When We're Happy, We Actively Sabotage Our Good Moods With Grim Tasks (arstechnica.com) 86
Beth Mole, writing for Ars Technica: Always keeping your house tidy and spotless may earn you the label of "neat freak" -- but "super happy" may be a more accurate tag. When people voluntarily take on unpleasant tasks such as housework, they tend to be in particularly happy states, according to a new study on hedonism. The finding challenges an old prediction by some researchers that humans can be constant pleasure-seekers. Instead, the new study suggests we might seek out fun, uplifting activities mainly when we're in bad or down moods. But when we're on the up, we're more likely to go for the dull and dreary assignments. This finding of "flexible hedonism," reported this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may seem counterintuitive because it suggests we sabotage our own high spirits. But it hints at the idea that humans tend to make sensible short-term trade-offs on happiness for long-term gains. "Although our data cannot directly tell us whether regularly engaging in unpleasant activities predicts psychological and social adjustment five or 10 years down the line, a large body of work has consistently demonstrated the importance of sleeping, employment, and living in a reasonably clean and organized home on mental and physical health," according to the study authors, led by Maxime Taquet of Harvard and Jordi Quoidbach of the University Pompeu Fabra in Spain.
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Your comment is completely off-topic here since the issue is about happiness and tasks .. at home, which will be unaffected.
And in fact, if universal income is a potential answer to the disappearance of jobs (replaced by -say- AI), it doesn't solve a bigger problem : can we live a happy life with no task at all ?
The answer may be no, and humans will need to find other non-remunerated tasks to keep them busy and happy.
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When you are almost depressed? Anything to take your mind off it.
When you are giddy? You can take on the WORLD! "That'll show 'em all!"
Somehow this observation is presented as a counter-intuitive result from examining new data. We ALL love counter-intuitive results. Comprehending them makes us feel intelligent.
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They're called hobbies. I have many and I enjoy my time off when I get it.
If it's a hobby then it's not a "task" in the classical sense. Or, it may be a "task", but it's one you enjoy and willingly participate in.
Re: Universal Basic Income would fix that (Score:1)
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Which classics?
Anna Karenina, The Odyssey, The Old Man And The Sea, The Brothers Karamazov. Also anything by Beethoven or Schubert.
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They're called hobbies. I have many and I enjoy my time off when I get it.
"On my planet, "to rest" is to rest, to cease using energy. To me it is quite illogical to run up and down on green grass USING energy instead of saving it." - Mr. Spock, TOS ep. 15, "Shore Leave"
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can we live a happy life with no task at all ?
For most people, no.
It doesn't hold true for everyone but most people have a need to be doing something, whether it's done for pay or prestige or out of a sense of altruism or to better mankind, or whatever....but most people aren't happy sitting around doing nothing.
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I figured since you've a six-digit ID that you'd know not to feed the trolls.
Back to topic... I can see this study's findings could hold some truth --I've read about other studies that say depressed people watch more TV and movies.
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Even with Universal Basic Income you still have tasks to do - shopping for your food, cooking your food, cleaning your house, maintaining your yard, taking a bath (well, maybe not in your case). There is ALWAYS something that needs to be done.
However, judging by some of my roommates in college, there will still be plenty of people that won't do them.
When we're not depressed, we get shit done (Score:5, Insightful)
This just in, shocking news, film at eleven.
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Clearly you are not a scientist. You're not asking the "Why?" question.
When we're not depressed, we get shit done
in order to become depressed by reminding ourselves about the crushing drudgery of our pathetic empty lives.
Not really: stuff like cleaning actually feels good (in my experience) when you're in a good mood. Optimism kicks in and suddenly it's not crushing drudgery, it's regaining a nice place to do the fun stuff in.
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Yep. Evidently scientists have to do something. Sometimes the only science that's getting done is the science of getting funded. :)
That needs to be added to the Slashot QOTD Database!
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Or maybe (Score:3)
Ever consider that some of us just don't like to sit in filth and that having a clean house makes some people happy?
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When I take something like Ketamine that neutralizes my depression completely,
Do you find that Ketamine works better than Memantine (Namenda?).
I have a friend who is bipolar, but is constantly SEVERELY pegged-out on the Depression side of things, to the point of being basically completely non-functional. He was helped GREATLY by Memantine for about a year, but then it Just. Stopped. Working.
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Dude, wake up to yourself, different strokes for different folks because it is in error for you does not make it an error for everyone else. For you obviously someone obliviously entering you home in dirty clothes, tracking footprints to your once clean lounge suite, yeah, how well do you handle that. Could it possibly be that you do not reflect majority behaviour and how much would you be harmed by the thought that feaces particles of all description float about within your place of residents, including yo
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For you obviously someone obliviously entering you home in dirty clothes, tracking footprints to your once clean lounge suite, yeah, how well do you handle that.
Don't confuse a desire for cleanliness as the inability to handle mess. Temporary mess is a part of life, living in filth is not. When I cook, I make the dishes dirst. That is quite a different topic from leaving those dirty dishes in the sink all week cleaning only the ones I'm about to use.
Not sought out because they're "grim" (Score:5, Insightful)
When I am comfortable and without external pressures for a while, two things happen. One, I get bored and want to do something. Two, I'm full of positive energy and want to apply that to making something somewhere better. So I start to do things, like clean house, or work on neglected projects, or sometimes starting a new project. I'm not seeking out "grim" things to spoil my good mood. I'm seeking out good things, things that I want to have done, that I've finally got the emotional energy to do.
This result is like saying "study finds that when people have too much money, they seek to get rid of it by spending it on things, contradicting assumptions that people generally want to have more money". No, of course not. They've just finally got enough money that they can spend it on things they want to. They still want more money in the future, so that they can use it to buy other things.
Likewise, happy people doing "grim" tasks aren't trying to get rid of their "excess" happiness, they've just finally got the emotional energy to spend doing things. They still want more happiness, so they can spend that emotional energy doing more things.
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Agreed, its usually something you want to have done... its not like people are going around thinking "wow, I'm in a good mood. Maybe I should start some ritual self mutilation to spoil it!"
Good mood = productive, Bad mood = destructive.
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No self-awareness (Score:1)
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bet the results are irreproducible and thus not science at all.
Sure they are. You can even have them published in The Journal of Irreproducible Results [jir.com]!
Repeat after me: (Score:1)
Psychology is not a real science.
It's not sabotage (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a bit silly to say that people are sabotaging their own good mood. I think it instead suggests an alternate viewpoint: What we call "happiness" is not simply an end-goal, but also a resource. When we lack it, we conserve it and try to generate more. When we have enough, we expend the resource to accomplish other goals.
This in turn suggests some other ideas that some of us may have already suspected. Hedonists may be extremely unhappy people. Various behaviors that can be described as "addiction to pleasure-seeking" may be a response to suffering some kind of happiness deficiency. Depression may make people unproductive. People who are a mess may benefit from receiving some kind of help, rather than piling on various kinds of punishments.
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It's a bit silly to say that people are sabotaging their own good mood
Especially since they might be in an even better mood afterwards.
Re:It's not sabotage (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's not sabotage (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, my immediate thought when reading this:
Specifically, people were more likely to engage in mood-increasing activities (e.g., play sports) when they felt bad, and to engage in useful but mood-decreasing activities (e.g., housework) when they felt good.
is that it makes perfect sense if you think of happiness not as "something that must be maximized at every moment," but a resource that needs to be rationed or even grown when it's in short supply, but can be expended more freely when it's available. People engage in mood-expending activities when they have extra "mood" to expend.
However, I still think that this misses my point a bit when it says, "They may explain how humans overcome the allure of short-term gains in happiness to maximize long-term welfare." The implication there, it seems to me, is that maximizing hedonism is still the end-goal, but that it's a simple trade-off between short-term happiness and long-term. I don't want to take much time in arguing the point right now, but I suspect it's not that simple. After a lot of thought, I've ended up thinking of the emotion "happiness" as more of a expression of something deeper that we don't quite have a word for, and that deeper thing is what we're all really after.
To keep things simpler, I might instead say it this way: There are different kinds of happiness. One is simple pleasure-seeking and hedonism, another is a more deep-souled immediate sense of "joy" that goes beyond normal pleasure, and yet another is something more like a longer lasting "overall contentment and satisfaction". So anyway, what I suspect this research is really showing is that... well... Imagine you're playing a RPG, and the goal is to build a magic sword that lets you save the kingdom. You have a stamina bar, and when it runs out, you can't do very much. You can't run, you can't fight, you can't craft. The point of the game isn't to keep the stamina bar full, or even to keep it as high as possible as much as possible. It's just a means to an end.
So I would argue that what we normally call "happiness" as an immediate emotional state is like that stamina bar. When your mood is low, you're not very functional, so we find ways to boost it by pleasure seeking. When it's high, we make use of it. But what you're after is not maximizing that immediate emotional state of "happiness". That's just what you do when you don't have enough. I believe our willingness to expend that resource is not necessarily a sign that we are engaging in long-term planning to maximize happiness, but instead a sign that there is some other larger thing, the equivalent of "building a magic sword and saving the kingdom", that we are willing to expend that resource to gain.
I think I have an idea of what that thing is, but it's hard to describe succinctly in a Slashdot post.
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There are different kinds of happiness. One is simple pleasure-seeking and hedonism, another is a more deep-souled immediate sense of "joy" that goes beyond normal pleasure, and yet another is something more like a longer lasting "overall contentment and satisfaction".
The positive psychology people have found good reasons to classify it into 3 types : positive emotions, flow, and meaningfulness. This might interest you : https://www.ted.com/talks/mart... [ted.com]
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Yeah, I don't know that I 100% agree with that breakdown, but I do think it's something like that.
For one thing, I think "flow" is a little crammed in there. I think there's reason to connect the idea of "flow" (as I understand it) to a sense of contentment, but it's probably not really about achieving the state of flow itself. At least in my thinking, I'd sooner say that regularly achieving a state of flow implies that you're good at something that you derive some pleasure and satisfaction from, and it
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I dread the thought of the necessary housework, and many other tasks to be quite frank, more than the actual doing of the house work. In so many cases, for me, the dreading is worse than the doing.
However, once the task is begrudgingly completed, I am pleased and content.
In a really good mood today (Score:1)
Isn't it obvious? (Score:1)
"Most theories of motivation propose that our daily choices of activities aim to maximize positive affective states but fail to explain when people decide to engage in unpleasant yet necessary activities."
If you don't always have the emotional energy to do unpleasant but necessary tasks, you'll either do them when you do have it (it's muc easier to cycle up a hill when you have momentum to start with) or wait until such time as the added misery involved in doing the task is outweighed by the increasing unh
Because that's when I've got the motivation (Score:3)
I do the chores when I'm in a good mood because that's when I've got the energy and motivation. Similarly, after a terrible day, forget it.
Also, your better than normal mood won't last even if you don't do anything with it - you'll return to equilibrium. I've tried! It's not sabotaging a good mood, it's making good use of it.
Better than doing it when depressed, surely (Score:2)
Isn't this just a case of it being better to do shitty things when you're happy than when you're depressed? If you're depressed, it'll just make feel even lower. If you're going to do something that'll lower your mood, don't do it when you're already low.
Oh, so that's what's wrong with me. (Score:2)
Publish or perish (Score:3)
This is the kind of crap you get.
Bullshit (Score:2)
"When We're Happy, We Actively Sabotage Our Good Moods With Grim Tasks"
Not me. When I'm happy I wallow in it, and the last thing I'll do is think up some "grim task" that needs to be done.
What a load of horseshit.
Science "reporting" for the masses (Score:1)
This is a wonderful example of what happens to probably so many science reports. Even the the original article admits "The researchers say they need to do more work to parse the connection. For instance, it may be that moods affect energy levels and focus, thus altering a person's interests or abilities to do certain tasks." The headline is nothing but pure speculation and an attempt to grab eyeballs. But the headline is certainly what anybody is going to remember about this. Even without looking at the ori
What I do when I'm happy (Score:3)
- or perhaps wrong assumptions? (Score:2)
When people voluntarily take on unpleasant tasks such as housework, they tend to be in particularly happy states,... /quote.
Why would housework necessarily be unpleasant? I have some personal experience that seems to contracdict the assumption:
- When I was student in a previous aeon, I had to work mornings as a cleaner. Not the most glamorous of jobs, not all that attractive; but I got to really like parts of it, believe it or not. There is something very satisfying and almost therapeutical about washing an enormous stone floor with soft soap, a brush on a stick and a cloth.
- Gardening; how attractive is it to put on a pair of wellies, get out in the middle of winter and dig ditches because your allotment is flooded? I spent my entire Christmas last year doing that for 5 days: 6 - 8 hours of digging down until the ground wather stood some 1.5 feet deep, then carting woodchips to fill up the ditches. It was the best Christmas I've had for a long time. Hard, physical work has been clinically proven to help with depression, whereas overindulgence works the opposite way. (In case you wonder why I would dig ditches only to fill them up, here's the explanation: the fundamental problems in my garden are lack of drainage and the fact that the plot is low-lying. I threw soil, I dug out, on top of the beds of my plot, which raised the ground a bit, and the ditches ran across the plot, so when they were filled with woodchips, they became neat foot paths. The woodchips form a very open structure, initially, which allows for drainage, and because the wood wicks the water up to the surface, it also helps the water evaporate faster. After 3 - 5 years it will have rooted down, so I can repeat the process, raise the ground level and improve the soil).
But enough rambling - I thnik what this reasearch actually shows is that doing physically hard work improves your mood, which probably has at least three contributing causes: one thing is, it feels good to create a desirable outcome; two, doing a 'mindless' task allows you mind to relax and wander for a while, and three, the physical activity in itself tends to lift your mood, as I said earlier. Rather than only doing 'unpleasant' tasks when you have an excess of 'happiness', doing it is what makes you happy.
Humans behaving in an economically rational (Score:2)
Try to get happy before doing chores (Score:2)
Could be another explanation.
I tend to take a joint before cleaning the house, for example. :).
To compensate for the horror I've got to go through