If a pill really could give us true happiness, would it be so bad?

Is it possible that working towards different goals with varied time horizons is one of the necessary components of happiness in life?

This also gets back to the problem of how to measure happiness

It is not clear to me that boredom is a state that reduces happiness. It does seem like some amount of boredom is valuable for diffuse thinking and creative insight.

It is fairly stable as GDP increases, so does happiness (ref). But it’s not always the case with every country. When is it not? Is there a pattern?

While happiness is very important to optimize for, it is also important to understand the marginal growth rate of happiness. We know that marginal improvements related to increased income decrease as income goes up, meaning it takes less money to improve the happiness of a poor person than a reach person.

Likely this is related to happiness.

Any possibility that it’s sufficient for happiness in life?

Is there a risk that this is actually a recipe for addiction and not for happiness?

While I suspect that life is better with more amusement, this doesn’t feel obvious by itself. There are accounts of folks in Native American societies fleeing assimilation into Colonial society, while it does not seem many, if any, colonials who assimilated to Native American society attempted to flee (from discussion with john fate faherty). Not to mention the fact that we do think some value in boredom, and more important is our ultimate goal of happiness.

It is possible that happiness has a practical limit, where increasing happiness small amounts takes a huge amount of effort. While I am not sure on this myself, one example that suggests this is the easterlin paradox.

GDP and happiness

This doesn’t mean some shallow reproduction of happiness, like merely pleasure or contentment. But if we can define happiness in as rich a way as we want, and we can think about a “pill” helping us achieve it.

A possible measurement for those outcomes could be happiness.

Could use to look at the data backing this more closely. Important to understand how quality of life and happiness are being measured. As well as the time span over which this decline is claimed.