I always hear the situation put this way, but it rings false to me. If you gave me a perfect happiness drug, I wouldn't want to sit in bed all day and take it. I would want to take it and go about my normal day only without the burden of misery — debug Java without wanting to claw my eyes out, help out people I meet because I don't feel stressed over my own schedule, etc. Being happy naturally has never driven me to sit in bed and has only ever made me a better person; I don't know why we assume drug-induced happiness would do the opposite. I suspect this is just because many of our current drugs do this as a side effect of inducing euphoria, and we're imagining that instead of a real happiness drug.
"Sit in bed all day" maybe isn't the best way to describe the problem with such a drug. "Never change anything in your life" might be better. People don't like change, and they generally only make serious life changes when they're unhappy with the way their lives are going currently. If you're never unhappy, you'll never change anything.
The negative consequence there is that often times we don't learn about ourselves until we attempt to make such a change. If you hate debugging Java, and you can take a pill that makes you not mind it, you might never discover that you could actually be a much better Ruby programmer than you ever were a Java programmer -- or that you really were never cut out to be a programmer at all and should pursue something totally different. You'd just chug along debugging Java your whole life and never realizing your full potential.
> If you gave me a perfect happiness drug, I wouldn't want to sit in bed all day and take it. I would want to take it and go about my normal day only without the burden of misery
I've been reading some meditation related books lately, and this was one of the ideas they were trying to get across. That meditating for a sense of fulfillment doesn't replace your desire to go about and do good work, it merely changes your perspective on how you feel while doing those things. Additionally, it (allegedly, convincingly argued) enhances your ability to do the things you like well, and to make better choices in general.
> I suspect this is just because many of our current drugs do this as a side effect of inducing euphoria, and we're imagining that instead of a real happiness drug.
A useful way to contrast that is with uppers. I took my friends aderall a few times in College - in addition to staying awake, I felt profoundly happy - yet I didn't give up my goals (study all night) - I merely had a good time doing them.
I know there's some science around parts of that - far too lazy atm to search and link it (sorry!). But perhaps it is a bit counter-intuitive that feeling deeply happy and satisfied could also drive a person to do more meaningful work at the same time.
Heroin is as close to "a perfect happiness drug" as anything human ingenuity has ever produced. My experience of its habitués tends to suggest that, while it's not impossible you'd become a better person under its effects, it is quite unlikely.
Alternately, I could make a solid case for MDMA. A huge rush of serotonin is closer to 'happiness' in my book; tickling the mu-opoid is more of a 'bliss' kinda thing.
If there were a beverage that worked like coffee except was more MDMA like, that our physiology could sustain in daily use, I dare say a lot of us would drink it.
It can be tricky from the outside to distinguish someone who's nodding from someone who's sleeping, but from the inside the two states aren't all that similar.
> I always hear the situation put this way, but it rings false to me. If you gave me a perfect happiness drug, I wouldn't want to sit in bed all day and take it.
Reason is a poor way of estimating behavior, in special, your own.
But this isn't reason divorced from reality — it's my experience that happiness does not have the effects postulated here. As I said, I have been happy on numerous occasions before. The result was not that I sat in bed all day with zero productivity.
The thought experiment is proposing a drug that promotes sustained, unconditional high levels of happiness, with zero drawbacks.
This doesn't compare with anything a normal person experiences during life. There's no rational expectation to be had of how anyone's behavior would be if such a drug existed.
