The banality of happiness.

 

('Destiny' by Tishk Barzanji, 2022)

I find that I'm the happiest whenever I'm not thinking about happiness or when I don't draw attention to the fact that I am happy.

I think this makes sense. I'm not thinking about how something in my life could be improved, and just enjoying whatever I'm experiencing in the present moment instead. I might not be strictly in the present moment, though. I love the beach, and whenever I'm there, I'm happy because I enjoy my surroundings, but also because I'm just generally having positive thoughts -- about how my current challenges will resolve themselves, my next trip, and so on. My attention might not be on what's immediately in front of me, but when I look back on each time I've gone to the beach, I remember being happy.

This all suggests that happiness isn't necessarily being in the present, which I've heard is a common way to define it. Being in the present is one way to be happy; if you're surfing a huge wave, you're probably not thinking about happiness as much as keeping your balance. But being in the present doesn't always mean you're happy either. Getting caught in a riptide definitely pulls you into the moment, since all your attention should be concentrated on swimming diagonally towards the shore, but I haven't met anyone who felt euphoric upon realizing they were suddenly being swept out to sea. Happiness is more or less simply forgetting that there is an alternative state in the first place. I don't even have to be jumping with glee, as I recall feeling happy as long as I wasn't in any obvious stress or thinking about happiness at all.

Perhaps happiness is a far more neutral emotion than we're led to believe. The World Happiness Report came out a few weeks ago, with Finland ranking as the planet's happiest country for the fifth year in a row. As someone who has lived there over half of their life, I can tell you that Finland does not feel like a place I'd associate with the word 'happy'. You don't walk out your door and see people smiling in the streets or hear much laughter. Actually, it's probably one of the places where people smile the least. People here are more known for their quiet, stolid demeanor, so Finns are typically surprised when they hear they're at the top of the list. But there's no stress about major things. Unlike in other places in the world, we wouldn't have to forego a necessary ambulance ride for fear of going bankrupt. We have the opportunity to pursue a free university or trade-based education upon after high school, to have agency over our life's direction. Nature -- the cheapest stress medication -- is always close, even in the cities. There are still problems, to be sure, as there are everywhere. I don't think of the Nordic countries as utopian societies. Yet you don't have to worry about getting punished for having bad luck -- whether that means being born into less fortunate circumstances or dealing with life throwing something difficult your way.

In fact, perhaps we could even go farther and say that happiness doesn't even have to include what we commonly think of as positive mental states at all. The past few weeks have been more busy for me than usual in filling out applications and doing job interviews. A few applications have been quite long and required my full attention for multiple days in a row. Many of the harder ones are done with, so I have a bit more free time and less to worry about. But strangely, I almost prefer the state that I was in during those few days. I would wake up, have some breakfast, start working, and have that be the only thing I really worried about for the day. In the moment, I was of course a bit stressed, but my attention was focused on just addressing one source of stress [1]. In a similar way, I (and I think many others) nostalgically look back at college for many reasons, with one of them being that I was really only stressed about schoolwork. Especially in my first few years, I wasn't worried about finding a job, filing taxes, or doing any of the other common duties associated with adulthood. I definitely faced challenges, but they were of a fundamentally different kind, much less existential, in a way.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is, maybe happiness is the wrong concept? Maybe what we really want, what we strive for with each of our actions, is to just not have to think about what our actions are aimed at in the first place. The goal is to just be -- it's a state, rather than an emotion. The state of not really thinking big-picture too much at all. And you don't necessarily have to be experiencing positive feelings in that state. It's not so much a state of not being stressed, but more just having the aperture of stress narrowly focused. From the little that I know, this to me seems broadly reminiscent of lessons from Eastern schools of thought.

At this point, it feels like I might be biting off a bit more than I can chew in a single post. Maybe the main idea is that, in trying to do good on an individual level, we shouldn't focus on removing stress as much as giving each other the means to select their stress. Stress pulls you into the moment, and in the moment, you're not thinking about whether something should be better. It's these feelings themselves that actually put you in the states that you want to get away from. They're useful in small doses, but it feels like you risk falling into the trap of thinking everything could always be better, which to me feels far worse. Maybe it's not happiness, an emotion, that we should be striving for, but a state of stress, chosen by ourselves, in which we're not thinking about our feelings of the state at all. 

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[1] This isn't to say I particularly enjoy writing applications (I don't really, even though they can be useful as exercises for self-knowledge), but maybe the state of mind it put me in? I also get into a similar state of mind when doing something that's more fun, like weightlifting, and I'd prefer to be in this state when it's induced by weightlifting rather than writing applications. So the state isn't the full story, since you can prefer one of the activities that brings about that state over another, but the state is clearly important. Maybe what I'm describing is really just flow.