[tss93]

The critique feels valid to me. There’s a tendency in modern psychology/media to pathologize the average human baseline: if you’re not consistently optimistic and thriving, something must be wrong with you, or at least you need to be in a pursuit of this.

But constant happiness isn’t realistic, it’s like a desire to be permanently high. From my own experience I’ve landed somewhere near the Buddhist framing: the healthy default is just calm and neutral, with happiness and sadness coming and going away.

Trying to force happiness as a permanent state seems like its own problem, which is kind of what Bentall is pointing at from the other direction.

[thewebguyd]

> healthy default is just calm and neutral, with happiness and sadness coming and going away.

This is a very healthy attitude, and people often miss it. Every feeling/emotion/state of mind is impermanent. It will come and go on its own, its biology and there's nothing you can do about it. It's trying to "cling" to a specific state, forever, that leads to our own suffering. The moment you've move from "I feel happy" to "I hope this lasts forever" is where you will suffer. Just be a witness to the coming and going, you witness happiness occurring, you don't become happiness, and its the same for other feelings and states.

[IAmBroom]

Almost as if there were some middle-path that was best...

[autoexec]

> There’s a tendency in modern psychology/media to pathologize the average human baseline

Is there though? I don't think modern psychology does. Where are these psychologists who don't think emotional ups and downs are a normal healthy part of life? Even in media it's often recognized that people being happy (or even just too tranquil) all the time, is wrong and creepy/unsettling. That said, it's absolutely true that advertisers are constantly pushing a narrative that you should be in an endless pursuit for what you don't have and that if you only buy what they want to sell you it will make you happier and improve your life.

[curiouscube]

It seems to me that you're implicitly thinking of happiness/sadness as zero sum. That can be very limiting.

[tss93]

Usually I don’t do math of sums, just let the happiness be and then fade or sadness or any other. Just grew to be ok with nothingness, cos I had a tendency of pushing towards sadness when I am not happy and then its like a pendulum and me riding it