The info I have read on happiness says most people are slightly happy on average. Not estatic, but overall in a good mood a good deal of the time (or so they say).
When you consider that we humans can reason out their place in the world, feel sympathy and reject the world is the ability to ‘enjoy life’ some kind of evolutionary programming to keep us reproducing? Depressed people do not make good reproduction material. Stereotypically they are less motivated to hunt for food than non-depressed people, they are more lethargic, they are less likely to be able to be involved parents and workers, they can be more irritable making them worse at social interaction and they sometimes withdrawl from society altogether. Not only that but depression can lead to viewing life as not worth it, so a depressed person wouldn’t run from a predator as quick or as often as a non-depressed person and they wouldn’t be as likely to want to bring another life into the world via reproduction.
So negative moods and not seeing life as a good experience seem to have a bad effect on the survival of the species. Is it possible that those of us who are capable of positive moods and enjoying life (which the studies i’ve read say most people do, more or less irrespective of their own turmoils) survived while those who were less likely to have positive moods or thinking life was worth it ended up dying off for the reasons I listed (they were less involved in community activities, less likely to run from prey, less likely to reproduce, etc)?
The point is, is enjoying a trip to disneyland or laughing with your friends in a way an offshoot of the fact that those who consider life enjoyable would be more likely to survive and reproduce than those who are depressed and feel life is not worth living? Did those who felt the latter way not reproduce as much or fend off the dangers of life with as much vigor and end up not passing on their DNA?
You can’t evaluate the question without jumping out of the context in which your outcome-evaluation criteria are applicable, and once they aren’t applicable you can’t evaluate the question because it ceases to have meaning.
i.e. — defining “advantage” involves some assessment that this or that outcome is desirable. You can arbitrarily set up axioms and working definitions to sidestep references to “this outcome would make me happy”, but your choice of axioms tends to reflect that same “desirability” motif.
But ignoring that anyhow and stipulating blindly that “survival of the species” would be an “advantage” while refusing to explain why or in what fashion, then, yes.
Our emotional assessments of our circumstances causes us individually and collectively to pursue outcomes and situations that make us happy; and, once happy (or, once most of the people are happy most of the time), it causes us to seek stability.
It’s a quality-assessment tool that provokes the species to cautiously embrace positive change (or to embrace it more aggressively if current circumstances are generating unhappiness) while rejecting negative change, and to participate in and help maintain our social structures, which makes them and therefore us efficient.
you can be depressed and still want to make fucky-fuck. that’s all you need. ain’t nature smart?As far as the idea about not running from predators, if you happened on a bear in the woods… well I doubt even many modern suicidal people would just sit about and let the bear have its way with them, instinct takes over.
also this question is very much based around modern assumptions. people 100000 years ago didn’t have much time or opportunity to sit and lament their boring lives during ad breaks on TV or whatever. I think depression as we know it is a purely modern social phenonomen. (sorry, that is just opinion, I have no source or backup for that)
perhaps it’d be more useful to consider the ability to enjoy life a privilege to be appreciated, rather than an advantage to be taken.
Some of the symptoms of depression are lack of interest in sex, lack of interest in food and chronic lethargy. So is mental befuddlement. These traits do not encourage reproduction or survival. At the very least, if a bear did approach someone who didn’t want to live and who had chronic lethargy and maybe malnutrition (due to not eating) would not run as fast or as far.
I don’t really know about the 100000 years ago thing. Do archaeologists know what life was really like back then. It was my understanding that they had alot of leisure time back then because their needs were pretty simple to take care of. It was only when we developed and agrarian society that we had to work 70 hour workweeks.
I think you’ve kind of turned the issue on its head. We are wired to take pleasure in things (in nature) that serve to increase our sense of security and well-being. The reason you enjoy a starry night, for instance, may well be that the absense of clouds indicates fair weather. A full belly is respite from hunger. A roaring fire provides warm and protection from predators. Et cetera.
On the other hand, the same programming drives (some) people to excess in consumption behaviors which wouldn’t be a hindrance in the Stone Age world but which are definitely contraindicated for reproductive fitness in the modern world. Alcohol and drugs, childhood obesity, young man’s disease (doing any number of stupid things to impress women or compete with other men), and so forth. One can look at these behaviors as logical outgrowths of perfectly healthy instincts in the pre-civilization world. Ancient man didn’t have to worry about having a heart attack from a coke overdose or early onset diabetes from overeating.
That being said, it’s generally a mistake to try to reduce the behavior of complex animals, especially humans, solely on the basis of reproductive fitness and genetic impulses. Our genes define how we are put together, but our experience and cultural influences have far more effect on how we think and what we value. We often deliberately do things that have no conceivable survival-related purpose. Sure, happier people tend to live longer lives, be more successful, have more and better-adjusted children, and otherwise demonstrate superior fitness, but this is due to the fact that they’ve learned ways of coping with life’s challenges that allow them to indulge in happiness-inducing behavior in a positive, instead of detrimental, manner. They pass on this tendancy not by the genome but by example and influence, or what some might term the “memome”*. There’s a genetic component to (some) depression, certainly, but your environment and upbringing dictates how you deal with it.
IMHO.
Stranger
Personally, I’m not really convinced of the concept of memes in the strict, Dawkins definition, but it’s a good metaphor for understanding the flow and influence of ideas.
and stipulating blindly that “survival of the species” would be an “advantage” while refusing to explain why or in what fashion, then, yes.