About a year ago, I wrote a bit about happiness, saying that I feel most "happy" in the colloquial sense of the word -- some mixture of joy, contentment/not wanting to be elsewhere, etc. -- during periods where I'm not thinking about happiness. For example, when I'm really busy with some big project or undertaking, I'm feeling many things, not always positive, but what I'm definitely not doing is thinking about whether I'm happy. And looking back on those times, I found that I often prefer those to times where I'm thinking more rigorously about happiness I then proceeded to claim that perhaps this state, where you couldn't be less concerned about things being better, concerned about happiness, is what constitutes true happiness.
Since I wrote about this initially, I've tried to test the hypothesis, trying to compare times I find myself thinking about happiness more to the times where I was too focused on other things, and I have only found that I did indeed feel happier than during times when happiness was frequently on my mind. This could of course be due to that weird bias where we view the past nostalgically, as better than it actually was in the moment, but the consistency of these observations makes me think there is something to this theory. In other words, I feel like this theory has been confirmed, and it feels awesome, not because I'm objectively correct about something, but because it enables me to better take action towards bringing more happiness into my life, which is harder to do when your target is unclear.
But if this is only a good way to check for whether you're happy, what do I actually mean by "happiness"? In the other post, I seemed to motion towards the idea that happiness -- or whatever term we want to use to label what seems to be a peak state of existence -- is simply presence, the state of not thinking about being anywhere else. I still think this checks out. If I choose to ignore this definition and go back to whatever previous intuitions I had in mind, I'd take children to probably be the happiest people around. But I think part of the reason this is the case is precisely because they don't keep imagining futures in great detail where things are somehow better, and neither are they thinking about what happiness is. So I do think this definition seems good, and that the way to check for whether you'd rather be somewhere else -- ie. whether you're unhappy -- is just recognizing the thought that you'd rather be somewhere else. For me, the perception of this thought seems to happen automatically, which for better or worse allows me to be on top of how I'm feeling generally. So what's the value of this? Not only do I (and, hopefully, others, if they buy this line of reasoning) feel I have a way to check for happiness, but also a grasp of what that means to me, and thus an improved sense of how to make good normative decisions for myself. It feels like most of my problems now are of a more "logistical" nature, of the variety "how do I get what I want?" rather than "what do I actually want?".
Simply having a definition for happiness, a way to check for it, and a method for bringing about more of it into your life still might not be enough, though. We might, for instance, be concerned with finding meaning in our lives rather than happiness. I see this word used sometimes synonymously with happiness, but one difference might be that you can still take your life to be meaningful without feeling like you're happy. You might not be "happy" very often in the traditional sense of the word as an artist -- the way at least many Western societies are structured makes it difficult to sustain one's self solely through a creative craft -- but as long as you believe in the importance of expressing yourself or certain messages to society through your work, it's worth spending your time doing that, as there is a greater reason you're devoting yourself to it. With that said, based on the definition for happiness I sketch out above, I do feel like happiness and meaning sort of coincide. In the example of being an artist, you might not be happy, but you also can't imagine yourself doing anything else, thus you're sort of forced to be in the present to do your best work (in turn, making meaning somewhat like happiness) [1]. Assuming this is at all correct, we might call the concept I'm trying to get at something like "happiness-meaning", though for brevity I'll stick with just happiness.
Maybe I am forcing it a bit here. It feels like I've heard some artists say they work to escape the negative emotions present in their mind, and that their art is the only medium through which to purge themselves of such emotions. In that case, perhaps you're only present to the extent that you need to focus on moving the brush across the canvas to create the work you want. Then, meaning is something separate from happiness, and it's still an open question as to what you should pursue.
Merely from personal experience, though, whatever it is you ought to pursue, whatever grand aim your actions need to be oriented towards the day, I have only become more convinced that it is this presence. The fact that I'm not always happy when present -- sometimes I'm anxious, scared, etc. -- but that I also still mostly prefer this state is what gives me the strong intuition that meaning coincides with presence/happiness, as doing something meaningful doesn't mean you're experiencing glee in doing it. In other words, I feel I've corroborated the ideas from the previous post across time, and it has led to a better personal roadmap for how to live.
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[1] In his book The Creative Act: A Way of Being, legendary music producer Rick Rubin contends that "there is a certain time for ideas to arrive, and they find a way to express themselves through us. I wonder if this is what is felt by most artists, or is the feeling I'm trying to describe in this passage -- a desire to be a conduit for whatever creative force needs to get expressed, regardless of how it makes one feel. One's meaning is then to do precisely this, and if being present is what's necessary for attaining that goal, one will attempt to be present (thus, also pursuing what I defined as happiness). If this logic checks out, I think it should move us closer to treating meaning and happiness as more similar.