Loving the life you lead

We all find it much easier to answer the question “What makes me happy?” than to reply to the tougher problem of “What is happiness?” I can say that I’m happy when I find myself in the company of the people I love, when I listen to Bach or Mozart, when I’m making good progress with my work, when I’m stroking my cat near a nice open fire, when I’m helping someone come out of a period of sadness or misfortune, when I’m enjoying a seafood platter with friends in a small harbor by the sea, when I’m meditating in silence or making love, when I drink my first cup of tea in the morning, when I look at the face of a smiling child, when I’m out hiking in the mountains or strolling through a forest … All these experiences, as well as many others, make me happy. But is happiness simply the accumulation of such moments? And why do these moments give me happiness, when they wouldn’t necessarily make everyone else happy? I know people who hate nature and animals, Bach and seafood, tea and long periods of silence. So is happiness merely subjective, is it realized only through the satisfaction of our natural preferences? And why am I sometimes happy to be living through a particular experience when at other times I’m not—when my mind is preoccupied, my body ailing or my heart anxious? Is happiness to be found in our relations with other people and external objects, or rather within us, in a state of inner peace that nothing can disturb?

Of course, it is possible to live well, and even quite happily, without wondering what happiness is, or what can increase it. This is the case, for instance, when we live in a highly structured world where the question of individual happiness hardly arises, where we draw our happiness from the thousand-and-one experiences of daily life, occupying our places and playing our roles in the community to which we belong, and accepting our share of suffering without demur. Billions of people have lived this way and continue to live this way in traditional societies. You need only travel a bit to realize this. It’s quite different in our modern societies: our happiness is no longer immediately linked to the “immediate data” of everyday, social life; we pursue it through the exercise of our freedom; it depends more on us ourselves and the satisfaction of our numerous desires—such is the price of our insistence on autonomy.

True, we can also, in the modern world, be more or less happy without asking ourselves too many questions. We seek the maximum of things that give us pleasure, and avoid as far as possible the things that are tiresome or painful. But experience shows that there are sometimes things that are very pleasant for a while, but later produce negative effects, like drinking a glass or two too much, giving into an inappropriate sexual urge, taking drugs, etc. Conversely, disagreeable experiences sometimes enable us to grow, and turn out to be beneficial in the long term: making a sustained effort in our studies or in the practice of some artistic activity, undergoing an operation or taking a nasty medicine, breaking off with people we are emotionally tied to even though they make us unhappy and so on. The pursuit of the agreeable and the rejection of the disagreeable do not always give us accurate bearings when we are trying to lead a happy life.

Life also teaches us that we have within ourselves various brakes that check the realization of our deep aspirations: fears, doubts, desires, impulses, pride and ignorance and so on. Likewise, we cannot control many events that may well make us unhappy: a deadening emotional environment or relationship, the loss of a dear one, a health problem, a setback in our careers … While we aspire to being happy—whatever this adjective may mean for us—we realize that happiness is something subtle, complex and volatile, and seems totally random.

This is why the scholarly community hardly ever uses the word “happiness.” Psychologists, brain specialists and sociologists almost all prefer to talk in terms of a “subjective well-being” that they seek to measure by an index of the “satisfaction” of the lives of those they are canvassing or studying. This state of “subjective well-being” is sometimes a snapshot: it’s the state in which people happen to be at the time of the scientific study—when electrodes are placed on their skulls, for example, so as to observe what’s happening in their brains while they are being stimulated in a certain way or carrying out a particular activity. However, scientists recognize that while biochemical studies and brain imaging make it possible to gauge pleasure (a simple stimulus), they can never measure happiness (a complex process). So when they want to talk about a “subjective well-being” that would be more akin to that complex experience, psychologists and sociologists have drawn up surveys designed to grasp it overall, and over a certain period of time: How do individuals assess their lives “overall”? It’s not just a question about one’s present sensations. After all, people can feel a temporary lack of well-being, due for example to an illness or a professional anxiety that has cropped up the very same day of the survey, but may still give a positive response to the question if they know that, overall, they are satisfied with their lives. Conversely, people can feel moments of well-being within lives that are, overall, painful.

So, happiness is not a transient emotion, whether agreeable or disagreeable, but a state that needs to be viewed overall, over a certain period. We say that we are “happy” or “satisfied” with our lives because, overall, these lives give us pleasure, because we’ve found a certain balance between our various aspirations, a certain stability in our feelings, our emotions, a certain satisfaction in the most important areas—emotional, professional, social, or spiritual. Or we say we are “unhappy” or “dissatisfied” with our lives if they give us little pleasure, if we are torn between contradictory aspirations, if our emotions and feelings are unstable and, overall, painful or if we are filled with an intense sense of emotional or social failure.

I would add that it is essential to be aware of our happiness to be happy. We can reply that we are “satisfied with our lives overall” only if we have reflected on our own existence. Animals may indeed have a sense of well-being, but are they aware of their luck in feeling well? Happiness is a human feeling linked to self-awareness. In order to be happy, we need to be aware of our well-being, of the privilege or gift represented by the good times in life. But psychological studies have shown that we are more aware of the negative than of the positive events that happen to us. The negative events mark us more deeply, and we remember them better. This fact is probably linked to a principle of evolutionary psychology: in order for us to survive, it is more important to detect and remember a danger, so as to find the solution to ward it off, than it is to remember an agreeable event. So we need, as soon as we experience a pleasant, agreeable, joyful moment, to become aware of that sensation, to take it in fully, to cultivate it for as long as possible. This was emphasized by Montaigne:

Thus, experience shows that becoming aware of our state of satisfaction contributes to increasing our happiness. We savor our well-being, and this reinforces within us the sense of plenitude: we rejoice, we are happy to be happy.

To summarize, I’d say that the psychological or sociological definition of happiness relates to this simple question: Do we love the lives we are leading? And this is the way the question is most often formulated in surveys of individuals’ “subjective well-being”: “On the whole, are you very satisfied, quite satisfied, not very satisfied, or not at all satisfied with the life

you are leading?” This assessment can of course vary over time.

So we can already describe happiness, understood as “subjective well-being,” as the awareness of a state of (greater or lesser) overall and enduring satisfaction. But is this sufficient for describing happiness in the full sense of the term? And, above all, is it possible to act on it? Can we make it more intense, longer lasting, more general and less dependent on life’s ups and downs?

Finally, we still haven’t mentioned the “content” of happiness. Now, as Aristotle points out, “with regard to what happiness is [people] differ, and the many do not give the same account as the wise.”