The One Reason You’re Not Happy
And no, not being happy doesn’t mean you’re sad
For centuries, many have tried to define happiness and for just as long many have casually proclaimed their unending happiness. What if all this time we’ve been wrong about happiness?
Knowing what happiness means to us personally helps us be better adjusted individuals with a realistic outlook. When people create a customized and rational definition for happiness they won’t expect to be happy every minute of every day. They won’t put the onus on others to make them happy and they’ll defuse aspects of the problematic word that won’t apply to them in their lifespace. The word itself has precious meaning to them so it’s not used carelessly. Instead, they use words like cool, chill, irie, good when asked how they’re doing for when they say they’re happy it’s for a monumental reason. Aren’t we wary of people who always say they’re happy? When a cool person deviates from their baseline and say they’re happy it makes them interesting. People will want to know what happened to bring on the change. But the most important person we have to communicate with and influence is ourselves and it helps to use words that have evolved with us to pinpoint, navigate and control our emotions.
One tactic an emotionally healthy person can try to be more even keeled and avoid toxic positivity is to define happiness on their terms. For example, happiness can be described as an elusive distinctive moment in a person’s life when they felt epic contentment. The definition must ring true to the individual, be their own personal thermometer and yardstick to detect, gauge, measure and identify their version of happiness. It shouldn’t be forced to match common definitions others use or those found in a dictionary and it’s free from external judgments and unsolicited input. Taking this a step further, happiness or that epic contentment might only occur in a very short time span, just like the time it takes for a high five. Anyone who’ve ever won anything valuable have experienced a brief heart palpable moment where there’s a burst of amazing energy that lasts a few seconds when they’ve realized they’ve finally accomplished something remarkable. Think the game winning basket, the signing of a mega deal, passing the test, landing on the moon, or hearing your baby’s heartbeat for the first time. In these monumental moments nothing else mattered, it was only us basking in some warm ether, even if it took a whole team to get us to this point. It doesn’t last very long until we get back to earth, and then to our emotional baseline.
This momentary euphoric emotion results from doing some meaningful work to obtain some worthy reward. That could be your new definition of happiness so you’re in control of calibrating your own emotions versus relying on someone else’s definition.
Maybe happiness is not supposed to be a permanent state, lasting for hours, days, years, or until the end of time. The work to get to happy brings continuous, voluminous joy at various points during the struggle and then again after achieving happiness because incremental progress means things are changing even if they are not in the direction we want them to go. Any type of change means there’s agency, there’s some power to move the proverbial needle and if we keep at it we’ll get somewhere, to that eventual spark that ignites that fleeting moment of happy. There’s nothing more miserable and frustrating than not being able to make a difference, to move forward, or being prevented from going on the adventurous happy-seeking journey with the prospect of that desirous moment of happy.
Unlike Victor Frankl, this would mean that happiness can be pursued, and for those who strike the right chords they will be rewarded with happiness. Some journeys might be unpleasant, painful, tedious or laborious like mowing the lawn, doing the dishes, paying monthly bills, getting a scholastic degree, but in the end, that quick burst of euphoria when it’s done and over could be your new definition for happiness. Joy follows happiness and is the longer lasting emotion felt when there is a sense of accomplishment, relief and the freeing of our time to do other things.
Depending on the journey, the mid-point might be a once in a lifetime accomplishment resulting in sheer happiness. Happiness is not always found on our life’s many journeys but when it does the journey becomes memorable.
This re-definition serves to manage happiness expectations. Obviously it sounds like something else but that’s not what this is about here. What’s being described is rewiring our minds to think independently to undo years of unnecessary negative emotions we ascribe to our lives when things don’t go our way. Happiness is one of our greater determinants of a good life but if the wrong things are being measured we will likely tell ourselves the wrong message, that life sucks when in reality we have joy. It helps to know happiness is a momentary high that’s followed by longer lasting joy that was preceded by some struggle. How could happiness be everlasting when the grass begins to regrow, or you get a drink of water and next thing you have a sink of dirty dishes, and knowing in twenty-nine days a new bill will be due? Happiness is the few minutes following mowing the lawn, loading the dishwasher and pressing the start button, pressing the submit button of your bill pay service and getting a passing grade on your last final exam. These are accomplishments to enjoy and savor, but the high doesn’t last. That’s why it’s important to be cool, chill, be irie and be good. But more importantly is the empowerment that comes from being in control of our own emotional expectations, having our own definition of a word with unreasonable expectations attached. How novel to think others might help us along our life’s many journeys but happiness is ultimately a brief solo experience!
It’s the frequent absence of, the ensuing struggle, and elusive nature of happy that makes happiness delightful. This fleeting momentary reward barely exists yet we know that it does and want more. When you asked for their hand or when you applied to that program, that nervous journey filled with bright hopes only made you happy when they said yes. Those years of waiting for them to ask or checking your phone for a response did not make you happy. It was the moment they asked, the moment you got the call and they said what you’d hoped to hear when you felt happy.
The celebratory feelings after happiness passes I’ve re-defined as joy or joyfulness, for when you reflect on each of those special moments you’ll see that you felt something indefinable at the exact second when the achievement was confirmed and then there was something emotionally lesser. That peak moment culminated the journey and that blip emotional high was when you experienced happiness. Afterwards, it’s a slow and steady decline through the valleys and peaks of joy until you decide you must feel that way again and so begin a new journey with the hopes next time you’ll languor and savor the moment.
In the meantime you’ll be cool, chill, irie, good, but you’ll never say you’re happy for in that moment of happy there’ll be only you and something other-worldly, spiritual even. And, by the time you’re able to verbalize how you felt, that specific feeling of happiness would have been long gone and replaced by lasting joy.
