Now I have a better sense of what dopamine is. This stuff apparently “flows along these circuits in anticipation of the event itself.” Anticipating a pleasure can be more pleasurable than experiencing that pleasure itself — meaning part of happiness is having something to look forward to — and enjoying that inbetween time.
That is part of Eduardo Punset’s argument in The Happiness Trip: A Scientific Journey, a book that approaches the pursuit of happiness from a scientific perspective. Basically, Eduardo argues that much of what we pursue in our quest for happiness are not actually factors that’ll trigger feelings of happiness in our brains.
Some of those fruitless human quests are well-known at this point; we’ve all heard that more money, once basic needs are met, won’t bring happiness, for example — an assertion with which Eduardo agrees. But Eduardo also argues that work, children — even health! — are not such huge factors in human happiness.
“We have radically new, complex, and lofty goals upon which our happiness supposedly depends, but the neural reward mechanisms are the same as ever, focusing on prosaic survival goals like food, sex, or avoidance,” Eduardo says.
But the message isn’t a simple eat, drink and be merry attitude towards happiness. Instead, Eduardo names some bigger, psycho-social needs people need in order to be happy: A sense of control or influence over what happens in their lives, a number of interpersonal relationships, an openness to mixed feelings, ambiguities and gray areas, a freedom from constant fear.
These needs are then connected to current social issues. For example, our present educational system, generally based on competition instead of collaboration, proves detrimental in fostering happiness. New infringements on civil liberties mute happiness with fear. Economic systems that fosters huge, difficult-to-bridge gaps in standards of living depress people by taking away their sense of individual agency.
All of this is complicated by the fact that people really do have less control over their own happiness than generally believed. Genetics prevails over happiness in about 50% of cases, Eduardo says. Add to that a total lack of control over what happens to you in your early formative years — including time spent in the womb! — which’ll forever affect your happiness level. Then combine that with social factors over which you have no control, yet too will control your happiness future — feelings of helplessness and ineffectuality generated by poverty lasts generations, for example. If you already tend to look at things with a glass-half-empty type attitude, this type of info may just convince you to throw in the towel on your pursuit of happiness….
Interestingly, what seems like an individual pursuit for happiness seems to require a more macro perspective — a pursuit for a society that’s more equitable, democratic, and collaborative.
Yet it’s these very obsessions with big picture, far-off stuff — say, stressing over how to achieve world peace, worrying about global warming, or even wondering how to fix LAUSD — that tends to push people out of happiness and into depression. Humans are unique in that we can create a great sense of fear, anxiety and ineffectuality in ourselves by envisioning at a huge problem that may not even happened yet (i.e. polar bear extinction). At one point, Eduardo asks Stanford Univ. neurologist Robert Sapolsky if depression is typically human, “the result of excessive introspection.” Sapolsky’s response: “The official scientific answer is ‘perhaps.’” Hmmm….
So how does one achieve happiness? Eduardo helpfully ends his book with a simple formula for happiness. It is:
Read the book to decipher the code –
