Happiness Is...
Two hits of dopamine, one lump of testosterone, some serotonin, a dollop of oxytocin, a touch of cannabinoids, and a little bit of opioids
When books about happiness started being published in the early 2000s, I had one thought: Happiness is for pussies. Bookstore windows stacked with happiness guides were the soft flatulence of a dying country. One that wanted to go to the beach, cuddle1, and play some sort of simplified, low-impact game that I could not yet name but was definitely pickleball. Let others garden. I wanted more.
While I was in college, I wrote a letter to a friend from my suburban high school. It contained a warning meant as much to me as for him: “Suburbs equal death.” I desperately loved my lovely girlfriend Cassandra, but avoided marriage for five years, quietly muttering, “Marriage equals death.” Given my history with women, I knew if I just avoided a wedding, I could have a wild sex life consisting of two or even three long-term monogamous relationships. I wanted adventure, heartbreak, freedom. I wanted the future that Theodore Roosevelt described in his 1899 speech The Strenuous Life, only a little more indoorsy and a lot less world-dominationy.2
I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph
Who among you would teach your boys that ease, that peace, is to be the first consideration in their eyes, to be the ultimate goal after which they strive?
In his 1974 book Anarchy, State and Utopia, philosopher Robert Nozick came up with a thought experiment called the Experience Machine. The machine delivers whatever pleasurable experience you desire, which for me is showing off that I know about philosophy books instead of just referencing The Matrix like an intellectually secure person.
Our intuition tells us that no one would choose to plug into the Experience Machine. Although the results of cheap and widely available opioids tells us otherwise. Still, I reject happiness, like the soldiers in Shakespeare’s Henry V3:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.4
My friend Ben Goldhirsh is so good at living the strenuous life that I once showed up at his house with my then five-year-old kid and he handed him a treasure map for his backyard, the construction paper dangerously burnt on all sides. Ben does jiu jitsu. Ben was chased by gang members after witnessing a crime – during the day – in Brooklyn. Ben moved with his family to Costa Rica for no good reason. So when he got involved in a documentary series called Happiness, I feared Ben had gone soft.
The series, which is on YouTube, is directed by his college friend Max Joseph, who co-hosted the show Catfish. Its premise is that America – and in particular Max – is over-indexed on status. We work too hard and self-flagellate for not achieving more. Which not only makes us unhappy, but keeps us from Rooseveltian experiences, since you can’t have those in Zoom meetings. At least not until they find a way to shoot hundreds of elephants and rhinoceroses on Zoom.5
One of the recurring experts in the series is Axel Bouchon, a biochemist who wrote one of those types of books that annoy me: The Capitalism of Happiness. Axel uses phrases like “return on happiness” instead of “return on investment.” He’s also German. If I’m going to get advice from someone on happiness, German is the second-to-last ethnicity I’d go to, after German-German.
Axel says that humans have six neurotransmitters (dopamine, testosterone, serotonin, oxytocin, cannabinoids, opioids) that create the nine positive emotions we can experience (enthusiasm, horniness, recognition, family love, contentment, friendship, amusement, pleasure, and gratitude). The trick is to get these neurotransmitters and either smoke them, snort them, or shoot them up. I haven’t watched all the episodes yet, so I’m guessing here.
Actually, Axel seems to believe it works the other way. By performing activities that lead to those nine positive emotions, our bodies will release those six positive hormones that sound a lot like drugs. Germans always do things the hard way.
So we should socialize, spend time with family, and have sex. You have to live in a very sick society to need this advice from a biochemist. If you stood in front of any group before the Industrial Age and told them they should have sex and hang out with their family, they would not fund your startup.
“You are 100 percent correct that pre-industrial society likely had a more biased distribution toward family and friends – oxytocin and cannabinoids,” Axel responded. “However, it is very likely there was a deficit in serotonin and opioids neurotransmitters at that time, due to a lack of recognition and pleasure. That would be a different form of societal sickness founded in a lack of self-esteem and personal growth options.” Because most people weren’t filling their basic needs, they were probably miserable in that coughy, beggy way that malnourished people with tuberculosis often are.
But because we now can rank ourselves numerically on two of the six neurotransmitters via money and social media followers – we don’t focus on the non-ranked activities we need to be happy. Which is why I’m launching a new social media company called Bedpost Notches.
Because we’re one of the most cooperative animals ever6, Axel is finding that the neurotransmitters released by hanging out with friends and family might contribute the most to neuroplasticity, a key part of wellbeing. So we’re not just unbalanced, but we’re leaning on the wrong levers. We need to be more social.
The idea that we should read a Substack and then adjust our lives seems like exactly the kind of dumb mistake someone in a radically individualist society makes. You can’t fix yourself by fixing yourself. You need to be surrounded by a community that isn’t staring at their phones and talking about work. The only fix you can make is to move.
Max, however, thinks that won’t work. “If you've been raised in the waters of rugged individualist capitalism, I'm not sure you'll be able to undo your wiring so much that you'll just love the hell out of living in Scandinavia,” he says. When he was in Copenhagen, he kept walking into restaurants and trying to get a table by flashing his Platinum American Express card that says “Max Joseph, Motherfucking Catfish Host.”
“Every place was booked up with reservations weeks in advance. The Danes are social planners.” he says. “My wife and I like to be spontaneous. The societies we grew up in encouraged that level of freedom and autonomy,”
I figured his reason for not moving to Scandinavia was going to be “the cold.” But “restaurants require reservations” would have pissed off Theodore Roosevelt even more.
Part of why the happiness machine grosses us out, besides having a name that sounds like a male sex toy company, is that much of our life does not occur in the present. We live in our memories. We bond through our memories.
My greatest memories were things that sucked at the time. Things that made me very unhappy. I low crawled under barbed wire under the stars while being shot at from rifle towers when the army let me do three days of boot camp. I fought a round with UFC fighter Randy Couture. I have sat through four entire operas.
Ben says that the answer to this happiness paradox is also balancing our neurotransmitters. “You want a balanced portfolio of memories. It’s not just ‘I’m at work and I don’t remember anything,’” he says. “I reflect all the time on when me, my wife, and my daughters all got a stomach virus in an RV in New Zealand.”
Two surprising facts about countries that get very rich, like ours, is that people have way fewer children and experience far more loneliness. It’s gotten so bad that the only way out might be watching a YouTube video featuring a German neuroscientist.
This was also an era that included a brief fad of cuddle parties. One of which I attended.
From the speech: “The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by and will win for themselves the domination of the world.”
Only, again, a little more indoorsy and a lot less world-dominationy.
Yes, Henry V calls his band of brothers “we happy few” but he means “happy” in a badass way.
Which I am in no way hoping Zoom does.
Shout out to naked mole rats.
Joel, thank you for your service. Thank you for braving the smelly-not-smelly carpeting of cuddle party rooms so the rest of us can live in contentment, peace, and freedom (from said smelly-not-smelly parties).
I read the Cuddle Party link, chortled happily, and then came across this weirdly specific prediction from 2006: "We are just a few years from a fad where adults crap their pants."
Bet you didn't think it would be kicked off by the POTUS....