II Gyan II: Is The Hedonistic Principle a satire site? I can’t tell. The first link was really interesting though. I also believe that this emphasis on “Hollywood happiness” has caused people to have unfair expectations of what to expect out of life. What makes it even more confusing is that I don’t even really enjoy Hollywood happiness; I hate going to parties, and I’m not excited by tangible objects, and these are two things that normal people are “supposed” to enjoy. Eudaemonia is much closer to what I consider to be happiness, and I really don’t think people get enough of that.
Okay, so say we find a way around that… we have robots to take care of our physical bodies, or we just take the shortcut and download our consciousnesses into a giant computer that generates happiness for us constantly. Civilization would still end since nobody would be making any new art or writing or music, but we’d be physically taken care of, and civilization isn’t necessary to our base survival anyway. Is there any reason now to take the long way round?
Dunno. Sounds like the French ideal. Not my personal cup of tea–but I will admit that there wouldn’t be any reason not to do so (except for things like an inability to deal with the Sun eventually dying and such.)
As to why it’s not my up of tea…well I just don’t think it’s wise even so. Regardless that the Sun won’t be dying out for a reallllly long time and even if it did, we wouldn’t care–personally I have a sense of pride in the human race.
Even as a kid, I hated the song “It’s a small world” just because I thought that just the fact that we existed and had accomplished so much was too impressive for us to consider our own world small.
Certainly I want to live a happy life and for all of our decendents to do so as well–but I would be severely against the idea of stopping mankind and not seeing how far we could go and what we could create given time.
I would point you to the comic version of Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind.
*** UNBOXED SPOILERS ***
In Nausicaa, the world has been poisoned and there is a great wall of encroaching jungle that further poisons and kills all the life about it. Over the course of the story, Nausicaa determines that the great forrest is actually drawing the poison out of the ground and converting it into harmless compounds.
Finally we get to the end of the story and we learn that the forrest was engineered and released by a group of scientists when the world was poisoned. Mankind would eventually be killed by the poison as well, so the scientists had created and stored a new bread of human that would not war or otherwise come to again wreck the world.
So what does Nausicaa do? She destroys the place. “A human race that is made not to kill and war, and to be only peaceable and friendly is not human. Mankind may have destroyed itself–but that is just as far as we could go and I will leave no travesty of ourselves to live an eternal life of hollowness.”*
*** END ***
So, that’s pretty much how I would stand on the issue. YMMV.
Paraphrasing from memory, which might have added a bit to the sentiment here.
It’s important to understand the difference between happiness and pleasure.
Pleasure can be feel-good sex, regardless of its emotional or health consequences. It can be a great-tasting meal, regardless of its nutritional value. It can be taking drugs, regardless of its effect on your mind and body.
There’s nothing wrong with pleasurable pursuits on a short-term basis; after all, life is to be enjoyed. But for too many people, a hedonistic lifestyle is all they’ve got, and it simply doesn’t add up to anything in the long run.
Happiness isn’t a simple out-of-context emotion; it’s the reward for successfully accomplishing something you set out to do, especially something challenging that involves personal or professional growth. And you can really experience a lot of temporary pain in the process of achieving it. But the hedonist would only see the pain, and would refrain from the process entirely. So his life is spent not in pursuing happiness, but in avoiding pain. It’ll never work.
That’s why the **putsuit **of happiness is so important. It’s the actions you take, pleasurable or not, that result in long-term happiness, not the happy feeling itself.
Frankly I’m surprised. What about no pain no gain? You want a great build so you work out. Man that hurts but your great bod makes you happy. Others too we hope. Eating pizza and ice cream every night makes you happy. Yum Yum. You gain 200 pounds and your health is shot and you’re not getting any action anymore. You’re not happy. You surpressed a painful childhood memory and you have to deal with all that pain so that you can be happy. Want more??
We went through this in the other thread. When you read my latest post there
you’ll see I don’t agree completely. Our discussion has helped me understand the connection {or lack of} between principles and happiness. In the other thread you said happiness is
So what about the changeing face of what provides happiness. For a while it’s pizzia and ice cream, then it’s an athletic body. You might say it’s the desire for happiness that is actually the important thing since that seems to be the constant. As pointed out earlier. You might do drugs because they made you feel good, The euphoria seems enough for a while. Then maybe it feels empty and false. Perhaps you begin to realize you are hurting others and you want to kick your addiction. You have to endure pain to do that but you do it ,…why? The desire for happiness, not happiness itself.
Hmmmm? Do the essential ingrediants of happiness promote happiness, or like happiness are they just what they are?
I read that, but then you asked why people aren’t spending their entire lives, in reality, in a drug-induced bliss. In reality, they don’t do that because the drug doesn’t exist. Do you not think that the question “If drug X existed, which it doesn’t, people would be drugged up indefinitely according to you, so why aren’t they drugged up indefinitely today?” is an intellectually dishonest question?
I think part of the OP’s confusion is that s/he mistakes pleasure and/or contentment for happiness. As many other people have already stated, what makes a person happy is a highly individual thing - for me it might be pleasure and contentment, for you it might be striving and achievement, and for another it might be fame and fortune. And it’s never as simple as that - happiness or lack thereof is the combination of all the impacts of all your situations, actions, emotional reactions, etc in your life.
If there were in fact a drug or a magic ray or the spores in This Side of Paradise episode of Star Trek TOS or whatever, I think most of the repulsion we feel for the idea is based on that fact that we don’t really truly believe such a thing *would * make us happy. This is the same thing that prevents most true-believers in a heaven or similar paradisical afterlife from actively desiring death - we may believe intellectually that it will bring greater happiness than we currently experience, but we don’t really believe it in our gut. This is especially true for those of us whose happiness is based in striving and achievement.
In particular, most of us are unwilling and unable to consider happiness in a condition in which we as individuals would not be recognizably ourselves. That is, if your greatest desire in life has been to say, pilot a helicopter, it is likely to be impossible for you to conceive of happiness wherein you would no longer care one way or another - that desire has been a defining characteristic, and without it, you can’t feel that you would really be you.
Then there are those of us, some traditionally religious, others with what could be described as religious beliefs (but not necessarily involving a god - I’m using religious in the sense of belief without real evidence), who believe that mankind exists for a greater Purpose. If universal happiness could be achieved such that mankind would cease to create, such a higher Purpose is unlikely to be fulfilled. That would certainly be a reason to object to some mythical drug/ray/spores/other that would lead to universal happiness
Personally, I have no belief in a Higher Purpose and I’m too lazy to be much of a striver. But I have trouble wrapping my mind around the concept of ceasing to be myself, which the elimination (via outside agency, as opposed to fulfillment via my own actions) of my current limited pleasures and desires certainly implies.
Happiness is to a large degree genetic, but it is also the ability to see your life as in sync with your goals and ideals. That is what i’ve gathered from reading the works of Deiner and Seligman, two of the only researchers on happiness (which is called subjective well being to make it sound more professional).
Why is it important? Because people enjoy it. Happiness also has alot of tangible benefits.
What i’m about to say is all from readings i’ve done, it’ll take a while to find quotes and proof if you want them.
Happy people have healthier immune systems, which results in lower medical costs.
Happy people can deal with reality better. It is true that unhappy people understand reality better and are pragmatic, but happy people deal with setbacks. Studies have been done on happy vs unhappy people and when they get cancer the happy people make more effort to research the disease and get treatment, the unhappy people just sit back and take it
Happy people make more money, roughly $10,000 a year more on average (from Deiner in a Readers digest magazine a while back)
Happy people have better relationships with others
Happy people are more productive at work. Plus depression costs roughly 12 billion a year in productivity and happy people aren’t as depressed.
basically think of all the bad things depression causes (weakened immune systems, worsening social relationships, apathy, less productivity at work, more medical costs) and do the opposite and that is what happiness does.
You seem to feel happiness and nirvana are the same thing, they are not. Buddhists try to cut themselves off from the world to obtain static perfection, happy people are just people who feel their lives are on the right track and as a result have better lives because of it.
The problem with that is happiness is only partially psychological. It is more biological and genetic than psychological. 50-80% genetic is what this study found.
I was talking about a genetic reason for happiness…so that would only seem to support my case. In a way of looking at it, emotions are what humans call “instinct” except when it occurs in a human instead of an animal. It’s the bit of basic training for making us act in (generally) a similar method as those around us to define the generics of the species that allow it to prosper.
For instance, in animals you will get species who freely mate and leave their infant to grow to adulthood on its own. There are other species who pick a single mate, and the pair raises a child to adulthood. In humans, we would call the instinct for single-mating “love” and the instinct to protect and raise our children “parental love.”
But of course, humans have advanced beyond animals and we don’t live by instinct alone–but I think it is a safe assumption to say that emotions are inherently based on instincts and studying them as such is–while not perfect–not a bad way to break them down into a simpler and more concrete form for discussion.
“Happiness comes in small doses, folks. It’s a cigarette, or a chocolate cookie, or a five second orgasm. That’s it, ok! You cum, you eat the cookie, you smoke the butt, you go to sleep, you get up in the morning and go to fucking work, ok!?”
Wow, this thread is so relevant to an epiphany I just experienced.
My brother who is the most upbeat , positive and happy person I personally know just shared a joint (something I rarely do) when we started to talk about his hotrod 72 chevy. He plans to change his exhaust system. Apparently the configuration of the factory exhaust manifold causes uneven discharges of exhaust that actually fight each other as they attempt to escape resulting in loss of horse power. I was amazed that some people would even consider such a minor factor and he further explained other areas for the improvement for motor performance. The basis of all these improvements was the achievement of BALLANCE
He then went on to explain that the achievement of ballance in his own life was his tool for happiness. I felt like the scales just melted away from my eyes.
A poor man can be very happy with his lot in life when everything he has or desire hums together in ballance. A rich man who spends 14 hours a day at the office but ignores his unhappy wife is out of ballance.
Ballance is different for everybody and we rarely achieve true ballance. But when we feel out of sorts, and recognize that we are out of ballance, we can take the course of action to restore it.
Teenagers are the unhappiest people in the world. They have such difficulty in understanding themselves, and fire off in focused directions in order to achieve happiness. Hours and hours at the computer, fighting with their parents, or any other singular pursuit that causes them to ignore their schooling and other aspects of their lives that are allowed to deteriorate .
I’m sure I can expand on this concept, but at the moment I’ve got other things I must do.
One of my most respected writers - John Stuart Mill wrote:
“Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness[…] Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness along the way[…] Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”
I feel that this is very true. Once I decided that I didn’t care for anything in life but being happy I could not bring myself to think about anything but how temporary and uncertain the things that made me happy were, which made me rather miserable. Once I focused on stuff other than “being happy”, it became a lot easier to do just that.
If a drug that makes a person truly happy is ever invented, I don’t think we should stop ourselves from taking it just because we’ll die out and not achieve anything else. Who the hell cares? Happiness is an end in of itself(though thinking about it that way makes it an unatteinable one). All the crap we build is only there to make it easier for us to be happy, if there was a drug that made humans truly happy they’d be happy without a future and without someone to pass on their DNA and without anything else really. So no one would build anything, but that would be just fine as far as anyone who got their prescription was concerned.
Really? Then why do we persist in making art and music, stuff that has to be interpreted and filtered through the often unhappy human brain, instead of all pitching in to find a more direct line to happiness? Shouldn’t the real artists be in the pharmaceutical labs or the VR centers? I mean, I could see how we’d settle for ineffective happymaking aids before the rise of modern medicine and technology, but if there’s no reason for that stuff now (since surefire happiness is more likely to be found in a pill than in a book) then we shouldn’t be doing it anymore.
Also, why is there art, music, and writing that is designed to elicit depression instead of elation, if the function of civilization is to make us happy? You can’t tell me Franz Kafka wrote in order to make humanity happier. He was searching for truth, as have thousands of other artists.
One point I think should be made–though feel free to argue the validity–is that the opposite of “happy” isn’t sad; it’s “stressed.” “Sad” would probably be the opposite of “euphoric.”
Music makes us happy because it relieves stress. If you’re feeling sad, the Blues can make you feel better because it helps you to “digest” over the feelings you are having by allowing you to focus on that–while still letting you feel like there is another human empathizing with you and that you’re not the only person to feel blue. And once you aren’t worrying about whatever it is making you feel bad–you feel happier.
Certainly you could take a drug to make you to feel happy regardless that your relationship is going to hell or whatever–but then you would never actually deal with the problem and apologise to her or dump her or whatever. You would be stuck with the problem. True, you wouldn’t care but that still doesn’t mean this would be healthy or helping you to advance your life any.
I’m getting the two threads mixed up. If we continue our discussion lets pick one thread and I’ll abandon the other.
I’m having a hard time understanding how this philosophy doesn’t contradict itself. There is the physical pain of working out which leads to the happiness of a better physique. Is the pain good? There is the physical pleasure of eating pizzia and ice cream, {and beer} that leads to serious health issues. Is the pleasure bad? Let’s say a sadist can only feel happiness by beating on me. Since his happiness is as important as my own how do I decide which is better. His happiness or my suffering, or my happiness and his suffering?
You’ll see some of the statements are repeated in the truth thread. Let’s just pick one thread.
Several times you’ve said, Happiness, well, makes people happy. and similar statements. I propose that the essential elements of happiness have and equal value to the end result. If one cannot truly exist without the other or one does not fulfill it’s purpose without resulting in the other, then they are mutually dependent and equal in value. I don’t think you can argue that water is more important than hydrogen or oxygen.
The pain people get from a workout is good because it leads to a good result. After the pain your body feels better, either from the endorphin or because you feel you have accomplished something toward your goal. You are getting closer to happiness and it is making you happy.
It should also be important to note that a good feeling comes last when working out, while when eating ice cream the good feeling comes first. Most people feel better from the former case, because the happiness overshadows the pain or sacrifice, making what is supposedly bad feel “worth it”. When the good feeling precedes the bad then you will feel bad when looking back on your experience. Guilt has more power over people than they sometimes realize it. It is something that can’t easily (for me at least) be suppressed. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart” offers a chilling description of what I believe guilt is capable of.
A sadist can not exist in a healthy society and needs to be fixed. A sadist is a person who lacks an important part of human nature; that is benevolence. Someone who does not care about other people is considered a psychopath and is sent off to a mental hospital. I don’t know if a cure exists for sadists, but if it does not, sadists need to be taken out of society because more people will be happy that way. In your situation the right thing to do is worry about the happiness of all those people that the sadist will hurt in the future and have him committed.
If no cure exists then this is a bad situation for the sadist the same way it will be a bad situation for the person born with no legs or arms. This just shows that perhaps happiness is not always guaranteed for everyone and the best thing for all of us to do it try to maximize it as much as possible.
Why is happiness important? I think that the ** feeling that people want** is defined as happiness. If you do not want that feeling it is not a happy feeling. By definition happiness is important.
I sometimes wonder why we can distinguish between all our bad feelings, i.e. despair, pain, anger and jealousy, but there seems to be only one type of happy feeling. This might be irrelevant, but I can’t be sure.
