Happiness

What is happiness? Zoologist Desmond Morris defined as the sensation you feel when life gets better. As a zoologist and darwinist, what he means by life getting "better" is that the organism that is experiencing happiness has had something happen or done something that improved their chances of survival and reproduction. What the science of positive psychology has shown is we have set points for our level of happiness which we later return too. This means that whether you win the lottery or become an amputee you will eventually return to the level of happiness you were before. This is called hedonic adaptation. If you didn't return to a set point level of happiness the organism would become complacent in improving its chances of survival. What makes an organism happy are the achievement of biological imperatives, a job you cannot retire from. Their called biological imperatives because they coorelate highly with biological fitness. 

They are;
Survival
      Food, water, and safety.
Territorialism
      Property, money and/or purchasing power.
Competiveness
      Achievement, respect, popularity, attractiveness, displays of wealth.
Reproduction
        Marriage, children, grandchildren and sex.
Group forming
        Community, family, friends and identity.
Quality of life seeking
        Leisure and emergency preparedness.

Think about the things that make you happy. Do the sources of your happiness coorelate with the above biological inperatives?

The reason that they do is because happiness like all emotions are products of you nervous system. Your nervous system is a product of your genes. Grass isnt happy because it doesnt have a nervous system because it doesnt have the genes to build one.

Humanity as a species has been around for around 10,000 generations. For 9,700 of those our ancestors lived as hunter gatherers. More recently in the last 10 generations marketers and businessmen were able to find products that produced the sensations of achieving biological imperatives without making any effort. Drugs that trigger the craving and pleasure centers of the brain that in the stoneage was produced by things like sex or achievement. Calorie dense foods that have no nutrients which didnt exist in our ancestors calorie scarce world. Instead of gathering nutritious plants we have retail therapy. Instead of supportive tribes we have divisive identity politics.

Marketers have figure out they can make money of us by providing the experience of low effort happiness. They've put us on a hedonic treadmill that instead of benefitting our children as it did in the stoneage it benefits their bank account.

As Nietzsche said in Thus Spoke Zarathustra " What is the greatest thing you can experience? It is the hour of your greatest contempt. The hour in which even your happiness becomes loathsome to you, and so also your reason and virtue. The hour when you say: 'What good is my happiness? It is poverty and filth and miserable self-complacency. But my happiness should justify existence itself!"