> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> We understand how to put multiple terms together to express nuanced ideas.
That's not the same as having a single word that embodies a specific concept, that helps/shorten the expression/sharing of it.
If you don't have this single concept that stands for itself, and/or that you don't know the word, as long as you can't name it, it's hard if not impossible to see it. That's why we give a name to things or people we find/meet.
Yet you do think of some people as a happy or jolly people and others as gloomy. This is the difference that is denoted here where your trying to describe a more general long term state of mind of a person.
Language determines how one thinks. People from different cultures count differently for example, and that affect how people do math. "two-dozen is two times a dozen" is more intuitive than "twenty four is two times twelve". To me twenty four and twelve are just two words, but two-dozen is clearly double twelve. Another example is the words brothers and sisters, where being older and younger less emphasized. In many asian cultures, where age is considered a prestige (or is it not?), there is a clear distinction between older and younger children.
This is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (though it's mostly Whorf's), and it's been largely debunked. Language may have some limited influence of perception of colours and innate direction, but probably not much more than that.
Sure, but in most cases its conjugations are just left out entirely, as in "קר לי"; literally "cold to me" (I am cold). "אני רעב" -> "I hungry" (leaving out the "am" English speakers would put it there), etc.
“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
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.
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.
I work in this area and I really dislike it when happiness is plotted against income only on a log scale, as is done here. The log scale effectively conceals the flattening-out of the relationship, which is the thing that shows you how progressive taxation + redistribution make the average person better off.
Whether it's a straight line up to $75K followed by a flat line from there on, or a curved (log) relationship all the way up, seems to me to make rather little difference.
Fig 2 of [1] shows high variance of happiness while income variation has only a small effect. There is roughly a 5 % (percent it is?) happiness delta for an income delta of about $ 500.000. However, the happiness delta between the different happiness levels is about 25 %.
Would “Income and emotional well-being: It doesn’t really matter” be a better title for the study? Or do I miss something?
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?
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]
"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".
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.
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.
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".
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.
>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".
>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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Aristotle wrote very widely. From the first description of octopus mating behavior to the first stab at formal logic ever, there are probably a lot of topics where he was wrong, but also a lot of other ones where he was right, where debate is still open or where his position was refined.
That his scripture was treated as canon by the christian church and not subjected to further scientific inquiry is one of the foundational stories of the modern science. That story is certainly not wrong though it lacks nuance. It is also where Aristotle’s bad rep is mostly from.
Aristotle‘s position on many topics is simply the first one uttered as far as we know. It is interesting because it is the start of a conversation, not because it is right or wrong.
Gross. This guy is pro-life, anti-gay marriage, and deeply embedded in religion, yet identifies as a "philosopher". He's the opposite of what we should be listening to.
That’s a very bigoted way to define „philosopher“. Philosopher’s job is not to tell things that you want to hear. Philosopher’s job is to challenge you.
The far bigger real world harm is new age snake oil peddlers telling people they are too fragile and weak to be happy so long as there are others out there thinking and saying mean things.
Suggesting to read challenging stuff is „gaslighting“? It's not. Just in case - reading does not mean agreeing with what you read.
I've no issues reading „harmful“ material. In fact, I specifically try to read stuff that is written either by people I don't approve or includes views I don't approve.
Please don't go into „real world harm“ territory. Unless you want to discuss at which point fetus/newborn killing brings „real world harm“. Coming from a very different background, you guys have some crazy views that seem to clash with modern science. But that's fine, such is the price for cultural diversity :|
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.
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.
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.
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.
> A good trick for reading comprehension is to read the last paragraph first:
I appreciate your concern for my reading ability!
As you’ve pointed out:
>It's easy to make knee-jerk emotional reactions.
Sometimes the urge to insert meaning into a text can be so strong that one can be compelled to ignore the entire premise of a blog post. Heck, a person might even resort to cheap condescension to defend what some might reasonably call empty self-congratulatory drivel!
She's essentially arguing that long-term happiness is an evolved signal that someone is on the right evolutionary path. It's the emotional self-help equivalent of a prosperity gospel.
Her argument can best be illustrated by a paragraph from another article titled How I cured myself with evolutionary psychology [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.
As far as I can tell, she has no training as an evolutionary psychologist. It's self help woo woo wrapped up in barely coherent scientific jargon - that demographic loves evolutionary psychology because it can be used to spin any story you wish about why humans are the way they are.
The statement is misusing words, in that rewards make you happy by definition. This is a typical postmodern statement, trying to reorganize deep rooted cognitive structures, with words, which is completely backwards.
It makes a lot more sense than the usual psychology frameworks, so I would rather approach it from an evolutionary psychology point of view than not lol.
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.