This is my perspective on the nature of happiness, mostly based on my own experience. I'm posting this here because I think it is relevant to EA. However, it might only be relevant to a limited extent.
The primary two take-aways from it that I think are relevant to EA are:
If you want more details, read on. However, a lot of the details in this post might not be very relevant to EA.
Raw Happiness might also be described as the opposite of raw suffering. It is the most directly relevant aspect of happiness. It might also be described as 'fun'. The total welfare of any given person is simply the amount of time that the person spends conscious or dreaming multiplied by the average amount of Raw Happiness the person experiences during that time. From an altruistic perspective, the thing we are trying to accomplish, by default, is to increase the average of this total welfare amount across all people. Directly unpleasant experiences like physical pain and nausea decrease Raw Happiness. Consuming food, especially food that tastes good, usually increases Raw Happiness. Eating something that tastes bad or smelling something that smells bad commonly reduces Raw Happiness.
Raw happiness, at any given point in time, can be positive or negative or zero, but it is almost always positive. From a welfare perspective, the zero point is equivalent to being dead or being asleep and not dreaming. So, for example, if a person were given the option of dying immediately or living another 30 years, but with their raw happiness level at the zero point, both of those options would be equivalent (at least from a selfish perspective).
Also, notably, the zero point is pretty far below the normal amount of raw happiness that people usually experience. For example, if someone were sleep-deprived to the extent of continuously almost falling asleep, but not able to rest, and needed to stay active and awake, for a full day, I think that would be about 25% as bad as being at the zero point.
It is also notable that there is no such thing as 'enough' Raw Happiness. Regardless of how much Raw Happiness someone has, they will always want more and will always want to avoid losing Raw Happiness. If it ever seems like you don't have enough happiness, you are probably having a problem with Satisfaction Happiness and/or Emotional Happiness, not Raw Happiness.
It seems pretty likely to me that, from an evolutionary perspective, Satisfaction Happiness and Emotional Happiness both exist to compensate for problems with Raw Happiness that could result in humans doing things that give them a lot of Raw Happiness, but don't actually accomplish anything useful, like improving their survivability, ability to reproduce, or social standing. So, basically, I think Satisfaction Happiness and Emotional Happiness are sort-of methods of emotional auditing to force us to keep applying effort, even when we already have good sources of Raw Happiness and there are only opportunities to improve our Raw Happiness by small amounts.
However, it's note-able that neither Satisfaction Happiness nor Emotional Happiness directly contribute to the overall welfare of a person. To some extent they contribute to changes in Raw Happiness, and, also, to some extent, changes in Raw Happiness contribute to changes in Satisfaction and Emotional Happiness. But a person can very easily experience a large degree of Raw Happiness at the same time as experiencing very low Satisfaction Happiness and Emotional Happiness, or vice versa. For example, if someone is injured in a way that is very painful, but, at the same time, they receive a large sum of money, the person could experience a large increase in Emotional Happiness (because the money makes them hopeful), but also a large decrease in Raw Happiness (because of the pain).
Satisfaction Happiness might also be described as the opposite of annoyance, but generally a very large degree of annoyance. Satisfaction Happiness is the aspect of happiness that people have the most contact with. They tend to mistakenly think it is Raw Happiness and they should pursue it if they want to improve their overall welfare.
The main thing that impacts Satisfaction Happiness is relative Raw Happiness. So, if the degree of Raw Happiness that someone is experiencing goes up, the person will gain some Satisfaction Happiness. Similarly, if Raw Happiness goes down, the person's Satisfaction Happiness will go down. However, if the person stays at that new level of Raw Happiness, the person's Satisfaction Happiness will slowly drift back toward Satisfaction Happiness's zero point, as the person gets used to that new level of Raw Happiness.
There are other things that impact Satisfaction Happiness other than relative Raw Happiness.
For example, as someone gets closer to orgasming, even though the person's Raw Happiness may be particularly high at that moment, there will still be a negative impact on their Satisfaction Happiness that accumulates, which will go away when the person orgasms. If the person doesn't orgasm, that negative Satisfaction Happiness will stay for a while.
This effect is also relative in terms of extent.
If a person's Raw Happiness has only been fluctuating by very small amounts, especially recently, but also going back a long time, the person's Satisfaction Happiness will be more reactive to those fluctuations to compensate.
But then if the fluctuations in Raw Happiness become much larger, the person's Satisfaction Happiness will be less reactive and the person won't necessarily even notice the smaller fluctuations that seemed so important to them before.
For example, there was a period of time when I was experiencing a degree of Raw Happiness that was very low, and it also hadn't been fluctuating very much for the last few months. Then the degree of Raw Happiness I was experiencing went up by a little bit for a few hours. Even though my Raw Happiness had only gone up a little, and even though I was still experiencing a degree of Raw Happiness that was much less than normal, I was experiencing a significant amount of positive Satisfaction Happiness. Rather than finding it annoying that my Raw Happiness was still much less than normal, I was appreciating my current state, and hoping it would continue.
Satisfaction Happiness is quite a bit more notice-able than Raw Happiness. In fact, it's so much more notice-able that I have often had difficulty judging how much Raw Happiness I was experiencing, because the sensation of Satisfaction Happiness is comparatively overwhelming. Often the primary way that I can tell how much Raw Happiness I'm experiencing is when I have previously experienced a large degree of suffering in the past that would have made the normally small degrees of suffering I deal with now seem tiny, and yet I still care about those tiny reductions in Raw Happiness. It makes me feel like my oversized emotional reaction is somewhat absurd.
In modern society, people don't usually experience very much suffering compared to thousands of years ago, when we were still in the process of evolving. If we get hurt, there are meds to help limit the pain, and there exist many technologies to help us avoid getting hurt in the first place. We usually have the option of being in a climate-controlled building when it is very hot or very cold outside. And we have a variety of clothing to make it less unpleasant to be outside in very cold, very hot, or otherwise harsh weather. Even though fluctuations in Raw Happiness in modern society aren't very large for these reasons, it is still very important to us that we have fun, and that is because of Satisfaction Happiness.
The fact that this effect is relative means that it is a bad idea to try to pursue Satisfaction Happiness through relative Raw Happiness. No matter how much your Raw Happiness goes up, pretty soon you will get used to it and that positive impact on your Satisfaction Happiness from the increase in Raw Happiness will go away. Increasing someone's Raw Happiness still improves the overall welfare of the person (where-as Satisfaction Happiness won't), it's just not a good idea to pursue Satisfaction Happiness specifically by increasing Raw Happiness.
From an evolutionary perspective, the purpose of Satisfaction Happiness might be to prevent us from being apathetic, even though we live in the modern world, where we usually experience a good amount of Raw Happiness, and don't have many opportunities for big improvements in Raw Happiness that we can pursue, or big threats to Raw Happiness to avoid. From an evolutionary perspective, it would be problematic if we decided we were doing well enough, and didn't need to keep putting effort into things.
But that's definitely not the way that we usually feel. If a person tries to do something for fun, and it doesn't end up being all that much fun, the person's Satisfaction Happiness will go down, and the fact that it wasn't as much fun as it should have been will seem like a big deal, even if the potential increase in Raw Happiness was pretty small. At that moment, it can easily seem like the most important thing to the person.
Overall, it might even be a good idea to specifically try to avoid Satisfaction Happiness, and instead try to decrease it. In particular, that might improve Emotional Happiness. However, I haven't tried it, and it's possible that it would involve too much of going against one's emotions, so it might be emotionally destabilizing for that reason. At least I haven't experienced many negative impacts from doing things that reduce my Satisfaction Happiness, and I've experienced some positive impacts.
Emotional Happiness might also be described as the opposite of depression.
Emotional Happiness is the aspect of happiness that I think people have the most difficulty with. If you don't feel like you're truly happy, that's probably an Emotional Happiness problem. More generally, when people talk about "true happiness", they're probably talking about very high Emotional Happiness. I think when people become suicidal, that is generally a result of very low Emotional Happiness.
In my experience, Emotional Happiness can be improved by:
Most notably, in my experience, pursuing Raw Happiness is not generally a good way to gain Emotional Happiness. It's possible to experience very low Emotional Happiness while still experiencing high Raw Happiness (or vice versa).
From an evolutionary perspective, it seems like Emotional Happiness is primarily a sort of emotional auditing to counter sources of false happiness. For example, the primary purpose of watching TV and movies is Raw Happiness. But, for the most part, it doesn't improve a person's survivability, ability to reproduce, or social standing. So, it's kind of a waste of time, which is why I call it a source of false happiness. On the other hand, if someone does something social instead, it increases the person's Raw Happiness, but it can also improve survivability, ability to reproduce, and social standing. I think this is the reason that doing something social tends to improve Emotional Happiness more than something similar that is not social. I think, to some extent, the amount of Raw Happiness that a source of false happiness generates will also be less because it is a source of false happiness, but I don't think the decrease is enough to stop people from pursuing primarily sources of false happiness. And I think that's why there is also Emotional Happiness as an additional counter to keep people from only pursuing sources of false happiness.
In my experience, high Emotional Happiness tends to allow people to function better, do things better, and accomplish more. For that reason, I think Emotional Happiness is especially important in high income countries like the USA, where I live, because it's more important that people like me accomplish more altruistically, than that we improve our own welfare by attaining greater Raw Happiness, or even a longer lifespan.
False hope can also cause a large reduction in Emotional Happiness. Hope can produce a significant amount of Raw Happiness, especially if the person is pretty sure it will pan out. But if the person eventually discovers that whatever positive future outcome they were looking forward to isn't going to happen, there needs to be a reduction in Emotional Happiness to compensate for all that Raw Happiness from the hope. Otherwise, people could gain lots of Raw Happiness without any effort by being overly optimistic.
Sources of false happiness can seem like they are increasing Emotional Happiness or at least keeping it from going down as much, because the increase in Raw Happiness from the source of false happiness produces a smaller associated increase in Emotional Happiness. But, it seems like there's always a corresponding reduction in Emotional Happiness after the increased Raw Happiness has ended, possibly a significant amount of time later, and the reduction far exceeds the increase. This can make it seem like sources of false happiness are good coping mechanisms for dealing with depression, but I think that's just an illusion because the negative impact on Emotional Happiness is delayed a while after the false happiness.
One example of a source of false happiness is recreational drugs, but I think they operate at least a little differently than most sources of false happiness. However, I think this source of false happiness might be more difficult for Emotional Happiness to counter for.
I think there is a sort of careful balance that needs to happen in the functioning of the brain in order for Emotional Happiness to counter for sources of false happiness, and recreational drugs mess up that balance. The result is that the person can more easily pursue sources of false happiness and gain an increase in Raw Happiness from them, without suffering as much of a decrease in Emotional Happiness. However, I think Emotional Happiness will still eventually catch up, reducing the increase in Raw Happiness from recreational drugs, and causing a decrease in Emotional Happiness to compensate for the past increases in Raw Happiness and Emotional Happiness.
Even though Emotional Happiness doesn't directly impact the overall welfare of a person, a person may seek Emotional Happiness to a much larger degree than the person seeks Raw Happiness if it is a much larger improvement in Emotional Happiness than the improvement in Raw Happiness. For example, someone experiencing a very large reduction in Emotional Happiness (depression) might strongly prefer to experience a very large reduction in Raw Happiness (pain or suffering), even though Emotional Happiness doesn't directly impact overall welfare. Like if someone loses a family member and is very depressed about it, they might far prefer experiencing a lot of physical pain, if it would just make the depression go away. If you asked a person with high Emotional Happiness and low Raw Happiness and then also a person with high Raw Happiness and low Emotional Happiness how they were doing in life overall, the one with high Emotional Happiness would probably be the one to say they feel better than the one with high Raw Happiness.
The indirect impact that Emotional Happiness has on Raw Happiness can be pretty substantial and important. This is primarily because Emotional Happiness is constantly having that indirect impact, even if it's not as big of an impact as from things like junkfood and electronic entertainment. More direct sources of Raw Happiness like junkfood and electornic entertainment tend to have a larger impact on Raw Happiness in the moment, but people generally spend a large portion of their time NOT eating food and NOT watching TV. However, it can also be difficult to measure the indirect impact that Emotional Happiness has on Raw Happiness, because increased Emotional Happiness comes with a feeling that is roughly the opposite of depression and feels like a sort-of "right-ness", and it can be difficult to tell the difference between that and Raw Happiness or Satisfaction Happiness.
