The Pursuit of Unhappiness: George Loewenstein on Why We're Wired for Misery

“I think our genetic makeup makes us miserable. We evolved to be miserable.” — George Loewenstein

 

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yeah, yeah. We’ve all heard that one before. When Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he remixed Locke’s “life, liberty and estate,” replacing the idea of property with happiness. As we know from last week’s conversation with the historian Joshua Specht, America’s age-old love affair with real estate has been perpetually mortgaged. And our guest today, the behavioral economist George Loewenstein, who happens — probably not coincidentally — to be the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud, offers a similar warning about the ideal of happiness.

 

Happiness’ antonym is misery. In his new book The Opposite of Happiness, Loewenstein explains that it’s misery, and not happiness, which has simultaneously broken humans and built humankind. We evolved to be miserable, the behavioral economist argues, explaining that English has four times as many words for negative emotions as for positive ones. The depths we can sink to are incomparably deeper and more interesting than the heights we can reach, Freud’s great-grandson reassures us. Happiness is a Disneyfied mush while misery is infinitely variegated, he tells us, building a twelve-part taxonomy from envy and regret to loneliness and anxiety. The behavioral economist even invents a “Misery Survey” and cites an experiment he conducted with married couples which found that doubling their sexual frequency left them less happy.

 

So much for sex. Loewenstein spent a lifetime escaping Freud and has ended up desexualizing him for modern America. I’ve always found behavioral economics to be a particularly miserable subject (ideology dressed up as science). But maybe that’s the point. Life, liberty and the pursuit of misery. A Loewensteinian redraft of the Declaration, anyone?

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       We Evolved to Be Miserable. Loewenstein’s starting point contradicts the entire happiness industry: misery is the human constant, and happiness the occasional exception. Not because society ruins us — he takes exception to Rousseau’s idea that we are born happy and civilized into unhappiness — but because our genetic makeup makes us so. Every negative emotion evolved to push us toward behavior that served our fitness; that is precisely why they are unavoidable. His evidence is asymmetry. English has, by his count, four times as many words for negative emotions as for positive ones. The depths of misery are incomparably deeper than the heights of joy. And happiness is “a big mush,” while unhappiness is infinitely variegated — twelve specific miseries in the book’s second half, each with its own facial expression, its own pattern of brain activity, and its own behavior. Novelists, he says, have always known this; they are better psychologists than the academics, and misery is simply more interesting.

•       Envy Is Local. Andrew’s cheekiest question: does Loewenstein, part of what he calls the second shift of behavioral economics, envy Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky and Richard Thaler, the field’s Nobel-garlanded founders? He didn’t deny it. We don’t envy billionaires and trillionaires, he explains; we envy people close to us and just ahead, and those three are the textbook case. Then the move that makes the book humane rather than cynical: meta-emotions. You’re not supposed to envy your friends, so when you inevitably do, you feel guilty about feeling envious — misery about misery. Understanding your own negative emotions, he argues, works like understanding another person: you forgive what you und