Happiness: Why it may be Hard to Find

            People strive for many things, whether it is finding a great job or creating a good family. At the center of things, however, the greatest life goal becomes one thing: happiness. The one thing that people want more than anything else in this world, the thing that they strive for, is happiness. But why is happiness so elusive? How is it that people are able to feel happiness? What makes people happy? How people find happiness, or a lack of it, and why are the questions that I will examine and attempt to answer in this essay.

            Happiness may be something that is hard to find because it is not always the most useful emotion for survival. Negative emotions encourage self-preservation. For example, fear gets one out of a dangerous situation and disgust encourages one to avoid unfavorable situations. (2). Contentment arises when there is no longer a threat or otherwise unfavorable situation. If contentment, as great a feeling as it is, was felt when there was a threat, then the organism feeling contentment would have the inability to escape a dangerous situation and would inevitably die (2). Thus it can be inferred that anything that felt content despite imminent danger would have been selected against, and those with the ability to feel negative emotions would survive. Though it may be our own goal to become happy, natural selection’s ‘goal’ is to have us survive and reproduce, so rather than having happiness or other emotions be an end, they are actually a means: a means that will help us achieve reproductive success (2). Negative emotions, rather than constant happiness, are essential for survival. Now that we are living in a world in which we don't have to frequently protect ourselves against predators, negative emotions seem to have lost purpose; however, this is not the case. Emotions like sadness can encourage strong social connections and emotions like jealousy can encourage monogamy (2). It is important to have some negative emotions; though happiness is a good feeling, it’s not always the most practical.

            There is clearly a wide range of emotions, and people often wonder why this would be the case: why is it that no one has moderate, rather than extreme, emotions (2). It is probably the case that the fitness between someone with a high mood and a low mood is small, and it seems that if they had a moderate mood, that would not allow them to survive most situations (2). Negative emotions help us survive dangerous situations and positive ones allow us to set goals (2). As a result, there is a big distribution between emotions and they are rarely toned down. These differences between happy and unhappy people appear to be mostly genetic. Since emotions can be determined through natural selection, it can be inferred that the difference between those who generally feel depressed and those who generally feel cheerful is a genetic difference (2). Those with genetic similarities often feel similar emotions, such as depression and symptoms related to it (3). Furthermore, those that are born happy tend to do ‘happy things,’ rather than ‘happy things’ making people happy. For example, married people tend to be happy not because marriage makes them happy, but because happy people get married (1). All of these emotions are carried through genes that have been modified through evolution and there is a fundamental genetic difference between the happy and the sad. How much happiness one is able to obtain may be a result of what’s in their genes.

            However, despite genetic differences, how happy or depressed someone is may not only be a factor of their genes, but could also be a factor of their culture as well. In Japan, for example, depression was not seen as a chronic disease until recently (4). Japanese psychologists would rarely have chronically depressed patients, and to a certain degree, a little sadness was actually viewed positively, or at least as a selfless and humble emotion (4). With the introduction of western ideas of happiness and sadness into Japan, however, more and more people began to suffer from and become diagnosed with depression. Additionally, more and more Japanese started to medicate themselves for depression (4). They were told that they were a depressed culture and they just had to realize it. When western culture merged with their own, it was almost as if they were able to feel emotions that were never there before (4). The Japanese and the Americans are certainly genetically different, which could account for some of the emotional differences, but the fact that the Japanese changed their view of depression into the western view means that culture would also have to influence emotion, and by extension, happiness. The fact that people in the west have such a hard time finding happiness might actually be due to culture, or the type of environment people put themselves in; happiness is hard to obtain because of the culture we have constructed.

            Usually, whether or not someone is happy is often explained by whether or not his or her ‘chemicals’ are balanced or natural, but this idea is becoming to seem more and more incorrect. The most common explanation for things like depression is that there is an imbalance in serotonin, which prevents messages in the brain from connecting and moving smoothly, causing depression (4). Even though this idea is wide spread, to date there is no scientific consensus about the relationship between serotonin and depression (4). Those who have an imbalance of serotonin are not always depressed. Additionally, antidepressant pills, which are supposed to fix the imbalance, are not excessively helpful. Though 5/10 people become better when taking them, 4/10 people become better with a placebo (4). Furthermore, in both cases, this result only indicates that there was a change in how depressed someone was, not that the depression went away completely (4). It seems as if rather than just having a chemical imbalance in the brain, humans tend to influence their own brains unconsciously, as if the I-function is unknowingly taking control. In this way, it seems as if both genetics and the environment contribute to an individual’s happiness (1). It is often the people themselves, not just their genes, which determine how the brain creates happiness (1).

            What makes people happy is actually quite simple. For example, being in good health makes people happy, but it is also just the expectation of how healthy they should be that determines their happiness (1). In other words, as people age, their health deteriorates, but their happiness may not because they have lower expectations for their health (1). Furthermore, though a high income can lead to happiness, that will only work up to a certain point, and an excessive amount of material goods will stop creating happiness (1). Only with moderation do people become happy. Much of this can probably stem back to happiness being genetic: feeling happy for being healthy had having the things one needs, without an excess burden, would help them survive (2). These days, however, the one real problem we have with happiness is that we put too much stake in things that we think will make us happy. Many people work for years trying to get an education or to get a job, but not everyone succeeds. For those who fail, the fact that they spent so much time and energy invested in it, only to loose it, can lead to severe depression. (2). The best way to obtain happiness is to limit the stresses we put on ourselves; it is to enjoy the simple things and to expect only the necessities of life. If culture teaches this, then people will be happier and more content as a whole, but with the current cultural standards, it is easy for people to become unhappy.

            Happiness, as with the other emotions, is caused by genetics, influencing the brain, as well as both cultural and personal influences. Perhaps the reason for why it is so hard to obtain is because it is excessively complicated. One needs to be in the right place personally, have the right cultural influences, and have the right genetic predisposition to have a completely happy brain, and even then, happiness might be detrimental in a given situation. Nevertheless, the other emotions have their own significance as well; they allow us to feel empathy and sympathy. They allow us to be human. Happiness, however, is still a legitimate and decent goal. It is important to live a happy life, but it may serve us well to honor more of the simple things, and that way, we can become content.

                                                                                      Works Cited

1) Easterlin, R. A. (2003). Explaining Happiness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 100(19), 11176-11183.

2) Nesse, R. M. (2004). Natural Selection and the Elusiveness of Happiness. Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, 359(1449), 1333-1346.

3) Rose, N., Koperski, S., & Golomb, B. A. (2010). Chocolate and Depressive Symptoms in a Cross-sectional Analysis. Arch Intern Med, 170(8), 699-703.

4) Watters, E. (2010). Crazy Like Us. New York, NY: Free Press.