Is happiness a choice? (divorce, celebration, crying, adult)

[cb2008]

Originally Posted by reneeh63

This song is just INFECTIOUS - I love it! I'm not a happy person....but this song helps a lot and gives me a bit of hope.

There's been at least one study showing that depressed people have a more accurate view of their circumstances...and I am plagued by depression. So much so that I really fight the "fat dumb and happy" view of life. Sometimes happiness feels delusional to me. It's a tough thing to get my head around - I can be happy for a few moments at a time but I seldom recall in my lifetime being happy for even hours much less days at a time. I seem much more prone to being "objective" which is often a downer!

Love the song.
It may be true that depression gives you a more accurate view of the circumstances, but one's attitude may help in accepting it and move to a place of equanimity if not contentment. Do you think?

[cb2008]

Originally Posted by animalcrazy

Detach But I'm missing your point about that it doesn't have to mean about not caring about others misfortunes

I still don't think happiness is a choice. Yes we all want to be happy and who wouldn't chose it if we could? Life has a way of derailing happiness. Yes you can choose a pathway that will take you back to happiness, sadness is as big a factor. You have no choice but to go through rough patches and hard times. Happiness evaporates rather you want it to or not.

I think of detachment not as being detached from the world and the suffering, but in doing one's part in helping those who need help is doing it as part of your karma! A duty that you owe not only to others but to yourself.

I agree happiness is an inadequate word to describe a feeling of wholeness which is what we seek, or should be.

[oldwoman]

Originally Posted by cb2008

Is neurotic the opposite of extrovert? Isn't that an introvert? The main difference I see between the two is need for people and need for solitude. I am not sure either one is inherently free of feelings of sadness, sense of lack of purpose, and brooding over the past.

Neuroticism is not opposite to anything really. It's a personality trait that measures how much negative emotion a person experiences. Low scorers do not experience a lot of positive emotions .... just not a lot of negative emotions. Extroverts experience more positive emotions, whereas, introverts do not, but introverts are not experiencing a lot of negative emotions either..... it's a bit complicated.

Need for 'alone time' is higher in introverts. Extroverts do tend to be 'freer' of negative emotions than the rest of us.

[ss20ts]

Originally Posted by Phil75230

Happiness is a choice" comes from people who assume people can switch their emotions of and on like a switch. Same assumption about intrusive memories. Frankly, I find this a case of people in more fortunate positions talking down to someone in a less fortunate position, which is unintentionally condescending at best or callously inconsiderate at worst.

If happiness were a choice, then we all should be content even when living in the most extreme poverty. People wouldn't be emotionally dissatisfied at all were they to live in dangerously substandard housing (if not homeless), poor quality nutrition, severely limited mobility or cognitive functions, and so forth. Thus, anybody in this situation should be happy and content if they are in it. No motivation to even seek out help to escape these conditions, let alone exert yourself to climb up from such circumstances, or even exert yourself to avoid such circumstances.

Happiness is a choice. You can choose to sit home right now and be miserable because you're sitting there on the couch by yourself. Or you can choose to sit on the couch and call up your friend Bob and invite him over to shoot the breeze,play cards, watch a movie, etc. You make the choice to be happy that Bob came over or you made the choice to be a mean old cranky pants magoo because Bob came over.....the nerve of him!

There's not flipping your emotions on or off. Personal responsibility. Life is full of choices. Not all of them are fun to make. Some just suck, but if you make the best of them, you're more apt to be happy. If you whine, moan, and carry on like a 3 year old, then you won't be happy. It's all up to you.

many poor people are happy....not because they're poor. Many don't even realize they're poor! I once met a man who lived in a log cabin with dirt floors. He grew up poor. He had no idea he was poor until his family saw JFK on tv telling them they were poor! It totally rocked their world. They went from being happy going folks to depressed folks because they were poor and now knew it. Everyone they knew lived like them....they didn't know anything different until JFK was on tv.

I know many disabled folks including a few completely reliant on others for any kind of help. Most of them are some of the happiest people I know! Why? They're still alive! One lady will tell you, I might be stuck in this wheelchair, but I'm alive and breathing on my own so it's a great day and I'm thankful for it. She's a positive person in general.....she's far from a mean old cranky pants magoo.

[Escort Rider]

Choosing one's attitude under a given set of circumstances is an interesting topic. About four decades ago I read "Man's Search for Meaning" by Victor Frankel. (Did not check that spelling). He had been a psychiatrist, was Jewish, and ended up in one of the Nazi concentration camps. But he survived the war and wrote that book about his experiences.


The lack of freedom in a Nazi concentration camp is as close to absolute as it gets. But Frankel points out that the last remaining freedom, the one that even the Nazis could not take away, is the freedom to choose one's attitude even under those horrendous conditions of hunger and brutality. He noticed that the inmates who gave up hope didn't live very much longer, and he credits his survival to his attitude (plus some luck).


Now please, I am not claiming that Victor Frankel or anyone else was happy there, but the example is as extreme as it's possible to imagine.

[cb2008]

Originally Posted by oldwoman

Neuroticism is not opposite to anything really. It's a personality trait that measures how much negative emotion a person experiences. Low scorers do not experience a lot of positive emotions .... just not a lot of negative emotions. Extroverts experience more positive emotions, whereas, introverts do not, but introverts are not experiencing a lot of negative emotions either..... it's a bit complicated.

Need for 'alone time' is higher in introverts. Extroverts do tend to be 'freer' of negative emotions than the rest of us.

thank you for explaining that.

[Phil75230]

Originally Posted by ss20ts

Happiness is a choice. You can choose to sit home right now and be miserable because you're sitting there on the couch by yourself. Or you can choose to sit on the couch and call up your friend Bob and invite him over to shoot the breeze,play cards, watch a movie, etc. You make the choice to be happy that Bob came over or you made the choice to be a mean old cranky pants magoo because Bob came over.....the nerve of him!

There's not flipping your emotions on or off. Personal responsibility. Life is full of choices. Not all of them are fun to make. Some just suck, but if you make the best of them, you're more apt to be happy. If you whine, moan, and carry on like a 3 year old, then you won't be happy. It's all up to you.

many poor people are happy....not because they're poor. Many don't even realize they're poor! I once met a man who lived in a log cabin with dirt floors. He grew up poor. He had no idea he was poor until his family saw JFK on tv telling them they were poor! It totally rocked their world. They went from being happy going folks to depressed folks because they were poor and now knew it. Everyone they knew lived like them....they didn't know anything different until JFK was on tv.

I know many disabled folks including a few completely reliant on others for any kind of help. Most of them are some of the happiest people I know! Why? They're still alive! One lady will tell you, I might be stuck in this wheelchair, but I'm alive and breathing on my own so it's a great day and I'm thankful for it. She's a positive person in general.....she's far from a mean old cranky pants magoo.

I used to believe this. That getting them out would help, telling them to "grow up" and all the usual one-liners people tend to give toward such people. I thought that putting some fire under the feet would motivate them. And I tried that with two acquaintances of mine, but that approach only gave them a temporary relief to them at best. Even when they were out and about, half the time they sometimes seemed to slip back into their unhappiness. Sometimes they'd snap back at me, and we'd just get mad at each other, usually with the other person leaving in a huff (in retrospect, their snapping back was entirely justified, I'm ashamed to say). At that point, I saw just how futile it was to get them out of their unhappiness and just gave up.

This baffled me for a while, until I read about how people can have intrusive memories - ones that pop up in their head all of a sudden (namely about depression, anxiety, often brought about by traumatic experiences like rape, bullying, or a very humiliating episode). Some of those memories are of very hurtful events, events most people in my experience would find very hurtful or degrading.

So for personal honesty's sake, I had to conclude that the "just snap out of it" approach is futile, contrary to what popular wisdom says. I also began to see the absurdity of saying people *choose* to be something or have a trait that is widely held in strong disrespect by society as a whole (justly or not). If they could indeed choose, then - some people do have stronger natural resilience ability than others, and it's wrong to hold people responsible for matters beyond their control. How do you get people to control themselves when they don't have a lesser capacity to exert control? (this also answers your "personal responsibility" remark).

So at best, your comment's credibility depends on the precise nature of the individual's psychological makeup, and even then to varying degrees. Some people are simply better able to control their mood than others. Even worse, shifting responsibility from the perpetrator (who refused to take responsibility for his or her own acts leading to someone getting hurt without just cause) is not just victim-blaming but gives the perpetrators behavior a false legitimacy.

This only creates a neverending treadmill - the culture shames the non-resilient, the non-resilient are unable to "let it go" because the culture largely agrees with the shamer's accusations, with the non-resilient being non-resilient precisely because his or her friends implicitly agree with the shamer's belief system even if they don't agree with the shamer's actions. So it seems to me that rather than blame the victim for their shortcomings, proper blame is put on the perpetrator for their actions and especially their attitudes that lead to their actions.

[cb2008]

As such, I find the "happiness is a choice" meme not only hypocritical, but very harmful (even dangerous) to people who are not happy or content for one reason or another. As said at the start, it's basically people at the top (emotionally speaking) assuming that "If I'm like that, then they should be too" - fully forgetting that maybe they got lucky. This is especially true of people who are like the old saying "born on third and think they hit a triple". And that is why I do not take seriously the idea "happiness is a choice".

I agree that calling it a choice is incorrect because who would consciously choose unhappiness? In any case it is a fleeting emotion until something else replaces it.

I think it is more reasonable to say how we view our situation, as hard and intolerable as it may be, can be a conscious decision. I see photos of the Syrian refugees faces in a recent issue of Time magazine. The photos capture moments of sunlight into a makeshift room, a woman nursing her baby, and it looks peaceful. There is hope.
So I guess despair and sadness can also be fleeting as happiness is. They may still not be able to do something about it but they can find the strength to bear it, get on with life, and even find some joy. We can call it coping mechanism instead of happiness.

I believe in what Vedanta says, that the spirit within is always joyous, in bliss. The situation we are in is not what makes us happy. If that were so then that same experience should make us happy every time. We know that is not true. It is how we learn to detach from the emotions that the situation creates the key to finding peace.

I once saw a news report of floods in an Asian country where this old man was wading in deep water, his house destroyed, his possessions all gone. Yet he looked happy. He told the reporter I am not worried, something will happen, it will be alright. It is a bewildering puzzle for us and it will always be.

[Nightengale212]

IMO from what I have studied on this subject which happened during a time in my life when I experienced a serious depression, the ability to respond to an experience with the positive emotions of happiness, joy, bliss, etc., requires a healthy level of chemicals namely serotonin and norepinephrine produced primarily in the brain. When these chemical stores are low naturally, or have been depleted by the effects of emotional trauma, physical illness, etc. it is very difficult if not impossible to feel the positive emotions of happiness, joy, etc., even in the most idyllic situations. This is the reason why serious depression is treated with SSRI medications (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) which attempt to stimulate the brain to produce these mood enhancing chemicals. So physiologically speaking I do not think the ability to experience happiness is a choice, because if I had the choice to choose happiness over depression I would have most certainly chosen happiness.

Having been many years recovered from depression which evolved following the death of my husband and intensified two years later as a result of a cancer diagnosis, I can honestly say I have yet to experience the intensity of happiness equal to the intensity of depression I felt. I guess I have been able to replenish my levels of serotonin and norepinephrine enough to deliver me a fairly sustained contented mood without the need for medication and that suits me just fine.

[Minervah]

Happiness is part luck, part fate, part hard work, part chemical make up and part genetic.