Happiness is a reward from our ancestors

That's not the same as having a single word that embodies a specific concept, that helps/shorten the expression/sharing of it.

If you don't have this single concept that stands for itself, and/or that you don't know the word, as long as you can't name it, it's hard if not impossible to see it. That's why we give a name to things or people we find/meet.

See shades of white (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shades_of_white), plural forms, different depending on the language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural#Use_in_systems_of_gramm...), love (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love) if only in Greek where it has at least 6 very distinct ones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love).

But, also, that knack for ambiguity and second and third order meaning in apparently detached sentences in some languages, it has its own charms.

Whether it's a straight line up to $75K followed by a flat line from there on, or a curved (log) relationship all the way up, seems to me to make rather little difference.

A lifelong process that involves an individual becoming whole by integrating various aspects of their personality and becoming their true authentic self.

Jung spoke about humanity suffering from neurosis, if they basically deep down feel that their life is meaningless. Oversimplified example is - if parents want a kid to be a doctor, and the kid succeeds at that, but is then severly unhappy, because he supressed parts of himself to do that.

Individuation is life long process, where the person is trying to put all the parts of themselves into light, even the parts they for example don't like about themselves, like being lazy, vain, etc. (The Shadow). And then live according to that authentic self.

Jungs's theory has nothing to do with evolutionary psychology or the idea that most people shoud be farmers like our ancestors or something. But it is similar in the way, that there is effort to uncover what makes someone happy - and that idea the depression is a message to the person that they are not on the right track, not one aligned with their authentic self. Depression is then considered a tool, a valuable one, and no mistake of brain chemistry or something.

I think there is something about this - that depression is lack of meaning. I also heard that in the startup context - a burnout is a state where you care about something, but come to subconscious realization that you are powerless to change it. It is basically another way a meaninglessness manifests. Because if you come to believe you can't influnce something, why would you keep working on it right? Your body will refuse that.

What the author of the article did is Jung's ideation, when she got married, moved to countryside and all that. Her explanation was evolutionary psychology and thinking it has somthing to do with her genetic ancestors, but that's just one explanation. In essence, she only admitted to herself, what she is really like deep down and then acted upon it. Ancestors or not, she got closer to her authentic self - instead of letting herself be programmed by the society. For somebody else though, the countryside life and kids might NOT be the right answer for them. Everybody is different, hence why it's called Individuation - seperating yourself, individualizing into your own authentic self.

This is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (though it's mostly Whorf's), and it's been largely debunked. Language may have some limited influence of perception of colours and innate direction, but probably not much more than that.