“I think our genetic makeup makes us miserable. We evolved to be miserable.” — George Loewenstein
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yeah, yeah. We’ve all heard that one before. When Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he remixed Locke’s “life, liberty and estate,” replacing the idea of property with happiness. As we know from last week’s conversation with the historian Joshua Specht, America’s age-old love affair with real estate has been perpetually mortgaged. And our guest today, the behavioral economist George Loewenstein, who happens — probably not coincidentally — to be the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud, offers a similar warning about the ideal of happiness.
Happiness’ antonym is misery. In his new book The Opposite of Happiness, Loewenstein explains that it’s misery, and not happiness, which has simultaneously broken humans and built humankind. We evolved to be miserable, the behavioral economist argues, explaining that English has four times as many words for negative emotions as for positive ones. The depths we can sink to are incomparably deeper and more interesting than the heights we can reach, Freud’s great-grandson reassures us. Happiness is a Disneyfied mush while misery is infinitely variegated, he tells us, building a twelve-part taxonomy from envy and regret to loneliness and anxiety. The behavioral economist even invents a “Misery Survey” and cites an experiment he conducted with married couples which found that doubling their sexual frequency left them less happy.
So much for sex. Loewenstein spent a lifetime escaping Freud and has ended up desexualizing him for modern America. I’ve always found behavioral economics to be a particularly miserable subject (ideology dressed up as science). But maybe that’s the point. Life, liberty and the pursuit of misery. A Loewensteinian redraft of the Declaration, anyone?
Five Takeaways
• We Evolved to Be Miserable. Four times as many words for negative emotions; depths far deeper than the heights. Happiness is a mush; misery is infinitely variegated — twelve kinds in the book.
• Envy Is Local. We envy the people just ahead of us — for a behavioral economist, that’s Kahneman, Tversky and Thaler. Then we feel guilty about the envy: misery about misery.
• The Freud Inheritance. He spent a career escaping his great-grandfather and ended up reinventing him. His mother fled the Nazis by bicycle; Edward Bernays paid for her college.
• The Missing Motive. Self-esteem is probably the main driver of human behavior — and nearly absent from economics. And couples told to have more sex ended up less happy.
• The Happiness Industry. Attention merchants that don’t give a fig about your well-being, advertising that sells the next car, and a generation for whom anxiety and depression have merged.
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.
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Buy The Opposite of Happiness: harpercollins.com
Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction: a behavioral economist on misery
00:02:06 Is misery our natural condition?
00:02:56 Novelists versus the happiness books
00:04:16 Freud’s great-grandson
00:05:38 Freud, thanatos and misery
00:06:29 Rousseau: born happy?
00:06:59 We evolved to be miserable
00:08:19 Physical misery versus psychic misery
00:09:46 Is it okay to be miserable?
00:10:01 Meta-emotions: guilty about envy
00:11:48 Does he envy Kahneman?
00:14:15 First-world problems?
00:16:11 Is happiness an American invention?
00:17:31 Has he had a happy life?
00:18:20 Twelve miseries and the Misery Survey
00:21:03 Confession, the couch and therapy
00:21:55 Religion: solace or source of misery?
00:23:52 Advertising, Edward Bernays and a family history
00:25:57 A therapeutic generation
00:27:35 Does therapy normalize unhappiness?
00:29:10 Bentham: can we quantify misery?
00:30:01 Adam Smith and The Theory of Moral Sentiments
00:31:50 Self-esteem, the missing motive in economics
00:32:24 The Adam Smith problem — and Hume
00:34:41 It’s On You: corporations and behavioral science
00:36:47 Happiness as a commodity
00:38:18 Does money make us happy?
00:39:30 The sex experiment
00:41:55 Trump, narcissism and insecurity
00:43:07 Nietzsche and the moustache