For most of the time that anatomically modern humans have existed—a highly contested figure, but let’s call it a million years—it has made good adaptive sense to be fearful, cautious, timid.

- from Pursuing Happiness

Ничего особенно нового в статье, конечно.

We have been hardwired to emphasize the negative, and, for most of human history, there has been a lot of the negative to emphasize.

- интересно, как это сопоставить с Rational Irrationality и прочей self-deception...

Забавно, что

He points out that the Founding Fathers, who queried, crossed out, and haggled over every line of the Declaration, let the “pursuit of Happiness” stand unedited and unamended. But he also points out that the eighteenth-century understanding of “pursuit” was rather darker than it might seem now. Dr. Johnson’s dictionary defined it as “the act of following with hostile intention,” and McMahon adds that “if one thinks of pursuing happiness as one pursues a fugitive... the ‘pursuit of happiness’ takes on a somewhat different cast.”

И еще раз подтверждается идея относительно set point:

According to positive psychologists, once we’re out of poverty the most important determinant of happiness is our “set point,” a natural level of happiness that is (and this is one of the movement’s most controversial claims) largely inherited. We adapt to our circumstances; we don’t, or can’t, adapt our genes. The evidence for this set point, and the phrase itself, came from a study of identical twins by the behavioral geneticist David Lykken, which concluded that “trying to be happier is like trying to be taller.”

ну и далее все очевидно, включая by-product of absorption ...

господибожемой, неужели завтра не надо на работу? какое счастье. вот и говори про absorption ...

кстати, если вбить "pursuit of happiness" в Google - мало не покажется.  ¶ 8:03 PM