The Cambridge Dictionary definition of ‘happy’ is feeling, showing, or causing pleasure or satisfaction.
Research the etymology of the word, and you’ll find the origins as coming from Middle English carrying a meaning of ‘lucky’.
If being happy means to experience feelings of pleasure, it presupposes that it is a temporary state of being. Yet, we seem unwilling to accept that happiness is something that comes and goes. We cannot feel ‘happy’ all of the time.
As the Middle English definition alludes, to experience happiness is, in some ways, to be lucky. In this way, we should embrace the moments we feel it and accept that it’s not something we can always control.
The idea that happiness is something we are striving for will inevitably lead to disappointment. What’s worse, we may have a completely flawed understanding of what it actually means to be ‘happy’.
In fact, in 1992 a paper was published in which Richard Bentall proposed classifying happiness as a psychiatric disorder owing to the list of symptoms he claimed could be associated with abnormalities in cognitive functioning. In other words, when we’re happy we are suffering from a disturbance in our emotional and cognitive functioning, in the same way that anxiety, depression or psychosis also causes such a disturbance. It just so happens that we’ve decided it’s one we’re OK with.
We have decided that happiness is ‘good’ and most other mental states are ‘bad’. But let’s consider a person who would categorise themself as ‘happy’ when doing something that is causing them physical harm or someone who experiences anxiety and this leads them to put an end to an aspect of their life that is harming them. It is often the mental states that we deem to be ‘negative’ that actually allow us to take a step in a direction that leads us to better things. Equally, an individual may continue doing something harmful because they experience moments of pleasure or satisfaction and they conclude that this makes them happy.
There is no escaping that happiness is something we are all seeking and, whatever it means, striving to be the happy-ist version of ourselves will be the making and breaking of us all…
The art of happyism 