What is happiness?

In recent years there has been a stampede to study the pursuit of happiness, create happiness measures for national policy, and publish pop-science and how-to books on the subject. In 2008 4,000 books were published on happiness, while a mere 50 books on the topic were released in 2000. The most popular class at Harvard University is about positive psychology, and at least 100 other universities offer similar courses. Happiness workshops for the post-collegiate set abound, and each day "life coaches" promising bliss to potential clients hang out their shingles. 

Yet the answers remain strangely elusive. 

Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Commission uses citizens’ reports of their happiness to assess national progress, and former French President Nicholas Sarkozy appointed a Nobel-encrusted commission to study a similar idea; the United Nations places “happiness indicators” on its war-burdened agenda; American science institutions pour money into fine-tuning measurements of “subjective well-being”; and Amazon’s list of happiness books by moonlighting professors runs from The Happiness Hypothesis to Stumbling on Happiness, Authentic Happiness, Engineering Happiness, and beyond.

But what do we really know about happiness? 

We know that people’s reports of immediate joy and misery fluctuate from activity to activity—sex is an upper; commuting is a downer—and often diverge notably from the summary answers they give to questions about their happiness “these days.” We also know that subjective well-being can be complex. People can be happy about work and sad about love; the latter usually matters more. The opposite of happiness, research suggests, is not necessarily despair, but rather apathy; some people just don’t feel much of anything. Nonetheless, people who say they are generally happy tend to be economically secure, married, healthy, religious, and busy with friends; they tend to live in affluent, democratic, individualistic societies with activist, welfare-state governments. The connection between reporting happiness and personal traits often runs both ways. For example, being healthy adds to happiness, and happy people also stay healthier.

For decades, researchers have been especially interested in—and, with the recent invasion of economists, are now obsessed with—whether money makes people happy. We know that being poor makes people less happy. Some researchers argue, however, that having more money beyond that needed for basic security returns no additional happiness and can even create unhappiness. Making more money may be fruitless because people adapt psychologically to their levels of wealth and, like addicts and drugs, need ever more money to get the same level of pleasure. Or perhaps it’s not really about the money; it’s about position. People chase money to feel superior to the folks next door. That, of course, becomes a vicious and pointless cycle. Other researchers agree that the more money one makes, the more money it takes to move the happiness meter, but they nevertheless insist that more money—unlike the futile experience with drugs—does bring more happiness, just at a slower pace among the well-to-do. 

The happily contrarian economist Deirdre McCloskey asks what gives us most meaning in life and suggests it is more often found in painful striving than in achievement. Perhaps she has it right -regular human beings need a direction to strive towards - that can act as a yard stick for measuring happiness.Of course a beautiful sunrise or a butterfly can randomly cause it too - but these are moments when a person transcends his 'being'. But otherwise human beings are quite lost when they do not have a goal or a job to work towards and don't really know happiness.

Of course, happiness is not about smiling all of the time. It's not about eliminating bad moods, or trading your Tolstoy-inspired nuance and ambivalence toward people and situations for cheery pronouncements devoid of critical judgment. While the veritable experts lie in different camps and sometimes challenge one another, over the past decade they've together assembled big chunks of the happiness puzzle.

So what is happiness? 

The most useful definition—and it's one agreed upon by neuroscientists, psychiatrists, behavioral economists, positive psychologists, and Buddhist monks—is more like satisfied or content than "happy" in its strict bursting-with-glee sense. It has depth and deliberation to it. It encompasses living a meaningful life, utilizing your gifts and your time, living with thought and purpose. It's maximized when you also feel part of a community. And when you confront annoyances and crises with grace. It involves a willingness to learn and stretch and grow, which sometimes involves discomfort. It requires acting on life, not merely taking it in. It's not joy, a temporary exhilaration, or even pleasure, that sensual rush—though a steady supply of those feelings course through those who seize each day.

Some lucky souls really are born with brighter outlooks than others; they simply see beauty and opportunity where others hone in on flaws and dangers. However if you aren't living according to your values, you won't be happy, no matter how much you are achieving.  But you can increase positive feelings by incorporating a few proven practices into your routine. Lyubomirsky suggests you express your gratitude toward someone in a letter or in a weekly journal, visualize the best possible future for yourself once a week, and perform acts of kindness for others on a regular basis to lift your mood in the moment and over time. "Becoming happier takes work, but it may be the most rewarding and fun work you'll ever do," she says.

Ultimately it seems that the state of happiness is not really a state at all. It's an ongoing personal experiment.