Synthetic happiness. Soon after an email from a friend to Dr Gilbert cc'ed its way into my inbox, I was hooked. Trudged through the website, and simultaneously had Champagne Supernova playing in the background. Suffice to say, the mood was mellow enough to ponder over life, the universe and everything. A relatively strong anti-absolutist (a word?) and an absolute believer in 'everything is relative', this guy had it bang on the money. Premise 1: Its all in your head. Nothing is real. In Milton;s words, the mind can make a heaven of hell; or a hell of heaven. Premise 2: If you can manage your emotions as a third person, you can manipulate them any which way you need. For your thinking pleasure, ladies and gentlemen: Corollary A: Is negative feeling also synthetic? All placebo? Then what's the fuss about The Giver's Sameness? Cut down on the correct oxytoxins and we should be tuned into good old humanoids. Never have a bad thought in our lives. Corollary B: What about feeling under transition? When feeling changes towards the same subject, object or human, is that also synthetic. Do we want to feel hate, sudden ingatuation or a deep intrigue in a new subject simply because it arrived at the right time. Corollary C: When we are confused (also known as heart vs head, religion vs instinct, free will vs social conditioning etc etc), is that what our 'emotion manager' is telling us vs what we are feeling? But synthetic happiness assumes the 'what we are feeling' doesn't exist...also, if only an emotion manager exists, why does he need to manage something? That in itself would assume something exists to 'manage', right?
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