Reevaluating the Pursuit of Happiness: Myth or Reality?

Is it just me or does there seem to be an increasing amount of people in the world who struggle with happiness? Maybe not their ability to experience happiness but their understanding of how much happiness they should expect from life.

I recently came back to this question after reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari but from a different viewpoint, an evolutionary one. I began to wonder whether one of the contributing factors is that we are limited in how much happiness we are evolutionarily capable of feeling?

Are we able to feel the same level of happiness as other emotions, namely, stress? And with other aspects of life evolving at an unprecedented rate is it causing the perfect storm where our continuous search for happiness is actually causing us much unhappiness?

Thousands of years ago as hunter-gatherers our main priority in life was to avoid becoming prey. The same question of priorities posed today would elicit a response along the lines of; “to be happy”.

As hunter-gatherers living to tell the tale of not becoming some animals prey required us to switch into a state of “fight or flight”, i.e. a stress response. The more evolved our nervous system was at initiating this switch, the greater chance of survival and likelihood of passing along genes to future generations. This was followed by thousands of years of natural selection that reinforced this stress response.

Of course, our ability to experience happiness was also available to us as hunter-gatherers, but how did the happiness response aid our chance of survival and genetic inheritance?

Happiness evolved primarily to help motivate other behaviours that increased our chances of survival; namely, food and sex. However, it itself was not an essential component in ensuring our survival. Therefore, could we say that evolutionary we are much less evolved in the emotion of happiness than we are stress?

This then brought me on to consider how this potential evolutionary handicap impacts our life when we take into account how intellectually we have evolved in extraordinary ways; played out in the advances of the agricultural, industrial, social and technological revolutions.

Have the giant leaps in industries created a dangerous imbalance when physically and emotionally we are still much closer to our hunter-gathering days?

When the world was less connected, i.e before world travel, tv, and the internet, our feedback loop for happiness came from immediate experiences and interactions within our local communities. Now, in this overly connected world, we look to others to set our limits and expectations of happiness. Social media being the current main driver.

Taking a snapshot of social media accounts would often give the impression others are experiencing a level of happiness yet to be reached by oneself. The knock-on effect is a continuous search for this new level of happiness and often the purchase of the materialistic belongings that accompanies the snapshot.

And although our intellectual advancements have allowed us a life with more pleasure and ease, it looks like we are unable to jump the journey of our physical and emotional capability of enjoying these luxuries beyond a certain point.

So, what are we to do with these potential new findings?

Well, if all to be true does it not release us from a lot of undue societal pressure? Does it not offer an explanation for why so many fortunate people by society standards are often no happier and some even struggle more as a result? Does it not help put into perspective that material possessions don’t hold the key to another level of happiness.

Personally being able to understand that our emotions have not evolved at the same rate allows me to apply different expectations to each. To understand why I can so easily conjure up stress in life. However, happiness seems more difficult to cultivate and manage has allowed me to stop chasing an emotion I had previously believed I should be experiencing more often.

And in accepting all of this has made me less stressed and ironically happier, even if it is only limited!