Before proceeding further, perhaps we should ask the basic question, “What is happiness?” Despite all of us wanting to be happy, the meaning of “happiness” is surprisingly difficult to define. Different people will likely have different ideas of what it means to be happy. For the goals of this website, let me try and describe what I understand it to be.
In our day-to-day lives, we all face a variety of challenges in the form of unpleasant situations and problems. Perhaps it could be a health issue, loss of a job, romantic break up, boredom, money issues or any of the other countless possibilities. To me, a happy person is someone who can, despite such challenges, remain in a calm and positive mood. Such a person, overall, will have mostly positive emotions rather than negative emotions such as those of anxiety and or depression.
The above definition of happiness is hardly perfect and you probably have a version of it that fits your life better. But perhaps we shouldn’t spend too much energy on accurately defining happiness, because the reality is we all know what it is. It’s a bit like, when we see a flower, we may immediately see it as “beautiful” though we may not be able to accurately say why it’s beautiful. So instead of focusing on defining happiness accurately, let’s concentrate on how to achieve happiness.
