7 ms·

A proposal to classify happiness as a psychiatric disorder (1992)

dmschulman 7mo ago
Woosh
techblueberry 7mo ago
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.
- dullcrisp 7mo ago
  Or was the nineties, so it would have been a “not!” or a “psych!”
  - lo_zamoyski 7mo ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhIdbRp6xeg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhIdbRp6xeg
  - genthree 7mo ago
    “… on Opposite Day!”
AnimalMuppet 7mo ago
<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.
- boesboes 7mo ago
  It's more of a comment on the absurdity of what is and is not defined as a disorder i believe.
kusokurae 7mo ago
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
letharion 7mo ago
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?)
- thomascgalvin 7mo ago
  I had to check if it was April Fool's Day
- kevin_thibedeau 7mo ago
  We went from 3% on anti-depressants in 1992 to 13%. Lots more are trying to induce happiness without an external change of circumstance or internal perspective.
adyashakti 7mo ago
it's Catch-22. the world is such a mess that if you're happy, you must be delusional.
- ranger_danger 7mo ago
  hard disagree. I think you can be happy about some things and not about others, and it's not so black-and-white.
  - nickburns 7mo ago
    Replace 'happy' with 'neurotic' and you got it!
- NoMoreNicksLeft 7mo ago
  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.
  - ranger_danger 7mo ago
    > But to do that I'd have to admit to myself that I can't change the greater world 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.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 7mo ago
      [flagged]
eouw0o83hf 7mo ago
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.
- lo_zamoyski 7mo ago
  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).
boesboes 7mo ago
Reminds me of https://thenewinquiry.com/book-of-lamentations/ 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
pogue 7mo ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd4tugPM83c
- erikerikson 7mo ago
  A similarly useful article: More U.S. Children Being Diagnosed With Youthful Tendency Disorder https://theonion.com/more-u-s-children-being-diagnosed-with-youthful-tenden-1819565754/ https://theonion.com/more-u-s-children-being-diagnosed-with-...
bensyverson 7mo ago
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.
- joshmarlow 7mo ago
  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".
  - bensyverson 7mo ago
    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-trap-second-edition-by-russ-harris/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/76053/the-happiness...
    - tim333 7mo ago
      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.
delichon 7mo ago
I need some advice on etiquette. Is the correct answer to "Good morning!" still "That's what the government wants you to believe." or is it now "You want me to contract a psychiatric disorder? What did I ever do to you?"
- freedomben 7mo ago
  I've always loved, "what's so morning about it?" What are other people's favorite humorous responses?
  - AnimalMuppet 7mo ago
    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.
    - amarant 7mo ago
      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)
      - doubled112 7mo ago
        Seems like you could use a few more bits.
  - thewebguyd 7mo ago
    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?"
  - sgbeal 7mo ago
    > What are other people's favorite humorous responses? "For a given definition of 'morning'."
gabrielso 7mo ago
Good news is that the government can offer free treatment.
tss93 7mo ago
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.
- thewebguyd 7mo ago
  > 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.
  - IAmBroom 7mo ago
    Almost as if there were some middle-path that was best...
- curiouscube 7mo ago
  It seems to me that you're implicitly thinking of happiness/sadness as zero sum. That can be very limiting.
  - tss93 7mo ago
    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
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
8bitsrule 7mo ago
The way to happiness is to stop chasing it. Never mind all the ads ... It isn't 'out there somewhere'.
- jongjong 7mo ago
  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.
  - notlenin 7mo ago
    happiness is very linked to unexpected surprises. 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 :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhakti_yoga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhakti_yoga
iberator 7mo ago
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
- stevedonovan 7mo ago
  Hypomania is very irritating, and can actually mess up a person's life. It's a neurotic defense mechanism that's opposite to depression
- thewebguyd 7mo ago
  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.
skeledrew 7mo ago
"You look happy. What's wrong?" Ultimate conversation starter.
emsign 7mo ago
If you are too happy to work, you are sick. Makes sense.
rglover 7mo ago
"It's so, so sad, to be happy all the time." - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzZPxUiAKTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzZPxUiAKTo
jayd16 7mo ago
I think the DSM 5 says a disorder must cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
- thewebguyd 7mo ago
  Correct. But even that definition risks over pathologizing the human experience. It creates a distinction between a broken brain and a reasonable reaction to a broken environment. 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.
  - RunningDroid 7mo ago
    > 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. Careful saying things like that, someone might accuse you of being a socialist (slight /s)
_doctor_love 7mo ago
> 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.
- autoexec 7mo ago
  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.
  - doubled112 7mo ago
    If I count on my fingers, just the ones I know the parents, I'd guess 7/10 kids in my neighbourhood have some sort of diagnosis or suspected diagnosis. To be honest, I'm also starting to wonder if we aren't medicating people for normal human emotions.
    - autoexec 7mo ago
      What do the parents you know say when you tell them that they're medicating their children for normal human emotions? My guess is that they could give examples of things that aren't actually normal which caused them to seek out a professional in the first place. 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.
arizen 7mo ago
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.
xyzelement 7mo ago
I find the word "happy" is unfortunately overloaded and confusing - and in its confusion makes it hard to know how to achieve the state. 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.
- IAmBroom 7mo ago
  > ...much like eskimos have many words for snow. ... 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.
tokai 7mo ago
Redundant as it is possible to be bipolar with light hypomania without depressive episodes. So its already covered.
lamontcg 7mo ago
If this proposal was to add toxic positivity and optimism bias as a psychiatric disorder, I'd be on board with that.
effed3 7mo ago
After ROTFL, and checking is not 1st april, seems in the same line of: "life is a disease, sexually transmitted, with 100% lethal exitus". 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.
aristofun 7mo ago
Americans have an amazing trait to make money and marketing bullshit out of almost any idea, however great or silly it originally is. In the process they usually spoil and dumb down it to the point of making no sense (but making more money). Happiness? Fine! Well sell that. Happiness is overrated? Even better! Let’s wrap that and shove it down the throat of different focus group. This is just brilliant.
bawana 7mo ago
Our tax dollars pay for this research? Im all for intellectual discourse, i just dont want to pay for it

Woosh

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.

dullcrisp 7mo ago
Or was the nineties, so it would have been a “not!” or a “psych!”
- lo_zamoyski 7mo ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhIdbRp6xeg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhIdbRp6xeg
- genthree 7mo ago
  “… on Opposite Day!”

AnimalMuppet 7mo ago

<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.

boesboes 7mo ago
It's more of a comment on the absurdity of what is and is not defined as a disorder i believe.

kusokurae 7mo ago

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

letharion 7mo ago

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?)

thomascgalvin 7mo ago
I had to check if it was April Fool's Day
kevin_thibedeau 7mo ago
We went from 3% on anti-depressants in 1992 to 13%. Lots more are trying to induce happiness without an external change of circumstance or internal perspective.

adyashakti 7mo ago

it's Catch-22. the world is such a mess that if you're happy, you must be delusional.

ranger_danger 7mo ago
hard disagree. I think you can be happy about some things and not about others, and it's not so black-and-white.
- nickburns 7mo ago
  Replace 'happy' with 'neurotic' and you got it!
NoMoreNicksLeft 7mo ago
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.
- ranger_danger 7mo ago
  > But to do that I'd have to admit to myself that I can't change the greater world 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.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 7mo ago
    [flagged]

eouw0o83hf 7mo ago

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.

lo_zamoyski 7mo ago
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).

boesboes 7mo ago

Reminds me of https://thenewinquiry.com/book-of-lamentations/ 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

pogue 7mo ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd4tugPM83c

erikerikson 7mo ago
A similarly useful article: More U.S. Children Being Diagnosed With Youthful Tendency Disorder https://theonion.com/more-u-s-children-being-diagnosed-with-youthful-tenden-1819565754/ https://theonion.com/more-u-s-children-being-diagnosed-with-...

bensyverson 7mo ago

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.

joshmarlow 7mo ago
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".
- bensyverson 7mo ago
  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-trap-second-edition-by-russ-harris/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/76053/the-happiness...
  - tim333 7mo ago
    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.

delichon 7mo ago

I need some advice on etiquette. Is the correct answer to "Good morning!" still "That's what the government wants you to believe." or is it now "You want me to contract a psychiatric disorder? What did I ever do to you?"

freedomben 7mo ago
I've always loved, "what's so morning about it?" What are other people's favorite humorous responses?
- AnimalMuppet 7mo ago
  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.
  - amarant 7mo ago
    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)
    - doubled112 7mo ago
      Seems like you could use a few more bits.
- thewebguyd 7mo ago
  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?"
- sgbeal 7mo ago
  > What are other people's favorite humorous responses? "For a given definition of 'morning'."

gabrielso 7mo ago

Good news is that the government can offer free treatment.

tss93 7mo ago

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.

thewebguyd 7mo ago
> 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.
- IAmBroom 7mo ago
  Almost as if there were some middle-path that was best...
curiouscube 7mo ago
It seems to me that you're implicitly thinking of happiness/sadness as zero sum. That can be very limiting.
- tss93 7mo ago
  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

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

8bitsrule 7mo ago

The way to happiness is to stop chasing it. Never mind all the ads ... It isn't 'out there somewhere'.

jongjong 7mo ago
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.
- notlenin 7mo ago
  happiness is very linked to unexpected surprises. 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 :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhakti_yoga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhakti_yoga

iberator 7mo ago

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

stevedonovan 7mo ago
Hypomania is very irritating, and can actually mess up a person's life. It's a neurotic defense mechanism that's opposite to depression
thewebguyd 7mo ago
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.

skeledrew 7mo ago

"You look happy. What's wrong?" Ultimate conversation starter.

emsign 7mo ago

If you are too happy to work, you are sick. Makes sense.

rglover 7mo ago

"It's so, so sad, to be happy all the time." - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzZPxUiAKTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzZPxUiAKTo

jayd16 7mo ago

I think the DSM 5 says a disorder must cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

thewebguyd 7mo ago
Correct. But even that definition risks over pathologizing the human experience. It creates a distinction between a broken brain and a reasonable reaction to a broken environment. 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.
- RunningDroid 7mo ago
  > 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. Careful saying things like that, someone might accuse you of being a socialist (slight /s)

_doctor_love 7mo ago

> 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.

autoexec 7mo ago
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.
- doubled112 7mo ago
  If I count on my fingers, just the ones I know the parents, I'd guess 7/10 kids in my neighbourhood have some sort of diagnosis or suspected diagnosis. To be honest, I'm also starting to wonder if we aren't medicating people for normal human emotions.
  - autoexec 7mo ago
    What do the parents you know say when you tell them that they're medicating their children for normal human emotions? My guess is that they could give examples of things that aren't actually normal which caused them to seek out a professional in the first place. 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.

arizen 7mo ago

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.

xyzelement 7mo ago

I find the word "happy" is unfortunately overloaded and confusing - and in its confusion makes it hard to know how to achieve the state. 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.

IAmBroom 7mo ago
> ...much like eskimos have many words for snow. ... 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.

tokai 7mo ago

Redundant as it is possible to be bipolar with light hypomania without depressive episodes. So its already covered.

lamontcg 7mo ago

If this proposal was to add toxic positivity and optimism bias as a psychiatric disorder, I'd be on board with that.

effed3 7mo ago

After ROTFL, and checking is not 1st april, seems in the same line of: "life is a disease, sexually transmitted, with 100% lethal exitus". 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.

aristofun 7mo ago

Americans have an amazing trait to make money and marketing bullshit out of almost any idea, however great or silly it originally is. In the process they usually spoil and dumb down it to the point of making no sense (but making more money). Happiness? Fine! Well sell that. Happiness is overrated? Even better! Let’s wrap that and shove it down the throat of different focus group. This is just brilliant.

bawana 7mo ago

Our tax dollars pay for this research? Im all for intellectual discourse, i just dont want to pay for it