There has been an explosion of interest in the area of happiness.Many research studies and popular books have been written on how to get it and how to get more of it. Prior to this intense focus of scientific research on happiness, the topic was largely ignored because the assumption was that we were rational, logical primates who used rationality to solve problems, adapt to the environment, and survive, which would lead to happiness. That assumption that rationality/logic is primary has been debunked. We are primarily emotional animals. If we want to understand our behavior, we have to focus on our emotions. How often do you or someone you know state the following: "I know what I should do but I just don't do it." The "should" refers to the logical direction the person recognizes as being the logically wisest choice, but the person cannot follow that action. Instead the person does something opposite, often destructive, and most often guilt producing ("I should've gone to exercise instead of staying in bed"). And sometimes the action is even puzzling to the person ("I can't believe I did that!) That is the power of the emotional part of us that often works underneath the surface, hidden from our conscious awareness.
Thus, we want to be happy but our emotions (the word emotion comes from the Latin, "to move"), working underneath our conscious awareness, often promote actions that often lead us astray. Why is that?
We have
hidden biases that interfere with our ability to effectively choose what will make us happy. Why would evolution select these hidden biases if these biases often interfere with our ability to obtain happiness? Evolutionary psychology argues that there is only one goal that evolution pursues – – the survival of the species and the reproduction of the organism. Those biases, no matter how irritating they may seem to us now, once were selected because they made us better suited for survival. We were better able to adapt to the environment and the requirements of the hunter-gatherer early human, and thus, these biases have survived because they worked to enhance the reproductive rate of the organism.
What that means for us now, the modern human who live in a different environment than the hunter-gatherer groups of more than 200,000 years ago, is that we must, first of all, recognize these hidden biases, confront them, manage our emotions, and decide if we wish to "listen" to the biases, or put the extra effort in to bring the rational part of the mind online. It takes real effort to fight the biases but is an effort worth doing. What that means for us in our day-to-day life is that
we must accept that there will be an internal struggle between our hidden biases/emotional drives and our rational and logical mind and that the struggle is a necessary one. We cannot deny the importance of emotions, nor can we deny the importance of rationality. But one thing is clear in the topic of pursing happiness-- it is better to pursue
good decisions rather than feeling good.
References: 1)
Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer by Cosmides & Tooby
2)
The Upside of the Dark Side, by Kashdan & Biswar-Diener
3)
Predictably Irrational by Ariely
