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Charles Darwin was not a well man. As a youth, he suffered from scarlet fever and eczema. He couldn’t stand the sight of blood at medical school, and his five-year voyage on the Beagle brought seasickness, headaches, and infections. After returning to England, in 1836, he developed severe anxiety and gastrointestinal issues, including bouts of vomiting and flatulence. He also suffered from insomnia, fatigue, and depression.
In 1849, ten years before he published “On the Origin of Species,” he wrote to a friend of “dreadful vomiting every week” and reported, “I was not able to do anything one day out of three.” He thought that he was “rapidly going the way of all flesh.” In fact, he lived another thirty-three years, though the ailments never left him. Giving a scientific paper, or even attending a party, could overwhelm him. By then, he had moved to a village in Kent, rarely venturing out without his wife, Emma.
From 1849 to 1855, Darwin kept a “diary of health,” recording his conditions as “goodish,” “poorish,” and “very bad fl[atulence] with fright.” He consulted some twenty doctors and tried Victorian cures, including hydrotherapy, which offered some relief, and galvanism. Diagnoses included nervous dyspepsia, water brash (acid reflux), and “suppressed gout” (whatever that is).
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What was the problem? Retrospective diagnoses range from Chagas’ disease, a parasitic illness he might have contracted in South America, to lactose intolerance. He may have suffered from some combination of diseases and allergies, and possibly Crohn’s. But some symptoms suggest a psychological condition. Agoraphobia with panic disorder is a plausible diagnosis.
Whatever the cause or causes, Darwin must, at some point, have asked himself, I got naturally selected for this? Of course, not every affliction has an evolutionary purpose. People get sick. But our extraordinary susceptibility to misery does raise a question about what kind of creatures natural selection has made us. We get depressed when we win the lottery; we lie awake worrying about whether the car needs new tires; we feel jealous when our girlfriend talks too long with the barista.
Anxiety might have adaptive utility when we are in danger of being eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger. But there are not a lot of sabre-toothed tigers around anymore, and we still get anxious, frequently for no very good reason. We don’t just react emotionally to things. We overreact. Why have genes for emotional overreaction, rather than genes for being cool, calm, and collected, been passed along? Wouldn’t we be reproductively fitter if we weren’t unhappy so much of the time?
These are questions George Loewenstein tries to answer in “The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us” (Harper). Loewenstein, who teaches at Carnegie Mellon, is a leader in the field of behavioral economics. Neoclassical economics relied on the fiction of the rational actor, someone who makes decisions by way of a judicious calculation of self-interest. Behavioral economics, by contrast, emphasizes the nonrational factors in economic decision-making. Whatever human beings are rational about, it’s not money. We overspend it; we under-save it; we buy stuff on impulse. We generally don’t do the math. Why it took so long for this to dawn on economists is mystifying. Didn’t those people ever read a novel? Virtually every famous nineteenth-century novel is about people behaving badly around money.
Still, figuring out why we act foolishly when we could, or should, or want to act otherwise is a worthy academic pursuit. Among Loewenstein’s contributions is the identification of what he calls “empathy gaps,” our inability to imagine how we would feel or behave in an emotional state different from the one we’re in. When we’re pain-free, we can’t really remember what pain feels like. When we’re angry, we can’t imagine being calm. Emotions, Loewenstein argues, can reprogram our whole psyche. He gives a personal example: learning that it is better to wait a day before responding to an annoying e-mail.
Didn’t we know this already, though? Adam Smith made similar observations in “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759). And some of Loewenstein’s work does seem to amount to a confirmation of common sense. One of his experiments, for instance, measured the effect of sexual arousal on judgment and decision-making in male students. Guess what? A sexually aroused young man reported a greater willingness to engage in morally questionable behavior to obtain sexual gratification.
Explaining how feelings affect our judgment is one thing. Why so many emotions make us unhappy is another. That’s the larger question Loewenstein takes up. His thesis is that these emotions “were built to keep us alive and reproducing, not to keep us happy.”
Loewenstein is hardly alone in proposing evolutionary explanations for misery. Randolph M. Nesse, a psychiatrist, made a similar case in “Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry” (2019), a work Loewenstein discusses. Such arguments recall the “selfish gene” model. Evolution is not about the reproduction of persons, is the idea. It’s about the reproduction of genes. And, from a gene’s point of view, the body is just a disposable gene container. It can fret about the tires, climb the Matterhorn, write “On the Origin of Species”—whatever, as long as the genes keep getting passed along. Darwin may have been wretched much of the time, but he had ten children. He checked the evolutionary box. Was he also farting and throwing up a lot? Sure. His genes didn’t care.
But Loewenstein thinks that negative emotions aren’t simply a design flaw or a regrettable by-product of natural selection. On the contrary, he thinks that we have good evolutionary reasons for being able to feel bad. Our ancestors would have been less “fit” to pass their genes along if they hadn’t been equipped with negative emotions. Fear could save us from predators; guilt could help us maintain the social bonds on which survival depended.
Knowing this, Loewenstein warns, won’t make us feel any less unhappy. “I offer in these pages no tips and precious little advice,” he writes. “This is not a self-help book.” (I wonder whether his publishers tried to talk him out of that.) Loewenstein describes the book as, instead, “one scientist’s bird’s-eye view of the subject, shaped by broad reading, personal experience, and, in many cases, my own research.”
“The Opposite of Happiness” is fairly nontechnical. There is no talk of neurotransmitters, and Loewenstein, who has himself conducted brain-imaging research, thinks that the interpretation of functional-MRI scans is often “not much more reliable than reading tea leaves.” The book is also quite personal, although selectively so. Loewenstein lets us know, for example, that he suffers from paruresis (shy-bladder syndrome) but neglects to mention that he is a great-grandson of Sigmund Freud, whose theories of unconscious drives bear some family resemblance to Loewenstein’s account of our emotional programming.
The problem with a lot of evolutionary psychology is that its explanations are hard to verify. It undertakes to explain an observable fact (we fret about bald tires) with an unobservable one (cavemen worried that a mastodon might trample them). Loewenstein is alert to the danger of producing “just-so” stories, accounts of human attributes based on unconfirmable hunches about what life was like in the Paleolithic era. But they’re hard to avoid.
Even if we accept these evolutionary explanations, they leave a further puzzle. Why do negative emotions so often persist long after they’ve served their purpose? Like the earworms of cheesy pop songs, they can get stuck in our heads. Our brains continue pumping them out even when the occasions for them have passed.
We also have the unfortunate ability to reëxperience some negative feelings just by remembering the occasions for them. We may find it hard to recall what physical pain felt like once it has stopped, but, when we remember something shameful we did, we can feel the shame all over again. Most of us could use an empathy gap there.
“At the heart of so many of our miseries,” Loewenstein says, “is not the fact that we feel bad, but the belief that we should feel otherwise.” Our brains fight with themselves. We feel ashamed of our shame, angry about our anger. The wish to escape an unpleasant emotion becomes another source of misery. Who’s running the show in there?
Not “us.” We may resolve, after firing off an intemperate e-mail, to respond more calmly the next time. But, when the next provocation arrives, our anger can make the resolution seem lame. As Loewenstein explains, we are adept at psychological self-sabotage. Sometimes our very efforts to gain control make things worse, as when athletes concentrate too intently on not trying so hard.
In the second half of “The Opposite of Happiness,” Loewenstein lets unhappiness sufferers speak for themselves. He has gathered their stories through what he calls the Misery Survey, in which more than five hundred respondents were asked about their experiences of negative emotions. Each was assigned an emotion at random and asked whether it had caused them misery. If it had, they were invited to describe the experience; if not, they were assigned another emotion. The stories make for fun reading (more or less), not so much because they hold surprises but because we recognize ourselves in so many of them. Misery, it turns out, loves company.
Loewenstein devotes a chapter to each of twelve varieties of misery. It’s a bit like Dante’s Inferno if Dante had modelled his work on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders rather than the “Summa Theologiae” of Thomas Aquinas. The first two circles in Loewenstein’s hell are Impatience and Boredom, followed by Anger, Envy, Jealousy, Rejection, Guilt, Shame, Anxiety, Regret, Loneliness, and, in the last circle, Depression, which he deems “a fitting finale to this Hieronymus Bosch underworld of psychic torments—not just because it is so supremely awful, but because nearly all the other miseries, when they persist and accumulate, can give rise to it.” (Hate, a resurgent political emotion across much of the planet, did not make the list. Neither did grief.)
Loewenstein suspects that depression, unlike some other negative emotions, has no adaptive function of its own. It arises, he thinks, as a by-product of other psychological systems in distress. That’s close to what Peter D. Kramer concluded in his 2005 book, “Against Depression,” where he defines depression as “a disease in which a host of injuries combine to cause a common downstream process that becomes self-sustaining.” It is hard to see how suicidality conduces to reproductive success. And depression can create what Loewenstein terms “the ultimate empathy gap”: people in its grip find it almost impossible to imagine what life without it would feel like.
At the other end of his inferno is boredom. We might not think of boredom as an emotion. It seems more like the absence of emotion. But, in a study tracking the daily feelings of some four thousand adults, Loewenstein and his colleagues found that boredom frequently accompanied strong negative feelings, including anger and anxiety. “We found that boredom was 4.2 times more likely to occur in the presence of another negative emotion than a positive one,” he says.
Two places where people commonly report being bored are doctors’ waiting rooms and airport terminals. We sit there fiddling with our smartphones, and with nothing else to do, running scary or angry scenarios through our heads—the medical news will not be good, the flight will be cancelled, they will close the gate while I’m in line at Starbucks—and composing powerfully cogent letters to the airline about the incompetence of the gate crew. We get mad when we are forced to wait for something for which there are no substitutes, and then we complain that we’re bored. (In a section titled “Why Are Dreams So Boring?,” Loewenstein says that one of the most “excruciatingly boring” things we can do is listen to someone describe a dream they had. This reads like a barely veiled put-down of his famous forebear.)
But how did we acquire the capacity for boredom? There don’t seem to have been airports or doctors’ offices back in Paleolithic times, when men just hunted and gathered (and, we hope, partied). Loewenstein suggests that the ability to become bored developed as a way of budgeting attention. “If early humans didn’t feel the urge to redirect their attention when staring at the same patch of woods,” he says, “they might have missed important opportunities—a rustle in the bush that signaled prey, or an approaching threat. Our ancestors who were better at reallocating attention had an adaptive advantage: they probably avoided more predators, found more food, and pursued more socially or intellectually engaging activities.” This might be a little just-so-y. It’s hard to see how the humans or proto-humans who never got bored were the ones who got selected out. Maybe sabre-toothed tigers ate them all.
Other evolutionary explanations seem more persuasive. Loewenstein agrees with many people who have written about negative emotions that feelings like shame and guilt perform a regulatory social function. They help enforce the norms of the group. Shame, in particular, encourages submission rather than confrontation, a response “designed to protect us from one of the greatest threats to our survival—being cast out.”
Explaining why negative emotions might have evolved, though, still leaves that problem of why they can become so consuming, so hard to toggle off. Why do we spiral? Is it because we inherited emotions like anxiety which evolved in response to genuine threats to survival and can now be triggered by the prospect of missing the bus? Or were our emotions always liable to become excessive? Did our Stone Age ancestors lie awake wondering whether they had remembered to put out the fire pit?
Loewenstein thinks that it’s at least partly the latter. Our emotional system, he says, “is prone, almost by design, to malfunction.” To protect us against threats, it has to be highly sensitive, prone to false alarms rather than risk missing a real danger. But this sensitivity also makes the system unstable. He believes our psyches are poised on a “razor’s edge” between negative feedback, which allows an emotion to subside when the threat has passed, and positive feedback, in which an emotion amplifies itself. Anxiety, for example, makes us more alert to threats, which can make us perceive more threats, which heightens our anxiety. It’s like driving on an icy road: the harder we brake, the more we lose control of the car.
Of course, an emotion that makes us miserable is not necessarily an irrational response to our circumstances. One question we can ask about psychological diagnoses is whether some states we classify as symptoms of mental disorders are responses to a world that’s genuinely frightening or depressing. What if life really is meaningless? What if other people really are out to get us? What if the barista really is hitting on our girlfriend? Then feelings like sadness, anger, and jealousy might be perfectly understandable, and the emotions that need to be explained are optimism, tolerance, and a sense of humor. Maybe it’s the optimists who are the crazy ones.
In the list of books that helped replace a theological understanding of the universe with a secular one, “On the Origin of Species” is near the top. One theory about Darwin’s poor health, in fact, was that he was horrified by the implications of his own discoveries—that our species was not a special creation and that no providence dictated its characteristics. Natural selection is a blind process. There is no being out there or up there that oversees its course.
Still, there is a way in which evolutionary psychology belongs to a religious tradition, the tradition of theodicy. This was the effort of theologians to explain why, given an omnipotent and beneficent God, there is evil in the world. Transposed to a Darwinian world view, this becomes the question: If natural selection has equipped us to survive and reproduce, why has it burdened us with so much misery? There is a temptation to assume that every form of suffering must have served some evolutionary purpose, just as God must have had a reason for earthquakes in Lisbon. The problem of why bad things happen kept intellectuals busy for centuries. The problem of unhappiness promises to do the same. It may be that both depend on a shared illusion: that it all makes sense. ♦