> Our culture leans on this so hard that people start to think there's something wrong with them if they're not feeling generalized happiness most of the time.

I don’t think this is true, unless you’re using ‘happiness’ to refer to euphoria or acute joy.

The happiness that is generally sought is more accurately described as a general lack of sadness or despair. Having a roof over your head, food on the table, a job to go to, decent health, and friends and family is what constitutes basic happiness. That is a good goal to work toward, in my opinion.

It's a balancing act no? Generally you certainly want to optimise to minimise unhappiness but not to the point of avoiding conflict/difficulty.

You could also say the same general thing for being goal-oriented instead of process-oriented for anything else.

Indeed. This just illustrates Goodhart's Law.

happiness <> euphoria

> There’s a tendency in modern psychology/media to pathologize the average human baseline

Is there though? I don't think modern psychology does. Where are these psychologists who are doing this? Even in media it's often recognized that people being happy all the time is wrong, creepy, and unsettling. That said, it's absolutely true that advertisers are constantly pushing a narrative that you should be in constant pursuit for what you don't have and that if you only buy what they want to sell you it will make you happier and improve you life.

Trying to distinguish happiness from all those other feelings is like trying to separate depressed from all the negative things you feel during a day. Some words do not describe specific emotions, but instead indicate a general state which has all kinds of internal variation and magnitudes. A person who doesn't have much financial stress, their kid isn't having issues that require lots of problem solving from the parent, their job is fine, they are not arguing with their spouse regularly. They would say they are happy. Alternately one can have accomplishments , new PR at the gym, solved an issue at work, but still think of themselves as unhappy because they have things that they prioritize more highly that are not going well.

A few years ago I read a claim that the word 'happy' is relatively young - ~500 years old - and that translations of others words into 'happy' are somewhat approximate.

My takeaway is that (presuming the argument is correct) that much of human striving is probably better described with specific words (as you suggested - joy, accomplishment, fulfillment, excitement, etc). For most of human history, most people probably didn't think "I want to be happy" but "I want to have a good partner", "I want a big family", "I want my crop to grow so I don't die."

I wonder how much unhappiness is caused by seeking a poorly-defined ideal of happiness.

The book was called "Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison".

I suspect you would agree with this: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/unhappy

Even if feelings are temporary you can still have them more or less often. When somebody says they are happy, of course it does not mean they are experiencing bliss all the time; it means that the relative frequency of positive emotions is high and the relative frequency of negative emotions is low.

I think a lot of people assume it's not possible to be happy because their life circumstances are incompatible with it and they can't or won't change those circumstances. I think in the US at least, the things we want most and the things we strive for are not things that make us happy.

"Happiness comes in small doses folks. It's a cigarette butt, or a chocolate chip cookie or a five second orgasm. You come, you smoke the butt you eat the cookie you go to sleep wake up and go back to f---ing work the next morning, THAT'S IT! End of f---ing list!"

-Dennis Leary

"For truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself." -- Herman Melville.

He describing to enjoy the warmth of blankets on a freezing winter night, it is imperative the nose be exposed to the cold likely as a metaphor to enjoy "happiness" something is needed for contrast.

It's more of a comment on the absurdity of what is and is not defined as a disorder i believe.

Thanks for the book recommendation.

+1 - https://www.google.com/search?q=every+brilliant+thing

I have often felt conflicted about happiness and what we should strive for in our lives.

It is true that most people seem to think happiness is the ultimate goal for life. They say they just want to be happy, that they just want their kids to be happy. Often times, though, it seems almost circular in logic; any time you pushback against the idea of happiness or why being happy all the time isn’t always good, people will just say “oh, that isn’t REAL happiness” or “that actually is happiness!”

Often this is when I bring up hedonism and say, “well, if pure happiness is all that matters, why don’t we all just do heroin all the time? You will feel great!” Of course, they will say “well the high can’t last forever and eventually your life will suck and that is why it isn’t real happiness.

I think it is more than that, though. Imagine you could feel the best feeling you have had all the time, just sitting there. You could just lean back and feel good for as long as you want. Would you want that?

I think most people wouldn’t, and not just because we don’t think it is possible. It is more than that. We want to do hard things that make us work and that hurt a bit and frustrate us, because there is a sense of satisfaction when you persevere. We need to feel pain and sadness, to feel the fullest connection with others through the full range of emotions.

It is not easy to articulate exactly what we want, but it isn’t simply happiness.

It's always fascinating to see how fundamental concepts of Buddhist teachings appear in different names, forms, and metaphors across cultures.

Dependent origination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da?wp...

While some ideas are more obvious than others I always wonder whether the same insights occurred independently (of each other -- excuse the poor choice of words), or if the ideas can all trace their roots back to the same teachings.

> healthy default is just calm and neutral, with happiness and sadness coming and going away.

This is a very healthy attitude, and people often miss it. Every feeling/emotion/state of mind is impermanent. It will come and go on its own, its biology and there's nothing you can do about it. It's trying to "cling" to a specific state, forever, that leads to our own suffering. The moment you've move from "I feel happy" to "I hope this lasts forever" is where you will suffer. Just be a witness to the coming and going, you witness happiness occurring, you don't become happiness, and its the same for other feelings and states.

I had to check if it was April Fool's Day

A similarly useful article:

More U.S. Children Being Diagnosed With Youthful Tendency Disorder https://theonion.com/more-u-s-children-being-diagnosed-with-...

Oh, absolutely. 99.999% of human history has been "just want to survive another year."

Russ Harris has a great book about this called The Happiness Trap [0], which is an introduction to ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy)

[0]: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/76053/the-happiness...

> My takeaway is that (presuming the argument is correct) that much of human striving is probably better described with specific words (as you suggested - joy, accomplishment, fulfillment, excitement, etc).

All those four words combined is something like the concept of eudaimonia that Aristotle describes in his Nicomachean Ethics:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flourishing

Just because the word 'happy' is relatively young in the English/European language, a conclusion can not be made for the whole Humankind.

It seems to me that you're implicitly thinking of happiness/sadness as zero sum. That can be very limiting.

I've always loved, "what's so morning about it?"

What are other people's favorite humorous responses?

I'm guessing that it's just a joke, but I'll admit that it reads like something you'd expect from somebody who doesn't know the difference between "sad" and "depressed" and thinks that there's some vast conspiracy to medicate people for normal human emotions. I'd bet this is smugly shared all over facebook by ignorant people who think that things like depression or ADHD don't exist.

Very true - which is why this piece "that translations of others words into 'happy' are somewhat approximate." would be very interesting if accurate.

I've not read Aristotle directly but translating eudaimonia was an example in the book that I mentioned. The argument was that eudaimonia is often translated as happiness but that doesn't make sense in contexts where we talk about a soldier dying experiencing eudaimonia (suggesting a loose translation).

Dunno. Traveling to less developed places parents still want the kids to be happy for a start. It's surprising in places without roads, internet, phones etc. how normal everything is.

It's normal for parents to want their kids to be happy… it's less normal for those kids to be "happy" all the time.

You don't think it possible for some one to die happy?

That sounds like me. There's a 1:1 correlation between how many cups of coffee I've had and the number of languages I speak.

And like a true computer nerd, of course it's an unsigned integer, meaning if I drink too much coffee I'm back to grunting only (this time on the toilet)

No. It's certainly not a goal. And even if it can somehow happen, soneone could be resigned or drugged, it's different from something like "happy to die".

This question itself seems to be a perfect example of the point that the word is worse than meaningless. Worse because people use it like it has a useful meaning.

One can die in a state that has a lot of the qualities or features that overlap with other states that people call happy, but that doesn't make them equal or equivalent.

Seems like you could use a few more bits.