IT'S (IM)POSSIBLE TO BE HAPPY

Introduction

This article has one purpose – to challenge you. Are you a person who can’t read the entire text because it’s too long? Yes? Well then welcome to the club of dopamine addicts. I’m a member as well.

You might wonder if reading this is worth it – YES IT IS. You will get to know the difference between happiness and pleasure and how they can lead to dissatisfaction with life or even depression. You will gain another perspective and hopefully make a step forward.

Major depressive disorder is on the rise.

World Health Organization (WHO) projects that depression will become the leading cause of burden of disease worldwide by 2030. Many factors contribute to the rise of the disease’s incidence, but here we’ll discuss unrealistic expectations. The portrait of happiness that the media presents together with the overprotective parenting leads to a lack of coping skills needed to survive the chaos and competition in adulthood. Children raised in this environment expect that the world will keep on giving whenever they desire. Sadly, at one point this just doesn’t work anymore and those who can’t handle it turn to inappropriate defense mechanisms (e.g., repression).

And who is the master of taking advantage of this new (depressed) generation? The answer is simple – all those who want to make money. On the top of the list are the social media and companies that rely on the fact that you must always buy the latest version of their new product (won’t name the company, because it’s self-explanatory).

The next question in line is how do they do it?

They do it by giving you pleasure – from getting likes on your post to buying a brand-new phone. We all know the feeling, the feeling when you get something you wanted. Unfortunately, this feeling doesn’t last. It only makes you want to do it again and again and again. Looking for constant pleasure is now so integrated into society that it’s confused with happiness. These two terms are widely considered similar and yet they stand on the opposite riverbanks – one could be leading to depression and the other to general well-being.

Too much pleasure is poison.

We have more of it than we ever had. We have more than we will ever need and yet something is not right with it. The more we have it, the more we are craving for it. It’s like we can never get enough. It’s an endless search for something we think we want and yet we don’t need. We are talking about pleasure.

Pleasure has many definitions but it generally refers to an experience that feels good when we enjoy something. Throughout human development pleasure was rare. It was a bite into a fresh sugary fruit in the late summer, it was a feeling after a successful hunt and of course after sex. It wasn’t something we had daily. We could say it was our inner driver – feeling pleasure meant we were full, satisfied and successful at producing the next generation. It was never meant to be a common experience; it was meant to give light in a dark, hard life.

What would happen if we had it all the time? What if we had a button we would press and release a small amount of pleasure every couple of minutes – our life would surely be better?

Capitalism has been selling us pleasure disguised as happiness for some time now. Using the word happy (think Happy Meals, likes and thumbs up or smiling emojis) as an ugly excuse to exploit our physiology. We do deserve to be happy, but we’ll never be, if we only crave pleasure.

How does social media give pleasure? They know that pressing the button will raise your dopamine levels and you’ll want to press it again. The controller behind isn’t even human. It’s an algorithm built by a computer, an algorithm that gives pleasure. It’s made just for you. It knows you better than you probably know yourself. And have you ever wondered why are there three dots when someone is texting you? It’s to keep you engaged online for longer. We won’t discuss other technics further here; it might get just too disturbing.

There is a difference between pleasure and happiness.

The more pleasure you experience, the less happy you are. This is a sentence I firmly stand by. The first time I came across it, was on a social media platform. I decided to click on it because I had no idea what it means (and because of the dopamine I needed). Throughout the research I came across dr. Robert Lustig, who I see now as the author of the sentence above. He described the difference between happiness and pleasure in seven key points.

1. Pleasure is short-termed and happiness is long-lived.

Pleasure: alcohol, chocolate, ice cream, bonus paycheck

Happiness: life goals (finishing school), exercising regularly, career advancements

2. Pleasure is a bodily experience and happiness is ethereal (feeling outside of the body).

Pleasure: being drunk, etc.

Happiness: a feeling of calm and contentment

3. Please is taking and happiness is giving.

4. Pleasure can be achieved with substances (e.g., drugs), but happiness cannot.

5. Pleasure is experienced alone and happiness is experienced in social groups.

6. Too much pleasure leads to addiction and there’s no such thing as being addicted to happiness.

All of this is tied together by the seventh and the most important fact. We experience pleasure through the release of the neurotransmitter called dopamine and we experience happiness with the release of serotonin. The latter helps regulate your mood as well as your sleep, appetite, digestion, learning ability and memory. Keep in mind that pleasure has its place. The goal is the proper proportion between pleasure and happiness. It’s up to you to find the balance.

Both bind to different receptors, but they interact with each other. The interaction is complex and on many different levels – let’s look at some examples:

- low levels of serotonin can lead to an overproduction of dopamine, which causes impulsive behavior,

- low serotonin level suppresses hunger, low dopamine level stimulates hunger,

- in patients with depression both neurotransmitters are usually lowered,

- in some cases, high dopamine levels can inhibit the function of the serotonin level, …

The last sentence is the foundation for understanding why pleasure is harmful to our happiness. Constant dopamine shots are detrimental to our social and personal stability. Instead of focusing on others and our relationships we focus on ourselves. It’s like we have forgotten how to live with others and prefer to live on our own. We have replaced people with something unliving. And now you stand here asking yourself why I feel so down and why is the depression on the rise. What’s the worst of all – we accept this as the new normal and yet we are the ones who could do something about it.

It’s hard (but possible) to be happy.

The ultimate question (and probably the reason why you are here) is what can you do about it?

Once you type into your search engine, you’ll receive millions of results. The websites offer a variety of solutions, most of them aimed at changing your habits or promoting health beneficial behavior. You’ll find solutions from the diet change, regular exercise, to the importance of sleep and so on. Some of them will benefit you and some won’t. Some might benefit other people, but you wouldn’t find them as useful. As you can see there is no such activity that would bring universal happiness to everyone.

There is something you can do though. Ask yourself a simple question – is this thing giving me pleasure or is it building towards happiness. For example, let’s pick the chocolate I eat almost after every lunch. I strongly believe it is giving me happiness, so I will continue eating it. No, let’s be real – it’s pleasure, so I might take it down a notch and enjoy it just once per week. Let’s try with one more example – your morning or evening social media activity. Yup, that’s 99,99% pleasure. What about the regular workout? Well, I don’t do it for pleasure…so it must be building towards my happiness. Do you have any examples?

Literature

1. Malhi GS, Mann JJ. Depression. Lancet. 2018 Nov 24;392(10161):2299-2312. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31948-2. Epub 2018 Nov 2. PMID: 30396512.

2. Seo D, Patrick CJ, Kennealy PJ. Role of Serotonin and Dopamine System Interactions in the Neurobiology of Impulsive Aggression and its Comorbidity with other Clinical Disorders. Aggress Violent Behav. 2008;13(5):383-395. doi:10.1016/j.avb.2008.06.003

3. Robert Lusting. HappinesHached: https://robertlustig.com/happiness-hacked/