What I’ve Slowly Come To Learn About Happiness

A friend recently showed me his ‘happiness graph’. It depicts the evolution of his perceived sense of happiness over time. One of my first thoughts was pfff, white people —then I remembered that I, too, was white people.

While I haven’t drawn up my own happiness graph quite yet, it got me thinking. Not right away, but in the days afterwards, the question

When was I happy?

crystallized in my mind. And I realized that, while I had obsessed about living a meaningful life and reinvented myself a few times over the years, I had barely ever asked myself that question.

The optimization trap returns

Now, I do adhere to the position that we can definitely get overly concerned with ‘maximizing our own happiness’ — which is just another shade of an endless optimization cult, itself a direct outpouring of a culture where nothing but the individual and its achievements are held sacred. In this framing, maximizing happiness is a matter of fine-tuning your protein intake and achieving a perfect equilibrium across the various areas of life — social, financial, health, etc.

Let’s set this perspective aside for a second; I’ve sufficiently argued against it elsewhere.

For the sake of this article, I will adopt the following assumption: being concerned with figuring out what makes us happy now or will make us happy in the future is not a useful, and even a potentially counterproductive, approach. But we can look back and try to identify the moments — or even extended time periods — when we were truly happy.

I don’t intend to go on an extensive exploration of the concept of happiness, but I hope we can agree that it’s not equivalent to pleasure.

There’s also, I’ve been told, a sense of happiness entirely independent of our surroundings and life situation. I can personally attest to the fact that a better alignment between our words, values, and actions decreases inner friction and leaves a much higher sense of peace, even when the outer circumstances may be chaotic. But I am far from the spiritual state of inhabiting a deep sense of happiness independent of whether I live in a castle or on the street. And yet, I am convinced it exists and is achievable.

I won’t go deeper into this sense, apart from saying that my time in India played a role, and you can find some of my thoughts on the matter in previous articles.

Laughter and the inner child

As unenlightened mortals, we can probably agree that certain factors are nearly guaranteed to make us quite a bit happier, while others make us quite miserable.

Today, I was reflecting. I remember happy moments, certainly. But since the year after high school, I’m not so sure I’ve ever felt happy for more than a few hours at a time. It’s a bit strange to write this out — and maybe it’s slightly exaggerated. For the longest time, I just didn’t actively consider it.

Without sharing a whole autobiography, I can say that the year after high school was quite adventurous and exciting — spent in Tunisia in an organization that reflected the general sense of anarchy in the country. After returning home, I soon entered a state of pure coping mechanism. This coincided with COVID, and for a period of two to three years, life was one big coping mechanism — one that worked so well in certain aspects that I had it completely take over my life afterwards. I was supremely functional. And by the hour, I got sick of it.

Disentangling myself from that construction was a lengthy process.

Happiness was simply not part of the picture. I still remember how strange it felt when I laughed again after many months. The muscles around my mouth that are apparently used for laughing had atrophied and would twitch uncontrollably. I felt, and probably looked, like a madman.

However simple and plain it might sound, laughter is indeed the best medicine. And a life filled with more laughter is a happier one. Full stop.

As a kid and teenager, I would regularly laugh so much that my stomach started hurting, and I had to make myself stop because the cramps were becoming physically painful. What a beautiful kind of pain!

That was the innocent laughter. While home wasn’t paradise and the atmosphere came to weigh on me over time, more so than I had realized until recently, I enjoyed quite a happy childhood, especially early on. The more I meet people from all walks of life, the more grateful I am for that.

So, in those days, my laughter was innocent.

After this coping period, I found my way back to intense laughter. But the quality was different. You know, sometimes I think about circularity. Not the ecological kind, but circularity within a lifetime. How the people that age well seem to become kids again when they’re old. Maybe these are the people that never entirely lose their inner child — even when life gets hard, as it inevitably does, sooner or later.

When you’re in coping mode and need to protect yourself, and to stop to laugh, you are protecting that inner child. Trying to keep it safe. But if that state lasts for too long and becomes the new operating mode, the child is locked away. It gets no space, no room to play, and increasingly, it is forgotten.

That, I believe, is how a cynic is born. Or someone who knows no humanity or love, only ambition. Or maybe those people whose corners of the mouth extend so far toward the ground they just emanate misery? Yeah.

Part of ‘adult mode’, or let’s say ‘adult protective mode’, is being serious. Taking care of things. Managing life. And certainly, there are societal rewards along the way. But these kinds of incentives are dangerous. They make you an expert at surviving and terrible at actually living.

Happiness isn’t all about fun. But if you never have fun, I just cannot see how you could be happy. What stands out about many spiritual figures, alive and dead (I’m especially thinking of the Dalai Lama), is their sense of and appreciation for humor.

Laughing and joking requires one to get out of their head. To take it all a bit less seriously. Laughing in the face of disaster is extremely powerful — granted, you could also see it as a coping mechanism. But then, is happiness itself, in the way we tend to conceptualize it, really much else?

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Choosing happiness is not egoistic

I’m reminded of the distinction between naive optimism and realistic optimism. It’s quite self-explanatory: the former is like constantly going through life with pink glasses on and ignoring all evidence contradicting one’s forcefully optimistic outlook. The latter acknowledges that the world is, to a large extent, a fucked up place and one may be in a relatively terrible personal condition, but chooses to be optimistic in the face of it.

And I think that’s what much of it comes down to: we have limited control over outside conditions and other people (not to say none). But we can choose to be as happy as we can be. To laugh as much as we can. Not to dwell in misery.

Because yes, there is definitely a pull toward a kind of nihilism, toward identifying with pain and suffering and making it our identity. Especially after debilitating experiences. I’ve been guilty of this: when you notice how the gap between you, the world, and the people you knew widens — how it comes to appear absolutely unbridgeable and you feel fundamentally alone — it is understandable to start to identify with this sense of alienation.

But understandable does not mean it’s constructive; just like being able to retrace and explain the motivations behind, say, an act of violence, does not validate it.

Another reason I didn’t want to actively pursue or prioritize happiness for a while was that I deemed it egoistic. With the world such a messy place and so much going wrong, why would I first worry about myself?

Turns out, if you don’t, you inevitably make the world an even messier place. Start with yourself sounded like a boring, irrelevant platitude I barely paid any heed to — until I’d had the experiences that helped me see the felt truth the statement speaks to. This perspective has been an integral part of my whole creative reinvention.

Subsequently, I reframed the whole concept of egoism. Taking care of and prioritizing yourself is not egoism. It’s self-respect put into practice. And that, in turn, gives you the means to effect worthwhile change, often indirectly, simply by being unapologetically yourself.

Then, prioritizing your own happiness becomes as much about everyone you interact with as about yourself. People are always inspired by examples. They follow or admire others for what they see in them. This is basically ‘be the change you want to see in the world’. Yes, it’s a platitude I stand by.

My practical helper list

Let me end with a few things that I have now identified as making me sustainably happier (no claims to depth or special originality here):

• Doing physically challenging things: multi-day hikes, running a marathon, etc.

• Immersing myself in creative projects, especially extended, open-ended ones: playing and recording music, writing, etc.

• Laughing and hanging out with people I truly like (on the contrary, I’ve found hanging out with people I don’t really like to be one of the most immediate ways of making me sustainably unhappier).

• Taking individual days or a few hours to just wander around a city and do whatever calls me in the moment (good idea to set a budget for that).

• Watching sunsets.

• Traveling. Traveling. TRAVELING!! (except when already overstimulated).

• Coming up with an idea and seeing it through from start to finish, whether it’s in business, creative pursuits, social experiments… as long as the energy is there, just running with it and seeing where it goes is one of those things that give me unparalleled enthusiasm.

• Chilling on the beach or at the lake. I often get into what you could describe as a hyperactive mode, and cold water and meditating for a while on the lakeside (which I did just recently) was one of the simplest, most wonderfully tranquilizing things I’ve done for my nervous system in a while.

• Going dancing with friends — or even alone. I love to move and dance, and I’ve enjoyed it alone on many occasions. I’m certainly not always in the mood, but when I am, it’s one of the most satisfying, freeing sensations I know.

• Reading a good book! Damn, this one hit me again recently. I love reading, but regularly forget it as it gets drawn out by other life to-dos — or I have no good book in sight. Oh, and I mean fiction. Sometimes I return to some pop sciency or self-helpy stuff, but most of the time it leaves me disinterested or unsatisfied after a bit, and I drop it. Fiction, friends, fiction is where the gold is.

• Climbing. The combination of unique physical exhaustion and puzzle-solving triggers a very specific addictive state in my brain.

• A long conversation about relationships, Eastern philosophy, life trajectories, music, the dry fruit export industry of Madagascar, or the neuroscience of raving with a dear friend I haven’t seen in months.

• A day alone in nature, or even better: a few days camping. Nothing better to ground myself. To regain perspective. And to appreciate how little we need. I believe it’s hardly ever having more that makes us happy. Rather, having less. Or actually: not worrying about having or not having at all. Being over having and such…

Ok, enough. This was a random assortment of what helps me. And no, I’m not talking about the pristine, ever-present happiness at the bottom of reality here; I’m talking about the very mundane sense of happiness — mainly as accepting the moment as is, and seeing the beauty in it.