…Of course, not every affliction has an evolutionary purpose. People get sick. But our extraordinary susceptibility to misery does raise a question about what kind of creatures natural selection has made us. We get depressed when we win the lottery; we lie awake worrying about whether the car needs new tires; we feel jealous when our girlfriend talks too long with the barista.
Anxiety might have adaptive utility when we are in danger of being eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger. But there are not a lot of sabre-toothed tigers around anymore, and we still get anxious, frequently for no very good reason. We don’t just react emotionally to things. We overreact. Why have genes for emotional overreaction, rather than genes for being cool, calm, and collected, been passed along? Wouldn’t we be reproductively fitter if we weren’t unhappy so much of the time?
These are questions George Loewenstein tries to answer in “The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us” (Harper)…
