I took a rescue Patterjack puppy some months ago. Yesterday I was walking her, and I noticed how happy she was. She just needed some grass to run on, a wooden stick, and possibly a friend to play with, to be as happy as she possibly could. I have never seen a human as happy as her.
I was wondering whether there is something flawed in human nature, maybe some hidden mechanism that keeps us from experiencing true happiness. Maybe it is what drove us to develop technology and civilization: maybe there was a gang of cavemen finding themselves deeply unhappy with their lot, and deciding to build an first a town, then a city, then an empire, in the hope of getting rid of their unhappiness. Maybe there were other tribes that were happy with their simple life, and went butchered and enslaved by their chronically unhappy neighbours.
I have seen true happiness, and it was in the eyes of a Jack Russell!
We mistake the innumerable constantly changing factors that make up phenomena, mental and physical, for something unchanging and real, thus when it inevitably changes we suffer due to our clinging to the ephemeral as solid.
Sorry for not contributing to the philosophical part, but I wanted to chip in and say that Jack Russells are brilliant. In fact, dogs are generally. Reposting for relevance:
If the dogs across the street, who go mental and bark for hours if their owners are out, are anything to go by they're certainly not happy all of the time. Dogs are probably bipolar.
When it comes to human happiness I think a lot of people are very time poor and simply don't get the opportunity to do what they want. If I want to meet up with my closest friends then we've got to try and schedule a weekend where we're all free, which might be once every two or three weeks. Kids, bastard kids. Don't have kids until you're at least in your thirties and have had the opportunity to develop and function as an independent adult. Or don't even have kids at all, you'll never have free time again just snatched moments now and then. A lot of lads don't develop a hobby because they'll spend their formative years playing video games, which they'll either grow bored of or not have the time to properly play anymore. There's the societal pressure to grind for a house and all sorts of shit as soon as possible rather than enjoying life. Grind and consume. Just fuck it off and travel for a bit. Learn to cook. Go fucking outside. Laugh. Just think fucking twice about having kids.
>>450720 >If the dogs across the street, who go mental and bark for hours if their owners are out, are anything to go by they're certainly not happy all of the time.
Dogs are social creatures, if they're alone they're unhappy. Nothing to do with being bipolar.
Dogs bred to be guard dogs or sheep dogs are sort of an exception as long as they're trained well.
>>450720 >If the dogs across the street, who go mental and bark for hours if their owners are out, are anything to go by they're certainly not happy all of the time.
Dogs are social creatures, if they're alone they're unhappy. Nothing to do with being bipolar.
Dogs bred to be guard dogs or sheep dogs are sort of an exception as long as they're trained well.
>>450720 >If the dogs across the street, who go mental and bark for hours if their owners are out, are anything to go by they're certainly not happy all of the time.
Dogs are social creatures, if they're alone they're unhappy. Nothing to do with being bipolar.
Dogs bred to be guard dogs or sheep dogs are sort of an exception as long as they're trained well.
>>450726 I really hate Brian sometimes, I didn't even click submit, I was alt-tabbing between different windows and ended up back on the post box somehow.
>>450720 >If the dogs across the street, who go mental and bark for hours if their owners are out, are anything to go by they're certainly not happy all of the time.
Dogs are social creatures, if they're alone they're unhappy. Nothing to do with being bipolar.
Dogs bred to be guard dogs or sheep dogs are sort of an exception as long as they're trained well
>>450716 We're self aware and have complex problem solving skills, this is the burden of knowledge that is described in the bible when Eve convinces Adam to try the apple. Even when they were writing the Torah, people were attempting to understand the void we all seek to fill because we know too much to truly be happy.
That is why thick people are happier, generally. However, freedom + time makes me about as happy as a Jack Russel. Slightly tipsy, around a fire, with people I like talking or fixing things. I make that exact same face when I correctly pre-torque a brake calliper without hurting myself.
Well do you want to be a dog, with all that comes with or would you rather stay a man?
>>450719 I prefer a golden retriever, although I wonder if at that point you might as well just make a child.
>>450720 My gripe is that our time poverty is ironically intrinsically linked to our attempts to commodify and ultimately save time. It's not kids that ruin the fun, it's the fact that rather than making a proper meal and taking the time to enjoy it you have people banging a meal prep in the microwave and then taking that time to eat it at the desk so they can catch up on work. In another example we go online to find socks thinking it will be easier and then spend 2 hours at it.
Like >>450730 I don't think it's actually too hard to be happy, it's just that we're very bad it for a host of reasons from simple desire to maintain our independence to a low-tolerance for delayed gratification.
Nah. Thick people are happier in some moments because they have no time horizon but you're looking at the thick in a noble savage sense if you think there isn't real human suffering among the mentally deficient - just look at how angry they get.
I concur, but I must add that a JR is a pain in the neck. She needs at least two miles walking and playing, or she will get morose and diabetic. She suffers from separation anxiety. She has a strong prey drive and she will try to catch and kill anything smaller than her. It's a challenging dog.
Mentally deficient people tend to suffer from rage attacks. For them, the world is full of strange people doing incomprehensible things and treating them differently. The frustration must be horrible to bear. A dog has no such qualms, he will just wait until you start doing things that actually make sense to him.
>>450746 Not him but you're talking out your arse when it comes to family and happiness. I get that your bumsore your mates don't have time for you but sitting in an empty house in your 50s with unlimited free time doesn't sound like a happy existence at all to me. It's the kind of nonsense calculation that precisely end up with people being miserable.
>>450743 >Mentally deficient people tend to suffer from rage attacks. For them, the world is full of strange people doing incomprehensible things and treating them differently. The frustration must be horrible to bear. A dog has no such qualms, he will just wait until you start doing things that actually make sense to him.
Not ThatLad, but maybe dogs actually do have these qualms, since there are instances of them doing all such as mauling infants to death.
I keep telling you lads. Hedonic treadmill. It's a real thing and if you get your noggin round it it explains an awful lot about our collective bipolarity.
Evolutionarily speaking, we are a goal oriented social species. We are hard wired to want to always be working on something, we need to make progress to be satisfied. Because throughout our history, that has been the direct and fundamental source of our survival and success.
The work is never done- When you bring home a mammoth you just hunted with the other cave-lads, you know the meat on it isn't going to last forever. You are biologically compelled to start making mental preparation for the next big hunt, start thinking about the change of the seasons might affect your prospects, and whether Big Ug and the Boyz from the other side of the river is going to try squaring up after he saw your lads dragging home the big kill. Maybe you and the lads should arrange a pre-emptive clubbing for him just to be safe. That kind of thing.
We are at our happiest in the short term when we have a full belly and our feet up on the settee, and the missus next to us, because that means we have successfully fulfilled all of our primary goals. We have food in our belly and there's a good chance we're about to procreate. Abstracting it out, this also goes for having money in the bank, having a nice house, having a new car, whatever- Fundamentally they are all signifiers of security and comfort.
But it never lasts long. We always need to be looking for the next thing, in order to ensure the ability to put our feet up on the telly with a full belly and a missus to spaff up [i]stays[/] secure. We need goals, and a plan to get there.
>>450758 Hobbies would delay and obstruct my progress towards the fundamental goals that everyone should achieve as a bare minimum. My misery is noble and austere and, best of all, free.
I've gone through periods of thinking like this in my life, and the tongue-in-cheek tone of your post suggests you already know this isn't an ideal approach.
I understand that there are times you just have to gut things through and do long periods of tough work, just make sure you have a plan to ensure that it's temporary. Otherwise something will break, physically or mentally. It is not possible to live in an unbalanced way for very long. I'm just about psychologically recovering after a year of spending virtually no money and dedicating all my waking hours to work.
When you do have the space to recover, it helped me a lot to change my environment for a bit. It wasn't quite a holiday, but I just spontaneously booked a few weeks out in the country by myself. Can't put in words how much it helped.
>Evolutionarily speaking, we are a goal oriented social species. We are hard wired to want to always be working on something, we need to make progress to be satisfied. Because throughout our history, that has been the direct and fundamental source of our survival and success.
Every organism will at some point try to spread to new habitats. From bacteria to plants and indeed humans. Even feral cats are forced to claim new habitats all the time because in some ways they're just as territorial as us humans and will not be tolerated in another cat's territory that was there first.
That said, of course no species makes as much of a big deal of it as we do. Our instinct to explore new habitats and constantly better ourselves and find out new things about the world around us has not only helped us propagate profusely, but has also given rise to things like science and technology. And thus, social evolution has long superseded biological evolution. As a species, we've made leaps and bounds in the last 300 years that are far from explainable through genetic mutation.
What's interesting is that following the "Out of Africa" hypothesis, almost all humans outside Western sub-Saharan Africa who are alive today are descended from a line of homo sapiens sapiens who left East Africa around 70,000 years ago, probably as a result of climate change, that being the beginning of the last Ice Age which saw much drier conditions in Africa and therefore diminishing natural resources. It could be that some of those human traits were honed as a result of having to cope with adverse conditions and scarce resources. While it is assumed by some that human populations in western Africa were under no pressure to leave their surroundings and spread to other habitats because their natural environment was much more plentiful.
