“Happy: feeling or showing pleasure or contentment.”
Dictionary definitions give us a way to properly use the word, but not an in-depth meaning of what the word could mean to you.
Happiness can be approached from many different angles. Philosophical perceptions, social work education, life experiences.
PHILOSOPHICAL
Glen Koehn is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Huron University College. He believes happiness to be a difficult word to define.
“Everybody uses the word happy. You learn to use the word as a child,” Koehn explains. “But when you sit down and actually try and say in detail, what it means to be happy… well, turns out to be hard to do.”
In philosophy, it is common to look back on the teachings of the iconic philosophers of past generations. Socrates had thoughts on happiness while Aristotle had his own complex concept.
“For him, happiness consists of activity in accordance with excellence.” Koehn explains this to me, but with such complexity, what does that mean?
To Aristotle, happiness required external factors. Health, friends, money, luck. Important factors in a successful life, but in Aristotle’s formula, factors in a happy life as well.
While this could be seen as correct to many, it is one philosopher’s meaning compared to any others.
Famed Greek Philosopher, Aristotle.
Anthony Skelton is also an Associate Professor of Philosophy in London, and a member of Rotman’s Institute of Philosophy. He believes happiness to be a concept dependent on the person being asked.
“The idea of happiness is very subjective. It depends on, you know, your experience of the world, or your expectations, whatever you may have,” Skelton says. “And so, there probably is a sense in which, you know, there are different ways to achieve happiness.”
By Anthony Skelton’s definition, it’s simply experiencing more joy than sadness, or pleasure than pain.
“Happiness really just is pleasure, or more specifically, to be happy is to have on balance, more pleasure in your life than pain. That’s a kind of hedonistic view of happiness.”
The beautiful thing about philosophy is it comes with many different views. Happiness could be pleasure over pain, but Glen Koehn feels as though not everyone can have happiness.
“I don’t think everybody can achieve happiness,” Koehn explains. “I mean, it’s partly a matter of luck. Some people are, I think, born with talent for happiness, they just have a kind of disposition that fits them to be happy. Other people are more say anxious or depressive.”
So, perhaps happiness is something not everyone can experience, or maybe it’s more basic than it seems.
Happiness as a word is a blank canvas. You can paint whatever you want over it to create your own definition. Perhaps it’s a superficial kind of happy with a smile on your face, or an overall feeling of happiness that races through your veins.
MENTAL HEALTH
Philosophical views on happiness, as you would expect, give us a lot to think about. The ideas that maybe happiness doesn’t have a meaning. That happiness is full of deception and personal struggles and successes.
But, accepting an answer to the question “What is Happiness” from one select group of minds is simply inconsiderate. While philosophers profess these teachings to students and whoever’s listening, there are so many other fields educated in concepts linked to happiness.
Mental health has become a more and more prominent topic of conversation in recent years. Diagnosed mental illness numbers are continuously going up it seems, a sign that maybe many others are struggling with understanding the difficult concept of happiness.
‘Mental illness’ itself is a broad term. Depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, eating disorders. These all fall under the category of mental illness. All different in their own ways, they share one thing in common. A lack of happiness.
Finding happiness out of being sad or even feeling below average is difficult.
Learning the philosophical side of the emotion, there is the belief that it is something you achieve one day through the support of external factors or with your own mental fortitude. DaQing Wang is a mental health worker currently at Daya Counselling in London. He believes happiness to be something you create, not achieve.
“I think, for a really, really long time people thought like, if I did ‘XYZ’, then I’ll be happy,” says Wang. “Whereas it’s very much that happiness is kind of a state that you create versus a state that you achieve.”
But, what does happiness mean in the world of mental health? The mental health worker believes, similarly to the philosophers, that it is up to the eye of the beholder.
“Everyone has an expectation of what happiness like should be, and everyone’s trying to live up to that expectation of happiness,” he explains. “So I think the biggest challenge I find in a lot of places and a lot of areas is just, everyone has this idea what everyone else thinks happiness is and they have to fit into that mold to be happy, and if they don’t, something must be wrong.”
SOCIAL WORK
Social media has held one of the biggest impacts over the happiness of many youths in recent years. The hunger for likes and attention, the unforgiving wars in the comment sections of many posts.
Andrew Mantulak is an associate professor of social work at King’s University College in London. He feels social media is no friend of happiness.
“I’m in the mind, the more you post, the less happier you are. Like, if you have to go out with a bunch of friends, you know, or go on vacation and you spend more time taking pictures than you do actually enjoying yourself, that’s a problem.”
But maybe, while not a great idea, this is how many people find their own form of happiness. Sure, it may be artificial and coming through the screen of a phone, but that’s your happy environment compared to someone else’s.
“Happiness when we look at, you know, what makes people happy, it’s that fit between people in their environment,” Mantulak explains.
“Because when people don’t have a good fit between their environment and themselves, that’s when they get into trouble, in our view anyways.”
Maybe that’s all there really is to happiness. Maybe it’s just a word that everyone has a different meaning or no meaning at all for. Sometimes it is just being content or finding pleasure in the small things.
Check out my full show on ‘What is Happiness’ at the top of this article or in the description of the video found below.
Comments