Happiness is a reward from our ancestors
woodfromeden.substack.com
woodfromeden.substack.com
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
See shades of white (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_white), plural forms, different depending on the language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural#Use_in_systems_of_gramm...), love (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love) if only in Greek where it has at least 6 very distinct ones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love).
But, also, that knack for ambiguity and second and third order meaning in apparently detached sentences in some languages, it has its own charms.
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.
“I want to be at home” “אני רוצה להיות בבית״
“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 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.
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.
Another interesting paper about this is "Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved", Kahneman and Mellers, 2022 https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
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.
Would “Income and emotional well-being: It doesn’t really matter” be a better title for the study? Or do I miss something?
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?
> 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]
[1] https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/how-i-cured-myself-with-... [2] https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/the-10-000-year-explosio...
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".
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 now use alcohol as a way to "call upon my ancient ancestors to guide my actions".
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.
>Happiness is a reward from our ancestors
Followed by the subtitle:
>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".
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.
Ah, yes, I'm somewhat of a philosopher, psychologist and social scientist too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's not science, that's how we got severely warped things like religion.
Long-term happiness is for some of the same reasons we have long-term psychotics.
Consciousness simply allows the fourth dimension of time applied to emotions.
Approval: DENIED.
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.
[0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-and-How-Not-to-Be...
Why do we care about what people said before? The same question applies to your own question now, why does it matter?
It apparently does matter, so perhaps it did matter, so perhaps it still does. Else why even bother asking now.
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.
Don’t get entrenched in your bubble, mate.
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.
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.
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!
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.
[1] https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/how-i-cured-myself-with-...