Dan Gilbert Synthetic Happiness Analysis

Happiness is what we feel when we get what we want, and synthetic happiness is what we get when we don’t get what we want. Happiness is also the feeling of well being, and synthetic happiness if feeling in a state of wellbeing, when not in such state. Synthetic happiness achieved through external stimulus should not be in use, but rather a synthetic happiness through acceptance of all emotions, should be practiced to help people achieve a real happiness, a real state of well being. Happiness has two parts, hedonia, which is the pleasure of the senses, and eudaimonia, which is pleasure of reason, living well and doing well. Humans, as animals, are wired to feel happy, as a reward. This is the evolutionary teaching of positive reinforcement. …show more content…
A synthetic happiness could help a human feel rewarded when no reward is given, or feel as though in a state of well being when the person is not particularly well. Over the courses of human evolution, the humans’ brain tripled in mass, to create a structure that no other animal has, the frontal lobe. The frontal love helps us simulate the future, and this helps us think about what event will help us achieve maximum amounts of happiness. This shapes our goals and how we perceive the world (“...Dan Gilbert on ‘Synthetic Happiness”). We can use external influence to create a synthetic happiness, thus an artificial view of the world we see. The difference between humans and animals is that, as Pierre Theilhard de Chardin says “No doubt, an animal knows. But it certainly does not know that it knows.” Humans are also extremely social creatures, so humans have also have been able to experience and acknowledge not only his own emotions, but the emotions of others. The ability to feel shame and guilt, and the ability to understand other’s emotions fueled the socialistic side of humans, and created cultures and families, which evolutionarily was favorable for adaptation. Creating these cultures and families are linked