Our culture confaltes happiness with pleasure
As a philosophical concept, happiness has a long history and has been tangled up with the history of society for as long as there has been society. Happiness consists of a grab bag of definitions that have changed and morphed over time. The root of the word, “hap,” means luck. And we see this etymological root in other words relating to chance occurrence: for instance, happenstance or perhaps. Early societies weren’t very happy; after all, with famine, plague, and war, they had a lot to be unhappy about. Happiness was chance, fleeting, and seemed to alight on only a select few in any given society.
If you google “happiness” today, you get “pleasure, joy, exhilaration, bliss, contentedness, delight, enjoyment, satisfaction, contentment, felicity.” Note the conflation of the concept of pleasure with the concept of happiness in this definition. Our current collective wisdom does not distinguish between reward and contentment at the etymological level, and fails to acknowledge the personal and societal consequences of mistaking one for the other at the biochemical level. And there are consequences, to be sure. This confusion is indeed of great benefit to corporations, as it is the basis for many of today’s most successful marketing strategies. To bypass this confusion, i personally give precise definitions for pleasure and happiness.
References
- Lustig, H., Robert. (2017). The Hacking of the American Mind Chapter 1. The Garden of Earthly Delights (Location 280). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.
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Type:🔴 Tags: Psychology Status:☀️