Don't Worry, Be Happy
February 18, 2007 9:13 AM   Subscribe

Why do humans suffer from inner turmoil?

I haven't read much on the subject obviously, but I've been thinking about this for quite some time. Does inner strife and suffering serve some sort of evolutionary purpose? Is it a part of the human condition that will never go away?

Why are people so chronically unhappy and discontent, or fearful or insecure? I'm not talking about mental illness or abuse endured in childhood or beyond.

I'm wondering about the garden variety inner turmoil that plagues humans. Is it all a result of our childhood? Why can't intelligent beings rationalize and lead a more contented life in adulthood?
posted by LoriFLA to Human Relations (28 answers total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: a bit open-ended and chatty without any clear answer

 
Response by poster: I also realize that a lot of people do live contented lives.
posted by LoriFLA at 9:19 AM on February 18, 2007


Because we know we're not infallible. It is only natural that rational beings aware of their limited capacities will second-guess themselves. Also, self-doubt is a protective behavior.
posted by baphomet at 9:21 AM on February 18, 2007


Response by poster: I also realize that a lot of people do live contented lives.

I meant to say: I realize some people are more contented than others.
posted by LoriFLA at 9:28 AM on February 18, 2007


i believe that self-doubt and second-guessing are a side-effect of intelligence, and that growth and inner turmoil are two sides of the same coin.
posted by rhizome at 9:30 AM on February 18, 2007


This question is basically what the entirety of the world's religions, and I'm thinking much of philiosophy and literature and psychology and now neurochemistry, has been trying to answer from the beginnings of recorded thought. There's not one answer to your question; anything you see here is going to be total speculation.
posted by occhiblu at 9:34 AM on February 18, 2007


I think part of it is the fact that we have evolved technologically fastser then we have emotionally. I mean we're barely out of the trees emotionally. For millions of years it was a major struggle just to survive and it took all of our time and energy to. I imagine that we were happy to be able to have a meal to eat and a dry spot to lie down. For most of us that is already taken care of and we don't know what else to do. Plus the fact that we incapable of looking objectively at the long term big picture. We are programmed for the short term.

Let it go.
posted by Justin Case at 9:36 AM on February 18, 2007


I'm not normally a fan of much evolutionary psychology, but studies in primate vigilance behaviour (google) resonate with much of the somatic and psychological factors around anxiety and probably contribute to the inner turmoil issues in humans.
posted by Rumple at 9:43 AM on February 18, 2007


As occhiblu says, there are so many religious, philosophical, sociological, psychological, etc. schools of thought on this that this is the ultimate chatfilter question -- along with its companions "Why are we here?" and "What happens after we die?" Personally I subscribe to a general buddhist notion that suffering is inevitable because we are attached to things (feelings, objects, people, relationships, desires, etc.) that are either naturally fleeting or unattainable -- and this realization holds the key to finding relief from suffering. (It also means that you can experience something painful AND still be basically a contented, happy person, which is how I would classify myself.) This is a completely different answer than the one you will get from an evangelical christian, for example.

If this gets deleted, I would suggest rewriting your question to ask for reading recommendations -- because, again, you're basically asking one of the most fundamental questions of the ages.
posted by scody at 9:51 AM on February 18, 2007 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Right scody, I thought it may be too chatty. I went ahead and posted after I did a search before I posted, and found that this question wasn't deleted:

Why does God allow human atrocities?
posted by LoriFLA at 9:57 AM on February 18, 2007


Response by poster: Or maybe the God question is legitimate because the reason can be found in holy texts.
posted by LoriFLA at 10:00 AM on February 18, 2007


I have my own, home-baked, maybe crackpot theory about this. I've thought of it more in terms of why most families seem dysfunctional to some degree or another, but I think coming from a dysfunctional family often leads to people who are "unhappy...fearful or insecure," so I offer it as potentially applying to that part of your question. Anyway, it goes a little something like this:

Evolutionarily, it made sense for us to be very emotionally attached to our children. But that attachment developed before we were well able to address infant and child mortality. So, not so very long ago, most parents watched one or more of their children die. As it would today, this traumatized many parents in various ways. Some became depressed and withdrawn, some enraged, some intensely anxious, etc. This impacted how they were able to parent their other children.

Without a lot of introspection, therapy, or other beneficial influences and hard work, many children grow up to be the kind of parents that their parents were. So, even now when many of us have parents who haven’t been traumatized by the death of their children, we feel the ripple effects. For example, we may have a dad who is violent, because his dad was withdrawn, because his dad was enraged, because he watched his children die.

So, that’s one possible explanation for why many grow up with troubled parenting. I’ll have to leave the last part of your question (why we can’t “rationalize [a bad childhood] and lead a more contented life in adulthood”) to others.

(I don’t know of any writings that explore this theory, but they may exist. If so, I’d be interested to learn of them.)
posted by daisyace at 10:05 AM on February 18, 2007 [1 favorite]


I've often thought about this too.

Obviously evolution doesn't care whether we are happy; only that we breed as much as possible.

I wonder whether tension might not be a more effective mental state for achieving this.

Desire is not designed to be satisfied, but to drive us ever onwards. Those who are satisfied with their lot achieve "less" than those who are driven to acquire status and power. Perhaps, in the harsher environment in which we evolved, it was the driven that survived.

On the bright side, because we are intelligent we can reprogramme ourselves to some degree, and find the humility that integral to happiness. But its hard work to do so.
posted by Touchstone at 10:08 AM on February 18, 2007


In my view, because the ways minds work are very complicated and entropy is always with us. Every one of us is broken in some way.

We frequently have conflicts between our instincts (emotions, faith and intuitions) and "rational" minds. Neither rationality nor instinct is a perfect problem solver, so it's not always safe or easy to pick one over the other. So there's the inner turmoil of choice.

Furthermore, most everyone's "rationality" is biased by preconceived ideas, typically set in our heads when we are young (but not always: some people see virtue in rigidity). When our preconceptions don't fit the situation we find ourselves, most people find themselves in mental stress. Don't underestimate this: historically, it's easier to wait for the next generation than change someone's mind. So there's the externalized conflict between bias and the world, subjective and objective truth.

Those are only a couple of possibilities, the "normal" ones, leaving alone the problems caused by trauma and organic damage (which are probably the same thing), for example.
posted by bonehead at 10:12 AM on February 18, 2007


Why does God allow human atrocities?

Huh. That seems to be clear deletion-fodder to me. Don't know if jess specifically decided to let it stay or if it just flew under the radar.

posted by scody at 10:14 AM on February 18, 2007


It's always nice when important questions in my discipline are referred to as "deletion-fodder" or chatfilter.

But that said, inner turmoil isn't itself desirable, but it's necessarily connected to some other desirable trait like drive, desire, ambition, or risk-taking. It may not always be so connected and there may be some selection pressure towards those who feel no regret, turmoil, or indecisiveness.
posted by ontic at 10:55 AM on February 18, 2007


What happens when you remove inner turmoil, strife and suffering, albeit temporarily through artificial means? People become torpid, apathetic, and insensitive to other's needs. Emotional pain is a Pavlovian reward mechanism we evolved that makes us industrious, and helps us proactively get along with other people.

Don't laugh. OK, go ahead I'm used to it. But I learned this at an early age from one of my favorite Star Trek episodes.
posted by Manjusri at 11:02 AM on February 18, 2007


I think it could be due to the fact we're self-aware and aware of others, and our emotions bind these kinds of awareness with our more atavistic impulses to eat, procreate and battle victoriously (as a species we're still hard-wired as predators).
In our earlier lives we may have developed methods to protect and satisfy ourselves emotionally, which, as we mature, might become become hindrances to socialization, achievement and actualization.
'Achievement' is the modern equivalent of killing a woolly mammoth. We obviously don't have to kill for our food. So, we crush the competition, make partner, outsmart and manipluate others, lie, cheat, steal, humiliate, ridicule, or commit other such 'civilzed' predations, ranging across a moral spectrum - whether legal, civil or illegal and cruel, the purpose is the same - to get something 'needed'. Our emotional reactions - and those of others - provide the input for rationalizing what we do. And when we can't rationalize, that's when we feel such things as unhappiness, discontent, fear and insecurity.
My two cents.
posted by nj_subgenius at 11:03 AM on February 18, 2007


Why can't intelligent beings rationalize and lead a more contented life in adulthood?

Humans who are capable of (and a tendency to use) rational and thorough forward thinking have a lot fewer children than those who don't.
posted by tkolar at 11:05 AM on February 18, 2007


A lot can be boiled down to fear of death. Our strivings towards immortality naturally create strife and inner suffering because we can never succeed, live forever or have enough. Most of us struggle against the cycle of life and modern science has encouraged us to believe that we can.

The human ability to think abstractly has certainly helped us to evolve but we are now burdened by being able to think about thinking. I think they go hand in hand.

Also, satisfaction can't exist without dissatisfaction. All these dichotomies need the other half to exist. You would not know happiness if you did not know suffering.
posted by bobobox at 11:06 AM on February 18, 2007


It's always nice when important questions in my discipline are referred to as "deletion-fodder" or chatfilter.

It's always nice when people take offense where none is intended. The question of human suffering is of course a profound one, which I have also pursued through my academic studies, literary interests, and creative endeavors. It also just so happens,
IMO, to fall outside the guidelines for AskMe: Ask Metafilter questions need to have some possible answer or should be asking for information that will be put to some practical use. Chatty open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of Ask Metafilter and push other questions off the front page.

I interpret that to mean that AskMe is not the place for open-ended philosophical or theological discussions -- i.e., chat. It does not follow that I believe such discussions are without value in the world beyond AskMe.

posted by scody at 11:07 AM on February 18, 2007


um, "have a tendency to use."

People with poor grammar skills, on the other hand, breed like rabbits.
posted by tkolar at 11:08 AM on February 18, 2007


I shall be very disappointed if there's a best answer.
posted by bonehead at 11:23 AM on February 18, 2007


I asked a question that touched on some of the same issues a while ago. admittedly unscientifically, I'm still convinced that our brains are too big for our own good, sort of.
posted by needs more cowbell at 11:29 AM on February 18, 2007


About 600 years before Jesus was born, a guy named Siddhartha Gautama wondered about this stuff. And he came up with 4 Noble Truths.

The First Noble Truth is that life involves suffering. Maybe not every minute, maybe not every day, but every life is going to have suffering in it, and that's the nature of it.

The Second Noble Truth is that it is our desire for things we cannot have -- he called it "thirst" or "craving" -- that causes suffering. Whether we are unhappy because we do not have enough food to feed our family, or because we can't get a good grade in Calculus, or because we are in pain that advil won't fix, it is of thirsting for things that Are Not.

Because they do not answer your question, I will not prattle on about 3 and 4, which deal with solving the problem.
posted by ilsa at 12:18 PM on February 18, 2007


It's always nice when important questions in my discipline are referred to as "deletion-fodder" or chatfilter.

well, as a fellow member of the discipline, I would call this chatfilter precisely because it's the basis of philosophy. That is, it is not the sort of question one can get an answer to; it is the sort of question people spend their entire lives thinking about, that humanity has spent millennia writing about. There is no expert who can come in to this thread and let us all know, hey, I just so happen to have done a little test in the lab last night that answers this one. The best we can do here is recommend reading, but even that seems almost pointlessly open ended because there are simply so many various directions one can go in. Emerson says awareness is a snag in our understanding; the mind goes "antagonizingly on" and "never prospers but by fits", which is a more poetic way of putting the thought above that the turmoil is the necessary other-side-of-the-coin of intelligence. This is an ancient theme in philosophy, religion, mythology & literature - the fall of man is the opening of our eyes; we gain knowledge, but at a cost, as we lose our natural, unquestioned place in the order of things and become outcasts in our own world.

The disagreements tend to be whether knowledge ultimately can solve the problem it causes - if you go with Plato / Augustine / Descartes, knowledge is only problematic because it's unfinished, incomplete, but if we were to have full knowledge, it would be be fully good (true=good=beautiful, after all - which emerson again ties nicely in with the xtian trinity, if you like poetic approaches). The opposing viewpoint is that knowledge is fundamentally incomplete and must be so, that "being" is nothing but "becoming", and the platonic ideals can only be considered metaphorically but mislead us when we start to imagine a unity somehow "underneath it all".
posted by mdn at 1:31 PM on February 18, 2007


I agree with Justin Case.

For millions of years it was a major struggle just to survive and it took all of our time and energy to. I imagine that we were happy to be able to have a meal to eat and a dry spot to lie down.

You need leisure time to feel most forms of angst. Our ancestors surely lived hard lives, but my guess is they didn't have time to dwell on them much. They were too busy hunting, gathering and seeking shelter. When I'm doing any of these things (searching through the fridge for food when I'm really hungry; running to find cover from the rain; etc.), I'm rarely unhappy (though I might not be happy). I get unhappy when I have time to sit and think.

Another idea: much (not all) unhappiness comes from the pressures of society conflicting with internal drives. I want to do X but I'd be embarrassed to do so; I did X and now I'm humiliated.

This sort of unhappiness surely dates way, way back. I'm sure ancient Mayans (for example) felt repressed and unworthy all the time. All you need for this is a culture with rules and taboos.

I'm not sure whether or not such culture dates all the way back to the dawn of man. Did people feel this way when they lived in small tribes? My guess is yes. It probably comes with the territory of being a social animal. But, again, lack of leisure time would mitigate it. If your tribe is busy fighting off another tribe, it doesn't have much time to enforce taboos.

It might be helpful to try to list the things that make us unhappy in broad categories. That way we can think about each category and what historical, cultural or biological forces might allow it.

My quick attempt (please refine):

-- romantic/sexual jealousy
-- loneliness
-- feeling that one isn't living up to ones potential
-- feeling that one is bad, sinful, evil or dirty
-- body issues
-- fear of harm coming to a loved one
-- belief that one is being judged
posted by grumblebee at 2:40 PM on February 18, 2007


Because we become attached to things, people, and situations and those things always change.
posted by Ironmouth at 3:40 PM on February 18, 2007


Babies cry to get what they need. Adults are just quieter about it. They softly cry all day long. If only a giant mother and father would just hold them...
posted by luckypozzo at 3:41 PM on February 18, 2007


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