Redefining happiness

This essay by Cody Delistraty aims to criticise the “specific, disturbing and very new version of ‘happiness’ that holds that bad feelings must be avoided at all costs." This results in people trying to portray their lives as a continuous string of peak experiences via platforms such as Instagram. This view has some roots in Hobbes, who

cast happiness as an unending process of accumulating objects of desire, thereby redefining it as a subjective, shifting feeling, predicated on our desires. ‘The felicity of this life,’ wrote Hobbes in 1651, ‘consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there is no such finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor summum bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers.’

This contrasts with an older idea of happiness, such as that of Epicurus, whereby:

happiness is merely the lack of aponia – physical pain – and ataraxia – mental disturbance. It was not about the pursuit of material gain, or notching up gratifying experiences, but instead was a happiness that lent itself to a constant gratefulness. So long as we are not in mental or physical pain, we can, within this understanding of happiness, be contented.

He also evokes the the Romantics, who embraced both joy and sorrow. Interestingly, the embrace of melancholy can acutually have some benefits. He cites some studies by the the social psychologist Joseph P Forgas at the University of New South Wales in Sydney which indicate that sadness can actually improve memory, judgement, and communication:

people remembered the details of a shop more accurately when the weather was bad and they were in a foul mood

people tend to make more accurate judgments when sad since we’re more aware and less gullible, relying more on what’s actually witnessed than on broad-strokes ideas and stereotypes.

Sadness also makes us better communicators and persuaders, according to his 2007 study, and we are better conversationalists – more adept at interpreting nuance and ambiguity – when sad than happy, according to his 2013 study.

People in sad moods, according to Forgas, tend to be more persistent and hardworking in complex mental tasks than happier people, not only attempting more questions but getting more of the questions correct than their happier counterparts.

Somewhat paradoxically, embracing a negative mood does not necessarily affect life satsifaction:

Those who believed negative emotions could be useful to them reported the same life satisfaction, regardless of their mood