Musings

The Unending Search

When we read about happiness quotient and how people in some countries are happier than others, it triggers the yearning  to emulate their eating habits, their perspective to life; we start comparing our lifestyle with theirs. It is natural to feel the need to be perennially happy. We make effort but soon get sucked up in our surroundings and life conditions. Situations, gratification make us happy, but that is also short lived pleasant feeling. Then we read happiness quotes on WhatsApp, forward them to friends and forget about it. This process goes on incessantly and we live our lives ‘in the flow’, as they say, rarely being truly happy.   

In this eternal search of happiness we live life making peace with disappointments, carrying the impression that nobody is completely happy ever. But what is this illusive ‘happiness’? Is there any universal definition? Mind scientists have already defined it as a mental state of pleasant or positive emotions like, contentment, well-being and intense joy, or subjective well-being; or simply what Daniel Kahneman calls “what I experience here and now”. Daniel Kohneman’s definition calls for deep understanding. A person’s obsessive thinking about past or worrying about future is the main cause of unhappiness, which prevents him from being aware of the present moment. But here, pleasant and happy memories do make us happy in the present. Likewise, looking forward to expectantly at some happy moment yet to happen in future also make us happy. So doesn’t it add to your happiness in the ”now”?

Without going into literal dictionary meanings, I want make it simple and say that happiness is a happy state of mind. In very broad term, in whichever way you define happiness ultimately it settles on the fact that it is highly subjective. To a great degree it depends on a person’s natural traits, hard wired habits, choices, and outlook to life. A lazy person’s happiness lies in not doing anything, while adventure seeking person will be very happy to test his limits of bravado in a jungle trail at night. I personally wondered to note that my level of happiness, when I bought my first car, was far less intense compared to the joy I felt when, as a child I got my first tiny toy car. A rich man has blunted sensitivity to happiness than a poor man, to whom a hefty meal can be a bonanza of happiness. 

When I heard stories of ‘good old times’ from my father, I always guessed that it was mainly due to simple life and good personal interactions in close knit societies that immensely gratified people. That is what makes Nordic countries like Netherland have a high happiness quotient. Spending time with family and friends, sharing and empathising with each other does give a sense of belonging, self assurance and joy triggered by a chemical called Oxytocin in the brain, a phenomenon which is the most primitive to human kind.  The complexities of present life in 21st century has made it more difficult to find true happiness for most of the people. When you see super rich people travelling in expensive cars, just note the expressions on their faces. Mostly they are glum, as if they are carrying the weight of their affluence. We pay the price at each step as we go on adding complications to our lives and then constantly be on the search of that illusive “happiness”, or just become so numb that we fail to notice it lurking somewhere round the corner and accessible.