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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.

> The problem with American culture specifically is that it treats "happiness" as a goal, rather than a fleeting feeling that is probably better described with a more specific word (joy, accomplishment, excitement, satisfaction, contentment).

Does it really? The sentiment of your post is pretty widespread at this point. It's kind of like saying "our culture is so commercialized" but everyone will tell you they're sick of commercialism.

> 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.

you can't experience Latino culture without thinking that they treat happiness as a goal, it's sort of like you're applying a Germanic/Protestant/Puritanical filter to Americans

also I don't think the more subtle distinctions between happiness and contentment is something people can be expected to maintain in their everyday speech at every moment. That's just not how language works.

Feels to me like this is good old "if a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure".

I.e. happiness is a good measure to identify other things in your life: If something makes you unhappy, address it, if something makes you happy, follow it. (Very simplified)

But if you make "maximizing happiness" the direct target without any context, you get drugs.

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.

happiness <> euphoria

Indeed. This just illustrates Goodhart's Law.

Happiness, when pursued, does its best to escape.

More like modern marketing depts and marketing theory leaning on it. They have replaced what religions used to offer when people asked about purpose, meaning, transcendence or what is the point of my story? Just telling people this is all just some biology and chemistry doesnt really answer questions about meaning. They will start searching for meaning elsewhere and marketing depts of corporate wonderland step in to fill the void.

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.

This reminds me so very much of that old American greeting: "Hey! How are you?" and then you don't give a shit about the actual answer, which must always be positive.

Having to explain to young children that people do this simply to say hello, that they aren't actually asking you your health or state, or anything really. Falls right in line with our need to smile ALL THE TIME.

I stand by statements made by my European friends: Americans are mostly full of shit, mostly liars, and ALWAYS are trying to sell you something.

Are we the Baddies? Yes, of fucking course we are.

> 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.

> 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 don't think emotional ups and downs are a normal healthy part of life? Even in media it's often recognized that people being happy (or even just too tranquil) all the time, is wrong and creepy/unsettling. That said, it's absolutely true that advertisers are constantly pushing a narrative that you should be in an endless 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 your life.

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

We went from 3% on anti-depressants in 1992 to 13%. Lots more are trying to induce happiness without an external change of circumstance or internal perspective.

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-...

> ...much like eskimos have many words for snow.

... which is a stereotyped myth, like most of what we were taught about indigenous peoples everywhere.

Turns out English has MANY more words for "stream of water on land" than Inuit has for snow. Inuit has multiple nuancing endings - but English has snow, snows, snowy, snowlike, and so one.

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

What are other people's favorite humorous responses?

Correct. But even that definition risks over pathologizing the human experience. It creates a distinction between a broken brain and a reasonable reaction to a broken environment.

DSM defines a disorder by how well an individual fits into the current economic and social system. Technically, if someone is so blissfully happy they stop showing up to their job, they would actually meet the criteria for a disorder.

Just like if someone lives in a high-crime area with little security they may have crippling anxiety. DSM would say they have a generalized anxiety disorder, but I would argue they don't, they are experiencing a reasonable reaction to a broken environment.

We are far too quick to jump to "this person isn't functioning in society, therefore something must be wrong with them" instead of doing the hard work of adapting our social and economic systems to be more inclusive of different types of human experiences.

Case in point, homosexuality used to be a sociopathic personality disorder, and pre-DSM we thought it was a mental illness causing enslaved people to want to escape slavery.

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.

What it exposes is that there are underlying methodological presuppositions that are hazardous.

If statistical frequency is our ultimate basis for normative behavior, then things like happiness can be pathologized. This is absurd, which means normativity cannot be decided by ubiquity or popular vote. You have to look to the objective nature of the thing.

This is another case where materialism utterly flops, because materialistic ontology - one that reduces all of reality to Cartesian res extensa - cannot account for the normative at all (among other things).

Yeah. I achieve happiness by not caring about anything too much. Nothing matters, ultimately. This is a universal truth. Once you internalize that, everything seems small. You can appreciate things more.

These days I enjoy just having the time to stare at the clouds for a few hours at a time.

I would honestly prefer to watch paint dry than going to work though.

The only thing I kind of want in my life is UBI because I hate being forced into the rat race.

I'm in a weird situation because I used to be a hustler software engineer/solo founder who would move countries at the drop of a hat (I.e. for opportunities) and I worked nights and weekends on side projects for like 15 years straight.

But now I don't care about anything. I'm just tired of striving. When you waste your life in the pursuit of a goal, eventually you build so many negative associations that you eventually don't want to work for anything anymore. I only like free stuff now. My idea of success now is getting stuff I didn't earn. I optimize for minimal effort.

I honestly feel more happiness when I get something for free.

Or was the nineties, so it would have been a “not!” or a “psych!”

Hypomania is very irritating, and can actually mess up a person's life. It's a neurotic defense mechanism that's opposite to depression

Yes. Too much of any particular state of mind can be bad.

The best is to cultivate a state of equanimity. Stop grasping at both good and bad states.

I'm not the world, I just live in it. It might be a mess, but that mess mostly doesn't affect me. The few ways in which it does can be effectively mitigated by anyone who puts in even the tiniest bit of effort.

For that matter, nothing much stops me from carving out my own little world where I can clean up what mess it is, and live there. But to do that I'd have to admit to myself that I can't change the greater world and even acknowledge that there's no real point in wanting that other than to chase high status among our monkey tribe.

hard disagree. I think you can be happy about some things and not about others, and it's not so black-and-white.

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