What is happiness for you?
Published
April 5th, 2023
by
Sirius B
“What is happiness for you?” That was the exact question I asked my Instagram audience of 1400 followers (mostly the youths) on the eve of International Happiness Day. The responses varied from cluelessness to food, satisfaction, and existences to love, and at best, happiness is as an “x”-- a variable that changes with time. It is intriguing to notice how people have their own understanding of happiness.
From the question, one thing was so obvious there is no definite answer to this happiness question. Given the many complexities and quandaries related to happiness and how to achieve it, philosophers and laymen, people from all walks of life including me, find it an interesting topic to contemplate over.
While writing this reflection, my understanding of happiness was mainly formed around my personal experiences, though I still feel that I have not understood the concept of happiness or the key to happiness in its entirety. I imagine that throughout life, every individual will experience moments of happiness or lack thereof and therefore the key to happiness and its understanding would constantly evolve with time and events. Nevertheless, I have felt happiness as a state of mind. I have sometimes felt that having what I wanted is happiness. I believe that happiness is to be felt and not really to be understood. But again, Socrates notes “The unexamined life is not worth living” and I couldn't agree more.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy points up that the Philosophers who write about “happiness” typically take their subject matter to be either of two things, each corresponding to a different sense of the terms in different contexts:
Happiness is a state of mind that rings very well with me and for better organization, I will try to describe happiness from my experiences through the state of mind and well-being/flourishing standpoints.
1. Happiness as a state of mind
While writing this essay, at this moment, I can make a haphazard guess that somebody might be living in comfort with wide smiles and some in misery. Somebody, I can imagine, is very sad in Samtse. Some of the red-cheeked boys from Laya staring over the snowy pinnacles of mountains -- might be wondering what this world really is. A woman in Thimphu might be under the serious influence that something must be changed in order to gain happiness. So the whole world consists of thoughts. We all think every waking day. Every second and every minute. Our minds wander here and there. Likewise--happiness as a state of mind is elusive as our wandering thoughts.
I remember seeing a poster with the happy runner-up child showing his excitement at the position podium and the winner with a grumpy face standing on the first position placeholder looking at the runner-up with dissatisfaction. From this story, I derive two inferences. First, happiness really is a state of mind and we are what we think. We can be as happy as we want to be.
What really is happiness for me? All my growing days, I have been trying to understand who I am, what my shortcomings are, how I can be happy and how I can be better, only to be forgotten when the sun is bright and the day heralds something new. I feel understanding happiness will require us to go beyond logic, and fashions and beyond the hollow cacophony of omniscient external shouts because happiness is inherent to each individual. For me, the one thing that defines me is the way I perceive things. I have always noticed that I look at the world through ideal and optimistic lenses. This has much to do with my feelings because how I see the world through my inner lenses will mirror my state of mind to the external world. This inner state must be in tandem with my outer actions for harmonious overall well-being and I believe that is happiness.
I believe there are countless reasons to be happy no matter where you come from or the kind of problems you have faced in the past. My happiness doesn’t come from, “If I work hard, one day I’ll be successful and happy.” My happiness is an inherent belief devoid of unquenchable happy destinations.
I have no words for unconditional happiness but for a person like me--who is often shaped by exposures and external stimuli, happiness as a state of mind largely depends on what's happening outside me. I have always found the inextricable nexus between external stimuli and the internal state of mind. For example, a simple analogy would be someone trying to make me angry. Similarly to this, there are many cases where the state of mind depends on what is happening around us. But I have also read and heard several times that I am hurt as much as I let others hurt me and I am as happy as I let myself be. At a granular level, I firmly believe happiness is an individual’s private business and happiness depends on each individual.
I also feel, as a pleasant person and having positive views (with the reality check), these ideals in me open up a door to connect with people and replicate happiness. It’s a simple and indispensable fact that when you smile at someone, they smile back. If that’s indisputably true, then why would I not try to make everyone smile because I understand everyone wants to be happy?
2. Happiness as well-being or flourishing.
I found Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs fascinating. The hierarchy of needs entails all the prerequisites that one would covet for in their life would flourish their life. Maslow proposes that physiological needs, safety needs, love, and belonging needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization needs determines an individual’s behaviour.
People can be happy if they have good food, good shelter and a good living standard. I surmise a happy life is a fulfilling life having everything I want. A father is happy when he is able to provide for his family. A family is happy when they have everything they need to thrive. When the family - the base unit of the community has everything they need to live a good life, it creates an enabling condition for them to live better, stretch out to the community to contribute in their own capacity, and thus ensure collective happiness.
As I noted earlier, happiness is different to different individuals, a well-being or a flourishing life may instigate people to do parlous actions. For example, I recently watched “The Wolf of Wall Street” a biopic based on Jordan Belfort directed by Martin Scorsese where the main character who is a millionaire stockbroker indulges in sex, drugs, and other conspicuous consumption (debauchery) despite having everything. From my observation, the mundane daily humdrum of life and chores make us discontent and motivate us to strive for more and more. The pursuit of grandeur and dissatisfaction in life can be compelling factor for people to be unhappy. Therefore, the trick to being happy is to be content with what we have and to take conscious actions that are fulfilling and satisfying.
The term happiness is nebulous because its understanding is examined through different contexts and standpoints, from a different epistemological points of view from the likes of eudaimonia to gawa in Bhutanese understanding, and from all the obliviousness of happiness, one thing is obvious--people want to be happy. In the class when you said there is no one recipe for happiness I could not help but agree on that based on my observations. I have no personal and definite answers for happiness nor what makes me happy because what is coming is oblivious but I have one arsenal understanding that I can have or create a fulfilling and satisfying life through enabling harmony between my thoughts and actions. On a concluding note, it is to be noted that the fundamental features of the language are that it is arbitrary in nature, and understanding the perspective of others through our own lens is always hard and flawed and so is the understanding of happiness. The question: “What is happiness for you?”, has no bright-line answer because the meaning of the question itself is confusing.