I think of early hominids. Were they happy? Is it meaningful to talk about their happiness at all? Can the determined process of surviving produce happiness? Can the mere fact that we survive from day to day be the root of our happiness? I think the quick answer is no. Mere survival is not happiness. There's more to it. It's qualified survival. Certainly surviving some events or achieving some kinds of successes will produce elation for a time, and the body is geared to produce the sensation, but that's not what we mean by happiness.
I find its useful to think about happiness as day to day surviving in some kind of 'style', or attitude that is not derived from the mechanics of the survival but connected to it through our self-consciousness, through our instincts for self-expression. How to characterise this? There has been a lot of research into happiness with few results to be sure about except, perhaps, that one's level of happiness is related to the number of friends we have, and that happiness tends to give us longer life.
That we have friends at all - as distinct from just mates - is a big clue, I believe, to what is going on in humans when it comes to happiness, not just for women but for everyone. The human personality is, as I argue elsewhere, a relatively recent evolved trait for the purpose of making us happier. How does this work? The human personality is a system for making bonds. The mating bond especially becomes deeper and longer lasting, giving parenting more strength, with the resultant improved fitness that bringing up healthy children to reproduction gives individuals.
The key, therefore, to happiness lies in the understanding our personality, in expressing it, and in being able to read correctly the personalities of others.
If this ability is an evolved trait, however, how is it that we seem to be so bad at it? Half of all marriages wouldn't fail and lonely hearts columns in newspapers would have few items in them. Well, culture obscures even the best efforts to be ourselves, and can readily be used to disguise who we really are. Goods have meanings over and above their nominal function, and much culture propagates these meanings rather than the underlying reality When you fall in love with the boy next door, is it because you love him for himself or because he has a Porsche and an iPhone? This is not a trivial question, and we do need to recognise that we form relationships on bases other than our innate natures.
Humans do not form a set of entirely individual personalities. True individuality does not exist. Rather, all humans have a nature that varies in a regular systematic way. We need to ditch the idea that we are all fundamentally unique individuals, and learn instead how the human personality has limited variations, and that we are more alike than we dare to think. To cut to the chase. Our very best partner, then, becomes someone like ourselves, because that is the only situation in which we can grow fully and realise the quality of self-expression that creates happiness out of surviving.
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