“I think our genetic makeup makes us miserable. We evolved to be miserable.” — George Loewenstein
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yeah, yeah. We’ve all heard that one before. When Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he remixed Locke’s “life, liberty and estate,” replacing the idea of property with happiness. As we know from last week’s conversation with the historian Joshua Specht, America’s age-old love affair with real estate has been perpetually mortgaged. And our guest today, the behavioral economist George Loewenstein, who happens — probably not coincidentally — to be the great-grandson of Sigmund Freud, offers a similar warning about the ideal of happiness.
Happiness’ antonym is misery. In his new book The Opposite of Happiness, Loewenstein explains that it’s misery, and not happiness, which has simultaneously broken humans and built humankind. We evolved to be miserable, the behavioral economist argues, explaining that English has four times as many words for negative emotions as for positive ones. The depths we can sink to are incomparably deeper and more interesting than the heights we can reach, Freud’s great-grandson reassures us. Happiness is a Disneyfied mush while misery is infinitely variegated, he tells us, building a twelve-part taxonomy from envy and regret to loneliness and anxiety. The behavioral economist even invents a “Misery Survey” and cites an experiment he conducted with married couples which found that doubling their sexual frequency left them less happy.
So much for sex. Loewenstein spent a lifetime escaping Freud and has ended up desexualizing him for modern America. I’ve always found behavioral economics to be a particularly miserable subject (ideology dressed up as science). But maybe that’s the point. Life, liberty and the pursuit of misery. A Loewensteinian redraft of the Declaration, anyone?
Five Takeaways
• We Evolved to Be Miserable. Loewenstein’s starting point contradicts the entire happiness industry: misery is the human constant, and happiness the occasional exception. Not because society ruins us — he takes exception to Rousseau’s idea that we are born happy and civilized into unhappiness — but because our genetic makeup makes us so. Every negative emotion evolved to push us toward behavior that served our fitness; that is precisely why they are unavoidable. His evidence is asymmetry. English has, by his count, four times as many words for negative emotions as for positive ones. The depths of misery are incomparably deeper than the heights of joy. And happiness is “a big mush,” while unhappiness is infinitely variegated — twelve specific miseries in the book’s second half, each with its own facial expression, its own pattern of brain activity, and its own behavior. Novelists, he says, have always known this; they are better psychologists than the academics, and misery is simply more interesting.
• Envy Is Local. Andrew’s cheekiest question: does Loewenstein, part of what he calls the second shift of behavioral economics, envy Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky and Richard Thaler, the field’s Nobel-garlanded founders? He didn’t deny it. We don’t envy billionaires and trillionaires, he explains; we envy people close to us and just ahead, and those three are the textbook case. Then the move that makes the book humane rather than cynical: meta-emotions. You’re not supposed to envy your friends, so when you inevitably do, you feel guilty about feeling envious — misery about misery. Understanding your own negative emotions, he argues, works like understanding another person: you forgive what you understand. And no, this is not a book about selfishness — sympathy, guilt and shame are some of the most social emotions we have. Nor are these first-world problems: the struggling farmer cares about self-esteem, guilt and loneliness as much as anyone.
• The Freud Inheritance. Loewenstein spent much of his career trying to escape his great-grandfather — he wouldn’t even mention the connection for years — and now finds himself reinventing him: his research on pain, hunger and sex is, he concedes, a study of what Freud would have called the conflict between id and superego. The family history is its own novel. His mother, Sophie Freud, was the daughter of Freud’s eldest son; when the family fled the Nazis, the main branch went to London while she and her mother escaped by bicycling through France. Edward Bernays — Freud’s nephew and the father of American public relations — paid for her college education when she arrived in the United States penniless. She later wrote Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family, about feeling rejected by the clan. And the glass-half-empty temperament? From both parents, he says, but more from his father. Andrew’s framing: a lifetime escaping Freud, only to end up desexualizing him for modern America.
• The Missing Motive. On Bentham and quantification, Loewenstein is cautious — psychologists can put numbers on feelings, but moving from an inchoate internal state to a figure is genuinely hard. His real hero is Adam Smith, not the Smith of The Wealth of Nations but of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, his first book and the last he revised, and in Loewenstein’s view a psychology book of striking modernity. (Andrew notes the Smith of Susan Neiman’s evil book last week is the same one; Loewenstein recommends Dennis Rasmussen’s book on Smith and Hume, and Rasmussen was on last week too.) His most provocative claim is about self-esteem: probably the single main motivator of human behavior, and yet almost absent from economics — one book and a handful of papers. Money buys happiness only up to a point. And his own experiment, instructing married couples to double their sexual frequency, found they did — and reported less happiness and less closeness. He doesn’t quite believe his own result.
• The Happiness Industry. Where the psychology meets the economics. Institutions built on attention — above all the internet companies selling advertising — “don’t give a fig about your well-being,” he says, and are amplifying human misery; Meta keeps losing lawsuits because jurors, like everyone else, simply dislike the company. Happiness sells the illusion that the next car, the next pill, the next accomplishment will do it, and advertising plays on a wiring we already have. On therapy he is careful: his friends and family include therapists, the research says therapy works (cognitive behavioral therapy especially), though the cultural focus on mental health may make people more inwardly focused. What strikes him in his students is how casually they mention their therapists, and how anxiety and depression, two separate conditions in his generation, have fused into one. On Trump, his verdict is short: a deeply insecure man driven by feelings of inadequacy. And the sign-off: a Nietzschean moustache, and a Nietzschean book. Andrew’s verdict: life, liberty and the pursuit of misery — a Loewensteinian redraft of the Declaration.
About the Guest
George Loewenstein is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor of Economics and Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the founding figures of ...
