What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [26]
Why is dysphoria so common? Why is it conserved? Why do anxiety, anger, and sadness pervade so much of our lives—concurrent with so much success, wealth, and absence of biological need in the lives of privileged Americans? The Russian psychologist Blyuma Zeigarnik discovered early in this century that we remember unsolved problems, frustrations, failures, and rejections much better than we remember our successes and completions.
Why do we hurt on the inside so much of the time? Here is an evolutionary approach: The last geological epoch save one was the Miocene—tropical savannas, fruit on the trees, good weather, a Garden of Eden. Peace of mind, satisfaction, and optimism—all of which mirrored the good weather outside—being adaptive were selected and flourished during this twenty-million-year-long paradise. The last hundred thousand years, the Pleistocene epoch, however, have seen bad weather: ice, flood, drought, famine, heat, more ice, hurricanes, more ice; one catastrophe after another. Who survives this ordeal? What kind of emotional life is selected by climatic disaster? Perhaps one that broods, worries, is “future-oriented” (this euphemism disguises the fact that future-orientation is not lotus-eating contemplation of the future, but a state fraught with anxiety). A person with this mentality always considered the catastrophic interpretations and could always see the cloud that the silver lining hides behind; he even woke up at four in the morning to make sure he hadn’t overlooked some subtle, awful portent. His brain endured because, by and large during the Pleistocene, he was right—disaster was just around the corner. This prudent neurotic passed his genes on. His blithe-spirited Miocene-brained brothers and sisters were washed away in a flash flood, froze under the apple tree, or were trampled by mastodons.
Here is a radical proposal: Homo dysphorus, our species, evolved during the Pleistocene from Homo sapiens, our predecessor. It is fascinating that the “big” brain (1,200-to 1,500-cubic-centimeter cranial capacity) first appeared about six hundred thousand years ago. But Homo sapiens sat on the savanna, wrote no books, planted no corn, spoke little, and built no cathedrals. Not until recent times, ten thousand or so years ago, did progress—agriculture, civilization, the accumulation of knowledge—first dawn. Why the long delay?
Maybe a big brain, sapience, is not enough. Dysphoria, bad weather on the inside, is needed to galvanize mere intelligence into action. Discontent, worry, depression, a pessimistic view of the future (but, as we will see, one with the underlying Miocene belief that a happy ending awaits), are necessary for agriculture, for culture, for civilization.
Each emotion of the dysphoric triad bears—no, is—a message—insistent, uncomfortable, hurting—goading us to change our lives. With our daily dysphoria, we are in touch with the very state that makes civilization possible, that transforms berry-gathering into agriculture, cave painting into Guernica, eclipse-gaping into astronomy, and, alas, ax handles into Stealth bombers. Each emotion has specific content and goads for specific action.
Anxiety warns us that danger lurks. It fuels planning and replanning, searching for alternative ways out, rehearsing action.
Depression marks the loss of something very dear to us. Depression urges us to divest, “decathect,” fall out of love, mourn, and ultimately resign ourselves to its absence.
Anger, highly opinionated, warns that something evil is trespassing against us. It tells us to get rid of the object, to strike out against it.
In light