What’s it mean to live a happy life?

By Ari Yeganeh

We live in a happy-obsessed society, constantly bombarded with happy smiling faces on TV or billboard ads telling us their version of happiness.

Even worse than this, we see our own friends on social media posting photos of their ridiculously happy faces; but never sharing any raw feelings of what’s really going on in their lives.

It is an unspoken law that we all want to be happy but the reality is that most of us have not thought about what happiness means for ourselves.

  WHAT ON EARTH IS HAPPINESS?

There are probably as many definitions of happiness as there humans on the planet but broadly speaking, modern psychology categorizes happiness in two parts:

Happiness is an emotion

Experiencing positive emotions like joy, pleasure and excitement

We are all familiar with this type of happiness – good food, great sex, new clothes, walks on the beach, hot oil massages and puppies, lots of puppies. This is what’s constantly advertised to us and what we think of when we see our happy smiling friends on Facebook.

Happiness as a life satisfaction

Living with a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment with life

We are less familiar with this type of happiness as it is not as straightforward as getting a massage or hugging a warm puppy. Rather it involves a deliberate process of self-discovery and cultivating the right mental attitudes to live a happy life despite the ups and downs of everyday emotions.

Let’s explore these…

HAPPINESS AS AN EMOTIONS

Chasing positive emotions

Imagine if there was a machine you could plug yourself into that made you feel pleasure and joy 100% of the time. Better yet, you wouldn’t know you were plugged in so you would have no feelings of guilt. Would you plug in or stay in your current life?

The answer you give this question can reveal a lot about how you feel about happiness as an emotion.

This is a common path to happiness for many people. “If only I have *fill in the blank*, then I’ll be happy”.

The obvious problem with this approach is what psychologists call hedonic adaptation – the idea that no matter how good something makes us feel, “most of the time we drift back to where we started, emotionally-speaking. One often-cited study famously showed that despite their initial euphoria, lottery winners were no happier than non-winners eighteen months later. The same tendency to return to “baseline” has been shown to occur after marriage, voluntary job changes, and promotions—the kinds of things we usually expect to change our happiness and well-being for the better in a permanent way.

This is not to say we shouldn’t enjoy the pleasures of life, we absolutely should celebrate getting that new job and we should cherish every moment of the honey-moon period of a new relationship. However, we should be conscious that experiencing these short term emotional highs does not equate to long term happiness.

Running away from negative emotions

Another unfortunate consequence of seeing happiness only as a positive emotional state is that we ignore or suppress any other emotions that don’t make us feel good. We all want to feel joy and avoid pain, this is normal. What’s not normal and is rather unhealthy is persistently avoiding or suppressing difficult or negative emotions.

The reality of life is that we all experience difficult emotions and circumstances. People get sick, we lose our jobs, relationships fall apart, things break, shit happens.

Put more elegantly by Murphy’s law “whatever can go wrong, will go wrong”

In his book, The Happiness Trap, Russ Harris writes:

The more we try to avoid the basic reality that all human life involves pain, the more we are likely to struggle with that pain when it arises, thereby creating even more suffering.” – Russ Harriss

Similarly, in Buddhism it is believed that “life is full of suffering” and that our suffering is caused by our “attachments” – ideals we hold in our minds about how life ought to be. And one of the biggest attachments we have is the desire to feel happy all the time. This unhealthy desire to feel happy all the time ironically leads to suffering and unhappiness in the face of inevitable adversity and Murphy’s law. We feel unhappy because we feel we shouldn’t feel unhappy.

Whilst none of us want to experience sadness, it is a fact of life that we will. Accepting sadness or difficult emotions is not the same as wallowing and indulging in them. Rather it’s learning to recognise that it’s healthy to experience the full range of emotions as a human being. And that these emotions don’t have power over us. We can observe emotions but we are not our emotions. And in due time, every emotion will come and go. No state of mind is permanent. Clinging on to positive or negative emotions is a fool’s game. Just let them go.

Note: Experiencing negative emotions is part of life, however if you are experiencing emotions like sadness, hopelessness or anxiety persistently on a regular basis, we recommend you reach out and seek appropriate help to better understand the root cause of your emotions.

  HAPPINESS AS LIFE SATISFACTION

Life satisfaction is determined almost entirely by the contents of our minds with no visible indicators on the outside world. It’s possible to be a raging success on the surface and feel completely dissatisfied with life, but it’s also possible to have nothing in the material world and be completely satisfied with life.

Philosophers, psychologists, spiritual gurus have all their views on what gives us satisfaction in life but the reality is that life satisfaction is a cake you need to bake yourself. There is no cake out there with the perfect list of ingredients that is going to satisfy everyone’s taste buds. You need to go on your own self-discovery journey to find what brings you to satisfaction and contentment.

Ingredient #1 – Meaning

“The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.” – Carl Jung

This is not an uncommon scenario in our society, especially in the younger generations: doing a job that pays the bills but provides little to no sense of meaning or purpose.

But deriving a sense of meaning doesn’t just come from work. We find meaning in relationships with loved ones, through parenthood, spirituality, contributing to others or simply through the fact that we are alive. Ultimately each one of us is responsible for creating our own meaning.

“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.” ―Anais Nin

The beauty of going on this journey is that we are all in it together. Not a single human came into being because of their own choosing. No one asked you if you’d like to be born. Your parents brought you into the world, and your parents were the result of their parents, and so on. In a strange cosmic sense, every human alive today is in the same boat. We all ask ourselves: Why am I here? What’s the meaning of my life?

Without gratitude, it’s difficult to imagine a life of satisfaction. No matter where we are in life, we will always desire something more. Gratitude involves taking a step back in our life and acknowledging and being thankful for all the people and situations that we are blessed with.

Being ungrateful is easy. Take being alive. How much money is your current level of health worth to you? If the richest person on the planet offered to buy your arms from you, how much would you sell them for? What about your eyesight or your sense of smell? No amount of money could buy that. Yet it is so easy to take for granted what’s right under our nose.

When you make the decision to practice gratitude daily, you will feel as though a new world will opened up to you. I can suddenly see things that were invisible before. The more you practice gratitude, the more you’ll start to observe the beauty and blessings you have in your life.

You can start with writing 3 things you are grateful for every morning when you wake up. This simple task makes a significant difference to how you will feel about your life. Your mind will constantly look for things to be grateful for so I can write them down the following day. Gratitude slowly becomes part of your mindset, something that will happen without conscious thought.

Ingredient # 3 – Presence

“It’s the moments that I stopped just to be, rather than do, that have given me true happiness.” Richard Branson

Think about the voice inside your head who’s reacting to the words you’re reading right now. It’s estimated we have between 20,000-50,000 thoughts every single day; but don’t worry you’re not crazy. 2500 years ago Buddha called this phenomenon: monkey mind. He observed that the human mind is filled with drunken monkeys, jumping around, screeching, chattering, all clamoring for your attention. You just have to sit silently for a few seconds so you can hear them.

This is not to say that having thoughts is bad and we should have less of them. Our huge brains are the primary reason we are alive today. Thinking about the past gives us immeasuarble opportunities for learning and growth and thinking about the future allows us to imagine and create our desired visions. The problem arises when we are over-thinking or worst unaware that we are thinking and have let the monkeys go wild in our minds.

When our mind wanders, we lose touch with the present moment and go into endless thought loops about the past or future.

“Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry – all forms of fear – are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of nonforgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.” Eckart Tolle

Empirically, we spend at least 50% of our waking time mind wandering not focused on the present moment; and the impact of this on our self reported level of satisfaction is clear..

We have come a long way since Buddha, yet his teachings on meditation remain one of the most effective ways to calm the monkeys in our minds and gain more presence and satisfaction in life. There are now hundreds of studies proving the physical and mental benefits of meditation and other mindfulness practices. We have written a guide complete with stick figures on how to form habitual mindfulness practice here.

“If you are quiet enough, you will hear the flow of the universe. You will feel its rhythm. Go with this flow. Happiness lies ahead.” – Buddha

Baking your own happiness cake

Ultimately each one of us is responsible for making our own happiness cake; one filled with ingredients that gives us true satisfaction and contentment.

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Last but not least, no matter what cake we choose to bake, let us not forget to share happiness with another