Sapiens 16 -- Happily Ever After

See also these transcripts, posted by someone else who took Dr. Harari's Coursera course.

Lesson 16 - part 1 -- Has progress made us happier?  (See this!)

• Some say "yes":  Modern medicine, comforts and conveniences, more power
• Others say "no":  See the downside of the agricultural revolution (lecture 5)
• Middle ground:  Not until the scientific revolution, after which we learned to use power for progress
• Should we be optimistic about our modern age?  Not really, because . . . 
• Whatever progress we've made, it's been only a very small sample of years:  "It is too early to know whether this represents a fundamental shift in the currents of history, or an ephemeral wave of good fortune."
• Over the last few decades, we have also disrupted "the ecological equilibrium of our planet in numerous new ways with what is likely to be very difficult and dangerous consequences for ourselves."
• Finally, "we can congratulate ourselves on the unprecedented accomplishment of modern Homo sapiens, only if we completely ignore the fate of all other animals. . . . modern industrial agriculture may well turn out to be the greatest crime in history, which caused massive suffering."
• We are not necessarily happier than our ancestors, since "social, and ethical, and spiritual factors have as great an impact on our happiness as material conditions."

Lesson 16 - part 2 -- What is happiness?  How to measure it.  The biological view.

• Definition:  "The generally accepted definition of happiness as is studied today in the social and life sciences is that happiness is subjective wellbeing. ... According to this definition, happiness is something that we feel. It is either a sense of immediate pleasure, or a sense or a feeling of long-term contentment with the way life is going."
• Scientific measurement of happiness:  "Psychologists or biologists who want to assess how people feel simply give them questionnaires to fill out and to report what they are feeling."
• Most important finding:  "happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth or health or even society. Rather, happiness depends above all, on the correlation between expectations and conditions."
• History doesn't seem to matter much:  "even dramatic changes in the conditions of human beings in history did not necessarily make them happier or change their happiness level for better or worse."
• "people in the Middle Ages had much more difficult living conditions in many respects than people today in the world. But their expectations were also very different from ours."  (bullock cart vs. Ferrari)
• How modern society makes us *more* unhappy:  "An interesting conclusion from this is that if happiness is indeed determined by expectations, then two of the central pillars of modern society, the media and the advertising industry, may actually be ... working to ensure that people won’t become happier even if there are huge improvements in their conditions."
• "There are lots of studies that show that the body image of people today is far lower than in the past. People are far less satisfied with the way they look today than they were 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago. This leads some scholars to argue that the issue of expectations in the media and so forth, cause discontent."
• Again, history doesn't matter much:  "So these are the main findings of scholars in fields such as psychology and sociology and economics. Happiness depends on expectations. Because expectations adapt to conditions, happiness levels throughout history changed to a smaller degree than we usually think."
• Biological view:  "evolution has shaped us to be neither too miserable, nor too happy. A biochemical system in our body shaped by evolution enables us to enjoy momentary rushes of pleasant sensations. But these never last long, or at least not forever."  We stick more or less to a baseline constant neurochemistry.
• Biology trumps history:  "If we accept this biological approach to happiness, that happiness is determined by our internal biological system, biochemical system, and not by events outside then it turns out that history is not very important, at least, not very important for human happiness, because historical events have very little impact on the structure of the human biochemical system, on the internal structure of our bodies and brain."

Lesson 16 - part 3 -- Happiness = meaning, or the Buddhist view of happiness

• Some argue that happiness is not just pleasure or brain chemistry:  "meaningful activities can be extremely satisfying, even if they’re not easy, even if they are not joyful very much" (Kahneman study)
• So, if happiness depends on meaning, then still, Medieval people could have been even happier than people today in affluent societies.
• But there is no meaning to human existence:  "According to science, at least to science in the early 21st century, humans, like, just like all other phenomena in the world, are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without any purpose, without any goal, without any meaning."
• So, happiness depends on somehow convincing ourselves that life has meaning when it doesn't really (self-delusion).
• Buddhism assigns the question of happiness more importance than perhaps any other religion in history.. . . People are liberated from suffering, not when they experience this or that fleeting pleasure, which immediately disappears but when they understand the impermanent nature of all of their feelings and therefore stop craving them and chasing them."