Am I Happy?

Well, am I?

How do you tell if you are happy?  For a start the definition of being happy is extremely difficult.  Is it a sense of satisfaction in a job well done?  Is it a surge of physical pleasure?  Is it freedom from pain, from worry?  Is it a general sense of optimism?

Furthermore, while the word "happy" describes a particular state, I am happy or not, we all agree that it is possible to say that one person is happier than another.  In fact it seems that there is a relative nature to the concept of happiness, that we decide how happy we are in comparison to the people we see around us.  In the same state of mind we may consider a person surrounded by slave miners to be happy, while miserable while surrounded by children frolicking in a meadow.

There are all sorts of people who say that the key to happiness is a particular thing.  Buddhists say that the removal of ego removes all worry and all that remains is a state of bliss.  The Stoics essentially said that happiness was the living of a moral life.  Hedonists claim that happiness resides in physical pleasure.  others say the key to happiness is there in our relationships to the people around us.  Some people think happiness is based on acquiring possessions and others think it is based on giving.

I am going to be predictable enough to say that happiness is complicated, not a single state of mind, and involves all of the suggestions above.  I fully expect scientists to build a framework of happiness based on electrical signals and combinations of chemicals in the brain, but we aren't there yet.  Therefore I am going to simply give my view of happiness from my own experience and what I have learned or heard from others.

I think happiness is a catch-all for essentially three states, which I call contentment, joy, and pleasure.  They are, of course, connected to some extent but not enough for me to feel that I can address them independently.

Contentment is the basic state of happiness in a person.  A sense of satisfaction rather than guilt.  A state without worry or fear.  A feeling that things in the future will be alright and the past doesn't haunt us.  A comfort in the relationships we have.  I have previously linked to a talk by the Buddhist monk Mathieu Ricard in which he describes contentment (which he calls well-being) as the deep sea of happiness.  Waves rise and fall on the surface but have little effect on the depths below.  He and I probably only disagree on the relative sizes of waves and sea.

Joy is that temporary sensation of excitement, interest, surprise.  It is what you feel when watching two people in love get married.  It is the sensation of something being very funny.  It is the feeling of listening to beautiful music, or riding on a roller-coaster.  It is an elevation of mood.  It is an unsustainable, but very real, feeling of happiness that is different than contentment.  It is a wave upon the sea.  This is the area on which most people concentrate their efforts to be happy.  People surround themselves with things that provide these moments of excitement in the belief that the more of these they experience the happier they will be.  They want a new car.  They buy a new car.  They feel joy in their new car.  Their joy recedes from that moment and they return to their steady state (some level of contentment).  Joy is very often disparaged by those talking about happiness, largely because of its transitory nature, but for the life of me I can't understand why joy isn't a good thing.

Pleasure is a physical thing.  Give someone a dose of heroin and they will feel pleasure.  Let someone with a very full bladder urinate and they will feel pleasure.  A taste of your favorite food indices pleasure.  Orgasm is pleasure.  Soft sheets is pleasure.  Hopefully you know what I am talking about.  Hedonists advocate a concentration on this portion of happiness, and pleasure is certainly important.  However, the human body adjusts itself to physical pleasures, reducing the amount of pleasure received from doing the same thing repeatedly.  Heroin is again an excellent example.  Heroin is pure physical pleasure but it takes more and more of it to get the same result, and the absence of it becomes more and more painful.  Still, a nice sandwich on a comfortable chair in the sunshine is more pleasant than being beaten with sticks in a stinking basement.

Am I happy?  Let us see.

I have perhaps the deepest sense of contentment that I have had in my life.  It isn't a perfect sense of well-being but I don't spend much time worrying  I am almost never afraid.  I am optimistic about the future.  I am solidly in love with my wife.  The biggest problem I have is a sometime sense of guilt about things I should be doing but aren't (right now I need to vacuum the rugs but haven't) and the lack of a wider group of friends that I can interact with in person.

I have a lower amount of joy in my life than I have had in a long time.  My social life is very limited, and there is a very small amount of novelty in my life.  My attempts to provide myself with joy largely consist of repeating my activities, such as listening to and playing the same music, or walking in the same beautiful places.  I don't play music on stage, or play sport on a team, or get much stimulation in general.   However, I am also very far from being locked in a cell.  I suppose to an extent the wave of joy has flattened, and the sea is more ripples than great Atlantic swells.

I can't complain about the amount of physical pleasure I get.  Good food and drink, a very comfortable house, and so on.  I live in luxury, or at least in my opinion.  Short of dangerous drugs or frequent trips to a spa I am not sure what more I could do for pleasure.  My only issues here are the body's adaption to pleasure, which I try to fight with focus and attention when something feels good, ad the simple physical discomforts of aging.

So, these are how I feel I am doing in comparison with how I have done before, and overall I would say that's pretty good.  I sometimes think about how happy I was in Portland, but that was a case of lots of joy and I forget how often I felt discontent.  Overall I think I am more happy than I was in Portland, probably as a result of getting over my Litany and my magic blue pills.  But is this empirically happy, or just relatively happy in comparison to my previous experiences? 

How do we tell if someone is happy?  I will start with language, which represents, and to an extent affects, our mental state.  If someone complains constantly about the futility of life, or how things are getting worse, or all the things that there are to worry about it would seem to me that they are representing discontent.  In my opinion I don't complain very much.  In fact I spend more time than anyone I personally know trying to convince people that life can be pretty wonderful, that life is getting better, and that worrying is largely useless. 

If people talk about how boring things are, or express no interest in ideas or events, or are often disappointed it seems as though they are not experiencing much joy.  I have been doing a lot more of this lately, having given up on joyful activities without my wife in which to share the experience.  I don't think I do this markedly more than average, perhaps less.

If someone talks about how unpleasant things taste, or feel, etc. then it seems as if their amount of pleasure is low.  I think I tend to talk much more about the other end of the spectrum than most people.

Probably the clearest sign of happiness is body language, particularly facial expressions.  Humans are excellent at telling a fake expression from a genuine expression.  A genuine smile is such an excellent representation of internal happiness that it is absolutely universal among humanity (although usually a sign of aggression in other mammals, that baboon is not being friendly) to such an extent that the only sensible conclusion is that it predates language.  A more erect and fluid posture, a tendency to pay attention to others and look them in the eye, concentration directed around rather than close in and towards the ground, denotes a confident and interested person.  At a grocery store that I frequent one of the cashiers remarked that I was always smiling, and always looked as if I was ready to party.  For me this is as objective a view on my own happiness as I could get.  I don't go to the grocery store to convince others of my happiness, i am shopping.

Am I happy?  Yes I am.  I am content, I experience pleasure, and I am not weighed down by a lack of joy.  When I look around at how others talk, act, express themselves it becomes clear to me that I am, in fact, significantly happier than most people.

Once I move to an environment more convivial to my joy, the world will be my mollusc.