On The Trail of Happiness

The question first came to me when I graduated from High School. In my High School yearbook, one of the stupid little questions asked of every senior was, “What do you want to be in the future?” or some such words of the same general line of inquiry which I can’t recall exactly. By my count, the most often used response to this question from the seniors that year was the simple phrase, “I just want to be happy.”

Not really wanting anything that specific from my future at the time, I considered this vague response by over half of the normal people I knew to be very intriguing and I wondered what they specifically meant by “happy”. I wondered what their definition of happiness was or what string of events would bring them joy. I wondered if they could even understand true happiness at such a young age. I wondered how they were going to go about bringing this quality to their life. I wondered if small presents of happiness would suffice or if a constant chain of happiness was their goal. Most importantly, I suppose, I wondered if I had been left out of a critical discussion during my senior year or perhaps overslept and missed a class that actually would have explained all this to me.

As a result of my confusion over my peers’ odd attitude, for many moons now I have had an insatiable obsession with the definition of happiness.

I just deleted (which should make you happy) a very long passage describing how I danced around this subject when I was younger. Instead of detailing that here, I will just jump to the point. When I was young, I would ask people about or make a note of their definition of happiness in very subtle ways. I never came out with the question verbatim but always seemed to get an interesting response in return from people who were very pleased to explain things to me in a general way. Anyone who knew me then can probably see that in me now so I won’t go any further into it.

In the last 5 or 6 years, however, I’ve become rather bold with my inquiry. Maybe that’s because I’m getting older and worry that I don’t have the time to play games anymore, I don’t know. I do know as a result of my more recent direct technique that asking a person what makes him happy or asking him to define happiness in his own words point blank is often uncomfortable for that person.

The point is that although a person may quickly respond that, yes, happiness is a worthy goal, that same person may have incredible difficulty describing what happiness really is.

Maybe that’s because people don’t think about it so much as time goes on or maybe they just never sit down and try to come up with their own definition. I also understand that for some people, happiness is not the goal of life. For them, effectively dealing with the many unhappy events in life seems to be the trick. For some, happiness is not dependable while unhappiness clearly is.

Yet, I fear that sometimes painting a strict definition of any such attitude or emotion may cause some people to negatively review or rationalize their behavior towards obtaining their version of happiness. It’s easier, sort of a stock self-preservation measure in casual conversations I suppose, to leave the definition as cloudy as possible.

Either way, it seems there’s no news here, the anecdotal evidence I’ve collected over the years points to the same conclusions drawn by the most recent scientific surveys that I’ve read on this subject. You can read about all that somewhere else, if you like.

Generally speaking, people often define true happiness with a trendy explanation of “the zone” one enters when happily occupied with a pleasant and challenging task of some sort. The task in this sense is loosely defined as anything from fishing to bricklaying. When absorbed in this manner, people say, an odd thing happens. It seems as though time flies. And people are never happier than when time zips right along.

It now seems to me that this strange effect on time, or actually our perception of time, is a key to unraveling all my clues to the definition of happiness.

I understand what people are saying here. I know that I must truly enjoy writing because while I’m doing it I lose all my normal concepts or standard recognition of time. (Just ask my wife, numerous mundane tasks are left ignored while I’m occupado in the office.)

Yet, I also understand the relativity issue regarding time. Time doesn’t really move faster or slower but this appreciation is relative to any person at any pole on the earth.

I am aware that while I’ve been happily pecking away at the keyboard, there are those people in this world who have at the same time suffered a dreadfully painful few minutes which seemed to last a lifetime to them. While I may be cheerfully busy, there are prisoners counting the bricks in their cells, ditch diggers bending down for two or three more shovels of dirt, school children anxiously awaiting recess, and harried office workers eagerly anticipating every millisecond they get closer to happy hour.

And, oh, well, I have suffered the opposite of happiness as well. I know there are times when I’ve hung on every second, stuck in a miserable time trap, while others finished off the back nine or happily engaged themselves with brain surgery.

As a weak example, I flew for many years and enjoyed most of it. Yet, I do recall that as events repeated themselves over and over I began to find myself in that lonely spot of time during those precious few moments just before landing. For some reason, about 5 to 10 minutes before final touchdown, my internal clock would wind up and begin an agonizingly slow count down.

Anxiety, laced with the fear of unknown future, seems to make time drag and results in a commonly accepted form of unhappiness.

So, after review, it seems I have wasted a lot of time searching for the definition of happiness. I admit that the years flew by rather pleasurably during this journey but I should have been looking for a better definition of time all along.

Cheers,
Mb