Hypothetical situation: You get hit by a truck and your brain gets damaged funny. Now you can't feel happiness anymore, everything else is fine and the same as before. Your ability to make sound judgement hasn't dissappeared. You get offered a surgical operation by a well-known highly qualified professional, the cost is completely covered by your insurance, and this operation is guaranteed to succeed and will recover your ability to feel happy, but its side effect is that you will always suffer 24/7 from a nagging (super annoying but won't stop you from functioning as a human being and a social entity) physical and a psychological pain that can at most be eased, but not solved by the modern means. No medical alternatives are present and it's very unlikely (cure to all cancers unlikely) that any alternatives will appear. Your case, although weird, is well-researched (hey, truck-kin has been at this side gig for a long long time now) and no alternative medicine (traditional Chinese medicine and stuff like that) nor any forms of psychological counselling (including taking pills or getting a religion) seem to work. Only the way offered to you will help. Do you agree?
Nah, I'd rather never feel happiness. Seems like it'll be better in terms of career opportunities or just functioning logically. Better as in: You won't celebrate early so you won't get caught off guard, etc.
If you don't know what happiness is then you will also not know sadness. you can only feel sadness if have fallen from the mountain of happiness. That's a nope. I don't need such a procedure.
I'll prolly choose to get operated on. I'll risk the persistent pain. It's one thing to lose your ability to feel happy when you've never experienced the emotion before, it's another thing when you can remember feeling happy before and knowing you can no longer experience that same rush of joy or quiet satisfaction or contentment. I think people underestimate the importance of happiness to one's well-being, one's life and one's very existence itself. I'd go so far as to say I amn't living, or alive if I am never happy... I'd just be existing, going through the motions, acting out the rhythms of life while being a hollow shell within. P.S. If I'm not wrong, happiness is also intrinsically linked to the brain's risk-and-reward system, making it integral to your survival.
Option two of course! Humans adapt easily. After having pain for a certain period of time, you'll live with it and not even consciously take notice of ot anymore. When I had belly pain every morning, evening and after meals, I got so used to it I only noticed how far it had come after taking treatment that made the pain go away. Before that, the doctor would aks me how things were going and I would say fine and not remember I had belly pain so often, because that was usual business. Then my mom would say "what about your bellyaches?" And I would be like "oh yeah, my belly hurts." Option 1 would destroy me. It's not an option where I become a robot, it's an option where my negative emotions continue to haunt me and try to shatter my self-esteem and my firewall happiness is gone!
suffer what? like physical suffering or mental suffering... if it's just physical suffering then cool if it's mental depends on how insane it is...but we all probably would pick getting through any kind of suffering than not feeling happiness... you'd probably kill yourself if you don't feel happy with anything you do. there won't be motivation anymore... it would be really weird when you see the people around you extremely happy and yet you don't feel anything. I don't think anyone would be able to go through in life without feeling happiness specially when you know what it feels to be happy and yet the same things you do or see that used to make you feel happy doesn't hit you the same anymore.
having lived with chronic pain for over half my life, I would take the operation in a heartbeat. I don't need emotional highs and lows, what I need is a full 8 hrs sleep without waking five times a night because I hurt and the ability to walk/stand/sit freely without pain.
The second option. Happiness is the regulator of all emotions. Not having it means that, sooner or later, I will lose myself.If I were to leave things as they are (The first option); Pleasure, or dopamine, would become the only way that I, even being completely rational, would resort to as a means to get back to feeling as much as possible to what happiness is. Whereas, if I choose the second option, I will live normally, as long as the pain (physical and psychological) does not prevent me from acting like a normal person.
First off, I admire all the spoonies here saying they don't notice their illnesses anymore. I still (and probably always will) struggle. On to my actual answer: I'd need to know if not being able to feel happiness means I can only feel sadness before reaching a decision. Option two is my current life, so it'd be just your regularly scheduled programming for me, which is to say, not great, so I'd take a life of alexithymia over that any day. But I would never choose a life of constant, infinite, unbreakable sadness. I'd choose the struggle over that defeat.
It depends on if I can still fell contentment, I suppose I wouldn’t be overly bothered by my lack of ability to feel happy… Wouldn’t be worth the pain or annoyance…
I'd probably take the procedure. Being happy is one of the things that keeps me going, for me having an annoying mental and physical pain is bearable just so I could be happy, for me not being able to feel happiness at no matter you do is worse than burning in hell, a world where you can't be happy is a world I would never want, besides, I'd probably get used to the pain with enough time.
100% reject the operation. Nothing else changes other than my ability to feel happiness. That's fine. I don't need it to function.
I'd rather feel pain and happiness then fucking be emotionless. Already had a period in my life where I just went straight years without being happy. I like being happy more then being fuckin numb. Plus, most of my childhood was literal migraines so I think I can take this easy.