What is happiness?

The complexities around the hows and whys of being happy can make even a normally cheery soul feel dispirited

Here’s a thought experiment. You can choose between one of two boons. Remain perpetually happy and blissful but give up everything you consider essential for happiness — like good health and relationships, financial stability, comforts, work satisfaction, and social stature. Or, get all of these but still remain perpetually angsty and miserable.

What will you prioritise — state of mind or life circumstances?

The answer is harder than you think. Even if you have the ability to be happy after giving up everything you cherish and value, your life will become devoid of meaning. And, if you are unhappy despite your happy circumstances, what’s the point of it all?

You are perhaps grappling with these thoughts, but this is just a reflection of the complexities around happiness. The world over, happiness is deeply desired but rarely understood properly. So, we have sifted through both thoughts and research on happiness to explore some very fundamental questions about it. Let’s begin with the most important.

1. What does it mean to be happy?

The majority of children’s stories have a common thread — that people, after much struggle and a few heroic deeds, eventually reach a point in life when they live happily ever after. What living happily actually means is never told.

This confusion persists into adulthood. For instance, it’s trendy for young parents to proclaim that they would want their children to grow up to be “just happy”. But probe a bit and you will hear that they would also want their children to achieve success and stature. Never mind that this would involve working really hard, staying competitive, and dealing with problems — in effect doing everything we don’t ordinarily consider to be happy states of being.

The fact is for all its obsession with happiness, the world doesn’t have a single unified and clear idea of what happiness means in absolute terms.

Across history, different cultures have enquired into questions of wellbeing in different ways. While our ancient Vedantic philosophy makes many references to ananda, the hugely popular, 1,000-year-old Japanese concept of Ikigai treats happiness as living life with a sense of purpose and meaning.

The science of happiness is also subjective to some degree because there hasn’t been much success in finding the exact biological markers of happiness, such as a hormone or neurotransmitter. For example, a low level of the neurotransmitter serotonin has been found to be a sign of depression, but conversely, a high level of serotonin doesn’t necessarily predict happiness. Hindered by the absence of any reliable biomarker, research on happiness is largely based on analysing human behaviour or responses to questionnaires.

Nevertheless, despite the multitude of ways in which happiness is perceived and pursued, there are some common ideas about what it is supposed to be. From a social sciences perspective, happiness can be hedonic or eudaimonic. Hedonic happiness is all about feeling good — feeling good in one’s life (affective) or feeling good about one’s life (cognitive). In the words of Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner and author, being happy in life is the happiness we experience immediately and at the moment. Being happy about our life is the happiness that exists in our memory when we talk about the past and the big picture. This is closer to “meaning.”

Eudaimonia, a derivative of Aristotelian ethics, refers to a state of human flourishing or of living well, and it involves notions like the cultivation of character and the pursuit of truth and knowledge. Some researchers have also focused on a third experiential sort of happiness (chaironic) that denotes not just gladness, joy, and bliss, but also grace and blessing.

These definitions may sound scholarly, but they are similar to both the philosophical and the popular interpretations of happiness. Anecdotally, we know that the non-academic common-man perception of happiness is primarily hedonic while Eudaimonia leans towards Ikigai and Chaironic happiness seems like a version of ananda.

2. Will more money make us happy?

Surely, most of us would love to have more money and figure out this question ourselves. Paradoxically, most of us also believe that “money can’t buy happiness”. Someday, somewhere, somebody invented this quote, and it has now come to be accepted as an unconditional truth.

The rich, despite having better insights, rarely bother clarifying this popular platitude for fear of looking tacky, and the not-rich, let alone seek context, find comfort in the idea.

Aptly, it is Bill Gates who offers some nuance on the subject.

At a 2019 'Ask Me Anything' session in Reddit, the Microsoft founder was asked if being wealthy made him happier. The billionaire said 'yes' adding that he was happier not because he could buy many luxuries but because he didn’t have the average man’s financial worries.

Gates’ response is a pointer to the complicated money-happiness relationship that several recent research studies have revealed. In a paper published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science this January, Harvard Business School professor Jon Jachimowicz and his colleagues show that although money does not necessarily buy happiness, it increases life satisfaction by helping us avoid many hassles that cause stress in our daily lives.

As Gates said on Reddit, he didn't have to think about health costs or college costs and that helped him find contentment. This is a relatable idea. If we don’t have to constantly worry about how much our commuting costs may increase due to rising fuel prices, then, all things being equal, we are in a happier space compared to somebody who does have to worry.

Another paper by researchers Lara Manganelli and Jacques Forest published in the February issue of Applied Research in Quality of Life shines some light on the extent to which money is linked to happiness.

The duo makes two key points. The first is that if you are poor and can’t afford basic necessities like food, shelter, clothing, and children's education, then, yes, more money will make you happier. And, the second is that if all your basic needs are being met, then more money can make you happier if you use it to satisfy psychological needs rather than materialistic ones — like building social connections, learning new skills, and living life with autonomy.

3. Can we learn to be happy?

Yes, genetics research says so. A 2018 paper published in Nature studied life satisfaction in 1,516 Norwegian twins. It concluded that only 30 per cent of the variance in life satisfaction was caused by inherited factors, making it clear that environmental factors play a significant role in our happiness.

Unlike inherited factors like personality traits and genes, which we can’t change, environmental factors can be tweaked or made more conducive for better life satisfaction. After all, we can’t do much if our genes have given us neuroticism, a personality trait that can make people more vulnerable to anxiety and depression. But, we can certainly change our job if we find the workplace culture toxic.

Genetic reasons aside, there are strong practical reasons why it is possible for us to learn to be happy. As we saw in our earlier analysis of happiness, our life satisfaction can be shaped by many factors. Some of these factors are external and guided by a combination of luck, circumstances, and life choices, such as our profession, health, and income level. But some of these factors are also purely psychological, such as our need to engage in activities that make our life more meaningful.

If we use these psychological tools proactively and more often, we should be able to boost our basic happiness. So, what are some of these tools? The plethora of happiness courses available on learning platforms these days give us a hint.

* An overwhelming majority of them emphasise the importance of building strong social relationships because study after study has shown that social support influences life satisfaction more than even income.

* Being busy but not feeling rushed is another way of lifting our happiness quotient. Surveys have shown that contrary to popular notion, the least happy people are those that have the most time on hand because an idle mind breeds worries and apprehensions. Notably, it is important to be busy but not terribly busy because that can cause anxiety.

* So, what do we do to remain busy in a productive way? Quite simply, use what psychologists call “signature strengths”. The things we are uniquely good at outside of what we do for a living, like a hobby or passion, are called signature strengths, and studies show that using these strengths in our daily life often can make us happier.

* Positive psychology experts also suggest that just as we need to work on our bodies and relationships, we should also work on our happiness. Stanford professor and author of The Dragonfly Effect Jennifer Aaker says that so many among us fail to find time for the people and activities that actually bring us happiness. So, instead of seeking happiness in unknown and unpredictable things, we should rely more on situations that have already worked for us.