Life After Full-time Work Blog

Or perhaps both? Because it turns out, they’re not opposites

Intuitively, instinctively, we all feel that we know that happiness and sadness are opposites. “Are you happy or are you sad?” is a question that often occurs. And for those of us who are numerical geeks, we might think in terms of a scale where, at one end, we have “happy” as +1, at the other end we have “sad” as -1, and in the middle, where we feel neither, as 0.

It turns out that we’re wrong. And we always have been, on this subject.

Using the word eudaimonia (which has been loosely translated in all kinds of different ways in English, though it really implies a conscious pursuit of life satisfaction), Aristotle reminded us that we choose happiness for its own sake and never as a means to something else.  That makes happiness as basic as anything could ever be, and so surely increasing happiness is unambiguously a good thing, right?

Well, Aristotle didn’t know that happiness and sadness are not opposites.  More happiness doesn’t automatically mean less sadness, or vice versa.  Happiness and sadness are different.

They have different brain circuits.

Happiness is part of our reward system. The parts of the brain that are involved are the prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens. (Never mind what else they do, it’s just that those are the parts of the brain that get involved.) Sadness uses a different circuit, involving the amygdala (the fight or flight or freeze center), the anterior cingulate cortex (which feels pain) and a different part of the prefrontal cortex. What does all of that techie stuff imply? It implies that happiness and sadness are parts of different brain systems, and so the happiness/sadness thing isn’t a “move in one direction or the other” thing, it’s two different dimensions.

And so, yes, we can feel both feelings together. Gosh, the brain is a complicated place, isn’t it!

So my mathematical brain starting looking for examples or contradictions, since I have always thought in terms of the “+1 to -1” scale, where something either makes us feel happier or it makes us feel sadder, in other words, we move along that straight line.

Can something, for example, make us feel both happier and sadder at the same time? I couldn’t think of anything. So of course (what else can one do these days?) I asked the internet. And it provided me with a couple of examples. One is nostalgia, where we can feel simultaneously happier when reminiscing about the past, and yet also sadder because those moments are gone and won’t return. Or music, which can trigger both emotions at the same time. Or a life transition, feeling happy about what we’ve done and sad or fearful about leaving it behind.

My logical self then asked if something can make us feel simultaneously less happy and less sad. Again, I consulted the internet. This time I encountered stuff involving neurotransmitters rather than stuff I could understand and feel intuitively. But never mind, it still appears that it’s possible.

OK, now I really understand that happiness and sadness aren’t opposites (though I still find it hard to adjust to that sort of thinking.)

And so it’s possible to increase both simultaneously or to reduce both simultaneously.  And in turn that means that, if we are to come up with a single measure that combines happiness as a good thing and sadness as a bad thing, we have to find a way of making a trade-off between the two.

Jeremy Bentham is known as the creator of utility theory, that tries to get around all of this. The way he saw the issue, it was essentially that we don’t know how to measure what makes us happy. He came up with a very pragmatic solution. If we choose to do something, that must mean that it makes us happy. And he called “utility” the measure of the degree of happiness an action induces. He thought that you can attempt to quantify utility by measuring the intensity and duration and other characteristics of an action’s pleasure or pain. But Bentham was ignorant of the non-opposite nature of happiness and sadness. (Nobody knew, until we started to study brain circuits.  Who knows what other transforming discoveries the human connectome project will bring?)  Anyway, Bentham’s concept of utility is the foundation of a lot of the theory of rational decision-making, even though there is no objective way to measure utility; the notion of relative utility still makes it a very useful concept in practice.

As it happens, it isn’t just that happiness and sadness aren’t opposites that makes this so difficult to deal with in practice. Daniel Nettle reminds us (in Happiness: the Science Behind Your Smile) that we do things for reasons other than happiness. Perhaps it’s to avoid greater sadness (choosing the lesser of two evils) or because, despite the sadness it causes, it gives us a feeling that we’re being moral. Whatever – if we choose to do it, it gives us “utility,” whether that utility comes from more happiness or less sadness or greater morality. We have expressed our trade-off via our behavior.

And so, without ever realizing that he was solving this dilemma, Bentham gave us utility as the trade-off function. In turn, this means that increasing utility must trump increasing happiness, because utility is the ultimate yardstick of what we truly cherish.

(Odd, isn’t it, that we don’t try to estimate people’s utility?)

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Takeaway

Happiness and sadness are different, and can exist simultaneously in our brains, rather than being opposite feelings. The way we trade them off is called our “utility” – and there’s no objective way to measure it.

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