Prezados 3,5 leitores, vou apresentá-los agora a uma “paisagem adaptativa”:

A idéia aqui é a seguinte:  suponha que na primeira imagem acima, a dimensão vertical simbolize uma magnitude que expressa o seu grau de bem estar, e que as duas dimensões restantes simbolizem, digamos, dois parâmetros de sua existência que estão sob seu controle _ por exemplo, dedicação à leitura e dedicação aos esportes.  Diferentes combinações de dedicação a uma coisa ou outra te levarão a ter mais ou menos bem estar. À medida em que “nos mexemos”, alterando os dois parâmetros (”mais leitura”, “menos esporte”), fazemos uma “caminhada” pela assim chamada “paisagem adaptativa” que nos levará a vales e a picos, onde os picos estão associados a mais bem estar e os vales, a menos bem estar.

A segunda imagem mostra a mesma coisa, só que estamos abstraindo a dimensão vertical, apenas para maior clareza explicativa.  A altura é substituída por aquilo que os engenheiros e topógrafos chamam “curvas de nível”, onde cada curva conecta pontos que têm a mesma altura.

O que acontece é que à medida em que “caminhamos”, dependendo da configuração do terreno, estaremos passando por vários “ótimos locais” e caindo em “depressões locais”.  Se, digamos, estivermos caminhando no absoluto escuro, ou em meio a uma espessa névoa, não temos como erguer a vista e ver os morros mais altos adiante _ nossa única maneira de saber se estamos melhorando nosso bem estar e olhando a inclinação do terreno bem junto a nós.  Isso certamente nos levaria, de imediato, a uma situação progressivamente melhor _ mas talvez não à melhor de todas, que poderia estar muito bem apenas alguns metros à frente, embora não possamos ver esse outro morro devido à escuridão ou à névoa espessa.

Nessas condições, dependendo é claro da geografia da paisagem, o resultado mais provável com que nos depararemos é o seguinte:

Essa figura, roubada deste post do “Cosmic Variance”, mostra que pelo menos em um primeiro momento da caminhada temos mais probabilidade de piorar a situação do que de melhorar.

A conclusão óbvia é a seguinte: se tivermos muita, muita predisposição a evitar qualquer perda de bem estar, por menor que seja, é bastante provável que fiquemos sempre presos a ótimos locais _ e seja bem pouco provável que consigamos chegar a um ótimo absoluto.  Por outro lado, se desenvolvermos formas de criar um bem estar artificial (por exemplo, quimicamente induzido), podemos sair caminhando pela paisagem sem nos dar conta de estarmos indo ladeira abaixo _ direto para um vale de lágrimas.

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Estas são algumas das especulações implícitas em um artigo da Newsweek, “Happiness: Enough Already“, mostrando que na atual sociedade americana (e possivelmente em outras) o processo de patologização da tristeza está levando a uma sociedade da euforia:

“It’s hard to say exactly when ordinary Americans, no less than psychiatrists, began insisting that sadness is pathological. But by the end of the millennium that attitude was well entrenched. In 1999, Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” was revived on Broadway 50 years after its premiere. A reporter asked two psychiatrists to read the script. Their diagnosis: Willy Loman was suffering from clinical depression, a pathological condition that could and should be treated with drugs. Miller was appalled. “Loman is not a depressive,” he told The New York Times. “He is weighed down by life. There are social reasons for why he is where he is.” What society once viewed as an appropriate reaction to failed hopes and dashed dreams, it now regards as a psychiatric illness.“

Isso certamente não é bom, porque

“The drawbacks of constant, extreme happiness should not be surprising, since negative emotions evolved for a reason. Fear tips us off to the presence of danger, for instance. Sadness, too, seems to be part of our biological inheritance: apes, dogs and elephants all display something that looks like sadness, perhaps because it signals to others a need for help. One hint that too much euphoria can be detrimental comes from studies finding that among people with late-stage illnesses, those with the greatest sense of well-being were more likely to die in any given period of time than the mildly content were. Being “up” all the time can cause you to play down very real threats. “

O artigo termina com uma nota filosófica:

“Even the psychiatrist who oversaw the current DSM expresses doubts about the medicalizing of sadness. “To be human means to naturally react with feelings of sadness to negative events in one’s life,” writes Robert Spitzer of the New York State Psychiatric Institute in a foreword to “The Loss of Sadness.” That would be unremarkable if it didn’t run completely counter to the message of the happiness brigades. It would be foolish to underestimate the power and tenacity of the happiness cheerleaders. But maybe, just maybe, the single-minded pursuit of happiness as an end in itself, rather than as a consequence of a meaningful life, has finally run its course.”

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Por outro lado, pensar muito sobre a felicidade pode deixar alguém triste.  Daniel Kahneman, reconhecido com um dos maiores pesquisadores da “ciência do bem estar”, confessou ao The Edge, ao responder a “pergunta do ano” (”qual opinião sua mudou recentemente“) seu desapontamento com os resultados de uma pesquisa que, segundo ele, demoliram uma de suas teorias prediletas.  O texto está abaixo do fold.

The sad tale of the aspiration treadmill

The central question for students of well-being is the extent to which people adapt to circumstances.  Ten years ago the generally accepted position was that there is considerable hedonic adaptation to life conditions. The effects of circumstances on life satisfaction appeared surprisingly small: the rich were only slightly more satisfied with their lives than the poor, the married were happier than the unmarried but not by much, and neither age nor moderately poor health diminished life satisfaction.  Evidence that people adapt — though not completely — to becoming paraplegic or winning the lottery supported the idea of a “hedonic treadmill”: we move but we remain in place.  The famous “Easterlin paradox” seemed to nail it down:  Self-reported life satisfaction has changed very little in prosperous countries over the last fifty years, in spite of large increases in the standard of living.

Hedonic adaptation is a troubling concept, regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum.  If you believe that economic growth is the key to increased well-being, the Easterlin paradox is bad news.  If you are a compassionate liberal, the finding that the sick and the poor are not very miserable takes wind from your sails.   And if you hope to use a measure of well-being to guide social policy you need an index that will pick up permanent effects of good policies on the happiness of the population. 

About ten years ago I had an idea that seemed to solve these difficulties: perhaps people’s satisfaction with their life is not the right measure of well-being.  The idea took shape in discussions with my wife Anne Treisman, who was (and remains) convinced that people are happier in California (or at least Northern California) than in most other places.  The evidence showed that Californians are not particularly satisfied with their life, but Anne was unimpressed.  She argued that Californians are accustomed to a pleasant life and come to expect more pleasure than the unfortunate residents of other states.  Because they have a high standard for what life should be, Californians are not more satisfied than others, although they are actually happier.  This idea included a treadmill, but it was not hedonic – it was an aspiration treadmill: happy people have high aspirations.  

The aspiration treadmill offered an appealing solution to the puzzles of adaptation: it suggested that measure of life satisfaction underestimate the well-being benefits of life circumstances such as income, marital status or living in California.  The hope was that measures of experienced happiness would be more sensitive.  I eventually assembled an interdisciplinary team to develop a measure of experienced happiness (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Stone and Schwarz, 2004) and we set out to demonstrate the aspiration treadmill.   Over several years we asked substantial samples of women to reconstruct a day of their life in detail.  They indicated the feelings they had experienced during each episode, and we computed a measure of experienced happiness: the average quality of affective experience during the day.  Our hypothesis was that differences in life circumstances would have more impact on this measure than on life satisfaction.  We were so convinced that when we got our first batch of data, comparing teachers in top-rated schools to teachers in inferior schools, we actually misread the results as confirming our hypothesis.  In fact, they showed the opposite: the groups of teachers differed more in their work satisfaction than in their affective experience at work. This was the first of many such findings: income, marital status and education all influence experienced happiness less than satisfaction, and we could show that the difference is not a statistical artifact.  Measuring experienced happiness turned out to be interesting and useful, but not in the way we had expected.  We had simply been wrong.

Experienced happiness, we learned, depends mainly on personality and on the hedonic value of the activities to which people allocate their time.  Life circumstances influence the allocation of time, and the hedonic outcome is often mixed: high-income women have more enjoyable activities than the poor, but they also spend more time engaged in work that they do not enjoy; married women spend less time alone, but more time doing tedious chores.  Conditions that make people satisfied with their life do not necessarily make them happy.

Social scientists rarely change their minds, although they often adjust their position to accommodate inconvenient facts. But it is rare for a hypothesis to be so thoroughly falsified.  Merely adjusting my position would not do; although I still find the idea of an aspiration treadmill attractive, I had to give it up.

To compound the irony, recent findings from the Gallup World Poll raise doubts about the puzzle itself.  The most dramatic result is that when the entire range of human living standards is considered, the effects of income on a measure of life satisfaction (the “ladder of life”) are not small at all.  We had thought income effects are small because we were looking within countries.  The GDP differences between countries are enormous, and highly predictive of differences in life satisfaction.  In a sample of over 130,000 people from 126 countries, the correlation between the life satisfaction of individuals and the GDP of the country in which they live was over .40 – an exceptionally high value in social science.  Humans everywhere, from Norway to Sierra Leone, apparently evaluate their life by a common standard of material prosperity, which changes as GDP increases. The implied conclusion, that citizens of different countries do not adapt to their level of prosperity, flies against everything we thought we knew ten years ago.  We have been wrong and now we know it.  I suppose this means that there is a science of well-being, even if we are not doing it very well.