What is happiness? What is unhappiness?
Below is is an initial draft of an early chapter of my book on happiness and mental illness. Feedback very much appreciated! Call me or email me or leave comments. Thanks very much. —Kent
What is happiness?
Happiness is a specific sensation (or set of sensations) in the body.
Couldn’t be simpler, right?
A lot of things follow from this. I’m going to list them quickly. When I write my book, I hope to have more to say about all of these things.
Happiness is something that we feel, not think about. It’s in our bodies, more than our minds – physical more than mental.
Happiness is a lived reality, every bit as real as any other sensation. If you think the sensation of getting punched in the face is a real thing, then so is happiness.
Happiness is not necessarily tied to the apparent or actual quality of one’s life. People living in poverty, solitude, illness, failure, can be well and truly happy. People living in luxury, with all the friends and good health in the world, having just obtained the greatest personal and professional success that they could ask for ... can be well and truly unhappy.
Like all of our sensations, happiness is something that we can pay attention to, if we choose. Or we can take it for granted, ignore it, not even notice it.
Any creature that has sensations can experience happiness. Dogs, cats, birds, lizards, definitely. Insects ... maybe. Or at least that should be our assumption until proven otherwise.
Happiness is, in principle, measurable. Not by taking surveys (“How happy are you on a scale of 1 to 7?”), but by doing physical measurements of sensory activity taking place within the bodies of people (and animals).
What causes happiness?
The sensations comprising happiness can arise for a variety of reasons. But the most important reason is again very simple: happiness arises due to a lack of unhappiness.
If you’re not experiencing unhappiness for any extended period of time, you will soon find that happiness arises.
That sounds tautological or obvious, perhaps, but I don’t think it is. To achieve happiness, don’t seek it directly. Just look for ways to eliminate unhappiness. Once that is done, happiness arises naturally.
What is unhappiness?
I say that unhappiness is a different, and much more varied, set of sensations in the body. (Again, simple.)
What specific types of sensation comprise unhappiness? Also, what causes unhappiness?
This is where things stop being simple.
I say that unhappiness is caused by experiencing sensations that you resist, you do not like, and/or do not enjoy.
Also, that unhappiness is the experience of those resisted, non-liked, non-enjoyed sensations.
Also, that those sensations cause further unhappiness.
In other words, unhappiness is a set of sensations. Which set? The set that you resist and don’t like experiencing. What causes it? Not enjoying your sensations.
Unhappiness is, and causes, and is caused by, unhappy sensations. Unhappy sensations are sensations you resist, don’t like, and don’t enjoy. Not enjoying the sensations that you are having both causes, and is, and is caused by, unhappiness.
That sounds circular.
Very much!
What does it mean to “resist,” “not like,” or “not enjoy” something?
Rather than trying to give a theoretical explanation, I want to start with an example.
Mushrooms. (Not the psychedelic variety, and not the kinds that will kill you. Plain, ordinary garden mushrooms.)
I don’t like to eat mushrooms. On pizza, in salads, stuffed with cheese, in an omelet. Baked, fried, raw, anything, doesn’t matter. They’re just gross. Ick.
What does it mean that I don’t like mushrooms? On a purely experiential level, it means something like the following: “I do not enjoy the sensations in my body that occur when I eat a mushroom.” (Many of the disliked sensations take place in my mouth, but if I pay attention unpleasant sensations can be found all over my body.) If I did not experience any unpleasant sensations in my body when eating mushrooms, it would be very strange to say that I don’t like mushrooms.
Do we want to say that the experience of eating a mushroom causes the unpleasant sensations? Well, yes and no. If I pay careful attention, I find that the unpleasant sensations start before the mushroom even enters my mouth. There’s the smell of it, which makes me gag a little bit. Before that, there’s the realization that I’m about to eat it, and I feel a bit queasy. If I know today that mushrooms are going to be served to me in a meal tomorrow and I’m not going to be able to get out it, I can experience unpleasant sensations today.
Sit down with me at this meal that includes mushrooms, and observe the progression of my unhappiness. As I approach the table, I have it in my mind that I don’t like mushrooms, which causes me to anticipate that I will not like the meal. My body sends me unpleasant experiences right away. Now I sit down and prepare to eat a mushroom, bringing the fork to my mouth, and a shudder goes through my body: another real, unpleasant physical experience that is felt in the body (again: just as being punched in the face is felt in the body). Now I actually begin to eat the mushroom, and it turns out that, yes indeed, I am not happy with the experience. I am filled with a real, physical sense of revulsion that is difficult to locate on one place: it seems to be happening everywhere at once. There are mental challenges at this point: I struggle to remain calm - I remind myself to be strong - I steel myself to meet the experience. Now I am somehow making it through the actual experience, chew chew gross chew swallow yuck don’t vomit whew! (Repeat this step for additional mushrooms in the meal ... less any I manage to palm and pocket in order to throw away later.) Now I am congratulating myself on my strength of character and making a mental note never again to go through such a thing if I can possibly avoid it.
Several points to make about this.
(1) Most of the unhappiness is physical, felt in the body, but there are mental aspects as well.
(2) Some physical aspects of the experience cause mental aspects. Gagging makes it hard to be mentally calm.
(3) At the same time, mental aspects of the experience cause physical aspects. Expecting the gross taste triggers unhappiness before the taste buds are activated at all.
(4) The bad sensations form a loop. Here’s what the loop looks like.
Anticipation that thing will be bad (primarily mental, but with a physical comopnent) –> Experience of thing as bad (primarily physical, but with a mental component) –> Conclusion that thing was actually bad (a mental conclusion based on what seems to be an undeniably physical experience) –> Reinforced belief that future things of the same sort will be bad. And thus back to the beginning.
So you’re saying that something like this can be generalized as an account of what it means to not enjoy an experience? And that having experiences that are not enjoyed is the cause of – and the effect of – and also, simply is – unhappiness?
Yes, that’s exactly right.
If I had to eat mushrooms at every meal, my life would be measurably less happy than it is. In general, every experience that I have, in which unpleasant sensations occur, leads me to be unhappy, to some degree. (As one would expect, the effect on my unhappiness is greater as the disliked sensations become more unpleasant, more common, and longer-lasting.)
If I have a large number of other experiences that are similar in quality to mushroom-eating, on an ongoing basis, then I will be an unhappy person. The more often I have these experiences, and the more I dislike them, the unhappier I will be.
More than that, I want to claim that this account of having experiences that one does not enjoy is the only thing that unhappiness is or could ever be. To the extent that my life lacks experiences that I do not enjoy or that I do not want to have, I am a happier person. If I never have any such experiences, then I am never unhappy.
Of course, there are a lot of words that we use to describe this. The experiences that cause unhappiness can be “not very nice” or “horrible” or “gross.” We can “not want them” or “hate them” or “fear them” or “despise them.” All of these are different ways of saying the same thing, albeit with different levels of intensity.
Any experience that you don’t want to have, at whatever level of intensity the “do not want” occurs, will cause (and be) (and be caused by) a form of unhappiness.
You mentioned “resist” earlier, but resistance didn’t play much of a role in the mushroom example!
True. Resistance is in there, but it’s hidden. Briefly: in my view, not wanting to do something and resisting doing it are important complements to each other. “I don’t want to do x” is primarily felt in the body, and believed by the mind. “I resist doing x” brings the will into the equation. Like most old school philosophers and theologians alike (once upon a time, I trained as a theologian, believe it or not), I think that the human will is an important reality that needs to be distinguished from both mind and body. But it makes things more complicated, and I can’t really tackle it here. (Again, I hope to fill this out when I write the book.)
Talk more about unhappiness as a loop.
Unhappiness forms a loop. As I outlined it before, the loop goes from expectation to experience and then back to a reinforced expectation.
I expect this will be bad
I experience this as bad
I remember this was bad
I expect the next occurrence of this to be bad
The badness is in the future, present, past ... and then back in the future again. Each of these leads to the next, and then the experience repeats. Unhappiness is always a loop.
By the way, “bad” here is just shorthand for unliked, unenjoyed and resisted. It’s not a moral claim or a functional claim or anything like that. In the case of eating mushrooms, the badness is pure revulsion, but it can take lots of other forms. Fear, sadness, anger, shame, worry, etc.
Why does it matter that unhappiness is a loop?
Let’s think about the nature of loops in a very physical and concrete way.
Picture a piece of rope. It’s hollow: there’s a tiny tunnel inside it. Now this particular rope is just a tiny bit magical. If you join this rope with other ropes just like it, and tie the whole thing in a knot, all the tunnels within the various pieces of rope will magically join together to form one big, interconnected tunnel. This specific piece of magical rope has been tied into a circle and is lying on the floor. Now picture two tiny creatures: one of them is physically inside the tunnel, inside the rope. The other is outside, standing on the floor next to the piece of rope.
So we have a loop, plus a creature stuck in the loop, and another creature outside the loop. Let’s spend some time in this scenario and make some observations.
(1) The loop doesn’t have a beginning or an end. It goes forever and yet goes nowhere. The poor creature caught in the loop wants to get out. Picture it moving around and around, constantly moving, backward, forward, around and around. It’s always moving, but it never makes progress. After a while, the poor thing will start to believe that there is no way out and it will be stuck forever. From the inside, the loop seems infinite.
(2) From the outside, we can see that the loop is finite. Most of the world is not the loop! The creature standing outside the piece of rope is not at all bothered by it.
(3) It’s easier to see the reality and nature of the unhappiness from outside the loop than from inside. The creature caught inside the rope may be frustrated and may feel that there is something seriously wrong. “No matter where I go, I can’t get anywhere,” it says. “What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with the world?” From outside, we can see that there’s nothing bad going on in the world, and nothing wrong with the creature in the loop – other than that it’s stuck.
(4) Loops are nothing but loop. The circle of rope consists of nothing, at all, other than a circle of rope. There’s not a deeper reality that makes things wrong.
(5) Loops can become entangled with other loops and form knots. This process can build on itself, and the knots can become bigger and bigger. Loops upon loops, knots upon knots, until the poor creature is living in a hopeless, tangled mess.
(6) Loops can also be cut! The trick is to find the right pair of scissors, and the right place to cut.
And all of this is the nature of unhappiness?
Yes! To be unhappy is to be stuck in a loop. All six of the points above apply to unhappiness.
(1) Unhappiness is self-perpetuating, and people caught in it feel well and truly trapped. It can feel like there’s no escape. It can go on for years, or even a lifetime. One obvious example is trauma. If you’ve had a traumatic experience, you may suffer a great deal from it for the rest of your life.
J. K. Rowling writes, as part of her famous/infamous essay on her feelings about trans people and safe spaces:
I've been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn't because I'm ashamed those things happened to me, but because they're traumatic to revisit and remember. ...
I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty, but I'm now married to a truly good and principled man, safe and secure in ways I never in a million years expected to be. However, the scars left by violence and sexual assault don't disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you've made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it's funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven't heard them approaching.
This essay of Rowling's has come in for a ton of discussion, debate, defense, and anger. But I've never seen anyone find anything negative to say about the sentences above. They have a ring of authenticity, of coming from a deep, true place of pain. And it strikes me that this woman, with all the money in the world, the ability to take as much time as she needs and hire any therapist in the world, hasn't found a way past her emotional scars. Her experience has taught her that such scars simply "don't disappear."
She’s stuck in a loop and she can’t get out of it. In fact, from inside the loop, she imagines that it’s impossible to get out. (The good news is, she’s wrong.)
I myself have been much worse off than a typically unhappy person: for a couple of years, I suffered from a severe anxiety disorder that left me unable to function normally. I fought and fought to get out of that particular loop ... and failed, and failed, and failed. It was awful. There truly seemed to be no way out.
(2) Unhappiness is finite. I can be caught in a loop of unhappiness, feeling like I can’t escape, while someone right next to me, even my twin, may well not be caught up in any parallel experience. As long as they remain outside the unhappiness loop, they are simply immune to it. They can live their entire lives as if it doesn’t exist – because it doesn’t exist, for them. (At the same time, the loops that form their unhappiness can be completely nonexistent in my life.)
(3) From outside of the experience of unhappiness, you can tell that unhappiness is just a part of life. But when you’re caught in it, especially if the unhappiness becomes so extreme that it gets labeled something like “anxiety” or “depression,” it can feel like there is nothing in the universe other than unhappiness.
(4) The unhappiness loop consists of nothing but unhappiness itself.
I’ve been stuck in a lot of unhappiness loops in my life. And for every one, I had a justification. We’re all good at justifications: “I am regularly unhappy because ....” You can fill in the blanks yourself. “My father didn’t love me, I don’t have enough money, my job isn’t fulfilling....” No, no, no! No! All of that is wrong! You are stuck in unhappiness because an unhappiness loop started and ensnared you in it. That’s it. Lots of people whose fathers didn’t love them, who don’t have much money, who have tedious jobs, are happy anyway! There is no reason for your unhappiness other than the unhappiness loop itself. Once you exit the loop, your “reasons” will melt away, along with the unhappiness.
Anxiety disorders are a particularly nasty type of unhappiness loop. When I was caught in my anxiety disorder, I believed that I had good reasons to be anxious, and that those reasons were what was causing my anxiety. I thought that, if I were ever going to get better, I needed to stop being afraid of the things that I was afraid of. The problem, the fear, seemed to be inherent in the things themselves. I believed that those things just were, inherently, frightening, and because of that I couldn’t see any way to stop being afraid of them. Thus, I believed that there was no way out. But all of that is wrong. The truth was, I was just in a loop. There was nothing causing my fear other than the fear itself.
A lot of people are afraid of death, and they suffer from that fear on an ongoing basis. Larry King was one of them. I learned this in a really interesting (and shockingly existential) interview that he did with, of all people, the comedian Norm McDonald. The interview is amazing and powerful and available on youtube. Like a lot of people, both of these men believed that in order to not be afraid of death, they would have to do something about death. And, well, death comes for us all, and there’s no way around that. So people like that try to think of a way to stop being afraid of death, some philosophical argument or religious belief that will make the fear just go away. But they end up finding the arguments are unconvincing, and so they remain afraid of death their entire lives. Fear of death becomes a potent and lifelong form of unhappiness. I want to tell people like this: the unhappiness caused by your fear of death is a loop. And there is nothing to the loop but the loop itself. Break out of the loop, and death itself will not bother you.
(5) Loops can get entangled with loops, causing knots that are really just larger, more complex loops. One form of unhappiness can become entangled with another form of unhappiness, with the result that unhappiness grows in extent and complexity. If you repeat this, over and over, you can form a great big mega-unhappiness that can engulf your whole life. If you get really good at it, you can make yourself so unhappy that you are labeled mentally ill.
My own anxiety disorder was built, step by step, from my own unhappy experiences and my amazing ability to link one form of unhappiness to another, creating ever greater and more complex forms of unhappiness. I really think that this process is the genesis of most mental illness. Pink Floyd used a different metaphor, but in my view they were correct: the wall is built one brick at a time.
I’m far from the first to talk about knots and unhappiness. It’s a pretty common metaphor we use for very unhappy people: we say that they are “tying themselves in knots.” In a more formal vein, Carl Jung described some aspects of mental illness as “having a complex.” Jung didn’t mean by this quite what I do, but it’s surprisingly similar in structure. According to Wikipedia: “Jung described a complex as a node in the unconscious; it may be imagined as a knot of unconscious feelings and beliefs, detectable indirectly, through behavior that is puzzling or hard to account for.” A complex can be imagined as a knot! I would maybe say the same thing the other way around: the knots that result from unhappiness loops can grow and grow until they are incredibly complex, and then the complexity itself becomes an additional cause of unhappiness. Rinse and repeat until you have a full-blown mental health condition.
(6) The way out of unhappiness (including anxiety, depression, and related forms of mental illness) is to cut the loop. Don’t tie yourselves in knots trying to get out of the loop! Just cut it. (The book I want to write explains how I learned to do that. But so does this substack. I’m working on it, anyway.)
(The short answer? Feel your feelings! Feeling your feelings cuts the loop and cures unhappiness.)
Wait, so you’re saying that the very simple lived reality that we all experience – that experience which we commonly name “I don’t like this” or “I don’t enjoy this” – forms a loop, and this loop is unhappiness, and that’s all unhappiness is? And most forms of mental illness are just an extreme form of this unhappiness, in which our unhappiness loops become entangled with other similar loops? And that’s all there is to any of it?
Yes.
So the way to exit our anxiety or depression or other forms of mental illness is to cut the loops?
Yes.
And if we cut enough loops, we will be truly happy? We will reach a point where we will never again experience anything that we don’t enjoy or don’t want to experience?
More or less, yes.
And we cut all the loops by feeling our feelings?
Yes.
In my book I want to write something like …
“Let’s end this chapter here. We will take up some objections in the next one.”
Thanks for reading.