Originally appeared on Have A Little Humor on October 16, 2015:
Happiness happiness happiness happiness happiness happiness happiness happiness happiness happiness happiness happiness happiness happiness happiness.
If you’re like me, you see a series of words like this, take a second to confirm that they’re all exactly the same, and don’t bother reading each word individually. Repetition bores us. (I can’t even spell the word repetition with more than one “ti”.) But do me a favor. Look at all of those “happiness”-es and read them out loud.
CHECKPOINT!
Read on only if you’ve read each precious “happiness” aloud.
Did the word lose its meaning? Some smart dude named Leon Jakobovits James realized that you can say a word aloud for 15 seconds and it will begin to sound like a bunch of silliness rather than something that carries meaning. He called the phenomenon “semantic satiation,” indicating that the brain becomes saturated by the rapid repetition of a word, and (if you really care about the science) the intensity of the neural activation the word causes is lessened, ultimately leading to a weakened cognitive association to the word’s meaning. So each additional time you read the word “happiness,” your brain is becoming less likely to form active connections to the meaning you know for the word, and you’re left wondering what the hell you’re saying.
But let’s throw the science in a saucepan on the back burner.
Here’s the meat:
Humans are obsessed with happiness. Every parent wants their child to grow up to be happy, and every child can regurgitate the importance of this mysterious morphological entity until they can recognize it. Thus, we feel that our mission in this war zone of emotional, financial, and material battles is to come out with untarnished “happiness.” We grow up hearing the word “happiness” around every corner, under every rock we turn, out of every weapon we fire or have fired upon us, and our job is to collect it and take care of it.
Humans are obsessed with happiness, but we’re working harder and harder, and becoming unhappier and unhappier. One sad indication is that the number of patients diagnosed with clinical depression worldwide increases by about 20% every year, due in large part to our increasingly sedentary and stressful lives. Economic depressions ebb and flow across the globe, endangering happiness and hardening its host. Often, we’re sacrificing fun for safety and stability. Sometimes, we’re forfeiting our good spirits for food and the needs of our family.
But we continue to utter the word “happiness.” And we fight hard to ensure that future generations are not left wondering what the hell we’re saying.
Now, this probably feels like one of those movies that ends and you sit there, dumbstruck, thinking: “Are you kidding me? That’s the end!?” But this post marks the beginning of a journey. After four years of chewing, the University of Michigan finally spit me out, and it’s time for me to “become an adult” and “assume responsibility.” In interest of honesty, the future scares the shit out of me. But I’m ready to share the chronicles of my marveling along the way and spread the meaning of happiness to all who seek it (and especially those who don’t).
Chronicles of Marveling 