Why Women Will Never BE Happy

Elon Musk recently retweeted a clip of Jack Neel interviewing @Rach4Patriarchy trying to explain, yet again, why women are so unhappy these days.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2051132695733006534?s=20

The standard rationales for declining happiness get trotted out: Feminism, women in the workplace, 'men ain't shit®', childlessness, single-motherness, etc. These are all provably true, which makes linking women's unhappiness to them a sure-fire means to engagement. As often as this lament resurfaces, it ignores one basic truth…

It is impossible for a woman to BE happy.

Happiness is something we feel when we DO, not something we ARE. All women (yes, I said all women) and most men don't understand that happiness is a proximate outcome, not an ultimate outcome. For four generations, women have been sold the lie that contentment can be a permanent, maintainable goal-state. And since the mid-90s, not only is sustainable happiness possible for women, but they also deserve to BE happy.

It’s why so many women gulp down antidepressants like M&Ms these days. If she, or the men who are expected to make her happy, can't achieve this state of Nirvana, Big Pharma and/or the wine & spirits industry has the medical shortcut to her deserved happiness.

But what if we're all wrong about the nature of happiness itself?

The human condition is defined by discontent. Read this again. Discontent. It’s essential to make a distinction from the boneheaded, Neo-Buddhist Jordan Petersonian baffle-garble that life is just an effort in managing suffering. But what if life is not suffering, and discontent is a good thing? What if discontent is a feature, not a bug, of being human?

As the vulnerable sex, women are easily sold on the fantasy of long-term happiness and contentment as a state of being. They believe they’re entitled to “having their needs met” and deserve to “be” happy as a condition of a rewarding life. This concept of deserved contentment forms the basis of many pleasant fictions sold to women by a Gynocentric social order. “Live your truth” and “Don’t judge me” are just a couple, but the want for sustainable security in a dangerous and chaotic world is hardcoded into women’s evolutionary firmware.

But in a society by women, for women, the innate need for contentment is exaggerated into a right or an entitlement to have her needs met.

FOMO (fear of missing out) and YOLO (you only live once) are extensions of this entitlement. I read these articles once or twice a year that outline the steep decline in women’s happiness. TradCons see this as evidence of women’s feminist rejection of motherhood and irresponsible men not living up to women’s expectations. Black Pillers think women deserve their unhappiness as some comeuppance for their hubris. But the honest answer is the misguided ideal that happiness is a state of being.

But happiness is in the doing. You cannot ‘be’ happy.

Evolutionarily, women are the vulnerable sex. As such, the fantasy of sustainable, long-term security, contentment, and happiness is so believable that it becomes something all women are entitled to. The problem is that women think “happiness” is an operative state.

Men instinctively understand that this premise is false, even if we never articulate it. Men must become more than we are if we hope to survive and reproduce. In the process of doing what that requires, we find the things and behaviors that make us feel happy.

The idea (to men, at least) is that men find happiness in what they do, while women agonize over a goal-state of contentment they’ll never achieve, but know it is possible if men would only cooperate. Men’s cooperation in sustaining a happiness that can never be realized in women is the foundation of both feminism and social conservatism. Feminists and TradCons both agree that men owe women a better life. And that better life means meeting her needs and sustaining the fantasy of a sustainable contentment. Because if Momma ain’t happy, God ain’t happy.

The Gift of Discontent

Discontent is a good thing. It’s what made us the apex species on the planet. You will never be content, but how you deal with it defines your character. You can be creatively discontent or destructively discontent. Women’s psyches have trouble grasping this because they want the proximate outcome of happiness to be the ultimate outcome. That outcome is long-term security. But the emotion of happiness doesn't work that way:

Happiness Is Only a Proximate Goal

From an evolutionary perspective, human emotions evolved because they generally confer evolutionary benefits to us, helping to ultimately increase the likelihood of survival or reproductive capacities (see Guitar, Glass, Geher, & Suvak, 2018). Just as anxiety evolved to help motivate adaptive behaviors, happiness has also evolved to help motivate adaptive behaviors.

Look at the things that make people happy. They generally map onto outcomes that would have, on average, led to increased probabilities of survival or reproduction for our ancestors.

Here is a short list:

• Food
• Sex
• Engaging in fun times with friends
• Success in social contexts
• Task completion

In broad strokes, we can easily see how these kinds of outcomes not only have the capacity to lead to happiness but also have clear benefits from an evolutionary perspective. The evolutionary take on happiness, then, is essentially this: Happiness is an affective state that motivates us to engage in actions that are likely to lead to outcomes that would, on average, lead to increases in the likelihood of survival or reproduction (see Guitar et al., 2018).

In evolutionary parlance, happiness is a proximate outcome. It matters and is nice, but it is not an ultimate evolutionary outcome.

From an evolutionary perspective, ultimate outcomes pertain to outcomes that bear on increases in the likelihood of survival and reproduction. Thus, we may be thrilled to have a piece of chocolate cake on the table in front of us at a birthday party, but that momentary happiness is not an end goal in itself.

We evolved to be happy when presented with rich food offerings because our ancestors, who were motivated to find rich foods, were more likely to eat and, thus, to survive and reproduce.

Like anxiety, happiness is an affective state with the primary evolved function of motivating us to engage in behaviors that would have led to evolutionarily adaptive outcomes under ancestral conditions.

Happiness is not an end goal; it is a means to an end.

— Positive Evolutionary Psychology: Darwin's Guide to Living a Richer Life, 2019, by Glenn Geher & Nicole Wedberg

Whenever you see the latest study on happiness indexes or hear some pundit mindlessly pop off about loneliness or happiness, remember, these people are operating from the outdated presumption that happiness and contentment are sustainable, ultimate outcomes. Many widely recommended strategies for increasing happiness do not pass the best methodological acid test. Any study or survey that uses a population's sustainable happiness as a metric is not only meaningless but also perpetuates one of the most damning myths of the 20th century into the present.

Women aren’t rewarded with sex for solving problems for men. Men must become. Men’s burden of performance teaches us the nature and means of ‘feeling’ happiness in the doing. Women just are. This is why ‘being’ happy and meeting their needs become entitlements. Entitlement to happiness only amplifies women’s disappointment in men in an age of social media ego aggrandizement for women.

The idea that women deserve to be happy is funnel marketing for moralists and feminists alike. But men cannot possibly make a woman be happy in the sense that she believes she is entitled to.

This disconnect is why women gaslight themselves with lies like “You are enough, girl” or “Live your truth.” Alcohol and antidepressants are the chemical remedies to “being” happy. If the state of happiness is too elusive for women, booze, SSRIs, and the reaffirming commiseration on Instagram are the artificial joy ready to mask the symptoms but never cure the disease.

Women’s collective hubris won’t allow for the kind of insight needed to realize the nature of happiness and how chasing security and contentment slowly kills them. No man can ever meet a woman’s needs or make her ‘be’ happy.

Happy wife, happy life is an ultimatum, not some aphorism you tell the groom at his wedding. How many self-righteous TradCon marriage influencers do you see preaching shame for men who don’t make their purpose in life the sustainable happiness of their wives?

You will never “make” your wife happy because happiness is a proximate, not an ultimate, outcome. These hacks are destroying men’s lives by perpetuating the lie that a wife’s happiness should be his life’s mission. Failing this means failing as a man, a husband, and a father.