30 thoughts on “What Defines Happiness?”

  1. JimV

    I personally would be happier in one situation than the other (not saying which one), but that wasn’t the question. Someone who feels great about her life is happy, by my definition, so I answered “5” (mild agreement) to all the questions. Either example could be deluded about how they think they feel – maybe Maria the happy mom secretly feels her great talent as a novelist is going to waste. Only the Shadow would know.

  2. Tom

    Adding to Neal J King’s #22 comment:

    One reason the L.A. Maria’s story makes us distrust that she is happy is that many of us simply cannot believe it is consistent. The idea of a drug-driven party lifestyle resulting in “real” happiness goes against all of our personal experience. Any such lifestyle *must* be punctuated by bouts of severe loneliness and depression. One cannot stay high all the time, and when you come down, your lack of real connections to others will make you unhappy. This is the reality of such a lifestyle. So, when the authors of the video tell us “L.A. Maria feels happy,” we simply don’t believe it, and we are right to doubt it. Because we know enough about the world to know that it simply cannot be true. So in a way this video shows nothing more than that we have experience about the world, and can judge for ourselves what is probable and what is very unlikely.

    The mom Maria story is different. That story is consistent with either conclusion, and so we are more inclined to accept the conclusion at face value.

  3. Tom

    More musings:

    It’s not that someone *couldn’t* be happy in L.A. Maria’s lifestyle, it’s just that it seems very unlikely. We judge it more likely that the video is wrong. Maybe Charlie Sheen is truly happy, like he says, but there are plenty of us who don’t believe it. He must have some core unhappiness that drives him into his lifestyle choice. But even if he is able to be happy with such a life, he certainly is not the norm.

    Or, since this is a physics blog, here’s a better example: the mathematician Paul Erdos. He lived a lifestyle that I would personally find very lonely – he never had a permanent residence, never married, just bounced around between colleges living with colleagues. However, all reports about him seem to suggest he was perfectly happy with this. I believe it, because, hey, it’s possible. But even so, I still don’t believe that most people would be happy with such a lifestyle. He was clearly a rarity in that sense.

    But, Erdos was not such a rarity as L.A. Maria. She supposedly is truly happy despite a lifestyle that is far more incompatible with happiness than Erdos’s.

  5. Stef

    “Why should the concept of happiness diverge so much from the concept of unhappiness ?”: simply because no single qualitative or measurable aspect of your life can be considered as making you happy, while myriads of qualitative and measurable aspects of your life can make you unhappy. Seems obvious to me: when you have an headache you’re unhappy, when you don’t, we can’t tell. The trouble actually comes from the fact that the experiment wants us to consider the lifes of the two Maria as a whole, and accept to qualify these whole lifes (as opposed to specific moments) as either happy or unhappy. But that’s someting we can refuse to do, and I would refuse: to me it is meaningless to speak of an overall happy or hunappy life. There is another related confusion in the experiment: in the first instance (are they happy ?) we are given their psychological state as if it was permanent, relative to their whole life. In the second instance (are they unhappy ?), we are given an exemple of a specific moment when they feel unhappy. The unbalance between happy(always)/unhappy(at times) is thus explicitely exposed in the experiment.

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