Emotions are not a mysterious soup in your head! This book dissects happiness into our individual emotions based on their evolutionary or biological purpose. This dissection reveals many breakthrough insights, such as:
• you only fall in love with strangers
• women only fall in love with men of equal-or-higher rank
• men fall out of love 4 years after meeting a woman
• you only envy former peers – like siblings and classmates
• you only feel humor when others make a mistake that you could make
• a mid-life crisis occurs when your rank plateaus and you stop feeling pride
• we say please and thank you so others don’t feel humiliation
• we only cry because we’re lonely
Prior to this book, our emotions have not been dissected – as we did long ago for our physical organs, like the heart or liver. Nobody has attempted it because many emotions can’t be explained by current evolutionary thinking – specifically that emotions must help you or your genes. Emotions like fear or love can be explained by this view, but not emotions that make us risk our lives to help a stranger, for example.
These emotions can be explained if you assume they evolved to harm you and your genes to help your group. Compassion, for example, makes people willing to risk their lives to help a stranger. Many of our most important emotions are group emotions – pride, humiliation, envy, humor, revenge and guilt.
Mark Devon has used new assumptions like this to turn the mysterious soup in your head into an easy-to-understand menu of emotions. You can use this menu to understand, predict and improve happiness – yours and those around you.
• you only fall in love with strangers
• women only fall in love with men of equal-or-higher rank
• men fall out of love 4 years after meeting a woman
• you only envy former peers – like siblings and classmates
• you only feel humor when others make a mistake that you could make
• a mid-life crisis occurs when your rank plateaus and you stop feeling pride
• we say please and thank you so others don’t feel humiliation
• we only cry because we’re lonely
Prior to this book, our emotions have not been dissected – as we did long ago for our physical organs, like the heart or liver. Nobody has attempted it because many emotions can’t be explained by current evolutionary thinking – specifically that emotions must help you or your genes. Emotions like fear or love can be explained by this view, but not emotions that make us risk our lives to help a stranger, for example.
These emotions can be explained if you assume they evolved to harm you and your genes to help your group. Compassion, for example, makes people willing to risk their lives to help a stranger. Many of our most important emotions are group emotions – pride, humiliation, envy, humor, revenge and guilt.
Mark Devon has used new assumptions like this to turn the mysterious soup in your head into an easy-to-understand menu of emotions. You can use this menu to understand, predict and improve happiness – yours and those around you.