How Evolution Made Us Unhappy

Gustave Flaubert was of the opinion that the three necessary conditions for happiness were stupidity, selfishness, and good health. Of the three, stupidity was the most important, he thought.

Instead, evolution seems to have bequeathed us with intelligence, altruism, and fragile health. It certainly prioritised the development of a big frontal lobe in our brain (which gives us excellent executive and analytical skills) over a natural ability to be happy. This tells us a lot about Nature’s priorities.

Nature doesn’t select the happiest individuals, but the fittest, in an evolutionary process that highlights fear and discourages contentment. Our chronically unhappy species is the product of such a process.

Not that evolution and natural selection have any particular plans. Evolution doesn’t want to go anywhere. It certainly doesn’t want to go anywhere better. If you are hoping that evolution will eventually weed out our chronic dissatisfaction and anxieties and make, if not us, at least our distant descendants happier, well, that’s likely not going to happen, as there is no drive or reason in Nature to pursue that particular project.

In the context of natural selection, the individual doesn’t really matter very much. Only the species matters. That’s why we still have terrible teeth and weak coronary arteries. These “design” defects can be awful drawbacks for a given person, but teeth and hearts tend to give us serious problems only after we have reproduced and, by then, our duty to the species has already been fulfilled.

Nature doesn't care about the individual.

Source: Rafa Euba

Feeling bad, at least intermittently, is what we do. So much so, that a state of happiness was determined to be clearly pathological by Richard Bentall, a senior lecturer in clinical psychology at Liverpool University, back in 1992. He argued this point in a tongue-in-cheek article, which was nonetheless as logical as it was persuasive.

Happiness, he wrote, meets all reasonable criteria for a psychiatric disorder: “It is statistically abnormal [...] and it is associated with various cognitive abnormalities—in particular, a lack of contact with reality”. He was of the opinion that happiness “should be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type.” The lack of contact with reality is probably what Flaubert was referring to when he said that one needs to be stupid in order to be happy.

Nature appears to want us to get depressed in times of adversity, as if there was an advantage in this. And it seems that there is. Depression helps the depressed individual disengage from hopeless situations in which he or she cannot win. Perseverance has a value, but it also has a significant cost.

If every attempt to woo that elusive potential partner, or get that promotion, results in utter failure, then perhaps the time has come to recalibrate one’s self-esteem downwards (a typical feature of depression) and start feeling depressed. Perhaps I am not, after all, attractive enough to win the affections of a woman like her, or competent enough to go any higher in the occupational ladder.

This recalibration, together with the acceptance that the desired goals will never be achieved, will be painful, but in the long run, the readjusted individual will meet a partner who is in his own sexual attraction league and will function occupationally at his level of competence. The acceptance of one’s appropriate sexual and tribal status will be a good thing for the group and therefore, ultimately, for the individual too, and it will have been achieved through a period of depressed adjustment.

In any case, the ultimate function of all the wonders in the biological world and of the evolutionary process is to maintain life through a cycle of conception and death of countless insignificant individuals, and not, however much we would like to believe it, to ensure that these individuals enjoy their short existence on this planet.

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Excerpted from You Are Not Meant to Be Happy. So Stop Trying!