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Why didn't we evolve to feel awesome all the time?

Quite a few people here have got the right answer I think. Euphoria and happines are simply counter-productive to our genes, and so the mental state we have formed now is simply the most adaptive and "useful" to our genes in order to procreate. If you're content and happy all of the time, then you wouldn't have the drive to seek out food and mate and pass on our genes, the mindset that we think of as normal now is merely what was most adaptive for our ancestors.

I disagree with those who say that if you were euphoric all of the time then you would no longer feel euphoric and it would become normal. As the outside said, depressed people don't need to feel happy to know that they are depressed. Another point against this is direct electrical stimulation of dopamine production - "wireheading". There is no tolerance built to this, it is just as rewarding the first time you do it as the thousandth time you do it. I think we merely believe that euphoria is transient because our entire biology is wired towards making us not too happy or too sad for too long, as that is counterproductive to passing on our genes.

An interesting webstie is The Hedonistic Revolution, which predicts that in the future we will be genetically modified to feel states of euphoria and happiness which totally transcend any drug experience that we have now. It's pretty interesting, and talks about most of the issues raised in this thread.
 
the outsider said:
I'm not sure I believe this - I mean it's not like depressed people need intermittent bouts of happiness to remind them how depressed they are. I tend to think of mental states as absolutes not relatives (or at least, relative to an absolute).
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i dont agree with this. Ive personally experienced a bout of hapiness make me realize how unhappy i had been normally. I dont think that im clinically depressed, but there have been times where ive been in a rut for a while and gotten used to it to the point i didnt realize it until something came along and made me really happy.

I do agree that feeling great all the time would make us useless from an evolution/survival standpoint. We do need good and bad feelings to motivate us.
 
L O V E L I F E said:
I think some people here are making this common mistake:

PLEASURE is NOT the same thing as HAPPINESS.

In fact, I think it's VERY important for each of us to learn to distinguish each of them from the other.
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Not only that, but contentment is not the same thing as happiness. It's important to distinguish between these two also, in my opinion.
 
the way you see it

Is relative to all experiences you've had alone or with others....lately when I spend time with certain new people in my life I get euphoric/nostalgic flashes of a simpler time.....I see the same visions on certain roads that i ride on to this day versus being a child....These experiences make me feel absolutely wonderful.....can anyone relate to me?
 
Love (aka rolling ;) ) is our baseline it's just clouded by all the other mental noise. C'mon now you told me this yourself lol.

We can also stop identifying with our thoughts/feelings so that it doesn't really matter what we feel/think because we don't confuse these with who we are. I don't think peace of mind comes from controlling thought/emotion but more from experiencing them differently. Even if we are able to decide how we feel 24 hours a day, we are still not "free" if we NEED to feel that way. If we can experience any thought and emotion but still be content, then we are free :)
 
The fact that we didn't evolve in such a way should say something about the use of drugs and about the importance of total euphoria and excitement.

L2R said:
i know of some philosophers who would disagree. ;)
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Yea but that's what philosophers are supposed to do, even if it's just for the exercise.
 
I do feel awesome all the time, at what point do you think you dropped off the evolutionary tree ?
 
Legerity said:
Love (aka rolling ;) ) is our baseline it's just clouded by all the other mental noise. C'mon now you told me this yourself lol.
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lol ah believe me i know.. i just thought it would be fun to see what others thought. :) thats why i kind of left it opened and didnt really distinguish between pleasure and happiness, as lovelife pointed out.. i actually agree with a lot of the things people have said here but i was kind leaning towards looking at things more from an evolutionary standpoint.. you know, why our brains arent hardwired to be more sensitive to pleasure and more resilient to pain.
 
I don't buy that feeling awesome is necessarily temporary, that we couldn't have been designed to feel awesome all the time. Particular states of mind are only temporary because the brain automatically modulates it's own behavior. I think it's obviously an adaptation, the only question is, "why?"
 
you are basing this question on the assumption that we have stopped evolving, who knows where we will end up, maybe the evolution process will include a period of being happy all the time, maybe once we were happy all the time and we have evolved past that point now.
 
Should we really be happy all the time though? i think it would be kind of annoying, could even become like some drugged up zombie state, smiling all the time... everyone would end up being retards. I think pain keeps you mentally alive, reminds you that your real, keeps you from taking things for granted especially the people in your life, the fact that you even have people in your life. If you felt good all the time everything would eventually become meaningless and superficial, reminds me of coke addiction.
 
Because if we did, we'd be as useful as Lotus-Eaters.
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This.

And yeah its probably been said already but if we felt awesome all the time we would probably be extinct by now. We are essentially programmed to feel good after having accomplished something. If this feeling was permanent than why bother doing anything at all. Shit why build a house when I can stand in the snow and freeze to death but still feel awesome while freezing?
 
freddy47 said:
This.

And yeah its probably been said already but if we felt awesome all the time we would probably be extinct by now. We are essentially programmed to feel good after having accomplished something. If this feeling was permanent than why bother doing anything at all. Shit why build a house when I can stand in the snow and freeze to death but still feel awesome while freezing?
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End of thread
 
We're evolving this way currently.
Prior, it's been all about getting the human animal where it's at.
 
twentysix said:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en...p.,cf.osb&fp=f2c1d4cb071b42e5&biw=793&bih=334
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torus.jpg

I don't know why, but this shape actually makes me feel pretty awesome!
 
I think we do evolve to feel awesome. But just like polarities, we need the opposite for the opposite. I'm not sure if we'll continue into the extremes, not balancing but experiencing a sort of bi-polar disorder, or we will actually reach a state of ecstasy, perhaps, when the "cycler" (butterfly wings) /abstract association gets going fast enough. Maybe on levels, we are meant to always feel awesome, but we haven't progressed to those levels, spiritually. Maybe we need to pass through some worse times to "cover" that territory, to build up to it, so at that point it's pretty much impossible not to feel aweasome all of the time, or nothing? Space is pretty vacant, and there's a lot of territory to cover. Perhaps the road may be long, but maybe not as "big" as the entire universe, for us (on levels). Maybe, maybe...
 
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