Sunday 4 March 2007

Pic of the day: "The world is full of unhappy people." And you know what? It is MEANT TO BE that way! It is actually one of the cases where evolution looks like Intelligent Design (or the other way around, I guess).

Unhappiness rulez!

The world is indeed full of unhappy people. This is no miracle, since it is almost exclusively they who have children in the first place. Calm down, I will explain. It will all make sense, in a somewhat grotesque way.

It is obvious that evolution sets a lower bound for happiness: If you are so unhappy that you kill yourself early in life, your genes are not passed on. In so far as genes contribute to happiness (and they do, more about that shortly) this is the end of the road for them. Even if you live to have offspring but then quickly exits the stage of life, this is a significant setback to your children and their opportunity to survive and have children of their own. So, extreme unhappiness is a bad choice for genes.

Less obvious is the opposite, perhaps because it is so rare that few people have observed it in practice. But you can actually have a baseline happiness level that is so high that you are happy alone. I might not have known this if it had not happened to me, but it does. While I am slightly less happy after a few years without my best friend, there is still no sense of desperation. I still enjoy my life the way it is and wish it could go on forever. (Isn't it really unfair that people who don't want to live can choose to kill themselves, but we who don't want to die cannot choose to live forever? Really unbalanced, if you ask me.)

Anyway, what happens if you are "too" happy is that you don't pester other people for attention, and so you are not around when they feel like continuing the species. (Unless they pester you for attention, I guess, but you probably creep them out a bit with your constant happiness.) In other words, much of our social interplay is caused by the constant attempt to achieve happiness through other people. And without this, most of us would never have been born.

***

"Wait, wait!" I hear you say. (Actually that is not you, just the voices in my head, but you probably say it anyway.) "Is there any reason why people who are happy alone should spend all their time alone? Does not this rather mean that they are unhappy together with others, which is a completely different thing?"

There are indeed also mental afflictions in which the patient suffers from mental anguish in the presence of others. Be aware however that most shy people really wish they could be together with others, but their shyness keeps them from doing it. In fact, this is the cause of the suffering. If you are shy but don't miss other people, you don't see a problem. And again, these are specific mental afflictions, usually called "social anxiety". While fairly common, they usually take the form of a fear of crowds, or of strangers, or specific social settings. Not an overwhelming desire to be alone.

Actually very few people have a desire to be alone. Those who are happy alone tend to also be happy together with others. But being together requires quite a bit of initial investmen of time, energy and frequently also money, and disrupts other interests . Avoiding making friends or getting a family of your own is not something that requires work (otherwise I would not have been this single, as I am quite lazy). It is not just me either. Even many women are single, even though women are traditionally those being sought out rather than those seeking out, at least by the opposite sex. But without a minimum of effort or at least alert interest, you are likely to be left alone. (Except by the occasional crazy stalker, who you would prefer not to reproduce with anyway.)

So in conclusion, most people would have very few friends, rarely spouses and almost never children unless they had this conviction that life could be better with company. If you had the conviction that life couldn't be better, then good for you, but bad for your genes (and the world in general, if I may say so. The older I get, the more I realize how badly the world could have needed my genes. A bit late for that now though! Go forth and multiply, nephews and nieces. You are the world's best hope now...)

***

Is happiness really genetic? Not entirely. But it is surprisingly stable. People mistakenly believe that they would become happy if they won the big lottery, but studies of people who did win show that they revert to the normal level of happiness within weeks. They still have lots more money than before, of course, but they have already adjusted to it, much like a pig farmer has adjusted to the smell. Humans are very good at adjusting to their conditions, and this works both ways. People who lose their homes in a fire, for instance, are usually deeply unhappy, but again this fades fairly quickly. Losing a family member takes more time to adjust to, probably more than anything else. But while people may insist that nothing ever has been the same since their husband died thirty years ago, their reported level of happiness was no higher when he was alive...

So whether it is genetic or not, we seem to have a "happiness thermostat" that can only be adjusted by extreme measures, such as years of meditation or a complete change of attitude. Even then it is slow going. We can attain a higher level of happiness day by day, by consciously choosing to not fool ourselves with illusions of future happiness but rather enjoy the present moment and live while we are alive, choose to do things that are meaningful and help others. But the moment we slip and fall back into our habits, we will return to our default values, until we have done this for so long that it becomes second nature.

And this is as good as it gets. If most people were not at least a little unhappy by default, we would not even have been born. And where would our happiness be then? ^_^