Jul 24, 2019 06:22 AM
https://theconversation.com/humans-arent...ing-119262
EXCERPT (Rafael Euba): A huge happiness and positive thinking industry [...] has helped to create the fantasy that happiness is a realistic goal. Chasing the happiness dream is a very American concept, exported to the rest of the world through popular culture. ... Unfortunately, this has helped to create an expectation that real life stubbornly refuses to deliver.
Because even when all our material and biological needs are satisfied, a state of sustained happiness will still remain a theoretical and elusive goal, as Abd-al-Rahman III, Caliph of Córdoba in the tenth century, discovered. [...] Happiness is a human construct, an abstract idea with no equivalent in actual human experience. Positive and negative affects do reside in the brain, but sustained happiness has no biological basis.
[...] Humans are not designed to be happy, or even content. Instead, we are designed primarily to survive and reproduce ... A state of contentment is discouraged by nature because it would lower our guard against possible threats to our survival. ... Different geographical locations and circuits in the brain are each associated with certain neurological and intellectual functions, but happiness, being a mere construct with no neurological basis, cannot be found in the brain tissue.
In fact, experts in this field argue that nature’s failure to weed out depression in the evolutionary process [...] is due precisely to the fact that depression as an adaptation plays a useful role in times of adversity, by helping the depressed individual disengage from risky and hopeless situations in which he or she cannot win. Depressive ruminations can also have a problem solving function during difficult times.
The current global happiness industry has some of its roots in Christian morality codes, many of which will tell us that there is a moral reason for any unhappiness we may experience. [...] Our emotions are mixed and impure, messy, tangled and at times contradictory, like everything else in our lives. Research has shown that positive and negative emotions and affects can coexist in the brain relatively independently of each other. ... It’s worth remembering, then, that we are not designed to be consistently happy. (MORE - details)
EXCERPT (Rafael Euba): A huge happiness and positive thinking industry [...] has helped to create the fantasy that happiness is a realistic goal. Chasing the happiness dream is a very American concept, exported to the rest of the world through popular culture. ... Unfortunately, this has helped to create an expectation that real life stubbornly refuses to deliver.
Because even when all our material and biological needs are satisfied, a state of sustained happiness will still remain a theoretical and elusive goal, as Abd-al-Rahman III, Caliph of Córdoba in the tenth century, discovered. [...] Happiness is a human construct, an abstract idea with no equivalent in actual human experience. Positive and negative affects do reside in the brain, but sustained happiness has no biological basis.
[...] Humans are not designed to be happy, or even content. Instead, we are designed primarily to survive and reproduce ... A state of contentment is discouraged by nature because it would lower our guard against possible threats to our survival. ... Different geographical locations and circuits in the brain are each associated with certain neurological and intellectual functions, but happiness, being a mere construct with no neurological basis, cannot be found in the brain tissue.
In fact, experts in this field argue that nature’s failure to weed out depression in the evolutionary process [...] is due precisely to the fact that depression as an adaptation plays a useful role in times of adversity, by helping the depressed individual disengage from risky and hopeless situations in which he or she cannot win. Depressive ruminations can also have a problem solving function during difficult times.
The current global happiness industry has some of its roots in Christian morality codes, many of which will tell us that there is a moral reason for any unhappiness we may experience. [...] Our emotions are mixed and impure, messy, tangled and at times contradictory, like everything else in our lives. Research has shown that positive and negative emotions and affects can coexist in the brain relatively independently of each other. ... It’s worth remembering, then, that we are not designed to be consistently happy. (MORE - details)
