8 ms·

Happiness is a reward from our ancestors

98 points by jinjin2 3y ago

the_mar 3y ago
I stopped reading when the author said the word "joy" can't be used as an adjective. What about "joyful" or "joyous"? And I know it's not exactly the same word but neither is "happy" and "happiness".
majormajor 3y ago
I think "content" is the English word the author is looking for - the first definition I see on Google from Oxford is "in a state of peaceful happiness" which seems like the intended long-term meaning - "a state", not a moment, and "peaceful", not surprise-driven. Beyond that, I'm a bit lost by where this is going - like the segue into confidence and building confidence by e.g. learning about roof building techniques if you were to build a house. What's the connection between that building a house - whether correctly or not - and the long term happiness? It's suggested that we "emulate past evolutionary strategies" and "we need to win the confidence of the minds of our ancestors" but... what strategies and past-mind approvals, exactly? And how? Is it materialist/economic/Marxian, an alienation of labor thing? Something more cultural? Family?
- koonsolo 3y ago
  "Content" is still a bit different, because it feels more layed back. The funny part is that "gelukkig" (same word but in Dutch) litteraly means "lucky". I'm sure it's the same for German. But lucky and gelukkig have completely different meanings. I would say "happiness" still comes closer. Now that I think about it, I don't think we have a word for "lucky".
  - em-bee 3y ago
    in german 'content' is 'zufrieden', which is quite different from 'glücklich'. 'lucky' would be 'glück'. translation tools suggest 'geluk' for dutch. in german 'glücklich' and 'glück" are very distinct, but i am guessing in dutch the words overlap more in use and meaning.
- gregwebs 3y ago
  The author links to a post of what personally worked for her [1]. > In order to cure my depression, I did the evolutionary psychology thing hard-core: I got married and had children. I dropped out of university. I moved to the countryside. I started to renovate and build houses and to grow food for my family. What seems like the author's fundamental explanation is also written there: > It is exactly the same with psychological pain. Ideally, psychological pain is information saying "stop doing what you are doing". The mechanism is not perfect and many people suffer from inexplicable psychological pain. But still, the purpose of psychological pain is telling people they are probably hurting their genes. > One big problem is that our genes weren't invented yesterday. What was once good for our genes is not necessarily good for our genes today. So when we experience psychological pain, it is likely to be because we do something that was bad for our ancestors' genes. She also notes that a lot of genes were selected for in the last 10k years, so some of our genetic instincts are for farming rather than hunting and gathering. [2] [1] https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/how-i-cured-myself-with-evolutionary https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/how-i-cured-myself-with-... [2] https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/the-10-000-year-explosion-the-book https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/the-10-000-year-explosio...
dilawar 3y ago
Happiness, like pain, is definitely a spectrum.
- PsylentKnight 3y ago
  I'd say it's more complex than that, it's multidimensional.
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
Speaking of ancestors, I think it is unfortunate that so many are unaware of what they found to be true about happiness, and what happiness is, and what it isn't. I am not impressed by evolutionary psychology and its superficial and half-baked just-so stories. Biology and psychology can give us hints and signs about things which are then folded into any sound account of the human person, but it is just that: information that enters into a fuller account. Very often, we don't even have that. We have unsophisticated intellectual dilettantism and amateur dabbling. We must first determine what happiness is before it makes sense to talk about how to achieve it. Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and others in the Western tradition have much to say about it [0]. They also have much to say about how to attain it. It make sense to start there. [0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-and-How-Not-to-Be-Happy/J-Budziszewski/9781684511075 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-and-How-Not-to-Be...
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Why does it make sense to start there?
- CelticBard 3y ago
  Why does what any of these people have to say about happiness matter today?
  - nunuvit 3y ago
    Why will any reply to your question matter tomorrow?
    - squirtlebonflow 3y ago
      Because it'll still be a good question
    - CelticBard 3y ago
      Why did you reply then?
      - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
w0de0 3y ago
My most unambiguously successful ancestor was the one who invented fire, or the one who got the hang of oxygen breathing. One expects their lives were brutishly unhappy.
throwaway892238 3y ago
I sincerely hope that nobody assumes that because this is on the top of HN that this isn't batshit crazy garbage. HN is an echo chamber that can turn a logical mind into one that starts assuming every premise upvoted on here is acceptable. Don't fall into that trap.
- ysavir 3y ago
  Can you elaborate on what you think is "batshit crazy garbage"? I'm not challenging the notion, I just think your post would have much more value if, instead of dragging HN's populace through the mud, you concentrated on specific points in the article that you think are prime examples of its impracticalities.
  - jrflowers 3y ago
    I can’t speak for GP but I laughed out loud when I read about how the author of this article knows how to “cure depression”. Aside from the ignorance of brain chemistry, situational factors that can contribute to depression, and the glaringly obvious fact of the subjectivity of how depression is experienced, the hubris to assert that this blogger ~knows the cure ~ inspires very little confidence in their credibility. For example, if you read me the first few sentences of this article and then said “This was written by someone that doesn’t provide any reason to trust their reasoning” I would not be surprised. In fact if you told me that the person that brags about their cure for depression in their blog was not very bright, I wouldn’t see cause to argue with you.
    - scaramanga 3y ago
      He didn't say he knows _the_ cure he says he cured himself. It's like someone loses weight and sticks to it, they don't know _the_ cure for obesity, but they managed to go from being obese to not being obese and staying there for some time and then wrote a blog wherre they say "wow, i found i was over eating due to eating shitty lunches at my desk and not doing exercise so then i switched to salads and cycling to the office, turns out i cured obesity in myself" It's completely different from putting forward an intervention and then claiming, against all scientific evidence, that this is a reliable and repeatable cure. A good trick for reading comprehension is to read the last paragraph first: "I don’t expect this to work for everyone or even most people who are inexplicably unhappy. But I believe that most people can gain some insight by reflecting over how their lives correspond to evolutionary history. " blah blah blah.. This is an incredibly weak claim, it's basically saying "[most] people can gain insight into their emotional state by reflecting on their basic needs and for some people (not all, or even most), that might make them not be unhappy, my evidence is a sample size of yours truly, plus maybe a few people i've talked to who agree". Wow. One can often get a different impression of articles by reading only the headline or the first para, which tend to be loaded with attention-getters or rhetorical tricks that are designed to be provocative and hook a reader in. It's easy to make knee-jerk emotional reactions. Article seems to me, just to be full of rather banal truisms masquerading as science. But so is just about everything else written on the topic.
carlossouza 3y ago
https://youtu.be/4q1dgn_C0AU https://youtu.be/4q1dgn_C0AU “The surprising science of happiness”, from Dan Gilbert, is one of the best TED talks of all time (over 4M views). In his amazing & funny 20’ presentation, he explains how our brains are wired and how it relates to happiness. The article reminded me of this great content
- OnlineGladiator 3y ago
  I found that video incredibly unconvincing. It just feels like pseudoscience telling people what they want to hear, and the data was underwhelming (assuming it's not flawed to begin with). I think a more plausible explanation is that people just lie to themselves to believe whatever they want. These people are only "happier" until they're forced to confront a reality that contradicts their beliefs. In other words it's willful ignorance masquerading as synthesized happiness. There's also data backing up what I'm saying. There's a study that's regurgitated constantly saying people aren't happier after making a certain amount of money ($75k), but almost nobody bothered to actually read the study. I think this contradictory study is a lot more convincing. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2016976118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2016976118
  - smokel 3y ago
    Thank you for raising skepticism about old studies! The new one that you mention is slightly suspect as well though :) It is based on data gathered from trackyourhappiness.org. Why would someone install an app to track their happiness? I doubt that this is a representative group of people. Another interesting paper about this is "Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved", Kahneman and Mellers, 2022 https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2208661120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
  - aston 3y ago
    You may be interested in this newer paper, reconciling the work of Killingsworth and Kahneman & Deaton. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
cjohnson318 3y ago
> In Swedish... someone happy in the moment is called glad... Someone happy in the longer-term is called lycklig. And we are not just some millions of weirdos in the northernmost of Europe. The Germans are froh when they are happy in the short term and glücklich when they are happy in the long term... Just because you don't have a dedicated word for something, doesn't mean that it is a foreign concept. In Arabic and Hebrew there's no dedicated verbs for "to have" or "to be" in the present tense, and yet these societies understand ownership and existence in the present perfectly. You can't take, like, two words from a language, and then say something meaningful about a whole society.
- GuardianCaveman 3y ago
  Yet other times the lack of that word denotes a different perspective on that subject. Short term or long term happiness isn’t differentiated in the untied states. I don’t think of happiness in terms of long or short term. Just as a temporary state that hopefully last a long time. Think of all the words we use to express love in English. In Chinese a word technically exists for love but it’s not used between people more for things but even then it’s not the same word. This is a perfect example of the characteristics of a language representing a change of perception on something as powerful as expressing love.
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    Interesting point about English. You're right, having a single word for "I am happy the light turned green just as I approached the intersection" and "I have 10 children and I am proud of the kind of people they turned out to be" really blunts the nuance. In my parlance, I'd call the second thing "meaningful" but not everyone strives for meaning (or think it matters) so it kinda doesn't have the same mindshare as the "by-default-short-term" happy.
  - cjohnson318 3y ago
    Y'all are saying that because Americans don't have a single term for "long term happiness" and a separate term for "short term happiness," then that creates some kind of blindspot for Americans. We understand how to put multiple terms together to express nuanced ideas. > In Chinese a word technically exists for love but it’s not used between people more for things but even then it’s not the same word. This is a perfect example of the characteristics of a language representing a change of perception on something as powerful as expressing love. This sounds like a cultural norm around language use. There's examples of this in English. You might say, "I love lamp." That's weird, it's a non-standard use for the word "love," but people would give you the benefit of the doubt and note that you "like" the lamp.
pontifier 3y ago
When I drink alcohol, I've found that it disrupts more recently evolved cognitive function before the older, more core regions. I now use alcohol as a way to "call upon my ancient ancestors to guide my actions".
mberning 3y ago
Conan, what is best in life? I don’t think we can look too much at our ancestors to conjure a definition of happiness. It’s probably wrong to labor under the idea that people ought to be happy. The fact that the human mind has such an infinite capacity for suffering and misery, while on the other hand having relatively less capacity for happiness, suggests that our minds are predisposed to not being happy, or not being happy for too long.
psuresh 3y ago
In Indian philosophy the ultimate happiness is called _thürēya_ , roughly translates to blissfulness and it is akin to _nirvāna_, the salvation
raz32dust 3y ago
Interesting way to put it, but is it particularly insightful? You're happy when you're doing things you think you should be doing, and what you think you should be doing is of course determined by evolution, modulo random mutations. I don't see how this helps me in any constructive way though. It is an intriguing thought exercise though.
- em-bee 3y ago
  i think it is a good start, but the conclusion is not going far enough. many people aren't happy. and the problem is figuring out why. are they not doing what they think they should be doing? if so, why aren't they? is something getting in the way? is their idea of what they should be doing different from what society thinks they should be doing? as a society i think we don't have the right idea of what makes people happy. we think we can tell them what they should be doing, but i think part of the answer is selfdetermination. we need to give people the freedom (and the ability to exercise that freedom) to make their own choices, and not force them to conform to our ideas and standards.
ck2 3y ago
So weird when people with such obvious limited life experience try to surmise "how things work" based on that limited experience. That's not science, that's how we got severely warped things like religion. Long-term happiness is for some of the same reasons we have long-term psychotics. Consciousness simply allows the fourth dimension of time applied to emotions.
- scaramanga 3y ago
  Yes, how dare people write about their life experiences :) Approval: DENIED.
bashmelek 3y ago
On the subject of different kinds of happiness, I enjoyed reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. He talked of eudaimonia, ie “good spirit”, “good condition of the personal daimon.” A sort of “thriving” or doing well. This is, in his language, the human good. But what fascinated me was the brief mention of another good, a good more proper to a god than to mankind, “makarios.” We might translate it “blessed.” In the everyday language of the ancient Greeks, the word could be used in other ways too. One could call the carefree lives of children, or of the rich and beautiful, “blessed” in this sense.
scaramanga 3y ago
Haha, the funny part about this article is the mention of people trying to find happiness by studying the works of people who seem constitutionally unable to experience joy and, perhaps as a symptom of that, are extremely prolific authors on the internet. Not to say that that's laughable per se, cos who knows what people take from reading the ramblings of unhappy people, some probably vibe with it, others may pity it.
simonster 3y ago
At some point in high school, I realized that the reason I was unhappy was that I was suppressing my feelings and ignoring what they were telling me. Instead, I needed to learn how to predict my feelings in advance and guide my behavior and thoughts proactively to avoid feeling unhappy. The kind of "confidence" that is important to happiness is very specific. Overall, I'm less confident and more anxious than the average person. What I can do is convince myself that I'm making the best decisions for myself under the circumstances I find myself in. As long as I can make optimal decisions without feeling strong negative emotions, I simply don't have to feel those emotions. For me, happiness is not "lack of a persistent itch to do things differently" — what is important is that, if I have a persistent itch to do things differently, I actually follow it.
Barrin92 3y ago
The most interesting sentence is the title of the piece. Happiness is a reward. Chasing happiness is a fundamentally mistaken project because if you just want to be in a mental state of happiness, do drugs, it's that easy. We got plenty of pharmaceuticals that short circuit all the annoying steps you have to do to be happy. Roger Scruton in "On Beauty" made a related point about erotic art and porn. What distinguishes the latter from the former is that porn is really about the experience the viewer gets out of it, the object is interchangeable and even degraded (literally humans reduced to body parts). Whereas erotic art requires 'disinterested interest'. that is judgement without reference to one's desires. It elevates, which is why there is beauty in erotic art but not pornography. Almost always when people talk about how to 'feel happy' they're really after the same kind of thing that Scruton says pornography satisfies. The much more meaningful thing is to look for beauty, which like truth or goodness is pursued for its own sake. That's arguably more meaningful, and it has little to do with whether you feel happy or sad about it.
- badpun 3y ago
  > Happiness is a reward. Chasing happiness is a fundamentally mistaken project because if you just want to be in a mental state of happiness, do drugs, it's that easy. We got plenty of pharmaceuticals that short circuit all the annoying steps you have to do to be happy. Drugs don't work like that. Over time, your body gets used to them, and you need drugs just to feel normal - and without them, you feel terrible. Just like with less dangerous addictions, e.g. to coffee.
baerrie 3y ago
Learning from your suffering is just about all it takes. For me, believing my suffering was “real” took some time and introspection. Now I draw a hard line at the things I don’t wish to do. The consequences are my path, if it is too miserable, try another.
Groxx 3y ago
The title: >Happiness is a reward from our ancestors Followed by the subtitle: >Long-term happiness only comes to those who emulate their successful ancestors Did anyone else get a severe case of mental whiplash from that? I pretty strongly agree with the title in many ways (the now is built on the shoulders of the past), but holy cow I do not agree with that subtitle at all. The rest of this reads like a pile of Sapir-Whorf combined with "works on my machine means it's correct".
- kubb 3y ago
  > I started to get the impression that I'm disagreeing a bit with the blog's basic premises. I believe that the reason why so much bullshit can pass, is that essentially, there are things that are not bullshit. If almost everything actually was bullshit, making people believe in things would have been much more difficult. Ah, yes, I'm somewhat of a philosopher, psychologist and social scientist too.
- elcritch 3y ago
  >Happiness is a reward from our ancestors >Long-term happiness only comes to those who emulate their successful ancestors The title made sense to me in terms of the subtitle when I read it. Our ancestors figured out how to survive and encoded it into happiness and passed it on as a gift. It's a sort of embedded encoding they've figured out and left for us in how to survive. Conversely I've begun thinking depression is a mammalian adaptation to weed out ineffective strategies more quickly.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
asimovfan 3y ago
We experience everything through our own mind. The only actual substance we have access to is the experience of our own mind. Like soybeans or imitation crab, doesn't matter what the content of the experience is, it is made up of the same substance.
chayesfss 3y ago
[dead]
sirobg 3y ago
> If, for example, you would build a house, you might not feel confident that the roof will resist rain and snow. The good way to handle such fears is to learn about state-of-the-art roof construction. The bad way to handle such fears is to take a mindfulness class where you learn how to feel confidence in the face of the unknown. To me, this "good way" isn't a way to build confidence. If you dig the roof building subject, you will probably stumble upon different good building solutions. Worst, you could find out the subject is controversial. In the first case, you need confidence to pick a solution. In the second case, you need even more confidence to pick a solution. To me, confidence builds up when you face situations like this, pick a solution amongst all these options even though it might not be optimal or even though it's disputed, and either get rewarded with a positive outcome or with a lesson clear enough that you know it will help you do better next time. To generalize further, to me confidence builds up when you are satisfied about the outcome you got when you battled challenges that matter to you, or satisfied about your behavior during the battle itself.
johny115 3y ago
I see that lot of people critize this a lot, but after reading the earlier post linked in the begining of it, it strongly reminds me of Carl Jung's individuation. A lifelong process that involves an individual becoming whole by integrating various aspects of their personality and becoming their true authentic self. Jung spoke about humanity suffering from neurosis, if they basically deep down feel that their life is meaningless. Oversimplified example is - if parents want a kid to be a doctor, and the kid succeeds at that, but is then severly unhappy, because he supressed parts of himself to do that. Individuation is life long process, where the person is trying to put all the parts of themselves into light, even the parts they for example don't like about themselves, like being lazy, vain, etc. (The Shadow). And then live according to that authentic self. Jungs's theory has nothing to do with evolutionary psychology or the idea that most people shoud be farmers like our ancestors or something. But it is similar in the way, that there is effort to uncover what makes someone happy - and that idea the depression is a message to the person that they are not on the right track, not one aligned with their authentic self. Depression is then considered a tool, a valuable one, and no mistake of brain chemistry or something. I think there is something about this - that depression is lack of meaning. I also heard that in the startup context - a burnout is a state where you care about something, but come to subconscious realization that you are powerless to change it. It is basically another way a meaninglessness manifests. Because if you come to believe you can't influnce something, why would you keep working on it right? Your body will refuse that. What the author of the article did is Jung's ideation, when she got married, moved to countryside and all that. Her explanation was evolutionary psychology and thinking it has somthing to do with her genetic ancestors, but that's just one explanation. In essence, she only admitted to herself, what she is really like deep down and then acted upon it. Ancestors or not, she got closer to her authentic self - instead of letting herself be programmed by the society. For somebody else though, the countryside life and kids might NOT be the right answer for them. Everybody is different, hence why it's called Individuation - seperating yourself, individualizing into your own authentic self.

98 points by jinjin2 3y ago

I stopped reading when the author said the word "joy" can't be used as an adjective. What about "joyful" or "joyous"? And I know it's not exactly the same word but neither is "happy" and "happiness".

majormajor 3y ago

I think "content" is the English word the author is looking for - the first definition I see on Google from Oxford is "in a state of peaceful happiness" which seems like the intended long-term meaning - "a state", not a moment, and "peaceful", not surprise-driven. Beyond that, I'm a bit lost by where this is going - like the segue into confidence and building confidence by e.g. learning about roof building techniques if you were to build a house. What's the connection between that building a house - whether correctly or not - and the long term happiness? It's suggested that we "emulate past evolutionary strategies" and "we need to win the confidence of the minds of our ancestors" but... what strategies and past-mind approvals, exactly? And how? Is it materialist/economic/Marxian, an alienation of labor thing? Something more cultural? Family?

koonsolo 3y ago
"Content" is still a bit different, because it feels more layed back. The funny part is that "gelukkig" (same word but in Dutch) litteraly means "lucky". I'm sure it's the same for German. But lucky and gelukkig have completely different meanings. I would say "happiness" still comes closer. Now that I think about it, I don't think we have a word for "lucky".
- em-bee 3y ago
  in german 'content' is 'zufrieden', which is quite different from 'glücklich'. 'lucky' would be 'glück'. translation tools suggest 'geluk' for dutch. in german 'glücklich' and 'glück" are very distinct, but i am guessing in dutch the words overlap more in use and meaning.
gregwebs 3y ago
The author links to a post of what personally worked for her [1]. > In order to cure my depression, I did the evolutionary psychology thing hard-core: I got married and had children. I dropped out of university. I moved to the countryside. I started to renovate and build houses and to grow food for my family. What seems like the author's fundamental explanation is also written there: > It is exactly the same with psychological pain. Ideally, psychological pain is information saying "stop doing what you are doing". The mechanism is not perfect and many people suffer from inexplicable psychological pain. But still, the purpose of psychological pain is telling people they are probably hurting their genes. > One big problem is that our genes weren't invented yesterday. What was once good for our genes is not necessarily good for our genes today. So when we experience psychological pain, it is likely to be because we do something that was bad for our ancestors' genes. She also notes that a lot of genes were selected for in the last 10k years, so some of our genetic instincts are for farming rather than hunting and gathering. [2] [1] https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/how-i-cured-myself-with-evolutionary https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/how-i-cured-myself-with-... [2] https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/the-10-000-year-explosion-the-book https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/the-10-000-year-explosio...

dilawar 3y ago

Happiness, like pain, is definitely a spectrum.

PsylentKnight 3y ago
I'd say it's more complex than that, it's multidimensional.

lo_zamoyski 3y ago

Speaking of ancestors, I think it is unfortunate that so many are unaware of what they found to be true about happiness, and what happiness is, and what it isn't. I am not impressed by evolutionary psychology and its superficial and half-baked just-so stories. Biology and psychology can give us hints and signs about things which are then folded into any sound account of the human person, but it is just that: information that enters into a fuller account. Very often, we don't even have that. We have unsophisticated intellectual dilettantism and amateur dabbling. We must first determine what happiness is before it makes sense to talk about how to achieve it. Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and others in the Western tradition have much to say about it [0]. They also have much to say about how to attain it. It make sense to start there. [0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-and-How-Not-to-Be-Happy/J-Budziszewski/9781684511075 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-and-How-Not-to-Be...

jncfhnb 3y ago
Why does it make sense to start there?
CelticBard 3y ago
Why does what any of these people have to say about happiness matter today?
- nunuvit 3y ago
  Why will any reply to your question matter tomorrow?
  - squirtlebonflow 3y ago
    Because it'll still be a good question
  - CelticBard 3y ago
    Why did you reply then?
    - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

w0de0 3y ago

My most unambiguously successful ancestor was the one who invented fire, or the one who got the hang of oxygen breathing. One expects their lives were brutishly unhappy.

throwaway892238 3y ago

I sincerely hope that nobody assumes that because this is on the top of HN that this isn't batshit crazy garbage. HN is an echo chamber that can turn a logical mind into one that starts assuming every premise upvoted on here is acceptable. Don't fall into that trap.

ysavir 3y ago
Can you elaborate on what you think is "batshit crazy garbage"? I'm not challenging the notion, I just think your post would have much more value if, instead of dragging HN's populace through the mud, you concentrated on specific points in the article that you think are prime examples of its impracticalities.
- jrflowers 3y ago
  I can’t speak for GP but I laughed out loud when I read about how the author of this article knows how to “cure depression”. Aside from the ignorance of brain chemistry, situational factors that can contribute to depression, and the glaringly obvious fact of the subjectivity of how depression is experienced, the hubris to assert that this blogger ~knows the cure ~ inspires very little confidence in their credibility. For example, if you read me the first few sentences of this article and then said “This was written by someone that doesn’t provide any reason to trust their reasoning” I would not be surprised. In fact if you told me that the person that brags about their cure for depression in their blog was not very bright, I wouldn’t see cause to argue with you.
  - scaramanga 3y ago
    He didn't say he knows _the_ cure he says he cured himself. It's like someone loses weight and sticks to it, they don't know _the_ cure for obesity, but they managed to go from being obese to not being obese and staying there for some time and then wrote a blog wherre they say "wow, i found i was over eating due to eating shitty lunches at my desk and not doing exercise so then i switched to salads and cycling to the office, turns out i cured obesity in myself" It's completely different from putting forward an intervention and then claiming, against all scientific evidence, that this is a reliable and repeatable cure. A good trick for reading comprehension is to read the last paragraph first: "I don’t expect this to work for everyone or even most people who are inexplicably unhappy. But I believe that most people can gain some insight by reflecting over how their lives correspond to evolutionary history. " blah blah blah.. This is an incredibly weak claim, it's basically saying "[most] people can gain insight into their emotional state by reflecting on their basic needs and for some people (not all, or even most), that might make them not be unhappy, my evidence is a sample size of yours truly, plus maybe a few people i've talked to who agree". Wow. One can often get a different impression of articles by reading only the headline or the first para, which tend to be loaded with attention-getters or rhetorical tricks that are designed to be provocative and hook a reader in. It's easy to make knee-jerk emotional reactions. Article seems to me, just to be full of rather banal truisms masquerading as science. But so is just about everything else written on the topic.

carlossouza 3y ago

https://youtu.be/4q1dgn_C0AU https://youtu.be/4q1dgn_C0AU “The surprising science of happiness”, from Dan Gilbert, is one of the best TED talks of all time (over 4M views). In his amazing & funny 20’ presentation, he explains how our brains are wired and how it relates to happiness. The article reminded me of this great content

OnlineGladiator 3y ago
I found that video incredibly unconvincing. It just feels like pseudoscience telling people what they want to hear, and the data was underwhelming (assuming it's not flawed to begin with). I think a more plausible explanation is that people just lie to themselves to believe whatever they want. These people are only "happier" until they're forced to confront a reality that contradicts their beliefs. In other words it's willful ignorance masquerading as synthesized happiness. There's also data backing up what I'm saying. There's a study that's regurgitated constantly saying people aren't happier after making a certain amount of money ($75k), but almost nobody bothered to actually read the study. I think this contradictory study is a lot more convincing. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2016976118 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2016976118
- smokel 3y ago
  Thank you for raising skepticism about old studies! The new one that you mention is slightly suspect as well though :) It is based on data gathered from trackyourhappiness.org. Why would someone install an app to track their happiness? I doubt that this is a representative group of people. Another interesting paper about this is "Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved", Kahneman and Mellers, 2022 https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2208661120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
- aston 3y ago
  You may be interested in this newer paper, reconciling the work of Killingsworth and Kahneman & Deaton. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120

cjohnson318 3y ago

> In Swedish... someone happy in the moment is called glad... Someone happy in the longer-term is called lycklig. And we are not just some millions of weirdos in the northernmost of Europe. The Germans are froh when they are happy in the short term and glücklich when they are happy in the long term... Just because you don't have a dedicated word for something, doesn't mean that it is a foreign concept. In Arabic and Hebrew there's no dedicated verbs for "to have" or "to be" in the present tense, and yet these societies understand ownership and existence in the present perfectly. You can't take, like, two words from a language, and then say something meaningful about a whole society.

GuardianCaveman 3y ago
Yet other times the lack of that word denotes a different perspective on that subject. Short term or long term happiness isn’t differentiated in the untied states. I don’t think of happiness in terms of long or short term. Just as a temporary state that hopefully last a long time. Think of all the words we use to express love in English. In Chinese a word technically exists for love but it’s not used between people more for things but even then it’s not the same word. This is a perfect example of the characteristics of a language representing a change of perception on something as powerful as expressing love.
- xyzelement 3y ago
  Interesting point about English. You're right, having a single word for "I am happy the light turned green just as I approached the intersection" and "I have 10 children and I am proud of the kind of people they turned out to be" really blunts the nuance. In my parlance, I'd call the second thing "meaningful" but not everyone strives for meaning (or think it matters) so it kinda doesn't have the same mindshare as the "by-default-short-term" happy.
- cjohnson318 3y ago
  Y'all are saying that because Americans don't have a single term for "long term happiness" and a separate term for "short term happiness," then that creates some kind of blindspot for Americans. We understand how to put multiple terms together to express nuanced ideas. > In Chinese a word technically exists for love but it’s not used between people more for things but even then it’s not the same word. This is a perfect example of the characteristics of a language representing a change of perception on something as powerful as expressing love. This sounds like a cultural norm around language use. There's examples of this in English. You might say, "I love lamp." That's weird, it's a non-standard use for the word "love," but people would give you the benefit of the doubt and note that you "like" the lamp.

pontifier 3y ago

When I drink alcohol, I've found that it disrupts more recently evolved cognitive function before the older, more core regions. I now use alcohol as a way to "call upon my ancient ancestors to guide my actions".

mberning 3y ago

Conan, what is best in life? I don’t think we can look too much at our ancestors to conjure a definition of happiness. It’s probably wrong to labor under the idea that people ought to be happy. The fact that the human mind has such an infinite capacity for suffering and misery, while on the other hand having relatively less capacity for happiness, suggests that our minds are predisposed to not being happy, or not being happy for too long.

psuresh 3y ago

In Indian philosophy the ultimate happiness is called _thürēya_ , roughly translates to blissfulness and it is akin to _nirvāna_, the salvation

raz32dust 3y ago

Interesting way to put it, but is it particularly insightful? You're happy when you're doing things you think you should be doing, and what you think you should be doing is of course determined by evolution, modulo random mutations. I don't see how this helps me in any constructive way though. It is an intriguing thought exercise though.

em-bee 3y ago
i think it is a good start, but the conclusion is not going far enough. many people aren't happy. and the problem is figuring out why. are they not doing what they think they should be doing? if so, why aren't they? is something getting in the way? is their idea of what they should be doing different from what society thinks they should be doing? as a society i think we don't have the right idea of what makes people happy. we think we can tell them what they should be doing, but i think part of the answer is selfdetermination. we need to give people the freedom (and the ability to exercise that freedom) to make their own choices, and not force them to conform to our ideas and standards.

ck2 3y ago

So weird when people with such obvious limited life experience try to surmise "how things work" based on that limited experience. That's not science, that's how we got severely warped things like religion. Long-term happiness is for some of the same reasons we have long-term psychotics. Consciousness simply allows the fourth dimension of time applied to emotions.

scaramanga 3y ago
Yes, how dare people write about their life experiences :) Approval: DENIED.

bashmelek 3y ago

On the subject of different kinds of happiness, I enjoyed reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. He talked of eudaimonia, ie “good spirit”, “good condition of the personal daimon.” A sort of “thriving” or doing well. This is, in his language, the human good. But what fascinated me was the brief mention of another good, a good more proper to a god than to mankind, “makarios.” We might translate it “blessed.” In the everyday language of the ancient Greeks, the word could be used in other ways too. One could call the carefree lives of children, or of the rich and beautiful, “blessed” in this sense.

scaramanga 3y ago

Haha, the funny part about this article is the mention of people trying to find happiness by studying the works of people who seem constitutionally unable to experience joy and, perhaps as a symptom of that, are extremely prolific authors on the internet. Not to say that that's laughable per se, cos who knows what people take from reading the ramblings of unhappy people, some probably vibe with it, others may pity it.

simonster 3y ago

At some point in high school, I realized that the reason I was unhappy was that I was suppressing my feelings and ignoring what they were telling me. Instead, I needed to learn how to predict my feelings in advance and guide my behavior and thoughts proactively to avoid feeling unhappy. The kind of "confidence" that is important to happiness is very specific. Overall, I'm less confident and more anxious than the average person. What I can do is convince myself that I'm making the best decisions for myself under the circumstances I find myself in. As long as I can make optimal decisions without feeling strong negative emotions, I simply don't have to feel those emotions. For me, happiness is not "lack of a persistent itch to do things differently" — what is important is that, if I have a persistent itch to do things differently, I actually follow it.

Barrin92 3y ago

The most interesting sentence is the title of the piece. Happiness is a reward. Chasing happiness is a fundamentally mistaken project because if you just want to be in a mental state of happiness, do drugs, it's that easy. We got plenty of pharmaceuticals that short circuit all the annoying steps you have to do to be happy. Roger Scruton in "On Beauty" made a related point about erotic art and porn. What distinguishes the latter from the former is that porn is really about the experience the viewer gets out of it, the object is interchangeable and even degraded (literally humans reduced to body parts). Whereas erotic art requires 'disinterested interest'. that is judgement without reference to one's desires. It elevates, which is why there is beauty in erotic art but not pornography. Almost always when people talk about how to 'feel happy' they're really after the same kind of thing that Scruton says pornography satisfies. The much more meaningful thing is to look for beauty, which like truth or goodness is pursued for its own sake. That's arguably more meaningful, and it has little to do with whether you feel happy or sad about it.

badpun 3y ago
> Happiness is a reward. Chasing happiness is a fundamentally mistaken project because if you just want to be in a mental state of happiness, do drugs, it's that easy. We got plenty of pharmaceuticals that short circuit all the annoying steps you have to do to be happy. Drugs don't work like that. Over time, your body gets used to them, and you need drugs just to feel normal - and without them, you feel terrible. Just like with less dangerous addictions, e.g. to coffee.

baerrie 3y ago

Learning from your suffering is just about all it takes. For me, believing my suffering was “real” took some time and introspection. Now I draw a hard line at the things I don’t wish to do. The consequences are my path, if it is too miserable, try another.

Groxx 3y ago

The title: >Happiness is a reward from our ancestors Followed by the subtitle: >Long-term happiness only comes to those who emulate their successful ancestors Did anyone else get a severe case of mental whiplash from that? I pretty strongly agree with the title in many ways (the now is built on the shoulders of the past), but holy cow I do not agree with that subtitle at all. The rest of this reads like a pile of Sapir-Whorf combined with "works on my machine means it's correct".

kubb 3y ago
> I started to get the impression that I'm disagreeing a bit with the blog's basic premises. I believe that the reason why so much bullshit can pass, is that essentially, there are things that are not bullshit. If almost everything actually was bullshit, making people believe in things would have been much more difficult. Ah, yes, I'm somewhat of a philosopher, psychologist and social scientist too.
elcritch 3y ago
>Happiness is a reward from our ancestors >Long-term happiness only comes to those who emulate their successful ancestors The title made sense to me in terms of the subtitle when I read it. Our ancestors figured out how to survive and encoded it into happiness and passed it on as a gift. It's a sort of embedded encoding they've figured out and left for us in how to survive. Conversely I've begun thinking depression is a mammalian adaptation to weed out ineffective strategies more quickly.
- deleted 3y ago
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asimovfan 3y ago

We experience everything through our own mind. The only actual substance we have access to is the experience of our own mind. Like soybeans or imitation crab, doesn't matter what the content of the experience is, it is made up of the same substance.

chayesfss 3y ago

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sirobg 3y ago

> If, for example, you would build a house, you might not feel confident that the roof will resist rain and snow. The good way to handle such fears is to learn about state-of-the-art roof construction. The bad way to handle such fears is to take a mindfulness class where you learn how to feel confidence in the face of the unknown. To me, this "good way" isn't a way to build confidence. If you dig the roof building subject, you will probably stumble upon different good building solutions. Worst, you could find out the subject is controversial. In the first case, you need confidence to pick a solution. In the second case, you need even more confidence to pick a solution. To me, confidence builds up when you face situations like this, pick a solution amongst all these options even though it might not be optimal or even though it's disputed, and either get rewarded with a positive outcome or with a lesson clear enough that you know it will help you do better next time. To generalize further, to me confidence builds up when you are satisfied about the outcome you got when you battled challenges that matter to you, or satisfied about your behavior during the battle itself.

johny115 3y ago

I see that lot of people critize this a lot, but after reading the earlier post linked in the begining of it, it strongly reminds me of Carl Jung's individuation. A lifelong process that involves an individual becoming whole by integrating various aspects of their personality and becoming their true authentic self. Jung spoke about humanity suffering from neurosis, if they basically deep down feel that their life is meaningless. Oversimplified example is - if parents want a kid to be a doctor, and the kid succeeds at that, but is then severly unhappy, because he supressed parts of himself to do that. Individuation is life long process, where the person is trying to put all the parts of themselves into light, even the parts they for example don't like about themselves, like being lazy, vain, etc. (The Shadow). And then live according to that authentic self. Jungs's theory has nothing to do with evolutionary psychology or the idea that most people shoud be farmers like our ancestors or something. But it is similar in the way, that there is effort to uncover what makes someone happy - and that idea the depression is a message to the person that they are not on the right track, not one aligned with their authentic self. Depression is then considered a tool, a valuable one, and no mistake of brain chemistry or something. I think there is something about this - that depression is lack of meaning. I also heard that in the startup context - a burnout is a state where you care about something, but come to subconscious realization that you are powerless to change it. It is basically another way a meaninglessness manifests. Because if you come to believe you can't influnce something, why would you keep working on it right? Your body will refuse that. What the author of the article did is Jung's ideation, when she got married, moved to countryside and all that. Her explanation was evolutionary psychology and thinking it has somthing to do with her genetic ancestors, but that's just one explanation. In essence, she only admitted to herself, what she is really like deep down and then acted upon it. Ancestors or not, she got closer to her authentic self - instead of letting herself be programmed by the society. For somebody else though, the countryside life and kids might NOT be the right answer for them. Everybody is different, hence why it's called Individuation - seperating yourself, individualizing into your own authentic self.