My Old Blog

Is a drug-induced sense of well-being the same as “real” happiness?

I think the likelihood of something like this happening is quite high. I also think it might be sooner, rather than later.

If you could take a pill that would make you feel happy, would you really be happy? Would you care? Is there really a difference?

What a great question!! Actually there are already a wide variety of measures that can get you close to the happiness pill: Sleep, exercise, beer, leisure, and sex to name a few.

But with a cool pill, even in the absense of all those things, even if everyone on the planet hated your freaking guts….you could still be happy.

That is bad news….for civilization. If people could be happy doing anything, then they would do everything. Cause and effect could be decoupled. You would no longer have to take prudent action to make yourself happy…you could do anything under the sun and it wouldn’t make any difference….you’d have a smile on your face all the way to the end of the world.

Or maybe if everyone got happy, they’d all want to do good things?? When we are happy we feel nicer, and more inclined to treat people with respect. Maybe the world would be a better place if we all got drugged up on happiness. Imagine being stuck in a traffic jam all morning yet showing up to work with a wink and a smile! Maybe it would be like one big Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.

And productivity?? Economic output would plummet. People use money as a surrogate for happiness. They buy stuff to make them feel better temporarily, to alleviate the anxiety of life….but that is only if life makes us anxious. No need to buy our happiness when we can swallow it in pill form….although I bet the pills would be expensive.

Or maybe productivity would go up? Recent business research shows that happy, positive people are more engaged and creative in their work. Maybe we’d all get rich? Although I’m unsure what we’d need all that money for if not to divert outselves from our unhappiness.

I think we’d spend it on video games….and in these video games people would be really unhappy. It would be novel and entertaining to us. Regardless, if we were all happy weekly status meetings at the office would be alot easier to sit through.

You know what I really think would happen?? I think the brain would revolt. It wasn’t made to be happy all the time.

And I know this is an imaginary drug. You could make it non-addictive…and non-damaging, right? Wrong. I don’t think we have the wiring for that. If a pill makes us happy, then two pills would make us happier. Sound familiar? We already have happiness pills….most of them are illegal and come from Amsterdam or Colombia.

If we were happy all the time, the part of the brain that makes us happy would get tired and unable to sustain the effort of all those endless days of smiles, candy canes, and bunny rabbits.

And in some sense happy is just the absense of negative emotions anyway. If you were always happy, I imagine you wouldn’t be quite so happy about it. Happy is a better than average mood. How can we be better than average all the time?

And besides, being happy all the time isn’t all its cracked up to be. Who doesn’t enjoy waking up in a shitty mood and drinking oneself into a stupor of self-pity?? I know I do!!!

I’ve spoken in the past about the quest for happiness. I admit it amuses me to think about. At the risk of appearing narcissistic, I will quote myself on this matter:

This brings us to today, where it is assumed that happiness is a birthright. It is no coincidence that unhappiness has increased as a result. As I have found through experience, thinking you must always be happy can itself become a source of unhappiness when you find it is impossible to attain, thus believing that it is some defect in yourself or unfairness of the world that is impeding your eternal inner peace.

As far as the question of whether or not I would care that my happiness was fake: Although I have no experience in this matter and it is purely a mental exercise…I would say it wouldn’t much matter to me.

I could sit peacefully on the hillside enjoying the view (which might be of a trash dump for all I cared) while the non-pill-users could get together an angry support group to protest the “reality cheaters”. Misery loves company. Thats why people keep telling me to get married I figure.

As far as whether or not there is a difference between “real” happiness and pill-form happiness: I think not. Only the unhappy would be troubled by such a question.

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What do you think? What would happen if they came out with a happiness pill? Would you take it?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 26th, 2005 at 11:13 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.