I’m not big on happiness, but given that we only measure it by how much we spend on it, I’m not sure it’s all that overvalued?

F that man happiness is da BOMB

I guess it’s a supply and demand thing.

Do you refer to hedonist “happiness” or other forms of happines, such as Eudimoneic happiness-from-excellence?

Because happiness…. is really really fun.

Blame Mill…

Still is there anyone else who experiences a slight satisfaction at being in a realy grim unhappy mood sometimes- I know it sounds like a bit of a contradiction but it seems to happen to me.

Oh & ‘tg’ yus I agree very much :)

o.o I was never taught to value happiness; I was taught to value money and family, which I shunned in favor of happiness.

How self-defeating is the suffering argument? Pain is defined by our not wanting it. The only value it CAN have is by what good comes of it.

Unless you choose other philosophical systems, which is something smart civilizations don’t do if they want to survive.

How else can one value suffering except as something that transforms you? In a sense, you can value it while it happens because in the end it will bring good. But without that end goodness, if suffering is meaningless, then there is no way one can value the suffering.

I love it how she just randomly asks cat that.

If I may interject, I think what hasn’t been mentioned yet is the crucial penultimate scene, and the antepenultimate scene. The juxtaposed metaphor in the subtext is the truism that you have to break an egg in order to make an omelette, a concept that is reflected in Girl’s comment about “emerging” from suffering (not to mention the title of the strip, “The Insider”).

The message I got then, is that we can argue all we want about personally moving in and out of personal suffering, but what is crucially ignored is that the emergence of happiness from suffering is commonly by no means constrained to the same individual(s). The happiness that emerges from that egg has nothing to do with alleviating the (metaphorical) egg’s suffering.

I think the comic wants to challenge our notions of happiness and suffering as local systems unto ourselves, as well as our reification of others’ suffering as a means for our own happiness to emerge.

But that’s just my two cents.

@mttp. I like the cut of your gibe.

Ursula LeGuin has a story about how the happiness of a society is predicated on the suffering of a single child in a closet somewhere, with an implication that the moral thing to do is to opt out of the society. (It’s a long time since I read it, so I may be getting it wrong even in broad strokes.) The story is called “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”. She says in an intro that “Omelas” is “Salem, O(regon)” backwards, but now I’m thinking Omelettes.

@Jonathan2: I was quite literally going to use that same story in my comment because I, too, associated “omelette” with “Omelas” and thought it strikingly relevant! No joke, we are on the same wavelength!

And since everybody took the words right out of my mouth, I am just going to say that, out of all the breakfast foods, waffles are most analogous to happiness (amirite?).

Sometimes it’s necessary to be satisfied with a situation (for instance, when satisfied is the best that the situation allows for, and the situation is the best of all available options). “But am I happy?” can be a really unsatisfying question to ask in those situations – and unproductive too.

I think that those of us who lives in a consumerist society are taught to value happiness because it compels performance.
“If i had enough money to get that car, then i would be happy.”
“If only she loved me, i would be happy.”

But are we really happy? For a moment, maybe. but then the honey moon ends and we’re back to looking for happiness… and in the mean time, we’re doing a lot to get it and probably making someone some money.

Your dissatisfaction is good for the economy.

Girl is such a dick. Cat just wanted to enjoy some breakfast.

I’m trapped in an inescapable happiness loop. Every time I start feeling down, the thought that the moment is somehow poetic hits me. Then I start to laugh.

This is awesome. One of the best.

the bird fights it’s way out of the egg. the egg is the world. he who would be born must first destroy a world.

So Dorothy… are you as amazed as I am at all the philosophical musings here? You’ve got quite a following :-)

Robert D, I don’t think that “if they loved me, I would be happy” is a result of consumer society. It’s prehistoric.

To paraphrase dave chapelle: “Men don’t buy sports cars because they like them. they buy them because WOMEN like fast cars.”

Might it be much simpler–wood/trees and so on: happiness = toast. Nice, hot, buttered. Maybe with cheese on top and further toasting/grilling?

Does girl’s misery know no limits?

Q) Why are we taught to value happiness? A) We aren’t. It’s a biological disposition. “Society” is just a word for people, all of whom evolved from millions of years of selective adaptation. Evolution rewarded those organisms that aggressively sought to maximize their own benefit (even at the cost of a few broken eggs). Those that did not died too young or were just too mopey to pass on their genes. Hmm, how many kids is Girl going to leave behind?

Happiness is a conspiracy perpetuated by the commies in an attempt to take our collective black cherries.

The societies that do value Suffering are the old backwards ones, the ones that are dead or dying in the west, that believe Suffering intrinsically produces spiritual enlightenment like fire produces heat- or perhaps just less troublesome peasants. This does not mean Suffering is without value, just that few value it for good reasons.

Happiness and Suffering are just information; Happiness the belief that our immediate situation is good, Suffering the knowledge that we are in pain because we are in pain. We seek compulsively for Happiness because our society has lost- almost certainly for the better- its overwhelming codex of moral directives, leaving us with few other ways of confirming that our path in life is good and our time spent worthwhile. Suffering’s value lies in its reliability as an indicator of great stress, the great stress which is required for great positive change.

Cargo Cults of both Happiness and Suffering are not uncommon in the present, nor have they been throughout history. But a healthy valuing of Suffering as a society is difficult within the framework of our modern moral relativism because if we are not as a group really sure what we want than the really great changes will never seem worth their price. Then Suffering becomes no more than an indicator that we have fallen dangerously behind the group, which is a Suffering we would all like to know we can emerge from.

Consternation. The comment box flushed my first attempt to post, and when I pasted from my backup in Notepad, I used a not-quite-final version. The second and third sentences should be:

Happiness and Suffering are just information; Happiness a biochemical testimony that our immediate situation is good, Suffering a pain experienced when experiencing ongoing pain. We seek compulsively for Happiness because our society has lost- almost certainly for the better- its overwhelming code of detailed moral directives, leaving us with few other ways of confirming that our path in life is good and our time spent worthwhile.

I like how conversationalist Girl is.
“Who wants an omelette!”
“WHY IS HAPPINESS SO IMPORTANT?”

Society values happiness over suffering because suffering totally sucks, whereas happiness is awesome. I realise that’s a tautology, but that also reflects how pointless asking that question is.

I think that the real question is not why society values happiness over suffering, but rather how is happiness and suffering defined in contemporary society, and what are the effects of those definitions?

Your formulations are all better than my own. I do still think that there is meaning in suffering, even the non-transformative kind (Is non-transformative suffering what we call faith?) – and I don’t think the meaning of suffering is something we value in our, oh, let’s say shared cultural narratives.

OMG, we actually baited DG into weighing in on the issue. Go team!

I believe mttp and “a different Jonathan” are definitely unto something. The striking resemblance to the short story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” cannot be coincidental. I mean, thematically, it’s all there. And in the comic, what do Cat and Girl “walk away” from? I applaud Dorothy for alluding to such a great author’s work while creating a multi-layered comic, and I applaud the commenters here for seeing the connection and thinking critically.

oh. I thought Cat was looking at that egg in that funny way and then threw it away because he realised it was the end result of a great deal of suffering from the chicken as it pushed it out of its very tight cloaca.
love Gareth :)

In the US, the ubiquitous Puritan heritage really seems to value suffering, even revere it. It mandates guilt as payback for pleasure. You’re not allowed to relax until you reach the blissful afterlife (good luck with that).

By that standard, if you’re happy, you’re probably doing something immoral.

Now get back to work, slackers.

Try valuing your suffering the next time you stub your toe.

If not happiness, then what? What else are we supposed to measure our lives by – fulfilling our biological, or societal, or spiritual, or moral imperatives? To me, none of those seem like suitable ends for humanity, but rather different means to achieve the end that encompasses all ends, which is happiness.

Even most religions, without explicitly extolling the virtues of happiness, implicitly make it part of the end goal. I mean, wouldn’t spending an eternity in paradise or achieving total enlightenment make you a pretty happy camper? To be sure, it’s not the prime directive of religion, but it certainly comes with the package.

I believe that every individual is always striving for happiness, whether they know it or not (usually not). It’s the universal motivation, no explanation needed. Meanwhile, I can’t think of anyone who would willingly pursue suffering for its own sake, as in, not as a means to achieve happiness in some way, somewhere down the road. We should accept suffering as an inevitable fact of life, but in the end it’s still something to be avoided. In a way, happiness is our biological imperative, something we were born to chase after, something we die chasing after. It’s much more than biology, of course, but if I knew the secret ingredients in happiness then maybe I’d be happy myself.

I was thinking about how suffering has very clear value in art, where tragedy is judged by its aesthetic value and instrumentation to the piece as a whole, rather than its benefit to any one person.

So we could value suffering if we wanted to live beautiful lives, rather than happy lives. Hm. That sounds dangerously tempting.

@Dante Salazar: To your second question I say yes. We already/all-too-often measure our happiness/suffering by how we fulfill/fail those expectations. Those expectations being social in nature are almost implicitly never personal expectations.
I, for instance, derive happiness in doing something for its own sake, including suffering.

And the moral of the story is… people are born to suffer, cry and wringe in pain, then die!

happiness feels good on my body

“the ones who walk away from Omelas” didn’t, in my reading, imply that walking away was the correct choice. She left the question open: “I do not know what they find, the ones who walk away from Omelas.” She wrote at least one novel in which the Utopian left home for not quite being the Utopia he thought it was, and then came back after looking at the nearest alternative.

I think suffering is underrated, and much more interesting than most “modern” varieties of happiness (eg, newport ads). Perhaps, however, adaptation to my environment has biased me, or rewired my neuroplasticity to the point where I deviate from the norm on the issue. If so, why doesn’t everyone rewire? I visualize people crying in McDonalds commercials, existential footwear… mascara commercials that show the product running with tears down ugly faces….