Happiness as a state

Often you hear that you need to find work that makes you happy or that you should strive to be happy in life. But what does that really mean? And is it even possible?

... For it is the doom of men that they forget!

Happy and happiness are so widely used that they might actually have very little meaning anymore. Let's assume it just means optimistic, enjoying life rather than being burdened by it. So it is about finding work that makes you feel optimistic and feeling optimistic in life, enjoying both. That sounds like good advice and it is. But it is also shallow and cheap if that's all there is to it. What is new and exiting today is same old tomorrow. Well, maybe not tomorrow for everyone, how fast things lose their appeal is partly personal. But inevitably they will.

I myself find that I'm great working on future achievements, and quite lousy at enjoying those realized. That's my personal experience of a universal human trait: we want what we don't yet have, the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. It makes us set goals, rise to challenges and grow, but it also takes the fun out of everything eventually. You feel most alive (or most miserable) when something big changes in your life: a new love or love lost, a new job or getting fired. Those feelings diminish over time until you're back at some kind of equilibrium. Everything becomes normal, and probably much faster than we would like. What makes the whole thing more tragic is that our psychology seems to be set up for failure, as we experience losses more powerfully than we do wins (this is called loss aversion).

Getting rich is new and exiting, being rich is something you're quick not to notice. If by happy we mean feeling better-than-normal, we're in for an eternal struggle for more. If that's the advice you're given, look for a better advisor. Instead, you need to look for ways to feel content with the normal, which is not so simple. Here again I find that it works for me to contemplate what I and all those around me have worked to achieve. We and those that came before us have worked so hard to be prosperous. What we all have available to us was not within the reach of kings and emperors throughout most of our history. This is fantastic! Let's always remember this!