Pinker acerca de la felicidad
pinker Another example is the strange notion of happiness. What is the psychological state called "happiness" for? It can't be that natural selection designed us to feel good all the time out of sheer good will. Presumably our brain circuits for happiness motivate us to accomplish things that enhance biological fitness. With that simple insight one can make some sense of some of the puzzles of happiness that wise men and women have noted for thousands of years. For example, directly pursuing happiness is often a recipe for unhappiness, because our sense of happiness is always calibrated with respect to other people. There is a Yiddish expression: when does a hunchback rejoice? When he sees one with a bigger hump. Perhaps we can make sense of this by putting ourselves in the shoes of the fictitious engineer behind natural selection. What should the circuit for happiness be doing? Presumably it would be assessing how well you're doing in your current struggle in life—whether you should change your life and try to achieve something different, or whether you should be content with what you're achieved so far, for example, when you are well-fed, comfortable, with a mate, in a situation likely to result in children and so on. But how could a brain be designed in advance to assess that? There's no absolute standard for well-being. A Paleolithic hunter-gatherer should not have fretted that he had no running shoes or central heating or penicillin. How can a brain know whether there is something worth striving for? Well, it can look around and see how well off other people are. If they can achieve something, maybe so can you. Other people anchor your well-being scale and tell you what you can reasonably hope to achieve. Unfortunately, it gives rise to a feature of happiness that makes many people unhappy—namely, you're happy when you do a bit better than everyone around you and you're unhappy when you're doing worse. If you look in your paycheck envelope and you discover you've got a five percent raise you'd be thrilled, but if you discover that all your co-workers got a ten percent raise you'd be devastated. Another paradox of happiness is that losses are felt more keenly than gains. As Jimmy Connors said, "I hate to lose more than I like to win." You are just a little happy if your salary goes up, but you're really miserable if your salary goes down by the same amount. That too might be a feature of the mechanism designed to attain the attainable and no more. When we backslide, we keenly feel it because what we once had is a good estimate of what we can attain. But when we improve we have no grounds for knowing that we are as well off as we can hope to be. The evolutionary psychologist Donald Campbell called it "the happiness treadmill." No matter how much you gain in fame, wealth, and so on, you end up at the same level of happiness you began with—though to go down a level is awful. Perhaps it's because natural selection has programmed our reach to exceed our grasp, but by just a little bit.
29.jun.1999
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Glosario de Experiencia de la Felicidad - Carlos von der Becke.