Ha, this is fun. But there's a kernel of truth to it. The problem with American culture specifically is that it treats "happiness" as a goal, rather than a fleeting feeling that is probably better described with a more specific word (joy, accomplishment, excitement, satisfaction, contentment). Our culture leans on this so hard that people start to think there's something wrong with them if they're not feeling generalized happiness most of the time.
A few years ago I read a claim that the word 'happy' is relatively young - ~500 years old - and that translations of others words into 'happy' are somewhat approximate.
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".
> 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).
All those four words combined is something like the concept of eudaimonia that Aristotle describes in his Nicomachean Ethics:
I've not read Aristotle directly but translating eudaimonia was an example in the book that I mentioned. The argument was that eudaimonia is often translated as happiness but that doesn't make sense in contexts where we talk about a soldier dying experiencing eudaimonia (suggesting a loose translation).
Dunno. Traveling to less developed places parents still want the kids to be happy for a start. It's surprising in places without roads, internet, phones etc. how normal everything is.
"Happiness comes in small doses folks. It's a cigarette butt, or a chocolate chip cookie or a five second orgasm. You come, you smoke the butt you eat the cookie you go to sleep wake up and go back to f---ing work the next morning, THAT'S IT! End of f---ing list!"
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.
"For truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself." -- Herman Melville.
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.
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.
> Our culture leans on this so hard that people start to think there's something wrong with them if they're not feeling generalized happiness most of the time.
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.
Trying to distinguish happiness from all those other feelings is like trying to separate depressed from all the negative things you feel during a day. Some words do not describe specific emotions, but instead indicate a general state which has all kinds of internal variation and magnitudes. A person who doesn't have much financial stress, their kid isn't having issues that require lots of problem solving from the parent, their job is fine, they are not arguing with their spouse regularly. They would say they are happy. Alternately one can have accomplishments , new PR at the gym, solved an issue at work, but still think of themselves as unhappy because they have things that they prioritize more highly that are not going well.
More like modern marketing depts and marketing theory leaning on it. They have replaced what religions used to offer when people asked about purpose, meaning, transcendence or what is the point of my story? Just telling people this is all just some biology and chemistry doesnt really answer questions about meaning. They will start searching for meaning elsewhere and marketing depts of corporate wonderland step in to fill the void.
The critique feels valid to me. There’s a tendency in modern psychology/media to pathologize the average human baseline: if you’re not consistently optimistic and thriving, something must be wrong with you, or at least you need to be in a pursuit of this.
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.
> healthy default is just calm and neutral, with happiness and sadness coming and going away.
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.
Usually I don’t do math of sums, just let the happiness be and then fade or sadness or any other. Just grew to be ok with nothingness, cos I had a tendency of pushing towards sadness when I am not happy and then its like a pendulum and me riding it
I'm assuming this is some kind of jab at the general propensity of psychiatry to classify most things as disorders, rather than a serious proposal. If anything, I think the problem has gotten worse since this was published. (Then again, maybe happiness has also gotten more rare since 1992?)
> "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?"
That sounds like me. There's a 1:1 correlation between how many cups of coffee I've had and the number of languages I speak.
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)
> It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains--that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant.
Reading this I can't help but feel that the person who wrote it is a POS.
I'm guessing that it's just a joke, but I'll admit that it reads like something you'd expect from somebody who doesn't know the difference between "sad" and "depressed" and thinks that there's some vast conspiracy to medicate people for normal human emotions. I'd bet this is smugly shared all over facebook by ignorant people who think that things like depression or ADHD don't exist.
Happiness is a derivative of purpose. If someone optimizes their life strictly for happiness while deprioritizing purpose, they likely won't achieve either.
Pursuing a meaningful goal almost always requires enduring unpleasant phases and friction along the way.
I think the DSM 5 says a disorder must cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
I really liked this paper. I think it's less of an outright joke that it's possible to squint your eyes and laugh that happiness could be a disorder, and more of shining a light on the psychopathological system that tends towards over-diagnosis and hyperfixation on those diagnoses.
"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.
What it exposes is that there are underlying methodological presuppositions that are hazardous.
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).
Yeah. I achieve happiness by not caring about anything too much. Nothing matters, ultimately. This is a universal truth. Once you internalize that, everything seems small. You can appreciate things more.
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'm not the world, I just live in it. It might be a mess, but that mess mostly doesn't affect me. The few ways in which it does can be effectively mitigated by anyone who puts in even the tiniest bit of effort.
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.
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.
Ha, this is fun. But there's a kernel of truth to it. The problem with American culture specifically is that it treats "happiness" as a goal, rather than a fleeting feeling that is probably better described with a more specific word (joy, accomplishment, excitement, satisfaction, contentment). Our culture leans on this so hard that people start to think there's something wrong with them if they're not feeling generalized happiness most of the time.
That's just not how life works.
A few years ago I read a claim that the word 'happy' is relatively young - ~500 years old - and that translations of others words into 'happy' are somewhat approximate.
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".
> 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).
All those four words combined is something like the concept of eudaimonia that Aristotle describes in his Nicomachean Ethics:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flourishing
I've not read Aristotle directly but translating eudaimonia was an example in the book that I mentioned. The argument was that eudaimonia is often translated as happiness but that doesn't make sense in contexts where we talk about a soldier dying experiencing eudaimonia (suggesting a loose translation).
You don't think it possible for some one to die happy?
Oh, absolutely. 99.999% of human history has been "just want to survive another year."
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...
Dunno. Traveling to less developed places parents still want the kids to be happy for a start. It's surprising in places without roads, internet, phones etc. how normal everything is.
It's normal for parents to want their kids to be happy… it's less normal for those kids to be "happy" all the time.
Just because the word 'happy' is relatively young in the English/European language, a conclusion can not be made for the whole Humankind.
Very true - which is why this piece "that translations of others words into 'happy' are somewhat approximate." would be very interesting if accurate.
Thanks for the book recommendation.
"Happiness comes in small doses folks. It's a cigarette butt, or a chocolate chip cookie or a five second orgasm. You come, you smoke the butt you eat the cookie you go to sleep wake up and go back to f---ing work the next morning, THAT'S IT! End of f---ing list!"
-Dennis Leary
+1 - https://www.google.com/search?q=every+brilliant+thing
I suspect you would agree with this: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/unhappy
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.
"For truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself." -- Herman Melville.
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.
It's always fascinating to see how fundamental concepts of Buddhist teachings appear in different names, forms, and metaphors across cultures.
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.
You could also say the same general thing for being goal-oriented instead of process-oriented for anything else.
> Our culture leans on this so hard that people start to think there's something wrong with them if they're not feeling generalized happiness most of the time.
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.
It's a balancing act no? Generally you certainly want to optimise to minimise unhappiness but not to the point of avoiding conflict/difficulty.
happiness <> euphoria
Trying to distinguish happiness from all those other feelings is like trying to separate depressed from all the negative things you feel during a day. Some words do not describe specific emotions, but instead indicate a general state which has all kinds of internal variation and magnitudes. A person who doesn't have much financial stress, their kid isn't having issues that require lots of problem solving from the parent, their job is fine, they are not arguing with their spouse regularly. They would say they are happy. Alternately one can have accomplishments , new PR at the gym, solved an issue at work, but still think of themselves as unhappy because they have things that they prioritize more highly that are not going well.
Indeed. This just illustrates Goodhart's Law.
More like modern marketing depts and marketing theory leaning on it. They have replaced what religions used to offer when people asked about purpose, meaning, transcendence or what is the point of my story? Just telling people this is all just some biology and chemistry doesnt really answer questions about meaning. They will start searching for meaning elsewhere and marketing depts of corporate wonderland step in to fill the void.
The critique feels valid to me. There’s a tendency in modern psychology/media to pathologize the average human baseline: if you’re not consistently optimistic and thriving, something must be wrong with you, or at least you need to be in a pursuit of this.
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.
> healthy default is just calm and neutral, with happiness and sadness coming and going away.
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.
It seems to me that you're implicitly thinking of happiness/sadness as zero sum. That can be very limiting.
Usually I don’t do math of sums, just let the happiness be and then fade or sadness or any other. Just grew to be ok with nothingness, cos I had a tendency of pushing towards sadness when I am not happy and then its like a pendulum and me riding it
I'm assuming this is some kind of jab at the general propensity of psychiatry to classify most things as disorders, rather than a serious proposal. If anything, I think the problem has gotten worse since this was published. (Then again, maybe happiness has also gotten more rare since 1992?)
I had to check if it was April Fool's Day
I need some advice on etiquette. Is the correct answer to
still or is it nowI've always loved, "what's so morning about it?"
What are other people's favorite humorous responses?
Always a fan of Gandalf's response to Bilbo:
> "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?"
> What are other people's favorite humorous responses?
"For a given definition of 'morning'."
There's Eeyore: "If it is good. Which I doubt."
But I knew a guy who didn't answer with words. He would just growl until he'd had coffee.
That sounds like me. There's a 1:1 correlation between how many cups of coffee I've had and the number of languages I speak.
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)
This reminds me of this old gem from The Onion:
FDA Approves Depressant Drug For The Annoyingly Cheerful [video/NSFW/2:06] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd4tugPM83c
A similarly useful article:
More U.S. Children Being Diagnosed With Youthful Tendency Disorder https://theonion.com/more-u-s-children-being-diagnosed-with-...
> It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains--that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant.
Reading this I can't help but feel that the person who wrote it is a POS.
I'm guessing that it's just a joke, but I'll admit that it reads like something you'd expect from somebody who doesn't know the difference between "sad" and "depressed" and thinks that there's some vast conspiracy to medicate people for normal human emotions. I'd bet this is smugly shared all over facebook by ignorant people who think that things like depression or ADHD don't exist.
Happiness is a derivative of purpose. If someone optimizes their life strictly for happiness while deprioritizing purpose, they likely won't achieve either.
Pursuing a meaningful goal almost always requires enduring unpleasant phases and friction along the way.
I think the DSM 5 says a disorder must cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
"It's so, so sad, to be happy all the time." - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzZPxUiAKTo
Reminded of that episode of House where the lady with dormant syphillis had something like this.
I wonder are there any ways I can contract this without breaking marital vows
I really liked this paper. I think it's less of an outright joke that it's possible to squint your eyes and laugh that happiness could be a disorder, and more of shining a light on the psychopathological system that tends towards over-diagnosis and hyperfixation on those diagnoses.
"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.
What it exposes is that there are underlying methodological presuppositions that are hazardous.
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).
"You look happy. What's wrong?" Ultimate conversation starter.
Good news is that the government can offer free treatment.
If you are too happy to work, you are sick. Makes sense.
The way to happiness is to stop chasing it.
Never mind all the ads ... It isn't 'out there somewhere'.
Yeah. I achieve happiness by not caring about anything too much. Nothing matters, ultimately. This is a universal truth. Once you internalize that, everything seems small. You can appreciate things more.
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.
Ahh 1992. At the time he probably didn’t know he needed to add a /s or he’d be taken seriously in our delusional future.
Or was the nineties, so it would have been a “not!” or a “psych!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhIdbRp6xeg
“… on Opposite Day!”
Overall happinesses and motivation and belief are signs of too high level dopamine.
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
Yes. Too much of any particular state of mind can be bad.
The best is to cultivate a state of equanimity. Stop grasping at both good and bad states.
Hypomania is very irritating, and can actually mess up a person's life. It's a neurotic defense mechanism that's opposite to depression
Reminds me of https://thenewinquiry.com/book-of-lamentations/ edit: A review of the DSM as if it where a dystopian novel basically, makes some interesting observations/points
Woosh
it's Catch-22. the world is such a mess that if you're happy, you must be delusional.
I'm not the world, I just live in it. It might be a mess, but that mess mostly doesn't affect me. The few ways in which it does can be effectively mitigated by anyone who puts in even the tiniest bit of effort.
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.
hard disagree. I think you can be happy about some things and not about others, and it's not so black-and-white.
Replace 'happy' with 'neurotic' and you got it!
<checks calendar> Wait, this isn't April 1st!
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.
It's more of a comment on the absurdity of what is and is not defined as a disorder i believe.