About Happiness

“Happiness is an imaginary condition formerly often attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and children to adults.”

Thomas Szasz cited by Lorie, P. and Mascetti, M.N. (1986)  The Quotable Spirit – Divine, mystical and inspirational quotations.  Macmillan Publishers Ltd.: London.  p.26.

In therapy, clients often present because, in one way or another, they consider themselves to be ‘unhappy’.  When asked what they want from therapy, they often say they want to ‘be happy’.

What the quote above highlights, however, is that happiness is a slippery concept.  Rarely, if ever, can we declare our current felling state as one of ‘being happy’.  Perhaps the nearest we can achieve is to look back over our lives and attribute particular periods as being ‘happy’ ones.

But were those times really ‘happy’?  If we were to examine our happy experiences of the past more closely, we would find those periods to include other emotions like disappointment, frustration, anger or sadness.

Even when looking to our past, then, our periods of happiness seem to evaporate with closer examination.

Why, then, is happiness so illusive?

One reason, I think, is we look towards happiness as a destination … something we need to work towards, a way of being with the world that we need to achieve … something that is marked by the absence of other, less pleasant emotions.  We want to be rid of our anxiety, depressions and disappointments, and replace them with something different.

Viewed in this way, however, happiness just becomes something that, like Szasz points out above, is attributed to other people, or times and places in our lives, but never now.

If we examine our experience closely, however, our feeling states are always mixed.  We feel fear and anger and upset and resentment etc., at all times of our lives.  There are few, if ever, truly ‘happy’ moments.

What does this teach us?  My view is that happiness is way to travel, it is not a destination.  Our experience will always be filled with ‘negative’ emotions.  Simply turning away from them … or worse, wishing them away to a future without them, is ultimately futile.

It is only in accepting, feeling and experiencing our world as it is, can we come to live ‘happy’ lives.  Happiness, in other words, is not somewhere we have been, or plan to go, but it is something we do  … furthermore, it is something we do despite our difficult circumstances.