Happiness Is Two Scales
atvbt.com
atvbt.com
This is one of the beefs that I have with the "love your job" culture. People reduce job satisfaction to a single line, where you either love it, hate it, or something in between.
I like to think of job satisfaction across many dimensions. Maybe you love your team, but commute is killing you. Projects are interesting, but salary could be higher. To make it more complicated, there dimensions and yourself change over time: projects start and end, colleagues join and leave, you might get raises or promotions.
Rating things in a simple happy/unhappy, love/hate scale is rarely useful.
Satisfaction is what I think most people mean by "happiness." And when you start thinking of it that way there are very actionable things you can do to improve this directly.
To create an emotion the brain alters brain chemistry as a way to send signals which we interpret as emotions.
It would be problematic if they could just be switched on without turning off.
Happiness itself is fleeting, it will come and go, you can't really aim for it, we are awful predictors of it and as you state it's an emotion so it comes an goes.
However we can strive to achieve a certain comfort, or tranquillity from knowing that we did our best, that we did what we could and what we should and gain a certain satisfaction from that.
That is much more rounded, it's more achievable and stops you from being at whim to the randomness of the world and your own moods.
Playing only video games, I can enjoy myself but my general happiness often suffers from lack of variety.
Sometimes, when I'm working on something hard, I might not be particularly enjoying myself, but I can be overall happier while being given a challenge.
The PANAS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_and_Negative_Affect_S...) is a widely used measure of mood that's based on this model, as an example.
One axis is "negative mood" and the other is "positive mood", so it's closer to something like despair on on one end of one axis, and joy on the end of the other axis, and lack thereof on both ends of each axes.
So high negative emotion and low positive emotion is something like sadness or something; high negative emotion and high positive emotion might be like anxiety.
There's arguments about which model is right (another is negative versus positive mood on one axis [i.e., valence], and arousal versus lack of arousal on the other axis).
The issue is that depending on time frame, or what you're assessing, people can feel positive and negative emotion at the same time. But on micro timescales I think there's more arguments. It might just be a sort of descriptive thing without any "correct" answer.
When you ask people to rate their mood, you find two clusters of responses, roughly corresponding to negative and positive mood axes, but they're slightly negatively correlated, suggesting one overarching valence dimension, but not as dominant as you might intuit.
Euphoria is low unhappiness and high happiness.
Depression is high unhappiness and low happiness
I can't really come up with what it would mean to be high unhappiness and high happiness. Manic, maybe? It sounds like a very confused situation.
Having both created a startup and worked a cushy job, I can relate
I rarely (if ever) comment on my mental health online, but I can totally relate to a X-Y quadrant as you describe. Many mental health professional debut their appointment with a dreaded question "how are you feeling today?".
If I had this diagram with me, it would save time and be way more descriptive of my state of mind.
As for the high unhappiness/high unhappiness quadrant: I'm not manic myself but know close ones who are. I think it fits.
Thanks for opening my mind about this.
I am happiest when I stretch past my limits, which not un-coincidentally means I am also always hitting my limits.
Would not change anything. Might change my mind at any time though.
(I am not manic, maybe an incurable optimist.)
Manic is kinda weird. The above makes it sound almost good, or kind of good. It is not. It is very dangerous. You do not want to be manic. (But you might, maybe, some of the time, want to be hypomanic.)
(Disclaimer: I have had contact with mania in my life but have never personally experienced a Bipolar I manic episode and I aim to keep it that way.)
It's like that.
Before that, we had Aristotle's physics, with its opposing forces of gravity and levity.
https://www.isoul.org/gravitation-and-levitation-theories/
This model of happiness seems overly complicated and burdensome. But funny.
In my experience (read: not a specialist, anecdotal data point), I relate to the 2-scale described here and more: the lack.
Typically, the lack of [feeling] or its opposite is as much a sign as its abundance.
To exemplify, being (un)happy is what one might call a positive action: you DO feel (un)happy. In that sense, not feeling any hapiness or unhappiness is putting yourself in an emotional void, which calls for action in a much different way that treating happiness VS unhappiness.
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Edit: to conclude:
Hence, the scale I'd like to propose is, for some definition of happiness and probably many other feelings:
* measure of lack, presence, abundance of effective emotions
* measure of wanted feeling
* measure of unwanted feeling
With 5 billion people online, there could be instant feedback on all models and hypotheses.
What is needed to coordinate humans to figure out how humans work?
What's more interesting to me is how it seems that "satisfaction" is equal to the first derivative of life quality - if your life quality sucks, and gets a little better, you feel satisfied; if your life quality rocks, and gets a little worse, you feel dissatisfied.
So, happiness behaves more like a fuzzy measure rather than like a probabilistic measure.
Two scales mean that they can be independent. You never experience:
1) Too much unhappiness
and
2) Too much happiness
Therefore, these are not two scales. As simple as that.