Just what is happiness anyway?

Last time we covered how happiness is at the center of all we do. This time of year provides us with a particular indication of that truth. I’d wager that each of us has wished and received wishes of happiness for this season of holidays almost constantly, for weeks. Where I’m from, it’s not unusual for the “Happy New Year” greeting to continue on as late as April. Happiness and the desire for it are ingrained even in the way we speak.

But happiness as a concept is difficult to pin down. It can mean different things to different people. It can also mean different things to the same people at different times. We can approach the idea spiritually, scientifically or philosophically. For our purposes, we engage scientifically.

At the most basic level, happiness is a positive emotional state. It is an experience of a good feeling.

Positive psychologists have come up with different theories regarding happiness and the way we live. There’s the hedonism theory, which stresses the accumulation of pleasure; the desire theory, which thinks of the happiest life as one where the most desires are fulfilled and the objective list theory, where happiness requires achievement in “worthwhile pursuits” as essential. A fourth theory, authentic happiness, combines all the previous three so that the pleasant, the good and the meaningful are all accounted for.

But things aren’t universally pleasant, good or considered worthwhile. It’s for this reason that the idea of subjective well-being is thought to be the best way to approach happiness in the field.

Subjective well-being considers the emotional feeling of happiness but it also has an analytical component where individuals assess how satisfied they are with their lives. It includes an overall assessment as well as specific assessments for different aspects of life. How you feel about important parts of your life like your career, your family life and your love life contribute significantly to your happiness.  With subjective well-being, each person has their own idea of happiness and their own feeling about how happy they are.

So when I speak about how happiness is central to our lives, I’m talking about how we all want to attain or maintain a high level of personal life satisfaction. It’s not that we want to feel good forever and always, it’s that we want to feel good about where we are and where we’re going in life.

“Happiness is a direction, not a place.” – Sydney J. Harris

This leaves us with a big question in the face of elusive happiness. Is our level of happiness something we can change? Is happiness something we can work toward?

We’ll answer these questions next time.