There’s a silver lining to your unhappiness

What can an economist teach us about misery? I had that question in mind while reading the new book The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us , by eminent researcher George Loewenstein.

The field is not exactly known for its facility with human emotions, but Loewenstein is a co-founder of behavioral economics, the subdiscipline that studies the many ways that people depart from the ideal of the perfectly rational actor.

He’s spent a career investigating how psychology and emotion shape our judgments, and his latest book offers a sweeping account of how suffering structures human life.

That might sound very bleak, like the opposite of a fun read.

But the book itself isn’t distressing — it’s a bracing, useful, and even comforting lens on what it means to be alive.

It emerged from a period of profound suffering in his own life, one where, he writes, he “thought about suicide constantly.” Writing it, he told me in a recent interview, was “kind of a silver lining for my own misery.” In Loewenstein’s own words, The Opposite of Happiness is not a self-help book.

To him, understanding is its own reward.

Though he adamantly refuses to dispense life advice, I still think the book offers much that can help us live more wisely, a little less at war with our emotions.

“Misery is inescapable,” Loewenstein writes.

“It’s not some malfunction or a bug in the system.

It is the system.” Negative emotions are “more powerful, persistent, and pervasive than positive ones.” That is because, he argues, unpleasant feelings — hunger, pain, anger, loneliness — are how evolution motivated us to do the things we need to survive and pass on our genes.

They still heavily shape our conscious experience, however mismatched they may feel to our modern circumstances.

Some version of that insight, that dissatisfaction is woven into the human condition, has been known to humans for eons, of course, captured in philosophical teachings like Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths.

The father of economics himself observed that people work hard to earn riches, only to discover the result offers no lasting contentment.