Am I Happy Yet?
Sam was an international antique dealer with a holiday house in the South of France, a yacht, a beautiful wife and two children. He’d worked his way up from very poor beginnings in the Western suburbs of Melbourne to build a successful business out of a natural passion for antiques and it was now turning over millions a year. Yet, for all this, Sam was sitting in my small two bedroom apartment telling me how dreadfully unhappy he was.
He said, ‘I’m rich, successful and I love my work so I should be happy … but I’m no happier now than when I was a depressed little kid living in the poor part of town,’
I asked him what he imagined this happiness would feel like if he had it. He described it as a powerful satisfaction, a euphoria, an ‘elation of the spirit’. I don’t think Sam is alone in that expectation – and ironically, it is that expectation that life should make us happy that causes so much unnecessary suffering.
There is a basic psychological truth which says that each individual is born with a ‘set point’ in their capacity for happiness; a conditioned predisposition that’s determined by genetics and personality. And while this set point of happiness is temporarily raised by life events, such as a growth of income, falling in love, or material acquisition, over time their ‘set point’ of happiness will return to the original level.
And because our expectations always increase in line with our life gains, this always feels like we’re becoming more unhappy as time goes on. As such, Sam’s expectation of ‘happiness’ was forming itself into an impossible pot of gold at the end of a rainbow he chasing, which seemed to be getting further and further away.
Most people think meditation is largely to do with the getting of happiness and how to keep it – which is why many people gravitate to meditation. After all, everybody wants to be happy, and most feel they don’t have enough – and that leads to the expectation that we should be happier than we are, together with an assumption that if we are not happy, then something must be wrong: we don’t have enough money, or the right car, the right lover, the right job, and so on. We figure that if only we could get all the stuff we want, we’d be happy.
And this keeps us running, trying to find the right combination of things that will break the ‘happiness bank’. But in this idiotic yearning, we forget that we’re a part of nature, and nature doesn’t respond to our expectations. So, like the rest of nature, our moods will change according to things out of our control – sometimes sun, sometimes rain, sometimes calm, sometimes storm, and there’s nothing we can do to change it.
The irony is that it is largely our attempts to create more happiness than we deserve that causes most of our suffering. But because this expectation has been conditioned into us by our parents and our culture, our entire life gets subsumed into our attempts to make it happen – which leads to us using consumption as the most direct path. And every advertising campaign coerces us to consume more – tweaking our ‘happiness expectations’ with examples of how we could be ‘beautiful, successful people’ laughing and smiling, always having fun – if only we could get a bit of what they’re selling.
But if we examine the qualities of the happiness we’re being taught to expect we see it is not happiness at all. It’s ‘fun’ – an adrenalized and euphoric state which has nothing to do with happiness.
Remember how Sam described his expected happiness? ‘A powerful satisfaction, a euphoria, an ‘elation of the spirit’. This is not the calm well-being of enduring happiness. Fun is an intoxicated state, impossible to maintain as a constant in our life, because it depends on a level of hormone driven excitement that can’t be sustained. But somewhere along the way, we’ve conflated the two states of ‘fun’ and ‘happiness’, and in the process, lost touch with the more subtle feelings of true happiness.
Which begs the question, ‘If happiness is not fun, what is it?’
The best answer to this question came from Theravada Buddhist monk I knew, who said: ‘Happiness is a habit, not a gift. Happiness is not found … it must be practiced.’
When he said this to me, it burst the bubble of an assumption I’d never questioned before. Like Sam, I’d grown up with the belief that happiness comes from ‘things’. We ‘get’ happiness because of luck, success, money, good fortune, opportunity and so on. This misguided notion of happiness caused me to live in a very anxious state, in which the quality of my temperament was constantly at the mercy of providence. Not a very happy way to live.
But what he said that day opened up a whole new view of happiness as a habit – as something which, like any habit, can be built. Result being, I began to look at happiness as a practical component of my health, rather than as some cosmic jackpot I either hit or missed.
From then on, I began figuring out how to build a habit of happiness. In this I was encouraged by something Richard Heinburg wrote in his book, ‘Memories and Visions of Paradise’ : ‘Medical experiments have consistently shown that mental attitudes and emotional states have a significant influence on health. Emotional states associated with egoic separateness – anger, blame, and feelings of isolation – tend to reduce the levels of body chemicals that serve to raise the pain threshold (endorphins) and that maintain immunity to infection (immunoglobulins). Emotions associated with transcendence of ego – for example, empathy, forgiveness, and nurturing – produce higher levels of these critical body chemicals.’
I figured that if happiness arose out of well being; the right balance of hormones in my body, and the right habits – then the only way to build that balance was to make the right actions. So my first task was to practice letting go of my expectations, and focus on acceptance of life as it came – and key to this was the idea of ‘acceptance’. I stopped panicking when periods of unhappiness, or sadness arose in me, and I stopped using fun to keep them at bay. And me being melancholic by nature, this was confronting at first – but I found the more I accepted this aspect of myself, the less intense my melancholia became.
I began practicing walking more slowly, looking around me – encouraging my sense of self to keep expanding beyond the little cocoon of my personal concerns.
I began taking pleasure in little things – a bird pecking at a crust of bread, a cat lying asleep in its back in the sun, an ant tugging at a crumb of bread. I noticed that there were so many small ways that people give to one another, that I had not noticed before – the small acts of kindness that people do, which rarely get noticed or acknowledged. How a smile from a stranger could transform a whole day. Inspired, I too began to practice these things – leading with kindness instead of mistrust, and I realised that the transformative effect went both ways. As I treated people so they began to treat me.
As the happiness habit slowly built itself within me, I found my thoughts naturally becoming infused with qualities of well-being: peace and tranquility, friendliness, kindness, generosity and affection. I began to enjoy life in a way I had not in the past.
And am I happy now? Well, I don’t know, but the interesting thing is, I no longer ask that question. And that makes me very happy.
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Roger’s book, ‘BEING STILL – MEDITATION THAT MAKES SENSE’ is available now. Just click on the links below:
AUDIOBOOK (including ebook & MP3 exercises) – AUD $25.00
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