Consider every starving, motherless ditch-sleeper, every emaciated, forgotten cancer patient, every unloved, unrepentant alcoholic; please also consider every cherry-popping teenage lover, every coffee-sipping, newspaper-reading father, every test-acer, and every enthusiastic family reunion participant.

Is the aggregate of humanity happy or unhappy?

Before calculating, remember to include the 1/3 of your life spent dreaming. Are dreams a positive place to be? I hardly remember mine at all, but I generally feel that disorientation and discontinuity may push the experience toward unhappiness. Then again, plowing Jennifer Love-Hewitt is good for quite a few utility points.

No. And I dreamed I was in Eureka last night making a FTL drive. But the Sheriff wouldn't let me near Allison.

Unhappiness is the incentive for achieving goals and happiness is the reward for achieving them. It is not where you are that matters but how you got there.

Global happiness increases as individuals' opportunity to improve their lot increases.

There are people that actually think they know what happiness is and that it can be measured. There are also polls galore on happiness. It is all mostly gibberish.

Ask yourself if you are happy and you cease to be so. - John Stuart Mill

Nobody really cares if you are miserable so you might as well be happy. -Cynthia Nelms

Little pockets of it float around in the aether and one of them hits you occasionally.

I think we are deluded enough for thinking we are happy, so I think it's a yes.

Happiness helps to achieve goals much more than unhappiness though.

As someone who has been involved in construction, I can say that humanity is not appropriate as aggregate.

I propose that it behaves more like neutrinos - they are constantly and imperceptibly passing through us.

?!?

If I think (perceive) I am happy, then I am happy. I don't see any room for delusion here other than a deluded person with a delusion about the factual state of my happiness.

We can have feelings on different levels, even conflicting ones. I can laugh at a joke, but be sad that the joke is funny. I can be in love with a woman and very happy about that, but extremely sad about the state of the world. I can think I'm generally happy overall, but have simply forgotten my sadness due to the MDMA. I might confuse myself by assuming happiness is the most important thing in life, and worth putting first and formost in all my decision, but then balk at the idea of trading places with a mentally challenged person who is unquestionably happier than I am. Much like questions about the meaning of life, the question in the OP can be answered in many ways depending on how someone chooses to understand it.

Nah. Happiness is just an emotion. You are just saying that the emotion isn't a stable characteristic.

Of course it isn't. Emotions aren't a characteristic. They are a thingamagic that is happening. Might as well consider whether bouncy balls are bouncing in aggregate.

So how do we tackle the question in the OP? It's the same question our moms and serious girlfriends ask us that's always somewhere in the back of our minds. Are we moving in the right direction, spending our limited time wisely, asking the right questions? Do happiness surveys showing poor folks in third world countries and religious people more often answer the question positively mean anything worthwhile?

OP probably really means "happiness with your life as a whole" rather than the momentary emotion. It is more like if people are "satisfied" with their life overall. I would think that across the world, across all age groups, most people would say they are pretty happy with their life as a whole.

Only those that can hover above the cesspool of civilization are truly happy. Few accomplish this. I am one of the few. But if you send me $99.95 right now (shipping and handling included!!!), I can start you on the road to true happiness through my series of easy to read and understand pamphlets.

Zeno's Secret Formula to True Happiness pamphlet series has helped millions on the path to bliss. With twelve pamphlets in this entire step-by-step guide, it is a must for all those seeking a way out of the dark woods of their perpetual woes. If you commit to all twelve pamphlets right away, you will receive FREE of charge, a large fruit basket. Payments can be scheduled on a monthly basis with the timing of each pamphlet in the series. If you are not completely satisfied with the series after one year you can shoot yourself. At which point your happiness is completely moot but mine is fully guaranteed. Order now; before prices increase due to the Feds increasing interest rates. Don’t wait, procrastination just leads to more woes.


This is a free public service announcement of SMP.

From the movie Tombstone. Exchange between Wyatt Earp and the Singer


Tombstone (1993)


00:41:15 Oh, he's laughing. I didn't think you ever laughed.


00:41:17 Yeah, I... I laugh sometimes.


00:41:20 Yes, but how often? Are you happy?


00:41:23 Am I happy? Well, I don't know. I'm happy as the next man, I guess.


00:41:27 I don't laugh all day long like an idiot, if that's what you mean.



PairTheBoard

Without deep lows, there are no deep highs. So the higher the variance of misery to happiness in your life, the better it is perhaps. Most would likely argue for a stable level of both however, but living under a stable level is (arguably) not living at all.

So take some risks, do some stupid stuff, place yourself in uncomfortable and difficult situations and take yourself out of your comfort zone. Those who do not - scientists especially - have little wisdom, albeit great knowledge.

As for the aggregate, the majority of humans are highly risk-averse, so I would argue that the majority haven't experienced the lowest of lows, thus highest of highs when it comes to happiness, and hence the concept of happiness largely eludes them.

Fortunately you can buy hoppiness.

You can certainly buy varied life experiences, happiness is secondary.

Doing mushrooms disagrees, its more like flip the coin...

You never had deep lows or a sense of fear/dread while doing mushrooms? Every time I've had them, I get bouts of deep lows, and bouts of deep highs and bouts of clarity in-between. Nothing like this for you?

What do you mean by 'flip the coin'? You mean, sometimes you can have a bad trip and sometimes it can be a good one?

Personally, I tend to get both in single trips.

SMP is definitely the sub-forum I find myself happiest in with threads like these

With perfect honesty I recall falling into a deep low of which sleep was prayed for…
And a campfire where I thought I might have solved something important about the brain.
Without these experiences being fresh in mind, and perhaps lacking sample size, my view may be relatively superficial...


The time scale in between shifts of emotion seems irrelevant, it is the shifts that I attribute to the flip of the coin. What’s relevant is does one state have some connection/causation to the other, which was the interesting point I was opposing.

It's handy that you've used the word 'opposing' there because I think that one state defines the opposing state. To provide a silly analogy, try to imagine a world without any bad behaviors: in such a world how would we know what the good behaviors are? There is no 'positive' without something 'negative' to give it meaning/to define it.

By the same measure, the worse the 'negatives' that have been experienced, the greater the capacity for positive experiences to be enjoyed. A person who has experienced a devastating loss (the deep low) for example, is likely to gain more happiness, appreciation and gratitude for other close relationships in his life (the deep high), than a person who has not experienced such a deep low.

Now I'm not entirely sure if we're talking crosswind of each other but thought I'd better clarify my viewpoint in case not.