Comment by somenameforme
2 years ago
This is a tangent, but when in the world did "happiness" become a desirable metric? If you think about it, it's really quite absurd. Happiness is a brief liminal state that should be triggered by relatively infrequent events. It is not a normal, nor desirable, default state.
Contentedness, satisfaction, at-peace, and so on - there endlessly more rational, logical, desirable, and attainable things to aim for. Yet everybody always says happy. Maybe this even goes some way towards explaining the plummeting mental state of the West at large. If one sets their life goal towards happiness, then they're ironically certain to end up unhappy, unsatisfied, and discontented.
> Contentedness, satisfaction, at-peace, and so on
Could you explain to me how this is not another name for happiness?
They are extremely different states of being.
You are happy to receive good news, or for something to turn out well, or whatever else. But it is not a resting state. It's a liminal state. Contentedness, by contrast, is a resting state. You can awake contented, fall asleep contented, and spend your days contented. You may rarely, if ever, experience happiness - yet find yourself able to find satisfaction in life nonetheless.
By contrast a pitiful, depressed, self loathing individual, can experience happiness as much as anybody else. But he is most certainly not content nor satisfied. Perhaps a junky would be another example. A junky certainly experiences happiness when his poison enters his veins, yet he almost certainly is far from content or satisfied.
You are just being pedant while answering to a non native english speaker.
3 replies →
Agreed that affirmative happiness is very hard to think about as a target.
But I find that most people, when they say that, actually mean reduction of suffering. That's easier to quantify--but still quite difficult, like most quantities in social research.
Do you not then run into other problems? For instance I find that lifting brings an immense amount of contentedness, yet it's essentially hours upon hours of self inflicted suffering and pain. The same is true of family. Somebody raising a 2 year old could describe it in many ways, but reduction of suffering would not be one. Such things greatly contribute to this sense of contentedness and satisfaction.
> when in the world did "happiness" become a desirable metric?
Happiness is not a metric, cannot be measured, and is one of the most important things
Despite it being unmeasurable we know that economic security increases it
"Happiness", not "perpetual state of unbridled ecstasy"