Late Friday Drunkblogging

Okay, it's not really that late (11:30), and I'm not really that drunk (barely tipsy, at best), but what the hell? I'm not big into the whole drunk dialing thing, and I don't have anyone I would call right now anyway, so instead I will leave a message for you, Faithful Reader. I hope I don't embarrass myself too badly with it.

I am also going to be splitting with tradition. Normally, I try to discuss some current event, and use it as a springboard for explicating my views on a subject. But after perusing the typical places I would find info about such events, I am uninspired. So I am going to try to improvise here, in the style of the great John Coltrane, albeit with words instead of notes, and regarding human happiness rather than, well, whatever the hell it was Coltrane played about.

So I've mentioned before in this space my idea that 'there is no one right way for people to live.' As with so many of my ideas, I blatantly stole this one from Daniel Quinn, whose work I acknowledge here (and, again, encourage you to check out Ishmael if you haven't by now.) But what, exactly does this mean?

Like any halfway-decent life philosophy, this one applies, more or less strongly, to a hundred, or a hundred hundred, different questions. Tonight's topic is: happiness.

Yes, I know, I'm thinking very small, just writing about happiness. Why not try something interesting, or important?

I will try to keep this brief-ish, although I'll almost undoubtedly fail. But hey; nobody's forcing you to read this, so feel free to give up anytime.

So yes, happiness. What is it, exactly, that makes us happy? Well, of course, there is a lot of psychological research into this sort of question. Which is a good thing, for the most part. Although I think that it is definitely possible to overthink this sort of issue, it's also a good thing to have some research that actually backs up the story you are telling.

And what is that story? Well, unsurprisingly to those who know me well, it starts with evolution and natural selection. Honestly, if you have doubts about whether or not human beings evolved, via the process of natural selection, to their current state, then you are hopeless and I have absolutely nothing to say to you on this front. Please return tomorrow for more thoughts about current movies, or something more in your intellectual wheelhouse.

So, human beings evolved. And, being as they were subject to evolutionary pressures, those that evolved to succeed in the environment they lived in did better. They reproduced more successfully, had more children, and those children, who shared many traits with their parents, eventually grew to take over, or rather to become, the community. Now what were those traits? In the case of cheetahs, we are not surprised to learn that they might have selection pressure to become faster, quicker, more stealthy. In the case of people, bigger and stronger is certainly good. But people are quite unique, apparently, in the vast selection pressure that intelligence was under. So, under the influence of this pressure, we got smarter.

Getting smarter allowed us all sorts of advantages. We learned how to hunt in packs. But not just by wandering around the woods and waiting to find prey. We learned how to track. We learned how to predict that when the rains came, the buffalo would be here. And when the grass bloomed, they would be over there. And, most importantly, we learned how to outsmart each other. None of this is particularly controversial in biological circles.

An idea which is almost certainly considered less conventional wisdom is the idea that natural selection also shaped us to be happy. I can't prove this, but it certainly seems to me that if you take two people, who are in all ways identical, only you change one such that the life he is living makes him happy, and satisfied, and you leave the other such that he feels no particular attachment to his life at all, that the first will be more successful in his life than the other. It just stands to make sense, to me. But, that said, I don't have the wherewithal to prove this piece of the theory, if it even is proveable.

However, if you'll accept that bit, I think the rest follows pretty well. So, given that we've been human beings (Homo Sapiens, that is) for roughly 200,000 years, and post-agricultural revolution for only 10,000, and post-industrial revolution for only 200, it kind of goes without saying that we spent much more time evolving to be happy in the pre-agricultural revolution lifestyle than we did to be happy the way we live now.

But what does this mean? I don't think that there's necessarily anything automatically better about the hunting+gathering lifestyle, although I will posit that it's not for no reason that most of us are just happy when we're on a walk in the woods. But one feature of the tribal lifestyle which I think is important is the feeling of community. Tribes exist on a very different plane from our modern society. One feature, the one which is most lacking in our modern-day society, is the feeling of belonging. The way that the tribe exists only for its members; the tribe, fundamentally, is the members.

This is very different from a modern corporation, say, which of course has employees, but is not of them. The corporation exists independent of the employees, and only partakes of them as much as it needs to to get its function done, which is generally the production of some service or good. The tribe, on the other hand, exists solely the help its members succeed and survive. It produces goods and services, but only as much as are needed by the tribe's members.

More than anything else, I think that we humans miss that feeling of connection. In a large way, it defines us. Makes us who we are, allows us to be more than we are. More than big TV's, or fast cars, or exotic vacations, I think that feeling connected to people, like you are part of a community that is larger than yourself, is what allows us to be really and truly happy. Unlike the TV, or the vacation, or an expensive meal, that connection is a gift that continues with time, grows deeper and better and richer, rather than depreciating with age.

And how do we get there, Faithful Reader? Well, unfortunately, not tonight. I see that I, as predicted, shattered through my goal of being brief-ish. Hopefully you can forgive this slight. For now, call your best friend. Say hi. Reconnect. Notice that, after just 30 minutes of talking, you feel better about yourself and your life than you did previously. Imagine what it would be like if every day were like that?