Happiness is an Up

What are conceptual metaphors and why do they matter?

Quick! Point to Happiness. Did you point to your own heart? A loved one in the room? A beloved pet? A comforting musical instrument?

Would you be surprised to know that happiness is up? After all if you go up you will feel elated. Your mood will be elevated and you will feel lighter. Go up enough and you will feel high, maybe even on Cloud 9 or Over the Moon.

Conversely, if you go down you will feel low. You may be down and out. You could become a downer to others. A real energy drain, an emotional nadir. Hopefully you don’t go so far down you become clinically depressed. At this point, you may need an intervention, but be careful with self-prescribing pharmacological pick-me-ups!

Love can also bring about happiness but for that you need to travel. For above all, love is a journey. Sometimes I think about my own partnership and how far we’ve come. It hasn’t always been easy - occasionally it’s been a bumpy road. But we’ve never hit a true dead-end or decided to go our-separate ways. Even some long-term couples who feel like they’re spinning their wheels may decide they can’t turn back now. But early on in relationships, it’s important to recognize if the relationship isn’t going anywhere.

Why am I writing about happiness and love? What does this have to do Biomythic? After all you are investing your precious time in reading this piece and time is money. Reading this whole piece may cost you 5 minutes. Will it be worth your while? How else might you spend your time? If it’s not working for you, by all means, go outside and take a jog. For us mortals, we are all living on borrowed time.

If you disagree with my thesis so far, feel free to write me and push back. Make cutting remarks if you must with a sharp-tongue. Defend your position or attack a weak point of mine. Who knows, you may be right on target. But if you do all this, you may unwittingly accept the conceptual metaphor common in our society that an Argument is a War. You could consider another framing to structure your thinking - maybe an argument could a Samba, a collaborative painting, a spicy gazpacho? If you frame an argument as gazpacho, perhaps all my article is missing is a little salt and oregano which I would gladly add.

The point is, without recognizing it, we equate many of our abstract concepts (i.e. happiness, love, time, arguments) with very concrete ones (direction, movement, currency & wars). These implicit conceptual metaphors then set initial boundaries that are rarely challenged in subsequent conversation. They set stage, so to speak.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their book Metaphors We Live By described these as conceptual metaphors. Conceptual metaphors are almost subliminal as they are so integrated into our language that we often no longer see them as metaphorical at all. And although it is not easy to quantify their effect, that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Does it matter at all that we equate happiness with up, love with a journey, time with money or an argument with a war? Do these embedded conceptions close us off to other ways of perception? What if anything is the sticky residue of these conceptual metaphors on our current understanding, our social discourse, our relationships, our lives?

Science also has metaphors that have been around so long that we hardly notice them. These metaphors are inevitable for much of the terrain of science is about subjects that are abstract in terms of our lived experience. When Steven Hawking compared space-time to an orange - smooth from a distance - but wrinkled close up due to local gravitational distortions, he did so because none of us can use our eyes to see space-time - apprehending quasars and black holes. We cannot see the very fabric of reality. We do not know if it is satin or homespun!

Like with happiness, love or time, we explore abstract ideas in science with what we know in our everyday lives. Core to this project is rediscovering these metaphors and considering to what extent they matter. As part of this endeavor we can propose alternative metaphors and evaluate their impact. Of course, I wish I could just do a data dump for you and you could store the information. That would save you from the work of reading and me the challenges of writing. But I’m afraid the brain as computer metaphor has limits! We all must construct our own learning. Next week I will further discuss how metaphors and analogies function. Thanks for reading and if you think of an interesting conceptual metaphor that I should be aware of, let me know. It would…lift my spirits! Ba dum tss!