The Enigma of Happiness
I want to preface this article by expressing that I have often struggled with finding happiness and everything I write about comes from personal experience and how I’ve combatted my own struggles. Do not be afraid to open up about how you feel and take the time to do everything you can for your mental wellbeing.
What is happiness?
Happiness is very much a paradoxical emotion. If I were to wake up one morning and say, ‘today I am going to be happy’ it would just become an impossibility. I haven’t defined what level of happiness or satisfaction I’m attempting to achieve because there is no real measure to how much joy I need to feel in order to be ‘happy’. I don’t even know what kind of ‘happiness’ I’m trying to achieve. Sometimes it can be a sense of meaning and purpose, other times it’s more of a spiritual and harmonious level of satisfaction.
It’s a pretty interesting concept because it’s so hard to define happiness and to know you are experiencing joy in a moment where you aren’t seeking it, yet it is so easy to know when you’re unhappy because you can effortlessly judge your pain but not your pleasure. We all have those times where we can definitively express our unhappiness in a situation. If I underachieved or received an unexpecting outcome in life which has actively made things worse, I know that I’m upset. When I hear some great news, there is that fleeting moment of happiness which immediately dissipates into thinking about what is next to come. Struggling to live in the moment has forever pushed the boundaries of happiness for me. I chase this intangible emotion every day and the moment I’m able to grasp it, it slips away only for me to repeat this cycle over again.
Compromising for less
Once I understood that trying to actively be happy wasn’t the way happiness worked, I attempted to define the constraints of my happiness and ultimately, I arrive at the question, ‘am I content?’. Contention and happiness are not the same but they do fall in the same ballpark. At the very least if I’m content I’m not (usually) unhappy. I reflect upon the day I’ve had and ask myself if I really enjoyed it. Sometimes, I can say with certainty that I had a great day but more often than not, it’s the opposite. Then I ask why wasn’t it great? What in particular happened that made me upset. This is where it can get tricky because nothing really needs to go wrong to not have a good day. Sometimes I just feel unfulfilled and other times I can just feel this empty hole within me that needs to constantly be stuffed with some form of recreational activity to disconnect from the reality that I am unhappy with who I am.
Again, happiness feels like an incredibly contradictory emotion. No matter how I attempt to look at it, whether I just try to have a good day or set out tasks that I know I should be satisfied with if I complete them, I won’t know if it’ll make me happy. At the end of the day, I don’t know what will fill that empty void within me and I don’t know if it's supposed to even be filled. Sometimes just having a day where you forget the existence of it can be enough to make you happy without you knowing it.
Changing perspectives
As an example, let’s say I’ve stayed in bed and played video games all day (after all, what else is there to do during a global pandemic). Do I feel happy? Not particularly. I could have spent this time learning another language or maybe I could have checked off one of the projects I have been wanting to work on for a while. The guilty sensation makes the day feel wasted and results in me feeling bad and unfulfilled despite the fact I should be happy that I got to spend the whole day relaxing.
Now, changing perspectives to am I content. I didn’t have any major deadlines upcoming, there was nothing crucial that needed to be done that I was procrastinating against and I got to unplug myself from reality and not stress out for no reason. So, while I may be unhappy with what could have been, I am still (mostly) content. The feeling of guilt can sometimes be so powerful that in situations like these, I can’t even feel content. But you can’t be too hard on yourself; everyone needs a break.
Again, the issues here is that I have set these arbitrary boundaries of what will make me happy and what will make me content when in reality, I haven’t got a bloody clue how I’m going to feel when I wake up and when I go to sleep and I don’t know what kind of curveballs life will throw at me.
Distracting myself
Distractions are what I’ve found to be an incredibly potent way to ‘forget’ that I might not be happy. During lockdown I feel that they have sometimes been a necessity to stay sane. Whether I’m hanging out with my friends or outside riding my bike and looking at all the cute dogs in the park, I don’t have to think about what I’m feeling. I don’t have to question if I’m happy at that moment because I am. Even though I’m not exclaiming it, I forget about all those nagging thoughts and irrational questions. But distractions are temporary. There’s no way of knowing how I’m going to feel later on.
Final thoughts
I suppose the fact that the sensation of happiness not being a permanent feeling is in a way necessary. The feeling is transient and as a result, lets us distinguish between good days and bad days. We all learn to just take each day as it comes and do what we can to help each other get by.
One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
