Recently I've pondered what happiness is. Everyone seems to have similar thoughts about it: delayed gratification, using happiness as a driving force behind our life's work (everyone's heard the "whatever makes you happy..."), etc. But should we be so quick as to deem happiness as our life's motivator? Why does happiness exist in the first place?
David Buss, in his paper The evolution of happiness brings up many evolutionary theories on distress, and how evolutionarily adaptive they were. He brings up the huge gap between modern and ancestral conditions, and how it affects different emotions such as jealousy (as well as how these emotions affect the new surroundings). well then can happiness be included within that group? is happiness fit to survive in our new environment? what /is/ happiness, anyway: a single emotion or a combination of them?
One learns in an introductory psychology class of "delayed gratification," the concept that if a child is able to resist temptation, then they will be more successful later in life. but why resist? one of the many things that I've been told as a child is that "everything you consume is limited. eat a lot now, and you won't be able to eat later." why? I don't believe that happiness should exist on either a short term or a long term basis. it should be able to do both!
where do they get this from anyway? "work hard now, and you'll be much happier later." I haven't seen many occurrences of that... all I see are people complaining about their jobs, groaning about how they have to go to work/study. The elders I know, they aren't necessarily happy; the best I've seen is content (think of happiness as that first mouthful of ice cream). perhaps there was an overemphasis in stability in the last generation...?
the reason I believe for happiness not existing on a long term scale is because of the needs of society cannot coexist with happiness. happiness is structured towards personal gain, like the caloric content in a tasty mouthful of ice cream. altruism, and working for a cause (etc)... I'll be again conjecturing here, but is it happiness through empathizing with the person you're helping? again, it's hard to know without actually knowing what happiness is. but I argue that happiness has no place in the construct we call society. there exists a disconnect between what we work for, and what we want to work for.
so happiness, using delayed gratification is delayed into oblivion? if it's true... that's a hard pill to swallow.
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