(Un)Happiness
What is joy, what is sorrow, what is happiness and what is sadness?I have often wondered about how one should actually define these. One way of attempting to do so would be to take a statistical approach. If one were to qualify life as a vector of data points proceeding to termination with time as its scalar value, the direction of variation would be indicated by the primary emotions of joy and sorrow. To keep things simple one would fix an axis that indicates a lack of either, in other words a neutral point of no emotion.
Joy represents those data points along time that rise significantly above the neutral axis and sorrow would naturally represent data points that fall significantly below the axis. This definition seems to fit fairly well even from a metaphorical point of view where the high points in life are those of joy and sorrow has always been taken to mean the lows of one's life.
Armed with these simple definitions, one could define happiness as the outcome ( or trend-line) that emerges when there are a significantly higher proportion of joys in life as compared to the lows. Sadness would conversely represent a higher proportion of sorrows. A truly simplistic representation. Perhaps the one thing that we are ignoring here is a definition for how far above the neutral axis does one have to be to be considered happy. It is quite obvious that a few high points of joy in an otherwise neutral existence would not quite qualify a person as happy. Whereas a few data points south of the axis with an otherwise neutral existence would be enough to bracket a person as unhappy. This exercise seems to yield one interesting result - you have to fairly high above the axis on average to be happy, but if you are even slightly south of the axis you are fairly unhappy. The scale for the vector quantity in this trend does not seem to be linear.
It would be interesting to consider the case where there are an equal number of highs and lows in a sample life. The net outcome perhaps would actually be neutral on a linear scale, but I suspect that in reality it tends to be an unhappy existence. Maybe what we should be looking at is the moving average. If there are more instances of sharp downward movements below the axis and only gradual upward movements, the net outcome is mostly an unhappy individual.
With this theory one could safely come to the conclusion that one needs prolonged periods of gradually increasing joys with a few high points thrown in for good measure to be a truly happy individual overall. On average, I think most people have an equal measure of joys and sorrows as could be expected in any normal distribution of data points. The nature of the sorrow scale, however, makes the net average fall below the axis and perhaps that is why there are (and have been) more unhappy people on this planet throughout human existence. Perhaps it is fitting that this prince of human emotion (sorrow) is also the most widespread and in some ways has been responsible for some of the greatest human achievements.
posted by Yaseen Mehter @ 9:38 AM
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