PSY:432

Happiness and misery. What wondrous terms. The pursuit or denial of which permeates our social and conceptual world, the subject of everything from popular television to self-help books, pervasive and saturating. Is life not the seeking of happiness? And similarly is it not an attempt to deny pain, sadness and misery so utterly that merely a vague shadow of it exists? What fickle fools we are to reduce life to the level of the purely experiential. It is precisely this concept which guides man as he reels from disaster to disaster, each successive generation building upon the next in a search for gratification disguised as some nirvana-like happiness. The ‘here’, the ‘now’, and the ‘for the bloody moment and damn the consequences’.

Darwin would chuckle in irony. Have we as a species who once worked so hard to divest ourselves of our physical nature now taken up and championed the cause of biology? That nothing can be your fault since you’re biologically predetermined to execute these precise actions? That such action is somehow inherently beyond your control? That you as a free creature have in fact no free will other than to blindly obey the biological imperative? Have we as a species suddenly made an about face and embraced biological determinism and the pursuit of gratification to the extent whereby we have denied our own humanity which we spent thousands of years constructing? ‘Tis a vicious ironic cycle; that at the end the social processes which our ancestors set in motion millennia ago to ensure human survival may one day sound out our own death knell. The seeds of destruction planted within the genesis of creation.

Now if only I didn’t have to write a psychological treatise on the measurement of happiness and misery. Leave that to the poets, the dreamers, the songwriters and the philosophers; they know what it’s all about. Why try to quantify everything? Why attempt to measure what is inherently subjective and immeasurable? The idea that we can completely understand one another is an absurd notion, yet colloquial terms fail so eloquently whenever we say ‘I know what you mean’; we can’t! Not exactly! Not to the subjective degree by which the next person means and feels what he or she says. At best all we can hope for is a vague similitude, nothing more. In that, man is sadly more than ever alone and misunderstood every moment of his sad miserable existence.

Joseph Conrad once wrote, “What is happiness? Not the conventional word but the naked terror”. Yet we struggle and strive and labour in such absolute drudgery in order to define the conventional word, and still turn up empty shovels. Is happiness reducible to a complex interaction of cognition and affect? Is happiness a rationalisation to positive versus negative life experiences? What is happiness truly? Does it even exist on the same continuum as misery as diametrically opposed absolutes? Maybe it’s too esoteric a concept for human definition. We know it when we feel it, but is that just the rush of endorphins? Or is it something more? Or is happiness all it’s cracked up to be? We certainly don’t want misery in our lives do we?

And how do we even attempt to measure something if we know nought about what it means? Hyper-intelligent-pan-dimensional-beings-which-look-an-awful-lot-like-mice have tried and failed miserably. You have to know the question to know what the answer means after all. And by golly do we have answers by the score, dribbling out of some person’s crabby old ears they are. But with no theoretical framework to ground those answers in, what is the point?

This assignment is driving me just a little potty.

‘Tis a dangerous thing, apathy. It draws many a good man to ruin, and shatters the foundations of nations. For evil to triumph, all it takes for good men to do nothing. Yet it’s insidious in its way, apathy, slithering like that snake of biblical days that brought man to ruin. Seemingly harmless and enchanting in it’s call for ‘later’. Away from me foul serpent! I have heard your call to despair and I deny it. And I pray for the strength to resist, even as the pace of the marching enemy called time quickens as it comes to break the door, even as it’s agents of distraction attempt entry via subterfuge and wicked trickery.

This assignment is really driving me potty.