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I think what you describe is nowhere near mania or euphoria, it is just generally being content with life.

I've also met people who are generally content.

I've suffered from extreme mood swings, and the next day after I punched myself in the face and hit my head against a wall I would just brush it off as "Me? No way I did that, I'm always happy".

If a large percentage of the population was generally happy, in the fashion you described, we'd know, there are countless scientific studies about happiness and well being.

I think the difference between a generally content person and what JJCM is describing is this:

- A generally content person responds fluidly and naturally to negative events as expected and usually goes back to being happy after the negative event

- If you fall on the mania/Euphoria spectrum, things that should upset you and that do upset others do not upset you, there is literally a natural resistance to changing mood

I fall somewhere between a generally content person and the euphoric, probably closer to generally content - but my resistance to mood change is definitely abnormal in that no one I interact with at work or in my family is as even and naturally resistant to mood change as I am.

What jjcm describes is almost definitely a FAAH mutation, likely a double mutation. I believe I have the same, and describing it as a sort of euphoria isn't entirely incorrect. Furthermore, it does correspond somewhat to the effects of various drugs on "normal" people. There's a reason some people with the mutation are described as "slightly baked" [0]. So I think it's extremely relevant to this discussion.

And a large percentage of the population does indeed have the single mutation. I've heard figures of 20 and 30%. I think it's also what you do with the mutation and your life circumstances that play a role in your personal happiness, of course.

I commented downthread with my personal experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24009025

[0] Highly recommended article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/a-world-withou...

Thanks, that was a very interesting read!

I know paracetamol also works to some extent for emotional pain, and perhaps anxiety and physical pain share some neural and developmental pathways.

Do you feel any physical pain?

How about empathy?

I've always had a profound disliking for people without empathy, and for good measure -- those people usually are psychopaths or narcissists, but if they are compassionate but just don't feel empathy, it's ok, I guess... though the nauseating feeling in my stomach that I first got when I was maybe 5 and I saw the reaction of a child I struck and robbed of his sunflower, just as instructed by my older cousin -- that is so fundamental to me, that it seems inconceivable that you can become a decent human being without it.

I caught myself hoping that at some point in the article some professional would point out how the lady is in fact flawed in some major ways.

As in you can't have your cookie and eat it too, while the rest of us are struggling?

I also wish the article elaborated more about why the daughter thought the lady was in fact horrible -- was that feeling ongoing, or just something in her adolescence, or just the same nagging feeling I have -- that there MUST be something terribly bad about someone without empathy.

Take for instance the story of her bipolar husband that died(killed himself?). Most likely she indeed could not have prevented it.

BUT maybe.... someone feeling empathy and not feeling reciprocated, would over time feel they are interracting with a robot, not with a human being.

I know I feel that way when I talk with my father and I know he's very low on the empathy scale -- the whole interaction feels so very fake and scripted after a while -- I can read his emotional states, I know what he wants, what he wants me to say, what his fears are, what his intentions are, but it is absolutely not the other way around.

Overall my father is a good person -- a very good and hard working doctor, contributes to charities and so on.

I wouldn't get my bad feelings about him if I only knew and spent a couple of days in my life with him as a writer writing an article about him, but I sure do as someone who wants a genuine and deep connection with him, just like the lady's daughter probaby did with her mother.

You're welcome! It is fascinating, isn't it?

I should have clarified, I'm no Jo Cameron. I'm no different from your average person in how I feel physical pain and empathy. It's extremely rare to have what she has, I think there are only a handful of people in the world that have that. What's far more common, and what I believe I have (and what a few other people in this thread have) is a double FAAH mutation. (That makes up the relentless positivity and lack of fear parts of her personality.) I can't find any estimates on the frequency of that, but around 20% of people have the single FAAH mutation that is basically a less strong version.

The discussion about empathy is an interesting one. But I think treating it like it's some genetic binary thing is completely the wrong way to see it. Empathy, in some ways, is a cultivated skill. The Nazis were elected. Does this mean that Germans were born with less empathy, unable to empathize with the Jewish, disabled, Roma, queer, etc? No, it just means that society succeeded in turning them into an Other who nobody could empathize with. That is to say, I think that if you gave two identical twins entirely different upbringings they would end up with different kinds of empathy. So I think sure, perhaps Jo Cameron doesn't have some of the genetic material for things we may associate with empathy, but she seems to have taken on many empathy-adjacent values like selflessness and really caring about others.

I think the thing with the daughter is just teenagers being teenagers. Having been a teenager once myself, I wouldn't read too far into it :)

If I had to speculate, I'd say the lady has 90% of the hardware that enables empathy, just that she doesn't feel pain, she cannot empathize with pain and things deriving from pain, just like I can't empathize with bats using ecolocation.

Perhaps she empathizes with other, more positive emotions.

However, psychopats surely do feel pain, but they lack the hardware to feel the pain of others and much more.

And sure, there's the fact that you can learn to voluntarily turn off your empathy.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8q8kb4/this-gene-mutation...

Some area of Africa is estimated at over 40%

I am also almost sure I have the same double mutation. Positive all the time, pot never got me high, very even mood, always optimistic. But I am also very empathetic.

In case of some failure - like not achieving your goal, losing somebody close, miscommunication with other people etc. - do you also stay happy? And what about anger? Or boredom?

Do you keep smile on your face when fighting with package compatibility of packages that you did not mean to upgrade but needed to because you wanted to change some small thing real quick? Legit questions.

From evolutionary standpoint I guess we should see biases on both sides, but back when living in the wild I would assume that more pessimistic worldview would be associated with higher survival rate. Not the case in today's world.

> back when living in the wild I would assume that more pessimistic worldview would be associated with higher survival rate

There is plenty of research that shows the opposite: only the optimists survive, and the harsher the environment, the truer this gets.

Pessimists tend to give up, optimists see opportunities others miss (within reason of course).

Pessimist may have been a wrong word. Maybe something along the lines of anxiety that can make you miserable in today's safe environment but could make you think more about potential problems and prepare for them ahead of time. Like "I need to have more food for winter" vs "It's going to be fine, it's such a nice day today".

You are both on to something.

Optimists are more likely to survive situations that are survivable given their lack of planning.

Pesimists are more likely to survive by planning around crysises and avoiding them.

There can be selection bias in both cases, and that's why we still have both.

I blogged about this recently. There's been a recent trend to fetishize optimism in companies.

"Pessimists Are Welcome To Apply"

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pessimists-welcome-apply-ben-...

In the same way that someone with chronic depression can still have days when they're happy, I can certainly still have days when I'm sad. I'd say it's much to a lesser degree though and I've almost never had negative emotions carry on to the following day.

Anger is pretty much non-existant for me. I had issues with a previous girlfriend because she felt I didn't care about her since I wouldn't get angry at things (she wanted to feel like I was willing to fight for her).

Boredom is inescapable. I'm as susceptible to that as anyone. I highly suspect that's just because we've tailored our existence around high information density activities in our web-based existence.

Code can be frustrating for sure, but I think I always know that when I am struggling with something, I'm learning from it and it makes me happy. When something REAL dumb happens, then really what can you do but laugh at it?

I agree with you about the evolution of it. I think the optimistic worldview is not advantageous in high risk environments. Along those lines as well I highly suspect that there are genetic components to my happiness. My father has a similar but not as exaggerated disposition. Things just really don't get us down that much. Here's one of my favorite pictures of him after our house burned down in the 2007 California wildfires: https://image.non.io/fire.webp

Sounds like a normal non-depressed human to me, is what I wanted to say before I saw the picture :) Thanks.

That looks like a man that doesn't let life hand him lemons without a juicer.

Thanks for sharing that!

I am glad I am not the only one. Thank you for posting.

Sometimes when you tell people it is difficult to not be happy and to get angry, they treat you like a skinny person humble bragging about how they can't gain weight no matter how much they eat.

It is just a thing in your genes and I am sure it came from my grandfather who survived the Bataan death march and Odonnel prison camp and was up until his death one of the happiest people I ever knew.

A fellow member of the double FAAH mutation club!

We meet every Tuesday, there are cookies :)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/a-world-withou...

I'm a little different, while I am occasionally happy at inappropriate moments, serious events affecting people really bring me down, like your average person. The death of someone close to me, for example, affected me very deeply and made me sad for a good while. But with the exception of that, I typically feel quite happy. Anything that's "just money" or "just stuff" usually won't shake me, for example I stayed in a pretty upbeat mood during the theft of most of my most valuable possessions in one go.

Personally, I would say whatever it is has had an extremely positive impact on my life. Aside from the huge benefit of just being happy, there's also the benefit of being more trusting (I accept random traveling strangers into my home via Couchsurfing) and doing all kinds of things I think I'd have skipped if I was more risk averse. And I've had some fun with the side effect of (to quote the New Yorker) seeming slightly baked.

Might be fun to make a social network of just those who have it: personally, I find that to a degree, I kind of have to hide my happiness and general contentment at life in order to not seem like an asshole to those around me struggling with various things. It'd be nice to have a place where that's not a concern. Perhaps we should all set up a Mastodon or something?

> make a social network of just those who have it

that does sound very interesting and useful, but also -- as a passerby who admittedly doesn't understand your condition at all :) -- if just one psychopath got in there, they could have a field day from manipulating a self-selected crowd of people who may be systematically easier to abuse with lower potential of negative consequences

I mean, I don't think I'd make it exclusionary and private to only people that pass a test or something. Perhaps anyone could join, just with the request that they have an open mind and be generally happy.

And no worries about not understanding it, some of the writing on it naturally focuses on the more extreme cases. If you met me IRL you'd just think I'm a normal guy, perhaps one that's just mostly upbeat. I don't have any worries about a psychopath infiltrating whatever future group for that reason: most people with it are just normal people, but happier.

The only thing I can think of is that people with it are usually a good bit less risk-averse. So perhaps there'd be someone pushing people into doing risky things. But I already do risky things: just my last trip pre-Corona I hitchhiked on a dump truck through two countries and a conflict zone :) Furthermore, I already evaluate the risk of most things I do and direct my life accordingly. (For example, I avoid excessive driving, and as such I do most of my medium or long distance travel in very safe modes of transportation like the TGV, which has never had a fatal accident in its many years of operation.)

You've given me an idea for a comedy: someone tries to infiltrate the group to get everyone to go on a risky adventure, he succeededs, and then the entire time he tries to hide that he's the only one stressing out at all the danger while everyone else is enjoying it and having a great time :)

Isn't there something about genetic predisposition to happiness https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8q8kb4/this-gene-mutation... ?

> -being happy in inappropriate contexts (people tend to not resonate with you when you're happy at a funeral).

Oh ! I have that. I somehow feel very calm and tranquil at a funeral. I understand it's a breaking point for people and it brings into focus a lot of emotions and tensions and I have that too but not at funeral.