Made to Suffer?

One interesting way to look at happiness and suffering is from the perspective of evolutionary design. Positive and negative emotions (as well as their more direct physical counterparts, pleasure and pain) were nature's way of ensuring that an organism avoided situations that would lead to its untimely death, and pursued things that would help it prosper. Severe heat is painful so that we avoid it (and avoid injury which could lead to death). Accomplishment feels good because doing things like building houses or harvesting crops helped us weather the uncertainties that nature brought. Rejection feels horrible, because we needed to learn to avoid things that made others expel us from social groups critical to our survival.

The key to the efficacy of the "driving" emotions in guaranteeing our survival is that they feel absolutely real. We must suffer from pain. We must suffer when we don't achieve, or when we fail to accumulate wealth. If we didn't, we wouldn't have avoided the situations that result in death when we were evolving in the wild, and our species wouldn't have made it to today.

However, to go with "what feels natural" (i.e., responding directly to the impulses our bodies and minds produce) is actually the path to continual dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction is evolution's crude method of making sure your genes make it to the next generation. It keeps us striving for the things that matter for survival of the species (food, wealth, sex, etc.), but not for the things that matter for our own happiness (contentment, peace, etc.). As a pawn in the game of species-level survival, evolution requires you to be permanently unsatisfied.

However, things are different in the context of modern civilization -- survival in the developed world is guaranteed until old age. We no longer need our emotions to drive us to do what we must to survive. Using logic and science, we have built incredible systems to support our survival. Yet, we are still driven by an unconscious system of emotions that push and pull us uncontrollably.

Powerful emotional drive is an old-fashioned machine that we no longer need for survival. It's like a polluting coal-fired power plant -- big, powerful, inefficient, and causing more harm than we can afford.

We need to figure out a better way to live our lives. We need a way to reduce the strength and "real-ness" of those powerful drives. Surprisingly, one has existed for thousands of years. It involves taking the time to understand the way our minds work, developing the ability to observe our thoughts and emotions, and consciously making an effort to change our minds for the better.

If it means transformation of your life, and experiencing profound happiness that grows, are you willing to try?