Since I have finished with Introduction to Psychology, I have found myself with more questions than answers. You would think the learning process would bring me answers, but when it comes down to psychology, I couldn't suppress this sneaky suspicion that with every answer you get, you are also given a handful of more questions. You can seek answers to these questions if you wish, but the second you grab a hold of one, you find it is attached to another twenty questions. I'm the type of person who needs answers. I don't like not knowing something. If the answer is out there, I simply can't justify not seeking it. With psychology, this just gets me in a world of trouble.
Close to the end of the semester, we had a lecture based on how people deal with changes in their lives. People have a standard level of happiness. As a whole, we don't stray from it very well. We can get very happy or very sad, but in the end, we always return to our default level of joy. For example, if you were to win the lottery, you would obviously be very excited and full of happiness for some time, but as you got used to that life, you would slowly return to your default level of happy until the fact that you are a multimillionaire no longer satisfies you. It works in the reverse also. If you lose both of your legs in a car crash, you'll most likely be very very depressed for some time. As your life continues, and you begin to realize that this is who you are, your body returns to the default happiness level once again.
Those are the answers. Here are my questions.
Do we ever really get better or worse? The way it is taught is we have a certain level of happiness that we return to no matter what, but is that entirely true? It seems more likely to me that we simply take that happiness, or lack of happiness, to become our new default level of joy. Perhaps the bar simply shifts, allowing those who lost their legs in car accidents to accept that this is their new life. They may not be happy, but this is the only level of happiness that they now know, and so they adopt it as their normal level of joy.
This leads to more answers.
The human mind cannot remember emotion in memory. How it works is this: we store memories in groups. Memories that made us feel a certain way group together. Memories of joy all stick together, usually in certain levels. If something made us feel very happy, it is stored with other memories that made us feel very happy. Close by, we'll store memories that made us somewhat happy, and then close to those we'll store memories that just made us a little happy. This works the same for memories of when we felt bad. We clump them, but we cannot actually store emotion in our memory data bank.
And now we're back to questions.
If we can't remember emotion, then how do we ever really know how happy we were before? We store things away in memories by clumping similar emotions together. Think back for a minute during times right after something terrible happened to you. Didn't everything else just suck back then? It seems that everything was damaged, all your memories stored on a low level of emotional joy. Perhaps those things weren't as bad as your remember them, but because everything else sucked, you are storing them on a lower level.
This brings me back to my emotional perception. If we have no way of storing emotion other than through clumping similar memories, how do we even know how happy we really were? If we just readjust the bar based on where our default happiness currently lies, how do we know that five years ago, we weren't 100 times happier than we are now? We don't. We have adjusted, and so even though our life is now 100 times worse than it was, we have simply set this as our standard level of happiness, and so we are grouping memories together that should really not be grouped together.
See what I mean by questions and answers? Prove me wrong if you can. I don't much like the idea that we settle simply because we don't know any better, and would be happy to alter my perspective.
Worst part? It actually makes sense.
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