The stable happiness over time is fascinating at the societal level. Maybe moving out of a pure psychological analysis, but what does this say about societal notions of "progress"? If we were just as happy before we had toilets, in what sense can we say the world is getting any better due to technology? Maybe we can say that things that objectively reduce disease and dying are good (because they allow each person to get more time being happy) but is technology that just makes life more convenient or entertaining basically worthless under this model?
While fascinating, I see a major problem with all happiness studies.
Back when I did research and treated patients in the field of pain management, we only had one reliable tool to measure pain - a Likert scale from 1 to 10.
How often, in the beginning, did I hear from patients, after telling them "10" is the worst pain ever, "Oh, Doc, mine is at least 11."
It took me a few weeks to find a way to get past this: "Ok, how about on a scale of 1 to 100?" "Oh, well then, maybe 70?"
I always managed to resist the urge to say, "Right, you mean "7" on a 10 point scale?"
It's even worse with meditation research. As much as we like to think, in our age of technological hubris, we can "measure" the results of meditation with brain waves or other tech aids, actually, the only way to know IF a person is meditating much less how well they're doing, is to ask.
I don't know, if you haven't talked with hundreds of people and started to get a sense of how abysmally poor people are at reporting events in their minds, you may not be as skeptical as I am. My sense is of the millions tested for meditation, probably less than 1% are actually "meditating" most of the time (maintaining a continuous, non judgmental, open awareness, without identifying with the passage thoughts, feelings and sensations)
But like pain, what in the world do people think being "happy" means (assuming they could make distinctions related to eros vs agape or some other kind of categorical system).
Oh, sampling millions of people makes a difference? I don't quite see how, since if your methodology is not valid on a small scale, I don't quite see how a larger scale makes any difference.
having said all that, I suspect your main premise holds, that barring civil war and other traumas, general resigned, bored contentment (ie the researchers' apparent idea of "happiness") probably doesn't change much.
Thought-provoking post. What if the reason happiness has been so stable over these decades is not because of the air-conditioner within our minds, but because of the air conditioner our society has built?
As technology got better and as quality of life improved increasing happiness (the furnace), maybe other things like the stress of wanting to maintain this quality of life, our access to seeing the larger problems of the world increased, political division, etc. (the air-conditioner) All those things decrease happiness, so perhaps people’s happiness remains the same is because, as a society we make no effort to increase it, which I think we could accomplish if we wished.
Unfortunately much of our effort goes to increasing money, (this has been the case for hundreds of years) so happiness and other things get left behind. This is what I think though, could be something else.
Very nice thought experiment. So if there are two halves to the control system, one pushing hotter and one colder, then possibly either one (or both) could be out of whack. Like you said for depressives and neurotics.
Should there be a different control system pair in the brain for every stasis point? Too much/little CO2, water, sugar, sleep, food, happiness, sex, etc etc? Isn't the brain (and otherwise in biology) good at reusing things that work? So should there be a single control system with sets of inputs? Or replicated control rods all over the place? You have a ton of brain experiments waiting to happen here.
Another way of looking at this pattern is in terms of interest/meaningfulness versus apathy/pointlessness. It’s always seemed to me that one part of depression as a disease is a feeling of apathy, lack of interest in anything, the pointlessness of life; while mania is connected to the idea that everything is meaningful, interesting and important. In everyday life it also seems that being happy involves having interests and things that are meaningful, while when we are sad our interests fall away.
This division has a natural homeostatic component : if everything is interesting then everything is confusing and nothing is particularly meaningful (and so we’ll try reduce our level of interest and calm things down) while if nothing is interesting we’ll try, in the end, to change things up and find something new. If we say that people are happy when they have the right level of interest in the world around them (enough to learn from experiences and find meaning, but not so much as to overwhelm the ability to learn and give meaning), then we’d expect happiness to be a constant.
This also explains why we don’t just eat gummy worms all the time: the first few worms are interesting and new, but after a while they are boring and there’s no point in eating any more.
Hi Adam! Great post :) I find the questions you end with fascinating (i.e. why do we watch movies about the Holocaust), but I don't think the answer is because we are driven to feel bad sometimes. I took a class on tragedy and lots of the literature in that field asks similar questions. Why do humans, dating back to 500 BCE, choose to watch fake pain and suffering? One common explanation is catharsis - we like to read/watch/listen to sad things so that we can release all of our pent up sadness. The explanation I like a lot better is about inoculation. In the same way we inject ourselves with a small bit of a disease in order to protect our bodies from succumbing too much to the real thing, we watch tragedies so that, when we inevitably experience pain and suffering, we are better able to roll with the punches. We don't go to the theatre because we want to feel bad; we go because we want to feel better, whether now or in the future.
My FAVORITE explanation for why we seek out sadness, however, comes from Susan Cain's book, Bittersweet. She believes that humans aren't ever driven to feel bad, they're driven to find meaning - and the most meaningful parts of our lives contain both happiness and sadness. Why do we cry during our child's graduation? Because we are proud of them but are going to miss them. Why do we listen to breakup songs? Because they remind us of the pain of losing a loved one, but also the joy we felt when we were with them. I think the reason we have both a furnace and an air conditioner in our heads isn't just because it's dangerous to be too happy or too sad; I think it's because we are always searching for meaning, and meaning requires both.
The idea of humans being universal pleasure maximisers and pain/suffering minimizers *unless mentally ill* is so OBVIOUSLY untrue that it's always amazed me that it's so universally accepted. Being a sadist (and thus interacting a lot with masochists) obviously helps with seeing this, but you don't need a paraphilia/fetish type sexuality for that, because from consuming morbid or grim cultural products to pretty much ANY serious sport (but especially endurance sports -- have you ever heard long distance runners talk about the "cave of pain") the human frequent and active non-maximising of pleasure is everywhere.
I think we use our mental control systems to maintain the environment we encountered as children. If it was chaotic, you are drawn to chaos. If it was happy and loving, you work to maintain that. Excellent post, Adam.
Look, you're a good kid, and I admire your optimistic spirit that shines through with every piece, so take the following as coming from a supporter, not some aggrieved troll:
1) Pooping in a climate-controlled bathroom makes you UNHAPPIER. It's true. Everyone prefers to "go to the bathroom" outdoors except in extremely cold conditions. Furthermore, people who have windows in their climate-controlled bathroom that overlook nature (trees, a lake, etc) are happier than those who don't.
2) Washing machines, dryers, etc. also make people UNHAPPIER. Helen Keller wrote a brilliant piece about this back in the 1920s. Basically, "automation" is isolating while previously, these "household chores" were a group effort. Plus, having household machines roar their engines assaults your ears with noise pollution. It's 100x more relaxing to sweep with a manual broom than it is to use a vacuum cleaner.
3) Starting these surveys in 1948 overlooks two enormous events - WW2 and the Great Depression, which would've shown some serious dips if they'd been included. Every single country on that post-1948 list was industrializing and growing more urban during the time of that survey. Conduct that survey in NON-industrialized countries such as Fiji, Marshall Islands, PNG, Samoa, and Maldives (esp Chagos islanders) and you'll get a FAR FAR different result. You might note that these are all island countries hint hint.
4) Depressives suffer from unrealized anger - think of it as stuffing your fist down your throat when you want to shout. Neurotics suffer from deep childhood trauma and are "erecting walls" to prevent themselves from being ever being hurt again.
5) Bhutan is the only country which has seriously studied happiness, but since they're not an industrialized country, they're outside your (your = the collective Western academic world) limited scope of awareness.
6) Go ahead and match the suicide rates in each of those countries from the happiness survey and you won't see a flat line. The survey misses these respondents for obvious reasons, thus skewing the results. The truly unhappy people exit the scene, so to speak, while anyone left to answer a survey has to have found some measure of happiness in order to keep enduring the monstrosity that is modern-day capitalism.
While you are at it, how about tackling a related question: why are some of the most creative people chronic depressives? My personal guess is that chronic depressives (myself included) tend to have a ruminative behavior. This can be helpful in cases where a particular problem is pretty gnarly and the average happy person gives up after a while. But the chronic depressive won't let it go. But this does pose the question: why do depressives brood about their woes and troubles, but happy people don't? In terms of art, the results are obvious. The depressives give us great art such as the blues. The happy people give us bubblegum music.
1. Happiness is a fairly inclusive term, but there are at least these two kinds: the cheerfulness we feel consciously and the instinctual, somewhat unconscious drives that Mother Nature put into our brains to motivate our ancestors to do things that increased the chances of their genes being passed into future generations.
2. This evolutionary process rewarded behaviors that helped our ancestors eat, avoid predators, find shelter, mate, and raise offspring successfully until they raised offspring in turn.
3. Number 2 above required some degree of seriousness, purpose, and caution. In tougher environments (e.g., excess cold, food shortages, predators), those genes that coded for better survival and reproduction were especially more likely to stay in the gene pool.
4. The seriousness, purpose, and caution that improved competitive genetic success would have been aided by a balance between joyfulness and attention.
5. The balance against joyfulness was passed down through evolutionary psychology to us as what we call anxiety. This is what limits our happiness set-point today.
What about the cultural differences? Some countries are happier than others. Immigrants are presumably happier in their new country. Fascinating questions. But also I’ve read happiness goes up by income (until it hits a certain level then the effect disappears) not surprisingly being poor makes everyone less happy.
the approach of this (very strong) post reminds me of Marvin Minsky's -- let's posit some machinery for how mind & emotions work, and then seek explanations in terms of these machines (and of course the idea of difference engines and homeostasis was central to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics -- just thought I'd throw it out there in case it helps further the discussion
The stable happiness over time is fascinating at the societal level. Maybe moving out of a pure psychological analysis, but what does this say about societal notions of "progress"? If we were just as happy before we had toilets, in what sense can we say the world is getting any better due to technology? Maybe we can say that things that objectively reduce disease and dying are good (because they allow each person to get more time being happy) but is technology that just makes life more convenient or entertaining basically worthless under this model?
While fascinating, I see a major problem with all happiness studies.
Back when I did research and treated patients in the field of pain management, we only had one reliable tool to measure pain - a Likert scale from 1 to 10.
How often, in the beginning, did I hear from patients, after telling them "10" is the worst pain ever, "Oh, Doc, mine is at least 11."
It took me a few weeks to find a way to get past this: "Ok, how about on a scale of 1 to 100?" "Oh, well then, maybe 70?"
I always managed to resist the urge to say, "Right, you mean "7" on a 10 point scale?"
It's even worse with meditation research. As much as we like to think, in our age of technological hubris, we can "measure" the results of meditation with brain waves or other tech aids, actually, the only way to know IF a person is meditating much less how well they're doing, is to ask.
I don't know, if you haven't talked with hundreds of people and started to get a sense of how abysmally poor people are at reporting events in their minds, you may not be as skeptical as I am. My sense is of the millions tested for meditation, probably less than 1% are actually "meditating" most of the time (maintaining a continuous, non judgmental, open awareness, without identifying with the passage thoughts, feelings and sensations)
But like pain, what in the world do people think being "happy" means (assuming they could make distinctions related to eros vs agape or some other kind of categorical system).
Oh, sampling millions of people makes a difference? I don't quite see how, since if your methodology is not valid on a small scale, I don't quite see how a larger scale makes any difference.
having said all that, I suspect your main premise holds, that barring civil war and other traumas, general resigned, bored contentment (ie the researchers' apparent idea of "happiness") probably doesn't change much.
Thought-provoking post. What if the reason happiness has been so stable over these decades is not because of the air-conditioner within our minds, but because of the air conditioner our society has built?
As technology got better and as quality of life improved increasing happiness (the furnace), maybe other things like the stress of wanting to maintain this quality of life, our access to seeing the larger problems of the world increased, political division, etc. (the air-conditioner) All those things decrease happiness, so perhaps people’s happiness remains the same is because, as a society we make no effort to increase it, which I think we could accomplish if we wished.
Unfortunately much of our effort goes to increasing money, (this has been the case for hundreds of years) so happiness and other things get left behind. This is what I think though, could be something else.
Excellent thought experiment. And I love the AC/Furnace metaphor for control systems.
You always make me see in new ways, Adam, thanks…this essay made me happy!
Very nice thought experiment. So if there are two halves to the control system, one pushing hotter and one colder, then possibly either one (or both) could be out of whack. Like you said for depressives and neurotics.
Should there be a different control system pair in the brain for every stasis point? Too much/little CO2, water, sugar, sleep, food, happiness, sex, etc etc? Isn't the brain (and otherwise in biology) good at reusing things that work? So should there be a single control system with sets of inputs? Or replicated control rods all over the place? You have a ton of brain experiments waiting to happen here.
Another way of looking at this pattern is in terms of interest/meaningfulness versus apathy/pointlessness. It’s always seemed to me that one part of depression as a disease is a feeling of apathy, lack of interest in anything, the pointlessness of life; while mania is connected to the idea that everything is meaningful, interesting and important. In everyday life it also seems that being happy involves having interests and things that are meaningful, while when we are sad our interests fall away.
This division has a natural homeostatic component : if everything is interesting then everything is confusing and nothing is particularly meaningful (and so we’ll try reduce our level of interest and calm things down) while if nothing is interesting we’ll try, in the end, to change things up and find something new. If we say that people are happy when they have the right level of interest in the world around them (enough to learn from experiences and find meaning, but not so much as to overwhelm the ability to learn and give meaning), then we’d expect happiness to be a constant.
This also explains why we don’t just eat gummy worms all the time: the first few worms are interesting and new, but after a while they are boring and there’s no point in eating any more.
Hi Adam! Great post :) I find the questions you end with fascinating (i.e. why do we watch movies about the Holocaust), but I don't think the answer is because we are driven to feel bad sometimes. I took a class on tragedy and lots of the literature in that field asks similar questions. Why do humans, dating back to 500 BCE, choose to watch fake pain and suffering? One common explanation is catharsis - we like to read/watch/listen to sad things so that we can release all of our pent up sadness. The explanation I like a lot better is about inoculation. In the same way we inject ourselves with a small bit of a disease in order to protect our bodies from succumbing too much to the real thing, we watch tragedies so that, when we inevitably experience pain and suffering, we are better able to roll with the punches. We don't go to the theatre because we want to feel bad; we go because we want to feel better, whether now or in the future.
My FAVORITE explanation for why we seek out sadness, however, comes from Susan Cain's book, Bittersweet. She believes that humans aren't ever driven to feel bad, they're driven to find meaning - and the most meaningful parts of our lives contain both happiness and sadness. Why do we cry during our child's graduation? Because we are proud of them but are going to miss them. Why do we listen to breakup songs? Because they remind us of the pain of losing a loved one, but also the joy we felt when we were with them. I think the reason we have both a furnace and an air conditioner in our heads isn't just because it's dangerous to be too happy or too sad; I think it's because we are always searching for meaning, and meaning requires both.
The idea of humans being universal pleasure maximisers and pain/suffering minimizers *unless mentally ill* is so OBVIOUSLY untrue that it's always amazed me that it's so universally accepted. Being a sadist (and thus interacting a lot with masochists) obviously helps with seeing this, but you don't need a paraphilia/fetish type sexuality for that, because from consuming morbid or grim cultural products to pretty much ANY serious sport (but especially endurance sports -- have you ever heard long distance runners talk about the "cave of pain") the human frequent and active non-maximising of pleasure is everywhere.
I think we use our mental control systems to maintain the environment we encountered as children. If it was chaotic, you are drawn to chaos. If it was happy and loving, you work to maintain that. Excellent post, Adam.
Look, you're a good kid, and I admire your optimistic spirit that shines through with every piece, so take the following as coming from a supporter, not some aggrieved troll:
1) Pooping in a climate-controlled bathroom makes you UNHAPPIER. It's true. Everyone prefers to "go to the bathroom" outdoors except in extremely cold conditions. Furthermore, people who have windows in their climate-controlled bathroom that overlook nature (trees, a lake, etc) are happier than those who don't.
2) Washing machines, dryers, etc. also make people UNHAPPIER. Helen Keller wrote a brilliant piece about this back in the 1920s. Basically, "automation" is isolating while previously, these "household chores" were a group effort. Plus, having household machines roar their engines assaults your ears with noise pollution. It's 100x more relaxing to sweep with a manual broom than it is to use a vacuum cleaner.
3) Starting these surveys in 1948 overlooks two enormous events - WW2 and the Great Depression, which would've shown some serious dips if they'd been included. Every single country on that post-1948 list was industrializing and growing more urban during the time of that survey. Conduct that survey in NON-industrialized countries such as Fiji, Marshall Islands, PNG, Samoa, and Maldives (esp Chagos islanders) and you'll get a FAR FAR different result. You might note that these are all island countries hint hint.
4) Depressives suffer from unrealized anger - think of it as stuffing your fist down your throat when you want to shout. Neurotics suffer from deep childhood trauma and are "erecting walls" to prevent themselves from being ever being hurt again.
5) Bhutan is the only country which has seriously studied happiness, but since they're not an industrialized country, they're outside your (your = the collective Western academic world) limited scope of awareness.
6) Go ahead and match the suicide rates in each of those countries from the happiness survey and you won't see a flat line. The survey misses these respondents for obvious reasons, thus skewing the results. The truly unhappy people exit the scene, so to speak, while anyone left to answer a survey has to have found some measure of happiness in order to keep enduring the monstrosity that is modern-day capitalism.
Keep up the good work! Sincerely :)
While you are at it, how about tackling a related question: why are some of the most creative people chronic depressives? My personal guess is that chronic depressives (myself included) tend to have a ruminative behavior. This can be helpful in cases where a particular problem is pretty gnarly and the average happy person gives up after a while. But the chronic depressive won't let it go. But this does pose the question: why do depressives brood about their woes and troubles, but happy people don't? In terms of art, the results are obvious. The depressives give us great art such as the blues. The happy people give us bubblegum music.
This is what I understand so far:
1. Happiness is a fairly inclusive term, but there are at least these two kinds: the cheerfulness we feel consciously and the instinctual, somewhat unconscious drives that Mother Nature put into our brains to motivate our ancestors to do things that increased the chances of their genes being passed into future generations.
2. This evolutionary process rewarded behaviors that helped our ancestors eat, avoid predators, find shelter, mate, and raise offspring successfully until they raised offspring in turn.
3. Number 2 above required some degree of seriousness, purpose, and caution. In tougher environments (e.g., excess cold, food shortages, predators), those genes that coded for better survival and reproduction were especially more likely to stay in the gene pool.
4. The seriousness, purpose, and caution that improved competitive genetic success would have been aided by a balance between joyfulness and attention.
5. The balance against joyfulness was passed down through evolutionary psychology to us as what we call anxiety. This is what limits our happiness set-point today.
Please discuss.
What about the cultural differences? Some countries are happier than others. Immigrants are presumably happier in their new country. Fascinating questions. But also I’ve read happiness goes up by income (until it hits a certain level then the effect disappears) not surprisingly being poor makes everyone less happy.
Talk about a buried lede! "Experimental History is like a blog, but for dogs"
the approach of this (very strong) post reminds me of Marvin Minsky's -- let's posit some machinery for how mind & emotions work, and then seek explanations in terms of these machines (and of course the idea of difference engines and homeostasis was central to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics -- just thought I'd throw it out there in case it helps further the discussion