I wonder whether we could look at the general concept of “happiness” in terms of variance. Maybe happiness is not a question of whether we are feeling up or down, but rather the size of our emotional range.
If you are always in the same mood, things can get boring. On the other hand, if you have out of control mood swings, things can get scary, or even dangerous.
I suspect there is an optimal emotional variance that gives us maximum satisfaction in life. But maybe it’s even more complicated than that.
Rather than a single value of emotional variance, maybe what we need is variation in our emotional range. Sometimes we need to retreat into a calm emotional monotone, and other times we need things to get just a little wild and crazy.
So maybe it’s not about optimizing for emotional variance. Maybe it’s about optimizing for variance of emotional variance.
Hmm. Maybe I’ll look into that more when I’m in the right mood.