With something as fuzzy as "happiness" there can be many scales.

This is one of the beefs that I have with the "love your job" culture. People reduce job satisfaction to a single line, where you either love it, hate it, or something in between.

I like to think of job satisfaction across many dimensions. Maybe you love your team, but commute is killing you. Projects are interesting, but salary could be higher. To make it more complicated, there dimensions and yourself change over time: projects start and end, colleagues join and leave, you might get raises or promotions.

Rating things in a simple happy/unhappy, love/hate scale is rarely useful.

I think it's simpler than this. Happiness is an emotion which is an acute phenomenon. It is impossible to sustain just like anger or surprise.

Satisfaction is what I think most people mean by "happiness." And when you start thinking of it that way there are very actionable things you can do to improve this directly.

I definitely think that it's relative, or as in Vanilla Sky "The sweet just ain't as sweet without the sour". I consciously recognize (and even appreciate?) the bad times because the best times in my life depend on comparing them to the rougher periods. It's the exceptions that make me most joyful, not some constant state of happy.

Sure, but I mean it literally. For things like this there is a lot of conflation of words like happy, joy, satisfied, etc. But the natural state of the brain is neutral, so it can react when needed.

To create an emotion the brain alters brain chemistry as a way to send signals which we interpret as emotions.

It would be problematic if they could just be switched on without turning off.

I think this is basically similar to the ideas of Stoicism.

Happiness itself is fleeting, it will come and go, you can't really aim for it, we are awful predictors of it and as you state it's an emotion so it comes an goes.

However we can strive to achieve a certain comfort, or tranquillity from knowing that we did our best, that we did what we could and what we should and gain a certain satisfaction from that.

That is much more rounded, it's more achievable and stops you from being at whim to the randomness of the world and your own moods.

I love how the two top comments on this post are "It's more complicated" and "It's much simpler".

It's all relative either way.

Including this statement?

Thats why we need domain driven design: First define “Happiness”…

This seems to fit in with my idea of general happiness, and actively enjoying oneself.

Playing only video games, I can enjoy myself but my general happiness often suffers from lack of variety.

Sometimes, when I'm working on something hard, I might not be particularly enjoying myself, but I can be overall happier while being given a challenge.

You're saying happiness and unhappiness exist on independent scales, should we plot them in an x-y graph then? Upper right quadrant: overexcitement, lower left quadrant: boredom. Not sure about the off-diagonals.

So there's a very widely used model of mood that posits this (the author didn't cite this which was surprising to me).

The PANAS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_and_Negative_Affect_S...) is a widely used measure of mood that's based on this model, as an example.

One axis is "negative mood" and the other is "positive mood", so it's closer to something like despair on on one end of one axis, and joy on the end of the other axis, and lack thereof on both ends of each axes.

So high negative emotion and low positive emotion is something like sadness or something; high negative emotion and high positive emotion might be like anxiety.

There's arguments about which model is right (another is negative versus positive mood on one axis [i.e., valence], and arousal versus lack of arousal on the other axis).

The issue is that depending on time frame, or what you're assessing, people can feel positive and negative emotion at the same time. But on micro timescales I think there's more arguments. It might just be a sort of descriptive thing without any "correct" answer.

When you ask people to rate their mood, you find two clusters of responses, roughly corresponding to negative and positive mood axes, but they're slightly negatively correlated, suggesting one overarching valence dimension, but not as dominant as you might intuit.

Boredom is low unhappiness and low happiness,

Euphoria is low unhappiness and high happiness.

Depression is high unhappiness and low happiness

I can't really come up with what it would mean to be high unhappiness and high happiness. Manic, maybe? It sounds like a very confused situation.

High happiness and high unhappiness is how I would describe parenthood. On the one side your whole life is a chore and feels like a grind. On the other hand your kids give bring you so much happiness you seems to smile/laugh more often.

It’s right there in the article, they mention running a startup is one example since it’s high autonomy and high stress.

Having both created a startup and worked a cushy job, I can relate

Your idea is really interesting.

I rarely (if ever) comment on my mental health online, but I can totally relate to a X-Y quadrant as you describe. Many mental health professional debut their appointment with a dreaded question "how are you feeling today?".

If I had this diagram with me, it would save time and be way more descriptive of my state of mind.

As for the high unhappiness/high unhappiness quadrant: I'm not manic myself but know close ones who are. I think it fits.

Thanks for opening my mind about this.

I can't claim credit here. I was just following on the idea that the original commenter floated.

The high unhappiness, high happiness quadrant is formally referred to as “my life”.

I am happiest when I stretch past my limits, which not un-coincidentally means I am also always hitting my limits.

Would not change anything. Might change my mind at any time though.

(I am not manic, maybe an incurable optimist.)

Manic is not that, at least not bipolar manic. Manic is energized. Manic is go go go go goooooo! Manic is I don't care about your stupid happiness thing, let's do stuff!

Manic is kinda weird. The above makes it sound almost good, or kind of good. It is not. It is very dangerous. You do not want to be manic. (But you might, maybe, some of the time, want to be hypomanic.)

(Disclaimer: I have had contact with mania in my life but have never personally experienced a Bipolar I manic episode and I aim to keep it that way.)

Sometimes people lose a parent and have their first kid in the same year.

It's like that.

Newton simplified physics with his model of gravity.

Before that, we had Aristotle's physics, with its opposing forces of gravity and levity.

https://www.isoul.org/gravitation-and-levitation-theories/

This model of happiness seems overly complicated and burdensome. But funny.

For many feelings, the linear measure is often ineffective, we can grant that to the author to highlight this fact.

In my experience (read: not a specialist, anecdotal data point), I relate to the 2-scale described here and more: the lack.

Typically, the lack of [feeling] or its opposite is as much a sign as its abundance.

To exemplify, being (un)happy is what one might call a positive action: you DO feel (un)happy. In that sense, not feeling any hapiness or unhappiness is putting yourself in an emotional void, which calls for action in a much different way that treating happiness VS unhappiness.

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Edit: to conclude:

Hence, the scale I'd like to propose is, for some definition of happiness and probably many other feelings:

* measure of lack, presence, abundance of effective emotions

* measure of wanted feeling

* measure of unwanted feeling

Why are we still guessing how our emotions work?

With 5 billion people online, there could be instant feedback on all models and hypotheses.

What is needed to coordinate humans to figure out how humans work?

For one Facebook owns most of the data. At soe point they tried testing some psychological hypothesis but everyone thought it was unethical. I haven't read this article but if you need a pointer https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...

Reminds me of this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_theory

Interesting take, but still boils down to the same: satisfaction = happiness - unhappiness.

What's more interesting to me is how it seems that "satisfaction" is equal to the first derivative of life quality - if your life quality sucks, and gets a little better, you feel satisfied; if your life quality rocks, and gets a little worse, you feel dissatisfied.

I don't remember where I learned this: "It isn't enough to be happy. You have to be content".

And yet I’ve found I’m willing to settle for being content for long periods even if it rarely rises to the level of actual happiness. Content is an under-appreciated state of being.

> Instead, happiness and unhappiness are two separate, independent scales.

So, happiness behaves more like a fuzzy measure rather than like a probabilistic measure.

It's likely that there are many more axes than 2.

Bullshit.

Two scales mean that they can be independent. You never experience:

1) Too much unhappiness

and

2) Too much happiness

Therefore, these are not two scales. As simple as that.

Oh, you can experience both immense moments of joy in times of tragedy, and vice versa. Your child gets born during intense warfighting. You find your dog (which you thought had perished) again after a hurricane that devastated your home. Your partner dies during a phase of extraordinary success.

This is the type of content I keep coming back to HN for. Very insightful.

So sticks and carrots?

the richer insight here is into the bias present in arrangements of binary classifiers imo. this article is dripping with it.