How to be happy
Happiness has always seemed elusive and mysterious to me. Not that I was a particularly unhappy child, but I did often feel that happiness was a goal that lay beyond checkpoints that I needed to discover and get past one by one. If I were to believe what society claimed (via family, authority figures, the media), it was as simple as following a prescribed path through life: study hard to do well in school, land a well-paying job, marry a good wife, buy a big house and a car, start a family, and eventually, I'd put together all the necessary parts of a happy life.
Even as a naive kid this smelled rather fishy to me; many adults around me certainly didn't seem happy despite all the outward signs of success. At the time of course I couldn't formulate it in these terms, so I just continued to follow the script I found myself in, puzzled and vaguely convinced there just was something wrong with me that prevented me from understanding what others did.
Now as a thirty-something I know a bit more about the world — on good days even fancying that I'm beginning to grow in wisdom — but if anything happiness seems more elusive and mysterious. My mood can shift from contentment to discontent without apparent triggers, and the pile of responsibilities and things to worry about only grows every day, yet the smallest of insights and coincidences can lead to moments of genuine joy.
I now believe that there's no deep secret to puzzle out, just the simple but difficult truth that we each are responsible for our own happiness: from figuring out what makes us happy to arranging our lives in such a way that we both achieve happiness and allow it to happen to us.
It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
(I’m about halfway through Flow, which got me musing about happiness. It’s a great book that I wish I had read earlier in life. I particularly enjoyed and was inspired by the chapter on flow in intellectual pursuits: memory, writing, conversation, history, science and philosophy.
This essay is part of a month-long series of 30 essays.)