number of days during which he
had felt happy. They amounted to precisely 14.
Happiness, as the Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes put it, is “like a
feather flying in the air. It flies light, but not for very long.”
Happiness is a human construct, an abstract idea with no equivalent in
actual human experience. Positive and negative affects do reside in the
brain, but sustained happiness has no biological basis. And – perhaps
surprisingly – I reckon this is something to be happy about.
Nature and evolution
Humans are not designed to be happy, or even content. Instead, we are
designed primarily to survive and reproduce, like every other creature
in the natural world. A state of contentment is discouraged by nature
because it would lower our guard against possible threats to our
survival.
The fact that evolution has prioritised the development of a big
frontal lobe in our brain (which gives us excellent executive and
analytical abilities) over a natural ability to be happy, tells us a lot
about nature’s priorities. Different geographical locations and
circuits in the brain are each associated with certain neurological and
intellectual functions, but happiness, being a mere construct with no
neurological basis, cannot be found in the brain tissue.
In fact, experts in this field argue that nature’s failure to weed
out depression in the evolutionary process (despite the obvious
disadvantages in terms of survival and reproduction) is due precisely to
the fact that depression as an adaptation plays a useful role
in times of adversity, by helping the depressed individual disengage
from risky and hopeless situations in which he or she cannot win.
Depressive ruminations can also have a problem solving function during difficult times. Where is happiness located?Gutenberg Encyclopedia, CC BY-SA
Morality
The current global happiness industry has some of its roots in
Christian morality codes, many of which will tell us that there is a
moral reason for any unhappiness we may experience. This, they will
often say, is due to our own moral shortcomings, selfishness and
materialism. They preach a state of virtuous psychological balance
through renunciation, detachment and holding back desire.
In fact, these strategies merely try to find a remedy for our innate
inability to enjoy life consistently, so we should take comfort in the
knowledge that unhappiness is not really our fault. It is the fault of
our natural design. It is in our blueprint.
Advocates of a morally correct path to happiness also disapprove of
taking shortcuts to pleasure with the help of psychotropic drugs. George
Bernard Shaw said: “We have no more right to consume happiness without
producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.” Well-being
apparently needs to be earned, which proves that it is not a natural
state.
The inhabitants of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World live perfectly
happy lives with the help of “soma”, the drug that keeps them docile but
content. In his novel, Huxley implies that a free human being must
inevitably be tormented by difficult emotions. Given the choice between
emotional torment and content placidity, I suspect many would prefer the
latter.
But “soma” doesn’t exist, so the problem isn’t that accessing
reliable and consistent satisfaction by chemical means is illicit;
rather that it’s impossible. Chemicals alter the mind (which can be a
good thing sometimes), but since happiness is not related to a
particular functional brain pattern, we cannot replicate it chemically.
Happy and unhappy
Our emotions are mixed and impure, messy, tangled and at times
contradictory, like everything else in our lives. Research has shown
that positive and negative emotions and affects can coexist in the brain
relatively independently of each other.
This model shows that the right hemisphere processes negative emotions
preferentially, whereas positive emotions are dealt with by the
left-sided brain.
It’s worth remembering, then, that we are not designed to be
consistently happy. Instead, we are designed to survive and reproduce.
These are difficult tasks, so we are meant to struggle and strive, seek
gratification and safety, fight off threats and avoid pain. The model of
competing emotions offered by coexisting pleasure and pain fits our
reality much better than the unachievable bliss that the happiness
industry is trying to sell us. In fact, pretending that any degree of
pain is abnormal or pathological will only foster feelings of inadequacy
and frustration.
Postulating that there is no such thing as happiness may appear to be
a purely negative message, but the silver lining, the consolation, is
the knowledge that dissatisfaction is not a personal failure. If you are
unhappy at times, this is not a shortcoming that demands urgent repair,
as the happiness gurus would have it. Far from it. This fluctuation is,
in fact, what makes you human.
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