Evolution Didn't Design You To Be Happy

Happiness and Evolution

When people are asked what they really want out of life most respond that they want to be happy.  They
may think more money, a better job, improved status, social recognition will make them happy.  Or they may think of all that as superficial and that they want inner happiness.  Whichever, people regard happiness as a good unto itself.

Happiness Readings and The Three Princes of Serendip

In culling out old links, I isolated Mind Shadows posts on happiness. They are an eclectic lot, about aspects of the subject.  What you will discover for yourself will be a case of serendipity, the term coined by Hugh Walpole about the story of the Three princes of Serendip, who discovered by accident. Enough of that. Enjoy the serendipity. Here are the Mind Shadow links:

The Peril of Positive Thinking

Don't like the news because it's always glum? Well, quit thinking the glass is half empty. Hey, it's half full, chum, and it's going to get fuller. Somebody will come along and top it off for you. Just don't ask me who. As for the news, you can always change your attitude toward events by getting your daily dose of Happy News.

"Ever since psychologist Martin Seligman crafted the phrase 'learned optimism' in 1991 and started offering optimism training, there's been a thriving industry in the kind of thought reform that supposedly overcomes negative thinking. You can buy any number of books and DVDs with titles like Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, in which you will learn mental exercises to reprogram your outlook from gray to the rosiest pink: 'affirmations,' for example, in which you repeat upbeat predictions over and over to yourself; 'visualizations' in which you post on your bathroom mirror pictures of that car or boat you want; 'disputations' to refute any stray negative thoughts that may come along. If money is no object, you can undergo a three-month 'happiness makeover' from a life coach or invest $3,575 for three days of 'optimism training' on a Good Mood Safari on the coast of New South Wales."

What more could you want? Hmmm, let's see--maybe a dose of reality.

"What makes you think unsullied optimism is such a good idea? Americans have long prided themselves on being positive and optimistic — traits that reached a manic zenith in the early years of this millennium. Iraq would be a cakewalk! The Dow would reach 36,000! Housing prices could never decline! Optimism was not only patriotic but was also a Christian virtue, or so we learned from the proliferating preachers of the 'prosperity gospel,' whose God wants to 'prosper' you. In 2006, the runaway bestseller The Secret promised that you could have anything you wanted, anything at all, simply by using your mental powers to 'attract' it. The poor listened to upbeat preachers like Joel Osteen and took out subprime mortgages. The rich paid for seminars led by motivational speakers like Tony Robbins and repackaged those mortgages into securities sold around the world." More from Barbara Ehrenreich

You Can Improve Your Life (And That's Not A Platitude)

Back when I was in college, back in the days of the Cold War and foreign policies based on MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction, I was introduced to the wide world as a rather dismal place. Camus told me that life was meaningless and that, like Sisyphus, all I could do was heroically roll a boulder to the top of a mountain for the rest of my life. Fred Hoyle had me believing that the universe had no origin, was in a steady state, without beginning and end, and was therefore godless. Because Einstein had shown that Newton's matter was not the basic stuff of gravity, like others I was persuaded that all was determined, including the course of my life. B.F. Skinner told me that I was like a pigeon in one of his boxes, governed by stimulus and response, devoid of any inner meaning, including freedom and dignity. Freud said my unconscious was a snake pit of repressed desires to sleep with my mother, and urges to kill my father. He said that I, and civilization with its discontents, could only hope to escape neuroses and find ordinary unhappiness.

Current wisdom has each of these perspectives as out-of-date. I learned slowly, painfully, to question the intellectual fashions of the day. Platitudes are never fashionable and some contain important truths.

Like others of my college generation, I was not inclined to look on the world as warm and cozy. That is still the case for undergraduates today, and right they are, although they can find a counterpoint that was not available to me. It is available to everybody, not just them.

I speak of positive psychology, which holds that one trouble with the world is that people do not work to make their lives happy. I don't speak here of Pollyanna and Panglosse, but of reasonable optimism. Reasonable in that we expect our lives will encounter trials and tribulations, but that we eventually will leave them behind.

Martin Seligman, a major spokesman for the movement, points out studies showing that people who dwell on negative experiences become increasingly negative. In contrast, others experience an improved sense of well-being when they keep "gratitude journals" in which they remind themselves of all they're thankful for.

Happiness requires steady and habitual plugging away at it. Negative feelings are easy to fall into, a path of least resistance. The more we dwell on them the more we return to them and the deeper we sink. Freudian analysis encouraged patients to introspect but they did not improve. The more they looked inward, the more they looked inward, despite insights into their behavor.

Still, for all his wrong-headedness elsewhere, Freud did acknowledge that "unhappiness is much less difficult to experience." He could not see his psychoanalytic method as a cause of discontent, which it was.

Those of an intellectual bent may expect meaty ideas in the teachings of positive psychology, but they would be disappointed. In part, happiness research finds truth behind age-worn platitudes and shows that their significance can become elements of a working program. (Research has found that life satisfaction is unusually high in Ireland, where people remind one another to "count your blessings.") Remember your mother telling you to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Your father told you to stop crying over spilt milk. You may say that's nothing new and that you already observe some platitudes.

Something new is here, and it is available to anybody willing to make the effort. In studying and applying positive psychology, you begin to understand more than what your parents used to tell you. You see more than the platitudes.

Check out a Time Magazine article on the subject, The Positive Psychology Center, "The Pursuit of Happiness" with interesting links at U. Alabama, Birmingham, and Martin Seligman's site, Authentic Happiness.

Martin Seligman & Happiness

Mind Shadows Home Martin Seligman & Happiness

A woman, call her Jane, sees a psychiatrist who prescribes Prozac for her depression. Joe, with bi-polar disorder, takes lithium. They have been helped by the pharmacopeia of drugs made available to the public. Undergoing standard therapies, others have gained a better sense of well being from the data psychology has collected on various mental illnesses. Over the years, psychology has focused on negative mental health, much to the benefit of those suffering from it.

But what about psychological studies on positive mental health? What makes people happy? Until recently, little research has been conducted on that. More

Happiness is Over-Rated: I

Mind Shadows Happiness is Over-Rated: I

Happiness isn’t what it used to be. Thoughts about it started with the Greeks and the thinking has changed over the years until today, with Prozac, it has become something Aristotle wouldn't recognize.

Today, there is a large body of research dealing with the psychology of happiness. Martin Seligman teaches that, in part, “Authentic Happiness” involves knowing your “highest strengths,” then using them “in the service of something you believe is larger than you.” Mihály Csíkszentmihályi speaks of flow and says it presupposes developing clear goals, concentration, and absorption so focused that one lapses out of self-consciousness. Sort of a how-time-flies-when-you’re-having-fun.

Soon, perhaps, with the help of psychopharmaceuticals, melancholics will become unknown. That would be an unparalleled tragedy, equivalent in scope to the annihilation of the sperm whale or the golden eagle. Eric G. Wilson has written a book in which he argues that the demise of melancholia would be an unhappy occurrence.

Martin Seligman, Dogs, Learned Helplessness

Learned Helplessness

In Learned Optimism, cognitive psychologist Martin Seligman recounts an experience he had as a graduate student at University of Pennsylvania. When he first entered the lab of Richard Solomon, he met a fellow graduate student who explained that a behavioral study was in trouble.

"It's the dogs," Seligman was told. "The dogs won't do anything. Something's wrong with them. So nobody can do experiments."

Over the past several weeks the dogs had been subjected to Pavlovian conditioning, daily exposed to two kinds of stimulus, high-pitched tones and brief shocks, which "weren't too painful . . . [like] a minor jolt . . . on a dry winter day." The experimenters wanted the dogs to associate the neutral tone and the shock, so that when the animals later heard the tone, they would react as if shocked instead--they would register fear and avoidance.

That part of the experiment concluded, the dogs were taken to a "two-compartment shuttlebox," each compartment separated by a low wall, which the dogs could jump over. The intent was to see if the dogs would react to the tone by leaping the wall to get away from it. If they did, they would provide evidence that emotional learning transferred to different situations. The dogs needed only to jump the low barrier, easy for them to do.

The fellow graduate student told Seligman that they did not. Instead, they lay on the box floor, whimpering. They had given up. They had learned helplessness.

In the first stage of the experiment, they found they could do nothing to escape the shock, so that in the second stage, the box, they did nothing.

Later, in his own experiments with canines, Seligman let some dogs escape the shocks. Not surprisingly, when these animals were individually subjected to stage two, they leaped over the wall to avoid the jolt. They had learned control of their environment, unlike the other group of dogs, which, predictably, lay on the floor and whimpered.

Yes, the experiment was cruel, even with a slight shock akin to static electricity upon touching a door handle, but the findings also have far-reaching implications for individuals, society groups, and entire nations.

I refer to explanatory methods, the ways in which people interpret what has happened to them. Take, as an example, the classic distinctions between pessimist and optimist. If anything bad happens, the pessimist thinks it will last long. He accepts that the event extends into the nooks and crannies of his life to undermine everything. He thinks that somehow he is at fault. On the other hand, the optimist regards it as temporary setback or defeat. She regards it as having only local application, not universal. She may accept some of the blame, if that be the case, but also realizes that there is plenty of blame to go around.

These explanatory styles determine life courses--success, failure, happiness, misery--and one can see them in population segments.* For example, a segment may have been victimized and exploited and, just like the dog, they have learned helplessness, inability to rise above circumstances. One could extend this perspective to cultures with fatalism as a deep heritage-belief or with endemic poverty as a cause of fatalism. He then could note differences between them and societies with more emphasis on personal responsibility and choice. As a concept, learned helplessness would help yield greater understanding of such peoples. *(In contradistinction to the individual pessimist blaming himself, an accounting must be made for victim mentality in groups of people--the tendency to totally blame other groups, not one's own.)

The findings have been developed in terms of applications for individuals and as for extension to cultures and nations, to my knowledge that remains to be done, although existing evidence points the way.