I’ve suffered from clinical depression with absolutely zero correlation to social factors and life circumstances. Between onset at age 11 and my early 20s I experience pervasive, uninterrupted despair. Oddly enough, it never affected my goals or terminal values, just my ability to achieve them. Then again, many people (perhaps the majority) die with many of the same goals they had in their youth, having done absolutely no work toward achieving them; so I’m not convinced explicitly held goals have a strong causal relation to behavior; perhaps having a goal is like getting a tattoo. But I digress. Biology matters a lot. I wouldn’t say clinical depression is the same as being unhappy about something; even at the most basic level, there’s obviously a lot more going on when someone’s unhappy about a life event than if they have wonky receptors for some neurotransmitter or another. (I never experienced the sort of confabulation that makes the clinically depressed try to attach their depression to life events though; perhaps because I was young.) I think we could achieve some working simulacrum of happiness biologically though.
I’ve suffered from clinical depression with absolutely zero correlation to social factors and life circumstances. Between onset at age 11 and my early 20s I experience pervasive, uninterrupted despair. Oddly enough, it never affected my goals or terminal values, just my ability to achieve them. Then again, many people (perhaps the majority) die with many of the same goals they had in their youth, having done absolutely no work toward achieving them; so I’m not convinced explicitly held goals have a strong causal relation to behavior; perhaps having a goal is like getting a tattoo. But I digress. Biology matters a lot. I wouldn’t say clinical depression is the same as being unhappy about something; even at the most basic level, there’s obviously a lot more going on when someone’s unhappy about a life event than if they have wonky receptors for some neurotransmitter or another. (I never experienced the sort of confabulation that makes the clinically depressed try to attach their depression to life events though; perhaps because I was young.) I think we could achieve some working simulacrum of happiness biologically though.