Can people be happy without being being sad?

[Insomniac]

For example, we only enjoy orgasms because we don't have them all of the time. If we were able to orgasm every waking moment of our lives, it wouldn't be pleasurable at all. On the other hand, when a person remains celibate for a very long time and then orgasms, the experience is more intense and feels more intense than it would be otherwise.

The same thing with say, chocolate, which used to be a real treat everywhere, and now can be had in any shop or store in most Western countries. So chocolate isn't as delicious, is it? You can't feel "full" until you've been starving. You can stuff yourself until you puke and keep eating, but eating after a day or two of fasting, artificially or not, fills your hunger in a way just eating large amounts of food doesn't.

Probably the best example is with water. After a hot day in the sun, nothing feels better than a cold shower. After being out in the cold of winter, nothing feels better than a hot bath. But without the displeasurable experiences first to make you uncomfortable, comfort means nothing.

Since the whole point of technological progress seems to be to get people to avoid extremes and displeasures, isn't that making us less "comfortable," even, because we're comfortable all the time? By being constantly satisfied, we're not ever satisfied. Etc.

I'm not saying we need to introduce artificial hardships into life, or starve people so they can better enjoy a good meal, but if delayed gratification really is more gratifying, how do we avoid instant gratification in a situation where most anything we feel we want we can get anywhere?

At this point, being led not into temptation and falling victim to it would be preferable to having a chance to be tempted at all.

How do we find happiness without being truly and genuinely miserable and wretched first?

[heelsguy]

it is like a pendulum: you cannot fully feel the extreme of one side (happiness) without having felt the opposite(sadness).

while you may feel happy without having experienced tragedy in your life, you do not FULLY appreciate it until you have felt the other.

I think technology actually allows us to get the impression of tragedy without having to experience it ourselves first. example, if a little boy sees a movie where a dog is killed by a car, he has that image in his head so the next time he sees his dog he appreciates him more than ever.

i appreciate i-pods more than younger people because I can remember back before you could hear clear music, in a portable fashion (walk-man, anyone?)

[Archangel]

There's too much being in the title.

[Archangel]

The above only applies to physical pleasure, though. Sure, if you're fucking supermodels all day, you're liable to get jaded at some point. However, I don't find that I have to read tons of drivel to enjoy a good book, or that I need to have dumb thoughts to take pleasure from the good ones. If you've read Hesse once, you'll appreciate Goethe for the rest of your life, if you're smart.

Yes, I just called everybody who thinks Hesse is a good writer an idiot.

Other than that, does appreciation come from comparison? Probably; so yeah, being able to truly enjoy a great steak is contingent upon having experienced both great and awful ones - or is it? I think it's sort of a moot point because very few people are surrounded by perfection 24/7. One of your Ferraris will have a manufacturing fault. Your personal chef will have one bad day. One of your Balinese temple dancers will have a headache. So nobody will have had only positive experiences in his life, and thus have some form of tertium comparationis.

[Insomniac]

There's too much being in the title.

What? I don't don't see anything wrong.

[freegood]

Are you you making fun fun fun of me?

Our bodies are wired for temporary gratification through the senses. Being happy or sad is an acquired state of mind. Maybe not happy but rather content.

[Archangel]

For example, when I grew up, my literary education was pretty unique. From age 6 to around 11 or so, my dad would read me not Dr Seuss and "young adult" stuff, but about 200 classic works, from Virgil to Kleist to Mérimée and Pushkin. So I knew what good books were without ever coming across bad ones - and when I started buying books purely for entertainment, around age 9, I did get tremendous enjoyment from them - but I don't think that reading Stephen Coonts altered my appreciation of, say, Lermontov, either negatively or positively. I just knew that they were different, but where is it written that because your mom is a gourmet chef and you know the difference between Boeuf Stroganoff and Filet Voronoff, you can't appreciate a McRib now and then?

[Okie Medicvet]

For me this is but another shade of the big question I have been wrestling with personally, the whole do we need to have evil to know what good is thing. Except there is a subtle but strong difference here.

I don't think we need to personally experience pain to know pleasure, but we do at least be aware that others have known pain to be able to truly appreciate what pleasure is...and we also need to have felt what is known as EMPATHY for the person in pain. Once we feel that, we naturally want to reach out and help, and to hit the other extreme, if we see firsthand others in pain and don't feel it we are nothing more or less than sociopaths.

[Insomniac]

Our bodies are wired for temporary gratification through the senses. Being happy or sad is an acquired state of mind. Maybe not happy but rather content.

So how does intellectual gratification fit into that? As Arch was saying, happiness is just dopamine or whatever being released, but reading a really good book, watching a really good movie, that sort of thing that appeals to our mind (but not our brain) doesn't wear us out in the same way.

[Okie Medicvet]

I think that would more qualify as contentment, which I think is in it's own way harder to obtain than the 'rush' one can get sometimes from happiness. More like a state of being than just an emotion, and more rare.

[freegood]

For example, when I grew up, my literary education was pretty unique. From age 6 to around 11 or so, my dad would read me not Dr Seuss and "young adult" stuff, but about 200 classic works, from Virgil to Kleist to Mérimée and Pushkin. So I knew what good books were without ever coming across bad ones - and when I started buying books purely for entertainment, around age 9, I did get tremendous enjoyment from them - but I don't think that reading Stephen Coonts altered my appreciation of, say, Lermontov, either negatively or positively. I just knew that they were different, but where is it written that because your mom is a gourmet chef and you know the difference between Boeuf Stroganoff and Filet Voronoff, you can't appreciate a McRib now and then?

There is the usual snobbery involved. 5 gourmet foods that used to be cheap. (http://www.cracked.com/article_17246_lobster-was-spam-5-gourmet-foods-that-used-be-cheap.html)

I think your experience was different. You took in so many great novels that you had enough to categorize classes into sub genres. It'd be like you knew what a type of leopard you like and a type of cheetah you hated. Not that you liked all types of leopards or hated all kinds of cheetahs. Whereas someone else would think jungle cats are dumb.

So that's different than a food snob claiming the McRib is the low bar in taste. It's true some people have tongues that can taste much much more, but dogs tongues are far more sensitive than ours and look at what they eat...

So there's many variables that factor into a person's satisfaction. Cultural, environmental, physical (color blindness), mental, historical (acquired tastes and nostalgia). It's our own arrogance to assume that we have the best of those characteristics to reach to the best of our tastes.


And shifting into the original discussion, I've been taking 3 vicodins a day for my teeth. Not sure if i needed that much for the pain, but now that I'm cutting back, I've been feeling a need for it. So is it possible to be sad without being extremely happy? I mean the whole thing about misery and company is the ability for other people to tell you how worse off you are...


So how does intellectual gratification fit into that? As Arch was saying, happiness is just dopamine or whatever being released, but reading a really good book, watching a really good movie, that sort of thing that appeals to our mind (but not our brain) doesn't wear us out in the same way.

I think intellectual gratification through novels is a form of delayed gratification. The subsequent payoff doesn't come after you read another great book and that could take hours. When you read a book, there's peaks and valleys. Valleys for the setup and the occasional poorly executed delivery, and peaks for the rest. Prolonged reading also accesses long term memory and pathways for insight and analysis that short reading (news and internet articles) does not offer. Read enough novels and your mind has already been primed for delayed gratification by the time you open the cover.

A more appropriate example wrt intellectual and instant gratification is a love for poetry. Even then it's difficult to read one poem right after another without reading it again or spending time for your brain to process. But would it be possibile to sustain that "readers high" after reading poems for 4-7 hours straight and doing it again day after day?

That would be ideal for the intellectual, no?

[Mustard]

The answer to this question is no. Next?

[Okie Medicvet]

party pooper.

[SammyKC]

Everything is balance.

[Okie Medicvet]

balance is just another word for bullshit.

[The Dude]

I think everything needs an opposite to truly be perceived.

That said, to the original point
Since the whole point of technological progress seems to be to get people to avoid extremes and displeasures, isn't that making us less "comfortable," even, because we're comfortable all the time? By being constantly satisfied, we're not ever satisfied. Etc.

that's where advertising comes in. We're constantly reminded of how we could have it (poor internet speeds, not enough channels, no HD, whatever); which appeals to our ego on a basic level. We don't necessarily experience the same things ourselves, but we can perceive that experience elsewhere.

Its also a self perpetuating cycle--every time progress is made again advertising comes into play. Even though we may be "comfortable," we are constantly reminded that we could be more comfortable.

In that sense, its not that we ever find happiness, but we are always striving toward the notion of happiness, which renders the experience of one's own misery and wretchedness unnecessary.

Of course that opens up a whole other can of worms--what is happiness etc? The situation I presented above seems quite clearly rooted in material happiness. If the alternative is essentially a state of nirvana, then I think that one's own experiences are necessary---you can't teach a feeling or an experience, those are things that true understanding only come empirically. In as much as it is possible to experience both ends of any spectrum, what makes the experience poignant is the journey from one end of the spectrum to another.

In that way it is absolutely possible for all manner of people to find true happiness--as it is rather subjective. Happy to me could be considered hardship to some and vice versa.

[Morfin]

Arch has nailed this one, IMO. Taking the orgasm example that Insomniac put forward, one does not have to feel pain to understand the orgasm feeling is good, nor eat sour food to be able to say that chocolate tastes good, or eating it provides pleasure.

However, to fully appreciate good, you have to experience the opposite. Taking Arch's Ferrari example, if you only rode or drove in a Ferrari, you would believe that all cars were like that. To truly appreciate a Ferrari, one needs to ride in a Chrysler Minivan (truly one of Satan's prize creations).

And, to SammyKC, I want to thank you for proving my opinion valid. It is only by reading your posting of an intellectually irrelevant aphorism that I can truly appreciate the well-thought out posts by those (few) GMFers with brains.

[freegood]

I think everything needs an opposite to truly be perceived.

That said, to the original point

that's where advertising comes in. We're constantly reminded of how we could have it (poor internet speeds, not enough channels, no HD, whatever); which appeals to our ego on a basic level. We don't necessarily experience the same things ourselves, but we can perceive that experience elsewhere.

Its also a self perpetuating cycle--every time progress is made again advertising comes into play. Even though we may be "comfortable," we are constantly reminded that we could be more comfortable.

In that sense, its not that we ever find happiness, but we are always striving toward the notion of happiness, which renders the experience of one's own misery and wretchedness unnecessary.

Of course that opens up a whole other can of worms--what is happiness etc? The situation I presented above seems quite clearly rooted in material happiness.

Maybe not the opposite, but at minimum, some thing or sensation that deviates from the baseline.

I think research so far explains material well-being pretty nicely. Our bodies constantly to adjust to a baseline with its environment, whether it's getting used to hot and humid weather or snowy and dry climates. It's partly why the third burger isn't as satisfying as the first.

What advertising leads us to believe is that the third flat screen tv is as satisfying as the first. Kind of like Pavlov's dog where the dog starts salivating at the sound of the dinner bell. In this case, getting that first home theater might've had some good history attached to it, like it being your first big purchase or the first experience of the Super Bowl in HD. None of that necessarily had misery or hardship attached to it, but at that moment, the baseline was broken.

Where this material satisfaction breaks from Pavlov is that hunger is a need and not a want or desire like materialist pleasure, so the mechanism for conditioning is not the same or similar for everyone. Despite this, advertising is selling the lie that a larger screen will improve that desired level of satisfaction. Bigger=Better=More Enjoyable. And for the most part, Western cultures don't need any outside pushing to validate this. Many eat more because they're sad. Smoke more because they're stressed. Drink more because they've got issues on the mind.

But when we apply that to get things, most of the expected gratification ends up as a way to one up other people, to make yourself look better in place of that initial ring of the dinner bell.
Consumerism at its best....


If the alternative is essentially a state of nirvana, then I think that one's own experiences are necessary---you can't teach a feeling or an experience, those are things that true understanding only come empirically. In as much as it is possible to experience both ends of any spectrum, what makes the experience poignant is the journey from one end of the spectrum to another.

In that way it is absolutely possible for all manner of people to find true happiness--as it is rather subjective. Happy to me could be considered hardship to some and vice versa.

I agree the journey and process is an important part for contributing to someone's happiness. Would one be more satisfied buying a new car with their own hard earned money, or with lotto money? Maybe driving the car itself would feel the same and that's all that matters.

And if happiness or sadness is a perspective or state of mind, then the approach in handling things is equally as important.

[Okie Medicvet]

As long as it still has that new car smell, I could care less if I 'earned' it or won it in the lottery.

Only thing is I don't buy lotto tickets.