When We're Happy, We Actively Sabotage Our Good Moods With Grim Tasks (arstechnica.com)

Beth Mole, writing for Ars Technica: Always keeping your house tidy and spotless may earn you the label of "neat freak" -- but "super happy" may be a more accurate tag. When people voluntarily take on unpleasant tasks such as housework, they tend to be in particularly happy states, according to a new study on hedonism. The finding challenges an old prediction by some researchers that humans can be constant pleasure-seekers. Instead, the new study suggests we might seek out fun, uplifting activities mainly when we're in bad or down moods. But when we're on the up, we're more likely to go for the dull and dreary assignments. This finding of "flexible hedonism," reported this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may seem counterintuitive because it suggests we sabotage our own high spirits. But it hints at the idea that humans tend to make sensible short-term trade-offs on happiness for long-term gains. "Although our data cannot directly tell us whether regularly engaging in unpleasant activities predicts psychological and social adjustment five or 10 years down the line, a large body of work has consistently demonstrated the importance of sleeping, employment, and living in a reasonably clean and organized home on mental and physical health," according to the study authors, led by Maxime Taquet of Harvard and Jordi Quoidbach of the University Pompeu Fabra in Spain.

Comments

When we're not depressed, we get shit done

[drinkypoo]

This just in, shocking news, film at eleven.

Not sought out because they're "grim"

[Pfhorrest]

When I am comfortable and without external pressures for a while, two things happen. One, I get bored and want to do something. Two, I'm full of positive energy and want to apply that to making something somewhere better. So I start to do things, like clean house, or work on neglected projects, or sometimes starting a new project. I'm not seeking out "grim" things to spoil my good mood. I'm seeking out good things, things that I want to have done, that I've finally got the emotional energy to do.

This result is like saying "study finds that when people have too much money, they seek to get rid of it by spending it on things, contradicting assumptions that people generally want to have more money". No, of course not. They've just finally got enough money that they can spend it on things they want to. They still want more money in the future, so that they can use it to buy other things.

Likewise, happy people doing "grim" tasks aren't trying to get rid of their "excess" happiness, they've just finally got the emotional energy to spend doing things. They still want more happiness, so they can spend that emotional energy doing more things.

It's not sabotage

[nine-times]

It's a bit silly to say that people are sabotaging their own good mood. I think it instead suggests an alternate viewpoint: What we call "happiness" is not simply an end-goal, but also a resource. When we lack it, we conserve it and try to generate more. When we have enough, we expend the resource to accomplish other goals.

This in turn suggests some other ideas that some of us may have already suspected. Hedonists may be extremely unhappy people. Various behaviors that can be described as "addiction to pleasure-seeking" may be a response to suffering some kind of happiness deficiency. Depression may make people unproductive. People who are a mess may benefit from receiving some kind of help, rather than piling on various kinds of punishments.

Re:It's not sabotage

[nine-times]

Yes, my immediate thought when reading this:

Specifically, people were more likely to engage in mood-increasing activities (e.g., play sports) when they felt bad, and to engage in useful but mood-decreasing activities (e.g., housework) when they felt good.

is that it makes perfect sense if you think of happiness not as "something that must be maximized at every moment," but a resource that needs to be rationed or even grown when it's in short supply, but can be expended more freely when it's available. People engage in mood-expending activities when they have extra "mood" to expend.

However, I still think that this misses my point a bit when it says, "They may explain how humans overcome the allure of short-term gains in happiness to maximize long-term welfare." The implication there, it seems to me, is that maximizing hedonism is still the end-goal, but that it's a simple trade-off between short-term happiness and long-term. I don't want to take much time in arguing the point right now, but I suspect it's not that simple. After a lot of thought, I've ended up thinking of the emotion "happiness" as more of a expression of something deeper that we don't quite have a word for, and that deeper thing is what we're all really after.

To keep things simpler, I might instead say it this way: There are different kinds of happiness. One is simple pleasure-seeking and hedonism, another is a more deep-souled immediate sense of "joy" that goes beyond normal pleasure, and yet another is something more like a longer lasting "overall contentment and satisfaction". So anyway, what I suspect this research is really showing is that... well... Imagine you're playing a RPG, and the goal is to build a magic sword that lets you save the kingdom. You have a stamina bar, and when it runs out, you can't do very much. You can't run, you can't fight, you can't craft. The point of the game isn't to keep the stamina bar full, or even to keep it as high as possible as much as possible. It's just a means to an end.

So I would argue that what we normally call "happiness" as an immediate emotional state is like that stamina bar. When your mood is low, you're not very functional, so we find ways to boost it by pleasure seeking. When it's high, we make use of it. But what you're after is not maximizing that immediate emotional state of "happiness". That's just what you do when you don't have enough. I believe our willingness to expend that resource is not necessarily a sign that we are engaging in long-term planning to maximize happiness, but instead a sign that there is some other larger thing, the equivalent of "building a magic sword and saving the kingdom", that we are willing to expend that resource to gain.

I think I have an idea of what that thing is, but it's hard to describe succinctly in a Slashdot post.