Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens ended up on my reading list because it was lauded by prominent personalities like Barrack Obama, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. I didn't read any reviews prior to reading this so I was really curious why there was a lot of hype about this book. From the very first chapter, I started to realise that I'm reading something special. But this article is not going to be about the entire book, but just a single chapter that would turn your world upside down. When I was about to finish reading the book, I paused for a moment and thought "Wow! this book had changed the way I look at things. Now I understand why we humans are the way we are, our inherent biases, most importantly the moments I once considered as the greatest moments of human history wasn't great after all and how those paved the way to most of our problems today". But I was pretty unaware that the penultimate chapter I'm about to read is going to provide me with some key insights into few questions that had been puzzling me for a while.
Figure 1 — Sapiens Front Cover (
Source)
Those questions are about happiness. The questions like why aren't we feeling happy regardless of living a very comfortable life compared to our forefathers? How can we be truly happy both as a society and as individuals? What factors greatly influence our happiness? I have already been researching to find answers to this question from both scientific and spiritual angles for a while. Before reading this book I had already figured out key psychological and sociological factors which affect happiness. Things like hedonic adaptation which explains that the level of happiness remains the same regardless of short term highs and lows based on positive and negative experiences, how capitalistic pro-consumerist propaganda creates a false mindset that happiness is in owning and experiencing more and more things, how social media makes us believe that to be happy we need large social validation, etc.
So, it was a pleasant surprise when I started reading the penultimate chapter of this book because it also explored happiness in detail. Initial sections summarized things I already know; outlining the social and psychological factors that affect our happiness (I'm not going to elaborate more on this since I'm planning to write a separate article on happiness). What makes the penultimate chapter of the book special is, in the later section, it explores happiness purely from a biological perspective, which is something I haven't given a lot of thought about.
It explains how the chemical produced by the brain called serotonin is responsible for feeling happy, how happiness level is affected by the range within which our serotonin level naturally fluctuate and how this fluctuation range differs for different people. This difference in serotonin fluctuation level explains why the same positive event makes some people happier than others and why the same negative event makes some people sadder than others even when all other social/psychological factors remain the same.
This fluctuation also explains why some people are not being affected too much by good or bad events and what makes people naturally happy and content. If a person's serotonin level fluctuates within a narrow range then they will mostly be indifferent to good or bad events. Even in being indifferent, there are two possibilities. If that narrow range is in a high secretion zone, they will be happy and content whatever happens. If that narrow range is in a very low secretion zone, they will be sad and depressed whatever happens. In other words, some people have a biological boon to be always happy while some are biologically cursed to suffer.
The chapter concludes that our happiness has a lot to do with whatever happens inside than outside. Changes in external social/psychological factors can only affect our happiness greatly when a person's biological serotonin level fluctuates in a wide range where the upper bound is in the high secretion zone and the lower bound is in the low secretion zone. But even this effect is temporary as the secretion level gets back to your average level within the range pretty quickly after you get used to the external factors.
If it sounds confusing let me explain this by using an example, let's assume you are from a middle-class family and some random stranger is gifting you a high-end BMW car. So if your biological serotonin level fluctuates in a wide range from lower-bound in the low secretion zone and upper-bound is in the high secretion zone, then you will feel extremely jubilant for a while. But once you get used to driving that BMW, you won't feel jubilant anymore because your serotonin returns to the normal level (average secretion level within your range). If you have a biological boon or curse, then you don't feel that much happiness from that gift because, for both types, the fluctuation range is very small, so the normal/average secretion level is very close to the upper bound(i.e. the highest happiness they can feel). So the person who has a biological boon will remain as happy as he used to be and the biologically cursed person will be as sad as he used to be regardless of the gift.
Harari implies the only probable way for the human race to achieve the state of "happily ever after" is by inventing a pill that boosts serotonin secretion to the highest possible level disregarding a person default upper bound without causing any side effects or affecting productivity. Though I believe Harari's views are accurate and he had presented a strong case, emerging researches on theories like neuroplasticity (i.e. study about the ability of the brain to change) may one day prove that brain chemistry thresholds aren't that rigid after all as claimed by Harari. So we need to be open-minded about that possibility too.
The chapter concludes by beautifully fusing ideas about happiness from both the spiritual (especially Buddhist) and scientific realms. If you love reading, this is one book which you shouldn't miss. If you don't love reading, try reading at least the penultimate chapter you may fall in love with reading after all. Happy Reading Folks!! 🙂
