Contributor and Detractors

There is a lame old joke which says that the nice thing about hitting yourself on the head with a hammer is that it feels so good when you stop. Certainly the presence of adversity in your life can make you unhappy. But does removing it make you happy? There are numerous things in life that can make you unhappy. These include shortage of money, criticisms from people whose opinion matters to you, feelings of inadequacy, boredom, and fearing for your physical well being, just to name a few. While these things make you unhappy, their removal does not make you happy. It will only make you less unhappy. It seems that there is an equilibrium state between happiness and unhappiness where you are neither happy nor unhappy.

There are things that make us happy and things that make us unhappy. Bertrand Russell, in The Conquest of Happiness, referred to these as contributors and detractors, respectively. Some of the detractors are mentioned above. According to Russell a contributor to happiness is zeal. That is, you have to have positive energy exerted towards something worth pursuing in order to be happy. Russell's student Wittgenstein added the notion that a sense of purpose was essential to happiness.

We are beginning to see a pattern emerging here. In order to be happy, you have to remove the things that make you unhappy and purse things that are somehow worthy of pursuing. In addition, these things that you pursue have to be things that you are good enough at to make progress. Next time, I will bring this all together in a coherent psychological theory.