Joy, Happiness, and Other Challenges …
In my upcoming blogs, I will discuss how various feelings can be challenges and functions of how we may lead happy, satisfied lives. Our feelings ever so often possess the potential to lead to our experiences of the joys of life and their opposites. Joy and happiness seem an optimistic and robust starting point and will serve as good juxtapositioning to other feelings and our dealings with them.
At the risk of stating the obvious, it seems that experiencing too little or too much of anything is a challenge. Good mental health, a balanced life, or life satisfaction is all about how we manage our feelings. Challenge or not, here we come! Let’s start with joy and happiness and see whether they are worthwhile to take on as challenges.
I will define joy as the feeling that has the second most potential to be experienced like intense happiness. Ecstasy would be the most intense one but that is for another day or blog. Our parameters for joy are our ability and attitude. For example, for some individuals becoming a parent is joyful, for others it is overwhelming, or downright undesirable. So, it isn’t the event itself that brings joy but our disposition and mindset toward it. In addition, I believe that the intensity of joy is a function of its negation. For example, if we have not felt love before, when we do feel love and know that we do, we experience joy. If we have not felt loved before, we experience joy when we do feel loved, and so on. If we accept the rarity of this feeling, we will not develop an entitled expectation of its experience and avoid becoming dependent on it. Challenge avoided.
Happiness on the other side can be intense but is not defined by it. Within the school of Positive Psychology, Dr. Seligman talks about three different forms of happy lives.*
First, let’s look at the “Pleasant Life” where happiness is based on experiencing pleasurable feelings. Examples are buying something we like and want, maybe a new pair of shoes, a better car, a bigger house. Or maybe we get a massage, spend a day in a spa, or meditate to our hearts content. Or we spend our time giggling and laughing with others. I call this happiness purchase dependent or the outward based happiness. The need and want to experience this happiness can turn into a challenge. Think of shop therapy or the addiction to consume personal services.
Then there is the “Good Live” where happiness is derived from doing something at which we are highly competent. This is called being in the state of flow. Time stands still. You exist in a state of exclusive concentration. You are fully in the moment. We can experience flow whilst working or playing. It is entirely based on our own competence and ability to concentrate in a specific area of life. It has nothing to do with somebody else providing a good or a service. It is independent happiness. Yet, to experience flow has the potential to become addictive as well. For example, needs for perfect competence are a hallmark of flow’s challenge as a source for happiness.
Lastly, there is the “Meaningful Life” where happiness stems from knowing your biggest strengths and using them for something larger than yourself. Once we identify those parameters and act accordingly, most of us will feel happiness. The interesting part of this source of happiness is that we need others for it. It is an interdependence-based happiness because our lives are void of meaning without others’ existence. Accepting this provides a challenge for most of us individualists.
I am not aware of anyone who generates enough energy to cultivate all these bases of happiness to their fullest. Maybe instead for happiness sources, we ask for what provides most life satisfaction? It turns out, that pleasure and pleasure enhancing experiences lead to the least durable and stable states of life satisfaction. Alternatively, pursuing the meaningful life bases results in the most stable and robust life satisfaction. At the same time, the bases of flow are much more stable than pleasure experiences but less overall impactful than meaning bases. It is as elegant as it is satisfying that the whole of all bases of life satisfaction is bigger than its sum.
In my opinion, that is worth taking on the challenges of joy and happiness.