Drugs. Implants. Virtual reality. Do we really want joy 24/7?
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson famously proclaimed a universal right to the pursuit of happiness. The key word there is pursuit. Jefferson thought that people ought to be free to chase after happiness; whether they attained it was their own business. In the 18th century, the technology to get happy despite circumstance or personality did not exist. Now, though, it's on its way — and that's not as delightful as it sounds.
What constitutes happiness? Freedom from worry? Or maybe contentment? A good definition remains elusive despite decades of neuroscience and psychiatry. Many researchers today have come to think that people have affect set points and that some of us are naturally happier than others. In describing optimal experience — the subjective state of happiness he calls flow — the psychiatrist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says it comes down to engaging in activities just beyond our skill level. Like Jefferson, Csikszent mihalyi understands that pursuit, and not outcome, is what's important.
Being reductionist about happiness doesn't mean it isn't fun, in all its myriad forms — free-floating rapture, blissed-out contentment, ecstatic partying. It's just that as a species, we generally keep these experiences in check. After all, the ways to induce them — alcohol, drugs, OK Go concerts — have historically come at a high cost.
We're entering an age in which technology may allow us to produce pleasant sensations all the time. Hints of that future go back to Prozac and other neurotransmitter-controlling drugs introduced in the late 1980s. But our ability to manipulate the molecules and electrical impulses whizzing through our heads is reaching a newly sophisticated level. Precise brain scanning is creating a vast trove of information about what happens psychologically, physiologically, and chemically when we are happy or sad (or stressed, angry, loving, homicidal, spiritual, or altruistic). The narcolepsy drug Provigil turns out to make people feel pretty fabulous and is taken as a stimulant. Ecstasy use has declined and cocaine use seems to have leveled off, but use of the ADHD prescription drug Adderall — increased focus, higher productivity — is on the rise. Today, neural implants are used to treat more than 30,000 people worldwide with Parkinson's disease; someday soon they might reliably jolt regions of the brain to induce or suppress specific emotions. "There is an industry of sorts that is trying to seduce you," says Oxford University pharmacologist Susan Greenfield, author of Tomorrow's People: How 21st-Century Technology Is Changing the Way We Think and Feel. "They want you to lose yourself, to want more of their product, whether it's virtual reality or a pill."
Obviously, sick people — say, with Parkinson's or narcolepsy — need medical intervention. And some percentage of humans will seek out mood-altering substances or experiences that imperil their lives. The problems start when happy-making tech nologies can be plugged in all day long without any of the traditional limits. I'm certainly not against technology. But should we use it to cure insecurity? Normal anxiety? We risk medicalizing the human condition.
From a distance, pleasure without fear or desire sounds pretty good. But in your grasp, it starts to feel less like paradise and more like soma. A species that shuts out adversity does not survive very long in a Darwinian universe. In the short term, humans with happy-making neural implants would cease to be interesting. Quenching feelings of hardship also means never feeling desire or want. Unpleasant as those emotions can be, they're also the basis for ambition and creativity. "Happy people are not ambitious," Greenfield says. "They do not build civilizations."
Ultimately, the problem could be self-correcting. As rich Westerners buy all the happiness products they can jam into their amygdalas, the developing world will be left blissfully productive. A good thing, because places like China and India have mighty new cities and wealth to build.
Maybe it's no coincidence that some of the happy-making stuff is manufactured in those countries. It's reminiscent of the scenario laid out by another prescient thinker, H. G. Wells. In his book The Time Machine, Wells wrote about a world where the happy, indolent elite — the Eloi — are served by industrious outsiders called Morlocks. The Eloi are also the hardworking Morlocks' food. Grim stuff. And also the exact opposite of what Jefferson was trying to tee up for Americans. Maybe he knew that if you have too much happiness, you don't get life and liberty.
Drugs. Implants. Virtual reality. Do we really want joy 24/7?
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