Humans aren’t designed to be happy – so stop trying

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To me happiness is a mood not a state that comes from fulfilling certain criteria. It is looking at the world with a positive spin and is entirely achievable but is also transient and not something you can hang on to. It comes and goes as your blood chemistry and the weather changes. Money doesn't buy it and life circumstances don't dictate it. You can take steps towards it but you can't guarantee it.

If you feed your gut bacteria properly, get enough daylight and move enough you will find it more easily as you will if you can see the glass as half full rather than half empty. But you can't grasp it and hold onto it and expect it to behave itself. The tighter you hold it the faster it will run away.

It has been a struggle to learn how but I feel I can invite happiness into my life quite successfully these days. I still struggle with bouts of anxiety and my life situation is far from ideal and it is seemingly beyond my capability to fix it but I can be and often am happy despite that.

I don't believe happiness is a thing you can acquire - that just reduces it to the status of a product in an already over commoditized world. I'd say happiness is more the absence of things such as pain, anguish, discomfort, anxiety, worry etc. When those things and others are removed or reduced you can start to feel better. I was very unhappy as a child because I had very bad parents. Once I was away from them I started to improve. I then had a poor marriage, and again once away from it I felt better. For the past 32 years I have been married to someone else and am much happier because all those negative things are largely absent. When I retired from work I felt better because I was free of wage labour (software engineer), and now I feel better. So perhaps rather than worrying about somehow getting happiness you should concentrate on removing the bad things in your life and happiness might just happen on its own.

But I agree with the title of the post. Human life was an accident of evolution (in my view) and so logically it can't be possible that we are designed to be happy, and indeed, why is there any reason why we should be? Emerson said the following, although he was probably going against the Constitution

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

The problem with believing that we are deserving of happiness, believing that we are entitled to it, is that we're not entitled to or automatically deserving of anything in this life.
If the notion of entitlement/deserving was achievable then there wouldn't be poverty in the world.

Humans weren't designed to be anything.

We evolved to be adaptable, to be able to survive and breed in a wide variety of environments. Which we have done very successfully, too successfully for either our own good or for the good of the rest of the planet.

I've found that a healthy cynicism can yield something like happiness!

"To everything there is a season."

For a long time, stick-up-their-butt Christians had convinced themselves that life-long, deep suffering was a mandatory part of life and that the only place and time for happiness was after death, in heaven--if you were among the lucky ones who pleased an impulsive god and repented enough. In the minds of some, the ONLY way to heaven was through absolute misery. I'll pass.

Eastern religions have long taught that happiness is a state of mind that can be achieved deliberately, but that other states of mind are just as valid and natural. I'm not going to spend hours meditating just to seek an elusive state of pure joy, but otherwise, the acceptance of a full variety of experiences and the emotions that may accompany them makes a lot of sense to me--even if it's not always easy to do.

My husband's great aunt Ethel who lived until she was ninety-something, when asked, "How are you?" would usually respond, "Well....I'm still alive!"

I agree that real happiness is usually something that comes from within, that external sources of pleasure are over-hyped in our consumerist culture, and that brief bouts of moderately "negative" emotions can be fulfilling in their own odd way--even if it only means that I feel better when I've come out the other side. For me, contentment is what I seek. Happiness is gravy!

"Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied." (John Stuart Mill)

I should consider Catholicism a fine investment. The sorts of Christianity you're complaining (and rightly) about, are heresies--for starters, the Puritan religion was a reactionary movement. Also, Jansenism (a Catholic heresy based in the old monastery of Port Royal, France) thought this way. Catharists AKA Albigensians tended to believe that no one who was "pure" could be glad, and then their "believers" who were not "pure" lived an orgy until they got tired and became "pure." Or died. Whichever was first.

Unfortunately, reading about Christianity today usually results in a steady diet of agendas, fraud, and heresy. Which is why I am Catholic and am very suspicious of anything that comes out in print, even from the Pope himself. A healthy cynicism is nothing like true happiness--but it sure helps!

What even is happy? I don't even know anymore, its a temporary state that sometimes you have in your life and it never lasts....so kind of useless after all.

I think that happiness is a choice. A person can choose to be happy, or else they can choose to be miserable. I choose to be happy.

Happiness...
It's just another 'color' to me, really. Maybe I do enjoy it, maybe I don't yet I cannot help but.

To me, no emotions stays dominant.
And no, happiness isn't really truly a form of pure bliss like many imagined nor lack of negative emotions and dissatisfaction.


The closest thing I've felt as pure bliss? Nothing.
Literal nothingness, not 'I-closed-my-eyes-and-see-nothing' that's just blocked light from the eyes. It's 'there-was-no-time-no-space-no-body-no-earthly-feelings-nothing'.
The 'color' of this 'mood' (if that even counts as a mood like at ALL) is incomprehensible, as opposed to 'bright', 'loud', 'warm', 'calm', etc... This is not the same as 'happiness' or 'joy' -- they're both meaningless in truth, but this is what most people expects to feel what happiness is.

I won't be surprised if this is the sensation of what some who is close to death or dying had felt. And no, I never had any near-death experiences myself, it's just something I simply stumbled in accident.

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a melancholy man named abe lincoln once said, "a person's about as happy as they make up their mind to be." but apparently his statement was an expression of aspiration and not a de facto thing, as he took the then current "treatment" of mercury [in pills called "blue mass"] in order to moderate his black moods [which didn't work, he said the pills made him "cross"]. i believe the ultimate happiness is available only in heaven, totally free of earthly wants and demands. i also believe this is a "freebie," available to all who put up with life for either a lifetime or a fortnight or even a few moments.

If our only goal is to reproduce, then that means that I am a huge failure, as well as every other woman who hasn't squeezed a screaming goblin out of her crotch, no matter what other goals I've accomplished or talents I have.

Now I really am unhappy.

How do you know if your really happy or just relieved

Even the richest of humans have something to complain or worry about.
And a person worrying about something like "will I get the flu during my vacation?" is probably what a person battling cancer wishes they could only worry about. But because the first person isn't suffering from any illness, they will try to nitpick on the biggest thing they can think of to stress about.
It's called taking life for granted. We all do it because we are emotional creatures that don't just live in the present like animals do. We worry about the past and the future, moreso than the present.

^ Apparently someone had a bumper sticker that said, "vaccinate your crotch goblins", and I find that phrase for infants and children amusing.