http://nature-sucks.com/index.php/do-we-have-to-accept-negative-aspects-in-life/30-do-we-have-to-accept-negative-aspects-page-1 wrote:Another popular line of thought is the notion of necessary opposites. It is commonly believed that opposite qualities of conditions have to exist in order for them to exist. For example: Hot and cold, black and white, soft and hard and so forth. To some, the existence of such opposite qualities explains why we have to accept negative events, including illness, pain and suffering also. We need them in order to experience the positive effects. We only know what love is, because we know that hate exists too. We appreciate being held and touched tenderly because we know that harshness and brutality also exists. Once more the conclusion resulting from this path of thought is that negativity is an essential part of life. But is it really so? Do we really have to experience unpleasant events (negativity) in order to experience pleasant outcomes? Perhaps it is sufficient to know that they exist, without necessarily having to experience these.

What do children tell us about it? Children usually hardly experience any negativity as they are tenderly looked after and cared for by their parents and yet they experience pleasure and joy. Children are also psychologically healthy until they have negative experiences. They learn that they could be harmed by strangers and some of them do. They get bullied at school or taken advantage of by older siblings. They get ill, injured and experience emotional hurt for all kinds of reasons commonly directly or indirectly through others.

http://nature-sucks.com/index.php/do-we-have-to-accept-negative-aspects-in-life?start=1 wrote:Do you have to eat something every time that doesn’t taste nice in order to enjoy something that tastes nice to you or do you just simply enjoy particular foods and meals? A newborn usually doesn’t have to go through the process of eating something terrible before it can enjoy the milk or other food that is offered. It is simply hungry or thirsty and gets something that tastes at least reasonably good or at worst, relieves the tension that hunger or thirst provides. With the result of feeling temporarily gratified, until the feeling of hunger sets in again and the cycle continues.

http://nature-sucks.com/index.php/what-is-perfection?start=1 wrote:perfection is the result of comparisons

http://nature-sucks.com/index.php/do-we-have-to-accept-negative-aspects-in-life/32-do-we-have-to-accept-negative-aspects-page-3 wrote:However, if later life turns out to be satisfactory, then the present may be more intensely cherished and every good moment more appreciated, as one is subconsciously comparing the different states.

What do you guys think? Is happiness relative to what you compare it to? Babies can be happy without knowing sadness? Or is them being born traumatic and this is what negative experience they have had??? But how good is their memory? If they don’t remember being born then how could this be it???

Over the last few years my life has got progressively better, but I think I appricaite it less. I think if I had been as happy as I am now several years ago I wouldn’t be able to believe how happy I am. But maybe this is some kind of bias??

Should we show people movies of horrible conditions so that they enjoy their lives more?D:

We've touched upon this topic before here and here.

I think it's not necessary to experience suffering in order to be happy. In fact, I think it's not even necessary to know about the fact that you're not suffering in order to be happy.

My conjecture is that we get the false impression that happiness must be relative due to the hedonic treadmill. When good things happen all the time, we become habituated to them. When we recover from bad things, the surprise of situations getting better is much stronger than if we experienced the same good situations regularly. I don't know the neuronal details, but perhaps this is due to downregulation and upregulation of neurotransmitter receptors. For example, when people do drugs repeatedly, their dopamine receptors downregulate, which causes them to feel terrible if they don't continue getting a flood of dopamine.

But the hedonic treadmill is an adaptation by evolution to ensure that organisms keep striving regardless of how bad or good things are. It should in principle be possible to design minds that don't do this downregulation business.

Side note: I don't agree with the rosy view of early childhood in the Nature Sucks quotes. When I was a little kid, I got sick a lot, and I was often bored, crying, angry with my parents, upset that I couldn't do anything I wanted, etc. I'm considerably happier now than I was as a child.

Ruairi wrote:Should we show people movies of horrible conditions so that they enjoy their lives more?D:

Ha. If the happiness-is-relative people were correct, maybe they should advocate installing fake memories of really painful past events into people's brains.

In general, the idea that happiness is completely relative tends toward absurdities. In an old essay, I called this idea the (third?) "law of emotion": For every emotion, there's an equal and opposite emotion. Well, if this were true, then first of all, life would always have net zero value, so we shouldn't really care what happens at all. Secondly, it can't be true that the net balance of happiness and suffering for a life are exactly equal at every point in the organism's life. So, for example, if you made an organism really happy (e.g., by injecting it full of good drugs) and then euthanized it before the hedonic treadmill or drug withdrawal could set in, wouldn't that necessarily be net-positive?

Ok cool, thank you!

Alan Dawrst wrote:Side note: I don't agree with the rosy view of early childhood in the Nature Sucks quotes. When I was a little kid, I got sick a lot, and I was often bored, crying, angry with my parents, upset that I couldn't do anything I wanted, etc. I'm considerably happier now than I was as a child.

D:!! sorry to hear it

Yea I don't agree with the rosy view either.

Just an interesting analogy I thought of;

I’m in France right now, and on the days I walk around in a t shirt and shorts, the French people are wearing trousers and jumpers. Because my “temperature treadmill” has calibrated me to feeling the right temperature in conventional clothes in average Irish weather (cold, wet, changeable)

And in a cold(er) country they might wear similar clothes in their “average” weather. Of course there’s a limit, Eskimo’s wont be wearing jumpers in their average weather.

But anyway, how would we put the idea of happiness being relative in this?

That would mean that I would be comparing how I felt to how I had felt at some other time and deciding how I felt now based on that?

Or thinking “when I go outside I’ll be cold” and then actually feeling colder outside?

I guess both of these do happen to some extent (especially the second), but I doubt that much.

Am I making sense?

It's definitely not necessary to feel sadness to understand happiness. You might have to remember feeling sadness, but you certainly don't have to feel it.

Also, depressed people can be sad for quite a while. I don't think it could last that long if it were all relative.

DanielLC wrote:It's definitely not necessary to feel sadness to understand happiness. You might have to remember feeling sadness, but you certainly don't have to feel it.

Also, depressed people can be sad for quite a while. I don't think it could last that long if it were all relative.

As regards your first point, why do you say that?

And as regards your second I meant relative as in "im feeling bad now because this is so much worse than how I was feeling at time X"

As regards your first point, why do you say that?

How could what you don't remember matter? It's past you, not you. You don't feel his pain (unless you can remember it).

And as regards your second I meant relative as in "im feeling bad now because this is so much worse than how I was feeling at time X"

Yeah, but I still don't think it would last that long. Also, you'd expect depressed people to be manic between depression episodes. If they're not bipolar, it's just depression.

Ruairi wrote:D:!! sorry to hear it

Oh, it was nothing out of the ordinary for a child. I had a really good childhood by comparison with other kids. That's my point: I think the niceness of childhood in general is overestimated. (Or maybe everyone else just has really miserable adult lives.)

Ruairi wrote:Or thinking “when I go outside I’ll be cold” and then actually feeling colder outside?

This might be genuine physical adaptation of your body and not just relative thinking in your mind. Perhaps some of both, though.

DanielLC wrote:How could what you don't remember matter? It's past you, not you. You don't feel his pain (unless you can remember it).

It could matter through physical changes to your body that aren't stored in your memories. For example, past unhappiness might increase the number of your dopamine receptors. But yes, I agree that any such physical change could in principle be created de novo without actually incurring the past unhappy experience, given sufficiently advanced brain technology.

DanielLC wrote:

As regards your first point, why do you say that?

How could what you don't remember matter? It's past you, not you. You don't feel his pain (unless you can remember it).

And as regards your second I meant relative as in "im feeling bad now because this is so much worse than how I was feeling at time X"

Yeah, but I still don't think it would last that long. Also, you'd expect depressed people to be manic between depression episodes. If they're not bipolar, it's just depression.

Sorry I missed the "not" in your original post! Good point.

Alan and I were talking about basically the same thing on fb, I concluded that what might be relative is emotions about emotions "I'm feeling sad about feeling sad" , "I'm feeling content about feeling sad" , "At first I was very sad about being sad but over time I forgot how much better being happy was and then I was only really comparing my sadness to my sadness and I became content with sadness"

Psychologists say, and I have observed anecdotally, that rumination about how unhappy you are is one of the surest ways to make yourself unhappy for a long time. Of course, sometimes rumination is unavoidable, but when you can avoid it, doing so might be a good idea.

I think this is very different advice from the suggestion to ignore suffering at a global scale. I find that I'm easily able to recognize how much pain there is in the world and at the same time not feel bitter about it -- rather, I just feel motivated to make things better. This is probably aided by the fact that I have an extremely comfortable and fulfilling life.

I'm not a fan of the Taoist approach of letting things be as they will be at the aggregate level, but I think it's a nice way to deal with the arbitrariness of what life throws at you on a personal level.