“If someone offered you a pill that would make you permanently happy, you would be well advised to run fast and run far. Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do, and a compass that is perpetually stuck on north is worthless.” —Professor Daniel Gilbert. Department of Psychology, Harvard University
“Many millions of people in the contemporary world have a compass that is perpetually “stuck on South”. They are always unhappy and discontented. They endure chronic pain and/or depression. Some victims of severe anhedonia can’t even imagine what it’s like to be happy. A minor blessing is that not all of their days are quite as terrible as others. So in one sense, their emotional compass can point North as well as South: a motivational system of sorts still functions. But the whole of their lives is spent in an Antarctic wasteland of misery and despair.
At the other extreme, a small minority of people are blessed with a compass that seems perpetually “stuck on North”. In pathological cases, they may be manic. But sometimes they are in varying degrees just “hyperthymic” i.e. the hedonic set-point around which their lives oscillate is unusually high compared to the Darwinian norm. Hyperthymic well-being is chronic; yet it’s not uniform. Thus some days of hyperthymic life are even more wonderful than others; pursuing their favourite activities makes hyperthymics even happier than otherwise. So again, the hyperthymic emotional compass is bidirectional: its scale is different, but it works. The relevant contrast here lies in the way hyperthymics are animated by information-signalling gradients of well-being, whereas dysthymics, depressives and victims of chronic pain spend their lives struggling to minimise ill-being. Either way, affective gradients rule.” —David Pearce
Source: https://www.gradients.com/