Cav's Place

I kept saying that depressed people think better, but now there’s even a study to back me up, though the researchers don’t agree with me when it comes to causality. They’re saying that being sad makes people think and recall memories better, while I was saying that thinking things through inevitably results in being depressed in this world we have created for ourselves. But the two opinions can simply be summarized by saying that there’s an undeniable connection between thinking and being sad, which is quite obvious.
On the other hand, the author of the study says that a positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation and reliance on mental shortcuts. When it comes to creativity, I assume he’s talking about quantity, because when you’re in a good mood you may feel like putting any talents you have, or just think you have, to use and creating something, while when you’re in a bad mood you really don’t want to do much of anything and tend to assume that whatever you’d try will turn out badly. However, it seems to me that the best creative works are very often born out of pain and sorrow, so this statement could be seriously challenged if quality would also be taken into account. The other three parts, namely flexibility, cooperation and reliance on mental shortcuts, can be explained by the fact that people who are in a good mood tend to be more confident, but also shallower and less attentive. So happy people will trust their own abilities to get things right even if they miss certain details and believe that everything will turn out well in the end even if something doesn’t sound so well at that particular moment, but that also means they’re less likely to notice potential problems and more likely to just ignore even those they do notice.

I don’t have many good things to say about happy people, do I? That’s because happy people are far less likely to do something to improve the world and, while further improvements may not be needed in an ideal world, that’s certainly not the case for us, considering how deeply flawed our society is and how much we have harmed and continue to harm the entire planet. Being unhappy with how things are drives you to want to change them, so this kind of discontent is what the world needs, though obviously not what the people feeling it need.
Things are a bit different when it comes to personal lives, however. Being reasonably happy with your personal life helps a lot, because it allows you to overlook any minor disagreements you may have with those who are close to you and the little things that go wrong on a daily basis. Such a good mood also gives you the confidence needed to solve any problems that do arise and also to help those around you, strengthening your relationships. That same confidence can make you believe you can do something to improve the world too, while having strong relationships with the people you’re close to ensures that you’ll have others to support you in your attempts or to comfort you if you fail. But you’ll still need plenty of contemplative moments even in your personal life, to ensure that no serious problem or potential problem slips past you, unnoticed until it’s too late, and contemplation and happiness don’t go too well together.
So an ideal state of mind is probably represented by being generally content with your personal life, though also setting aside some time for contemplation in order to ensure that no problems remain unsolved for too long, and generally discontent with the world, though also enjoying some moments of hope, confidence and excitement in order to actually do something to improve it.

Regarding one’s personal life, long-term happiness is certainly possible, though rather rare, and nearly everyone has reasons for temporary happiness at least a few times in life. On the other hand, extremely few people have any reason to be happy with how the world is and works. So you’d think that the necessary degree of discontent required for improvements would always be there and we’d constantly be moving in the right direction, yet that’s not the case. That’s not the case partly because the powers that be make it very difficult and risky for anyone to try to change society, partly because unhappy people aren’t too confident in their abilities to begin with and partly because those in power have always tried to provide just enough people with just enough reasons for momentary happiness to prevent the unhappy ones from creating a strong enough movement.
But providing people with reasons for momentary happiness requires taking their needs and wants into account and actually doing something for them, so a better method for keeping them subdued was desired. It took a long time, but eventually, with the advent of modern psychology, it finally presented itself. Generalized feelings of unhappiness were called depression and started being treated as a disease, the “patients” being taught how to get over whatever’s making them unhappy and given drugs to simply make them less unhappy regardless of how they view things. That was a great day for the powers that be, not to mention for psychologists and pharmaceutical companies, and a dark day for the world, because people naturally want to be happy and more and more of them resort to these methods, treating the effects and doing nothing to remove the actual cause of their unhappiness, essentially doing the work that those in power had been forced to do up to that point.
If, as this study says, people who are in a negative mood are less gullible, less shallow, more eloquent and have better memory, they’re a threat to the status quo not only because they want to change it, but also because they could actually have the means to do so. On the other hand, if people who are in a positive mood are more gullible, shallower and have a harder time recalling past events, they’re easier to manipulate, while the fact that they’re less eloquent also means that they’d have a harder time attracting others to their cause even if they desired to do so. That said, being happy because you truly have a serious reason to be happy is wonderful, but not being unhappy despite having a serious reason to be unhappy only ensures that things will continue getting worse. It makes perfect sense for those in power to desire such a situation, but I can’t understand why do the rest of us allow it!

Perhaps a society in which the leaders would be unhappy and their subjects would be happy would be a giant leap towards utopia, because such leaders would be able to identify any problems or potential problems and truly want to solve them, while such subjects would be willing to do what their leaders would advise them to do in order to accomplish just that. But since the current situation is more or less the opposite, we need to stop being just pieces in their game, stop doing what they want us to do, hold on to our unhappiness and use it to fuel our efforts until we’ll actually manage to change the world for the better. Because if we don’t, who will?