Happy?
New York Magazine recently had an article on happiness and the learned optimism/positive psychology guy, Martin Seligman. I think this is a problematic idea in general — there’s of course nothing wrong with being happy (or content, anyhow; I think of content as a day to day state more than happiness), and it’s more pleasant to be content than not, but a lot of this work seems to be problematising unhappiness more than it already is.
We already — at a societal level — think unhappiness is a Bad Bad Thing, and needs to be Fixed Immediately With Drugs. And I’m not disagreeing with this, at the extreme. But everyday unhappiness is normal. Things aren’t always perfect. Sometimes unhappiness is a clue that things need to be changed. Sometimes unhappiness is a normal response to bad things happening. And you need to either deal with bad things happening — which takes time — or make changes. Sometimes the change that needs to be made is a pill. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s making the hard changes in your life — moving, quitting the job, whatever. Sometimes, it’s accepting that you need to grieve and grieving instead of fighting and rushing it. (A lot of these ideas are also covered in a book called The Right to Feel Bad, which is an interesting discussion too.)
As nice as it is that depression is finally a real illness (mostly), it’s also bad, because it pushes certain solutions over others, and gives some blame to people who don’t use those solutions. (For instance, look at the piles of comments I get from people telling me to just take pills already. If you’ve not read enough to know that I’ve tried a lot of them and they don’t work (except for Paxil: when you’re awake only 2 or 4 hours a day, you don’t have time to be depressed!), then maybe you’re not the person to be giving me that kind of advice.)
And this is a problem with the learned optimism stuff. You can just choose to be an optimist! The book is clear that you need to choose optimism at the right times and pessimism (aka realism) at the right times, but very little else that discusses these issues are clear about that — which leads to all those pessimists, what is WRONG with them, why don’t they just choose to be happy?
But I also wonder, what do we mean by happy? Seligman seems to mean (or perhaps seems to have meant) doing something that we enjoy, having connections in the world — the happiness as a side effect (what I consider contentment, mostly). But his critics seem to suggest he means happiness as a light, everything is good and will be good, no need to change things idea, and I wonder if a lot of the popularisation of this has changed there. Happiness like that seems to be false, gilding a pile of garbage and pretending that’s all there is. This goes back to what I said earlier: if you’re always happy, something is odd. No one’s life is perfect.
The other side of this is the romanticising of madness. But then, can I track creativity and unhappiness together? Is it just that we think of a few of the recent artists who were brilliant and insane, and assume they correlate? I don’t know. I hope not: what price art?
I did the happiness test, of course. I am around the 20th percentile in all the groups, with a score of 2.something. I am somewhat wary of some of the results — ooh! atheist! lose happiness points! — and the questions are poorly asked or answered. I do not know what that means.
via Ms. Pigpuppet
July 21st, 2006 at 3:05 pm
The medicalization of unhappiness also seems to ignore the very nature of happiness. Happiness is a reward our brains give us for doing things that have correlated with survival in past generations. When you feel happy, recent behavior is reinforced, and the next time you have an opportunity to repeat that behavior, you’re likely to say to yourself, “Hey, last time I did this, I felt happy! I think I’ll do it again!”
If you had a way of making yourself happy all the time, you’d soon enter a rut where you had no motivation to change any behavior — even behavior that might be harmful or dangerous to you.
I predict that the next generation will see a new entry in DSM, called something like “Antidepressant-associated apathy”.
July 21st, 2006 at 3:09 pm
I moved up from the 12th to 18th percentile since April, which is nice, I guess.
I thought the anti-positive psychology person quoted in the article made a good point, that it’s innate optimism, which can’t be learned, that makes people happier, so it’s probably better not to tell people that and make them feel bad.
I remember reading something about madness and artists that may have contradicted the link (ie that on anti-depressants, they’re just as creative), but I can’t remember where.
July 21st, 2006 at 11:06 pm
Seligman has GOT to be pseudonym, right? (It translates as ‘happy man’ or ‘lucky man’).