Science and the Industrial Revolution have given humankind superhuman powers and practically limitless energy. But are we happier?
In recent decades, psychologists and biologists have taken up the challenge of studying scientifically what really makes people happy.
The first step is to define what is to be measured. The generally accepted definition of happiness is ‘subjective well-being’. According to this view, happiness is something I feel inside myself, a sense of either immediate pleasure or long-term contentment with the way my life is going.
The second step is to give people questionnaires to assess how happy they feel. A typical questionnaire asks interviewees to grade on a scale of zero to ten their agreement with statements such as ‘I feel pleased with the way I am’, ‘I feel that life is very rewarding’, etc.
The third step is to tally the results from different groups of people and compare the results. For example, a study might compare a thousand people who earn $100k a year with a thousand people who earn $50k.
Conclusions from these studies:
Money does bring happiness only up to a certain point. Beyond that point, it has little significance. For people stuck at the bottom of the economic ladder, more money means greater happiness. On the other hand, if you are already earning $250k a year, making more money will almost certainly not make a big difference to the way you feel over the long run.
Illness decreases happiness in the short term, but is a source of long-term distress only if a person’s condition is constantly deteriorating or if the disease involves ongoing and debilitating pain.
Happiness is expectation minus reality. - Henry David Thoreau
When we try to imagine how happy other people are now, or how people in the past were, we inevitably imagine ourselves in their shoes. But that doesn’t work because it pastes our expectations onto the material conditions of others.
For example, medieval peasants went without washing for months on end, and hardly ever changed their clothes. Modern affluent societies that expect people to take a shower and change clothes everyday, they might think that is an abhorrent way of living. Yet medieval peasants seem not to have minded. They were used to the feel and smell of a long-unlaundered shirt. It’s not that they wanted a change of clothes but couldn’t get it - they had what they wanted. As far as clothing goes, they were content. It is all a matter of expectations.
If happiness is determined by expectations, then two pillars of our society - mass media and the advertising industry - may unwittingly be depleting the globe’s reservoirs of contentment.
In previous eras the standard of beauty was set by the handful of people who lived next door to you. Today the media and the fashion industry expose us to a totally unrealistic standard of beauty. As a consequence, we are constantly rebasing our expectations based on what we see through television and the internet. Hence people are far less happy with the way they look.
Biologists hold that our mental and emotional world is governed by biochemical mechanisms. Our subjective well-being is determined by a complex system of nerves, neurons, synapses and various biochemical substances such as serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.
Our internal biochemical system seems to be programmed to keep happiness levels relatively constant. Some scholars compare human biochemistry to an air-conditioning system that keeps the temperature constant, come heatwave or snowstorm.
Human happiness conditioning systems differ from person to person. On a scale from one to ten, some people are born with a cheerful biochemical system that allows their mood to swing between levels six and ten, stabilizing with time at eight. Other people are cursed with a gloomy biochemistry that swings between three and seven and stabilizes at five.
How can this be squared with the psychological and sociological finding that married people are happier on average than singles?
If we accept the biological approach to happiness, then history turns out to be of minor importance because it does not change our serotonin levels, and hence it cannot make people happier.
Today, when we finally realize that the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system, we can stop wasting our time on politics, social reforms and ideologies, and focus instead on the only thing that can make us truly happy: manipulating our biochemistry.
However, the biological assumption that happiness equals pleasure is contested by some scholars.
Daniel Kahneman discovered what seems to be a paradox in most people’s view of their lives. He asked people to recount a typical work day, going through it episode by episode and evaluating how much they enjoyed or disliked each moment.
If you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. - Nietzsche
Assessing life minute by minute, medieval people certainly had it rough. However, if they believed the promise of everlasting bliss in the afterlife, they may well have viewed their lives as far more meaningful and worthwhile than modern secular people, who in the long term can expect nothing but complete and meaningless oblivion.
As far as we can tell, from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose.
Hence any meaning that people ascribe to their lives is just a delusion. The other-worldly meanings medieval people found in their lives were no more deluded than the modern humanist, nationalist, and capitalist meanings modern people find.
So perhaps happiness is synchronizing one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction.
Both the above views share the assumption that happiness is some sort of subjective feeling, and that in order to judge people’s happiness, all we need to do is ask them how they feel. It views these feelings as the supreme source of authority. Yet this view is unique to liberalism that sanctifies the subjective feelings of individuals. Most religions and philosophies have taken a very different approach to happiness than liberalism does.
According to Buddhism, most people identify happiness with pleasant feelings, while identifying suffering with unpleasant feelings. The problem is that our feelings are short-lived and changing every moment. So if I want to experience pleasant feelings, I have to constantly chase them, while driving away the unpleasant feelings. Even if I succeed, I immediately have to start all over again, without ever getting any lasting reward for my troubles.
The real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction. Due to this pursuit, the mind is never satisfied. People are liberated from suffering not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, but rather when they understand the impermanent nature of all their feelings, and stop craving them.
Buddha agreed with modern biology and New Age movements that happiness is independent of external conditions. Yet his far more profound insight was that true happiness is also independent of our inner feelings. The more significance we give our feelings, the more we crave them, and the more we suffer. Buddha’s recommendation was to stop not only the pursuit of external achievements, but also the pursuit of inner feelings.
Most people wrongly identify themselves with their feelings, thoughts, likes and dislikes. They never realize that they are not their feelings, and that the relentless pursuit of particular feelings just traps them in misery.
Up until the 21st century, Sapiens were incapable of breaking free of their biologically determined limits. But this is no longer true: Homo sapiens is transcending those limits. It is now beginning to break the laws of natural selection, replacing them with the laws of intelligent design.
Biological engineering is deliberate human intervention on the biological level (e.g. implanting a gene) aimed at modifying an organism’s shape, capabilities, needs or desires, in order to realize some preconceived cultural idea.
There is nothing new about biological engineering. Humans have been castrating bulls for perhaps 10,000 years in order to create oxen who are less aggressive, and thus easier to train to pull ploughs.
But recent advances have opened up previously unimaginable possibilities. For instance, we can today change a person’s sex through surgical and hormonal treatments.
Even more remarkable wonders can be performed with genetic engineering. Geneticists have managed to:
The Neanderthal Genome Project suggests that we can now implant reconstructed Neanderthal DNA into a Sapiens ovum. But why stop there?
Perhaps in a few decades, genetic engineering might enable us to make far-reaching alterations not only to our physiology, immune system and life expectancy, but also to our intellectual and emotional capacities. Tinkering with our genes won’t kill us, but we might fiddle with Homo sapiens to such an extent that we would no longer be Homo sapiens.
Cyborgs are beings which combine organic and inorganic parts, such as a human with bionic hands. In a sense, we are all bionic these days, since our natural senses are supplemented by devices such as eyeglasses, pacemakers, orthotics, and even computers and mobile phones.
Examples:
Of all the projects currently under development, the most revolutionary is the attempt to devise a direct two-way brain-computer interface that will allow computers to read the electrical signals of a human brain, simultaneously transmitting signals that the brain can read in turn. Such interfaces can be used to link a brain to the Internet, or to directly link several brains to each other.
The third way to change the laws of life is to engineer completely inorganic beings. The most obvious examples are computer programs and computer viruses that can undergo independent evolution.
Many programmers dream of creating a program that could learn and evolve completely independently of its creator. It would be free to evolve in directions neither its maker nor any other human could ever have envisaged. A computer virus is one prototype for such a program.
Imagine another possibility where you could back up your brain to a portable hard drive and then run it on your laptop. Would your laptop be able to think and feel just like a Sapiens? The Human Brain Project hopes to recreate a complete human brain inside a computer, with electronic circuits in the computer emulating neural networks in the brain. In 2013, the project received a grant of 1 billion euros from the EU.
The pace of technological development will soon lead to the replacement of Homo sapiens by completely different beings who possess not only different physiques, but also very different cognitive and emotional worlds.
What we should take seriously is the idea that the next stage of history will include not only technological and organizational transformations, but also fundamental transformations in human consciousness and identity. These could be transformations so fundamental that they will call the very term ‘human’ into question.
Physicists define the Big Bang as a singularity. It is a point at which all the known laws of nature did not exist. It is thus meaningless to say that anything existed ‘before’ the Big Bang. We may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world - me, you, men, women, love and hate - will become irrelevant. Anything happening beyond that point is meaningless to us.