In modern technological society, we are becoming increasingly obsessed with the notion of happiness. So much so that academics are developing ways of assessing which are the happiest countries in the world. Supposedly, Finland is the happiest country and the other Scandinavian countries are up there on the listing. Now I personally have never been to any of these countries and although I have a deep appreciation for their contributions in the arts and sciences, frankly they are not up there on my list for places that I would like to visit. And it’s not just because of the cold weather. After all, Chicago, where I am from, is no Cancun. Rather, the reason I am less interested in visiting the Scandinavian countries is because of the wildly varying day lengths as a result of their being so far north. I would feel very depressed by the extremely short days in the winter and I would feel uncomfortably overstimulated by what for me would be all of that excessive daylight in the summer.
In the first case, I would experience Scandinavia as a dreary numbing experiential vacuum. In the second case, I would experience Scandinavia as an undifferentiating place with too much organic stimulation in the form of relentless sunlight. In other words, it would be difficult for me to absorb the imprints that the Scandinavian grounding would leave on me. And that would not be conducive to my feeling happy.
Mostly in the past, I have focused on the imprints left by individual organisms: people and animals and even plants. But total organic living environments can be thought of as leaving imprints as well. Sometimes these environments leave us with positive feelings. And sometimes not. When we are simply passively engaging with them, the positive feelings they leave us with are simply those of joy. As when we lie on a beach or walk through a national park. When we are actively engaging with organic living environments, the positive feelings we are left with are satisfaction. As when we gather foods or ornamental plants, hunt, fish, make crafts out of organic materials, or build houses or other shelters out of organic materials.
In general, joyful interactions with the world involve making imprints. This involves engaging with both whole organic systems of positive stimulation as well as particular elements of the system: people, animals, plants, even salient features of one’s geographical environment. Here I am thinking of things like sacred mountains or sacred rivers – parts of our living environment that native peoples endow with spiritual attributes and, therefore which they perceive as having similar capacities as living beings. Humans open themselves up to receiving organic imprints from both whole organic systems from traditional living environments as well as from particular figure elements from within these environments. Whether dealing with whole organic systems or particular figure elements within these systems, humans experience all of them as joyful to the extent that they make their lives more organically vibrant.
Now to the extent that it is humans making organic imprints on parts of or on whole organic systems, they experience more joy from taking on a more active role than when they are just receiving organic imprints alone. But whether the focus of the experience is on making or receiving imprints, the joy comes in from the immediacy of the experience.
The opposite of happiness is unhappiness, and unhappiness occurs when the amount of stimulation a person is experiencing does not fall within a comfortable range for him to absorb it. It ends up being too little or too much for him. And the person ends up feeling either very numb or else very stressed out from the sensory discomfort. The experience of unhappiness, like the experience of happiness, occurs as a result of the stimuli generated within a person or as a result of the stimuli he receives primarily from the humans around him. He experiences these emotions in the form of imprints: imprints that a person generates within himself towards himself, imprints that a person generates within himself that are directed outside himself, and imprints that are generated by other people towards him.
Of course, a person can also find himself in a situation where he isn’t experiencing any imprints at all, either self-generated or generated by others. This is when a person is experiencing numbness in an experiential vacuum. Furthermore, a person can find himself in a situation where the imprints he is experiencing are so intense that they stress him out. This understimulation and overstimulation have in common that they are both forms of sensory distortion. And they both make people extremely uncomfortable. And they are both very common in modern technological living environments. Now the way most people deal with it today is by bouncing back and forth between overstimulation and understimulation in an attempt to intermittently achieve some middle level of stimulation which would approximate organic stimulation. But what people would really like to achieve is happiness: a level of stimulation that makes and sometimes preserves organic imprints on them. So here is where the obsession today on happiness comes from. An attempt to fight the deleterious effects of sensory distortion that is the inevitable result of living in modern technological society.
© 2024 Laurence Mesirow
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