That's just not how life works.
My takeaway is that (presuming the argument is correct) that much of human striving is probably better described with specific words (as you suggested - joy, accomplishment, fulfillment, excitement, etc). For most of human history, most people probably didn't think "I want to be happy" but "I want to have a good partner", "I want a big family", "I want my crop to grow so I don't die."
I wonder how much unhappiness is caused by seeking a poorly-defined ideal of happiness.
The book was called "Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison".
All those four words combined is something like the concept of eudaimonia that Aristotle describes in his Nicomachean Ethics:
This question itself seems to be a perfect example of the point that the word is worse than meaningless. Worse because people use it like it has a useful meaning.
One can die in a state that has a lot of the qualities or features that overlap with other states that people call happy, but that doesn't make them equal or equivalent.
> the word is worse than meaningless
It seems as though you are redefining it to be meaningless, then projecting that onto everyone else. Is it not curious to you that everyone else takes no issue with its usage?
Russ Harris has a great book about this called The Happiness Trap [0], which is an introduction to ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy)
[0]: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/76053/the-happiness...
Even if feelings are temporary you can still have them more or less often. When somebody says they are happy, of course it does not mean they are experiencing bliss all the time; it means that the relative frequency of positive emotions is high and the relative frequency of negative emotions is low.
I think a lot of people assume it's not possible to be happy because their life circumstances are incompatible with it and they can't or won't change those circumstances. I think in the US at least, the things we want most and the things we strive for are not things that make us happy.
It is true that most people seem to think happiness is the ultimate goal for life. They say they just want to be happy, that they just want their kids to be happy. Often times, though, it seems almost circular in logic; any time you pushback against the idea of happiness or why being happy all the time isn’t always good, people will just say “oh, that isn’t REAL happiness” or “that actually is happiness!”
Often this is when I bring up hedonism and say, “well, if pure happiness is all that matters, why don’t we all just do heroin all the time? You will feel great!” Of course, they will say “well the high can’t last forever and eventually your life will suck and that is why it isn’t real happiness.
I think it is more than that, though. Imagine you could feel the best feeling you have had all the time, just sitting there. You could just lean back and feel good for as long as you want. Would you want that?
I think most people wouldn’t, and not just because we don’t think it is possible. It is more than that. We want to do hard things that make us work and that hurt a bit and frustrate us, because there is a sense of satisfaction when you persevere. We need to feel pain and sadness, to feel the fullest connection with others through the full range of emotions.
It is not easy to articulate exactly what we want, but it isn’t simply happiness.
It's the striving itself that is the source of our suffering & dissatisfaction
The reason its hard to articulate what we want is we are conditioned to think of our life as a series of targets to hit, but that striving is where we suffer. Maybe you target wealth, then you look for happiness, then you look for meaning, and it doesn't end.
Life is like a fire, you don't ask the fire what its goal is.
> We want to do hard things that make us work and that hurt a bit and frustrate us, because there is a sense of satisfaction when you persevere.
Even with this, making satisfaction the goal will turn it into another struggle or commodity to be consumed. We like hard things because the intensity forces us to be present. The striving mind stops worrying about the future or the past and you are fully present with the task at hand.
Once you can get out of the way of yourself, you realize we don't actually want a better experience, we just want to stop being distracted from the one we're already having.
thewebguyd out here laying down some Noble Truths!
-Dennis Leary
He describing to enjoy the warmth of blankets on a freezing winter night, it is imperative the nose be exposed to the cold likely as a metaphor to enjoy "happiness" something is needed for contrast.
Dependent origination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da?wp...
While some ideas are more obvious than others I always wonder whether the same insights occurred independently (of each other -- excuse the poor choice of words), or if the ideas can all trace their roots back to the same teachings.
No. Authors, Henry David Thoreau in 1854 and here Melville in 1851, and others at the time in that region were very heavily influenced by Hindu scriptures especially the Bhagavad Gita. Hindu mythology was mentioned several times in Moby Dick including referring to the whale as the Fish Incarnation of Vishnu.
Does it really? The sentiment of your post is pretty widespread at this point. It's kind of like saying "our culture is so commercialized" but everyone will tell you they're sick of commercialism.
I don’t think this is true, unless you’re using ‘happiness’ to refer to euphoria or acute joy.
The happiness that is generally sought is more accurately described as a general lack of sadness or despair. Having a roof over your head, food on the table, a job to go to, decent health, and friends and family is what constitutes basic happiness. That is a good goal to work toward, in my opinion.
also I don't think the more subtle distinctions between happiness and contentment is something people can be expected to maintain in their everyday speech at every moment. That's just not how language works.
I.e. happiness is a good measure to identify other things in your life: If something makes you unhappy, address it, if something makes you happy, follow it. (Very simplified)
But if you make "maximizing happiness" the direct target without any context, you get drugs.
Having to explain to young children that people do this simply to say hello, that they aren't actually asking you your health or state, or anything really. Falls right in line with our need to smile ALL THE TIME.
I stand by statements made by my European friends: Americans are mostly full of shit, mostly liars, and ALWAYS are trying to sell you something.
Are we the Baddies? Yes, of fucking course we are.
But constant happiness isn’t realistic, it’s like a desire to be permanently high. From my own experience I’ve landed somewhere near the Buddhist framing: the healthy default is just calm and neutral, with happiness and sadness coming and going away.
Trying to force happiness as a permanent state seems like its own problem, which is kind of what Bentall is pointing at from the other direction.
This is a very healthy attitude, and people often miss it. Every feeling/emotion/state of mind is impermanent. It will come and go on its own, its biology and there's nothing you can do about it. It's trying to "cling" to a specific state, forever, that leads to our own suffering. The moment you've move from "I feel happy" to "I hope this lasts forever" is where you will suffer. Just be a witness to the coming and going, you witness happiness occurring, you don't become happiness, and its the same for other feelings and states.
Is there though? I don't think modern psychology does. Where are these psychologists who don't think emotional ups and downs are a normal healthy part of life? Even in media it's often recognized that people being happy (or even just too tranquil) all the time, is wrong and creepy/unsettling. That said, it's absolutely true that advertisers are constantly pushing a narrative that you should be in an endless pursuit for what you don't have and that if you only buy what they want to sell you it will make you happier and improve your life.
More seriously (very little indeed) maybe the 'problem' is all those activities that need to create more and more new problems/disorders to justify all the work uppon, so what if psychiatry is a psychiatric disorder? regressum ad infinitum, take the red pill.
About happiness, Buddha, asked about the way to happines, say: happiness is not the destination, is the way.
FDA Approves Depressant Drug For The Annoyingly Cheerful [video/NSFW/2:06] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd4tugPM83c
More U.S. Children Being Diagnosed With Youthful Tendency Disorder https://theonion.com/more-u-s-children-being-diagnosed-with-...
I think other languages have more shades for this much like eskimos have many words for snow.
For example in the Jewish tradition the word "nahas" is something like the satisfaction of watching the children you raised become excellent parents of their own.
Another word "simha" could be translated as "happy occasion" but really is only used for positive lifecycle events (birth, marriage, etc)
In modern English we would probably use "happy" for all these but it's unfortunate that we'd also use the same word for triviality like "I am happy jerking off in my basement"
The beauty of "nahas" and "simha" is they point us towards a sustainable and deeply meaningful way to be "happy" - to achieve significance in our lives that makes us feel good because things are deeply good.
"Happiness" does not act as a guidepost in the same way. I believe it actually comes from the same root as "happen" - a sort of vagarity you hope to stumble into but aren't sure how to work towards.
Don't get me started on the English word "love" lol.
... which is a stereotyped myth, like most of what we were taught about indigenous peoples everywhere.
Turns out English has MANY more words for "stream of water on land" than Inuit has for snow. Inuit has multiple nuancing endings - but English has snow, snows, snowy, snowlike, and so one.
"Good morning!"
"That's what the government wants you to believe."
"You want me to contract a psychiatric disorder? What did I ever do to you?"What are other people's favorite humorous responses?
> "What do you mean?" he said. "Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?"
"For a given definition of 'morning'."
But I knew a guy who didn't answer with words. He would just growl until he'd had coffee.
And like a true computer nerd, of course it's an unsigned integer, meaning if I drink too much coffee I'm back to grunting only (this time on the toilet)
DSM defines a disorder by how well an individual fits into the current economic and social system. Technically, if someone is so blissfully happy they stop showing up to their job, they would actually meet the criteria for a disorder.
Just like if someone lives in a high-crime area with little security they may have crippling anxiety. DSM would say they have a generalized anxiety disorder, but I would argue they don't, they are experiencing a reasonable reaction to a broken environment.
We are far too quick to jump to "this person isn't functioning in society, therefore something must be wrong with them" instead of doing the hard work of adapting our social and economic systems to be more inclusive of different types of human experiences.
Case in point, homosexuality used to be a sociopathic personality disorder, and pre-DSM we thought it was a mental illness causing enslaved people to want to escape slavery.
Careful saying things like that, someone might accuse you of being a socialist (slight /s)
Reading this I can't help but feel that the person who wrote it is a POS.
To be honest, I'm also starting to wonder if we aren't medicating people for normal human emotions.
In previous generations children with corrective lenses were rare, and kids used to fear being made fun of and being called "four eyes" for wearing glasses to school. Recently it's gotten a whole lot more common for kids, even toddlers, to wear glasses. It might be tempting to think that Big Eyeglass was treating people for normal human blurriness, but it's more likely that eye glasses, and eye care more generally, has gotten more accessible and that more kids getting the care they need and recent environmental factors are contributing to the increase in kids needing glasses (and needing them at younger and younger ages).
It's the same with mental health issues. We have increased awareness of mental health, reduced stigma around seeking and receiving treatment, improved treatments, a better understanding of various conditions and how to diagnose them, and recent environmental factors that may be exacerbating problems if not inducing them.
I wonder are there any ways I can contract this without breaking marital vows
"If our so-called scientific system were really objective and honest, it would include happiness as a disorder." I think this is the goal the paper is trying to expose, more than just making a joke about mapping a good feeling to a description of a bad feeling. Indeed, I think the last line of the paper gives it away - our current system is very incomplete and needs to be extended:
> Indeed, only a psychopathology that openly declares the relevance of values to classification could persist in excluding happiness from the psychiatric disorders.
If statistical frequency is our ultimate basis for normative behavior, then things like happiness can be pathologized. This is absurd, which means normativity cannot be decided by ubiquity or popular vote. You have to look to the objective nature of the thing.
This is another case where materialism utterly flops, because materialistic ontology - one that reduces all of reality to Cartesian res extensa - cannot account for the normative at all (among other things).
Pursuing a meaningful goal almost always requires enduring unpleasant phases and friction along the way.
Never mind all the ads ... It isn't 'out there somewhere'.
These days I enjoy just having the time to stare at the clouds for a few hours at a time.
I would honestly prefer to watch paint dry than going to work though.
The only thing I kind of want in my life is UBI because I hate being forced into the rat race.
I'm in a weird situation because I used to be a hustler software engineer/solo founder who would move countries at the drop of a hat (I.e. for opportunities) and I worked nights and weekends on side projects for like 15 years straight.
But now I don't care about anything. I'm just tired of striving. When you waste your life in the pursuit of a goal, eventually you build so many negative associations that you eventually don't want to work for anything anymore. I only like free stuff now. My idea of success now is getting stuff I didn't earn. I optimize for minimal effort.
I honestly feel more happiness when I get something for free.
I personally have been experimenting what basically amounts to a Christian version of Bhakti Yoga [0]
basically "wow, thanks God/Jesus, this is wonderful, I love you, you're awesome, thanks for X, Y, Z, etc". If you can stay in that mood of gratitude and occasionally add in a lil "and if I could get an A or B that would be great, but no worries if not", and... in my belief system/experience, the desired outcome happens somewhat effortlessly :)
Most business owner people have it. That's why they are often out of touch with random Joe.
They belive in success even if math is saying that's bias.
Form of pychosis
The best is to cultivate a state of equanimity. Stop grasping at both good and bad states.
For that matter, nothing much stops me from carving out my own little world where I can clean up what mess it is, and live there. But to do that I'd have to admit to myself that I can't change the greater world and even acknowledge that there's no real point in wanting that other than to chase high status among our monkey tribe.
Do you though? Can't we believe that change is possible, but also choose not to act on it? Not saying that's right or wrong, just that it's possible.
Seriously, happiness is a psychiatric disorder? Rare, sure, but a disorder? That's the craziest thing I've heard since... well, since the Iran war, I guess, so not very long. Still, that's nuts. I cannot imagine the world view that it must take to look at happiness that way.