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When you come down to the dull facts, happiness is an evolutionary adaptation that exists to make us engage in certain behaviours at certain times when they might optimise our chances of surviving and reproducing. Happiness makes us tend to pursue some things and avoid others. But it’s the same story with our less compelling emotions: boredom, dissatisfaction, sadness and all the other negatives. They all evolved in our souls to make us behave in certain ways at certain times, in order to optimise our chances of getting laid and getting breakfast. Humans feel happiness. Lower-order creatures, such as sea squirts, don’t. Humans feel boredom, dissatisfaction and sadness. Sea squirts don’t. Theodosius Dobzhansky, the geneticist, argued: ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’ If an emotion is there inside us, it’s because it evolved there because it had a use. Trying to deny our deeply wired nature, or to displace the aspects that we don’t like is, in the words of the old Zen joke, like a naked man trying to tear off his shirt.
What use could all the negatives be? Our rush to create alchemist’s gold from positive psychology has made it seriously unfashionable to seek good reasons for the existence of our unsmiley side. But it has long been known that having a moderate dose of pessimism can make us see the world more accurately, Psychologists call this phenomenon “depressive realism’. It works because, in general, life dishes out more rough deals than good ones, and people with mildly miserablist outlooks are better at predicting the outcomes of real-world situations than cock-eyed optimists who, in tests, tend woefully to overestimate their success, their status and the chances of happy things happening around them. A dose of thermometer-sucking hypochondria is entirely healthy, too: we are built to worry about whether there is something wrong with us, because our Neolithic ancestors needed to stay perpetually alert for infected food and infectious diseases.
The slight evolutionary advantage that depressive, hypochondriacal cave dwellers had over their happy-go- lucky neighbours meant that, over millions of years, the most carefree died young and the anxious ones thrived. If you’re permanently happy, you don’t want things to change. You don’t evolve. Constantly cheerful Stone Agers would have lolled about grinning while their wounds festered, their crops died and bears devoured their children. If you’re less than happy, you want to improve yourself and your world.
Randolph Nesse, a psychiatry professor at Michigan University, argues that depression not only has strong evolutionary reasons for existing, it can still help us today. Depression often interjects in life to tell us to stop what we’re doing and to reconsider, he explains. This is particularly useful when something genuinely depressing happens in our lives, such as a job loss or relationship break-up, where it is in a healthy part of human experience to slow down to take time to grieve, to mull, to reassess the way that we act in this world and make changes. Doctors, however, are increasingly keen to dull this pain with pills and get us off the convalescent couch. When the Archives of General Psychiatry published an American study of 8,000 people who had been diagnosed and treated as depressed, it reported that up to a quarter of them were not clinically glum, they had just undergone a normal life event such as family bereavement. Their symptoms, it said, should be left to pass naturally although that wouldn’t help the drug multinationals to sell ever-increasing numbers of sadness-numbing chemicals.
Depression-damping can have strange side-effects, too. If naturally timid, depressive people have their inhibitions Prozac-ed away, this may warp our social structure and even flip our financial markets into resounding booms and busts. Big traders might not be notorious for their timidity, but they do tend to be stressed out, anxious and subject to plunging morale and thus often get prescribed antidepressants. so they may trade more aggressively if the happy pills remove their natural caution. Prozac-type drugs boost the brain’s levels of the hormone serotonin, which can also make us more status-hungry. Research shows that tribe-leading monkeys have twice as much serotonin as the others in the group. If the top monkey loses his position, his serotonin levels plunge. Any one of the other monkeys could be made the boss by just giving it an antidepressant to boost its serotonin levels. Thus, high-pressure workplaces may become even more pushy when the life-challenged Prozac-poppers all start wanting to become top monkey.
Excerpted from pages 178 to 180 of Enough: breaking free from the world of excess by John Naish