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Our brain doesn’t know how to be happy, or even content. It simply lacks the genetic instructions to carry out that task. It knows how to do a million other less important things, from writing a letter to maintaining our balance; from appreciating the music of Bach to smelling a rose, but if you ask the brain to be happy, it simply doesn’t know how to respond.
This is because the genetic code we carry in our chromosomes, which is the product of thousands of years of evolution through natural selection, is only concerned with survival and reproduction. We share this with every other creature in the natural world. Happiness does not necessarily have anything to do with survival and reproduction, and therefore belongs in a different realm. This is the realm of abstract ideas and myths. We may be able to think happiness, but our mind is unable to feel it as a sustained experience.
In fact, even if we set aside the idea of happiness as a life goal for a moment and decide that we will settle for a state of contentment as a more modest target, we will still stumble over the same obstacle: Nature doesn’t want us to always feel content and satisfied, let alone happy, as this would lower our guard against possible threats to our survival.
Happiness, as the Brazilian poet Vinicius de Moraes put it, is “like a feather flying in the air. It flies light, but not for very long.” In its teasing elusiveness, it has also been compared to a capricious butterfly, which “when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you," according to 19th-century American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. In any case, what is clear is that happiness is, at best, fleeting and inconstant, in the form of intermittent joy, and never the stable and serene Nirvana that some self-help books tell us we can access by following their simple instructions.
Many morality codes preach a state of virtuous psychological balance through renunciation, detachment, and holding back desire as a way of reaching a state of happiness. In fact, these strategies merely try to find a remedy for our innate inability to enjoy life consistently, so we should take comfort in the knowledge that unhappiness is not really the result of our moral shortcomings. It is the fault of our natural design. It is in our blueprint.
In this blog, we will look at the myth of happiness from many perspectives and, in the process, we will touch on topics such as happy personalities, “happy pills," street drugs, whether pursuing pleasure as a proxy for happiness may be the way forward, the unhappy workings of the brain, evolution, dreams, and even fairy tales. I explore all these issues in detail in my book, which shares its title with this blog. Happiness is a crucial concept. We spend all of our lives pursuing it, so it deserves a very careful analysis.
We are determined by our biological design to experience mixed and messy emotions, often simultaneously. Postulating that there is no such thing as happiness may appear to be a purely negative message, but the silver lining, the consolation, is the knowledge that having difficult emotions doesn’t represent a personal failure. The inevitable unhappiness that we all suffer, at least intermittently, is not a shortcoming that demands urgent repair, as the happiness gurus would have it. Far from it. This unhappiness is, in fact, what makes us human.
