depressive realism

-- is the theory that depressed people get into the state they are in because they somehow see the world with greater clarity, and thus more accurately. you don't have to be a genius to tell that this was something i held true since i was very young. through the lens of adolescent angst, it seemed so correct, so perfect, a real paragon of cynicism. of course that's why i'm unhappy. it's because i'm smarter.

so now that we're grown, and can look back on those times with a mixture of amusement and disgust, we can ask ourselves: what's a more mature formulation of that theory? well, the model is not exactly true -- it doesn't predict depression. people get depressed for a whole load of reasons, but just as many dumb people get it as insightful ones. however, if you only study people who do not meet diagnostic criteria for the illness, the pattern re-emerges: the happier a person is, the more deluded* he tends to be (it's not a trivial correlation either).

so here's a rare case of intuition being borne out by statistics, and the cynical viewpoint actually being sort of correct. life sucks, and you get happy by believing that it doesn't.

there's a big problem with this, though. thought experiment: you invent a brand of therapy where people actively learn how to be ignorant. not CBT, you understand, not monitoring cognition, or filtering thought processes, but actively pursuing ignorance. my guess: not too many people lining up at the door**. which means this: unhappiness has a price, and it's possible to derive utility from elsewhere, at the cost of negative happiness.

there are other examples of this, which i've discussed with some of you in the recent past: martyrdom, or (irrational) sacrifices made in order to claim the moral high ground. it just goes to show -- even our newer ideas of utility are outmoded, and there are much higher abstractions of value that i don't think have yet been fully considered.

* psychologists don't like to call it "delusion", because of the specific connotations of the word, but it obviously best gets across what i mean.

** i would, incidentally.