Engineering happiness

by Sam Zanahar

Version 2.3, March 2010

I have a great interest in the modulation of the human mind and body, with the aim of achieving a higher level of happiness. It's about engineering happiness through pharmacological means.

We are aware of street drugs used to this end, but they are all inadequate. Cocaine and amphetamines produce happiness through the crude enhancement of dopaminergic brain activity, but they do a lot of long-term damage to the functions they momentarily enhance.

Opiates make happy through sedation, but their effects wear off, and inactivity and dullness accompany the happiness they induce.

Ecstasy surely creates a beautiful sense of harmony, but here, too, the effects wear off, and a desired state of happiness becomes harder to achieve when sober after having relied on ecstasy.

Humans are inadequately predisposed to be happy, simply because a good dose of unhappiness is superior in the Darwinian fight for survival. Natural selection of the fittest sides with those who try harder, and in order to be highly success-oriented, one has to be discontent with one's status quo.

Until genetic engineering will take care of the current shortcomings of humans in their quest to be universally happy, pharmacological intervention is the only realistic alternative. But, to emphasize it again, the pharmacology of cocaine, opiates, ecstasy, amphetamines and the like is too crude to be a sensible solution.

All humans are equipped by nature with a delicate system to experience happiness: sexuality. Pharmacological mediators of happiness should act to enhance sexual experience. Desexualizing pharmacological agents, such as some antidepressants, do not point into the right direction.

All rights reserved.
Sam Zanahar
Via del Biscione, 6 Rome, 00186 Italy
Last updated: March 16, 2010