The phenomenon of happiness, like love, has been worrying mankind since ancient times. Happiness — elusive, fleeting, indefinable — is of interest to philosophers, theologians, and even politicians. In recent years, happiness has also been studied by the natural sciences — biology and medicine.
Psychology also has its own view of happiness. It can be thought of as a feeling, more precisely, as an “internal awareness of an emotion,” as the American neuropsychologist Antonio Damasio defines it. In other words, if you are happy, you simultaneously feel that you are very good, and you are aware of this feeling.
Accordingly, everything that prevents us from being aware of pleasant moments does not allow us to be happy: anxiety, depression, fuss, because of which we are inattentive to ourselves, everyday worries that cause us to overreact.
Another enemy of our happiness is the inability to live in the present. When we constantly return our thoughts to the past or hope for happiness in the future, we do not notice the good that is happening to us at the moment. This was known in antiquity, but we still need efforts to learn to perceive the small joys of life.
Mere comfort—when we are warm, full, and safe—is not enough to experience happiness. Happiness has two more important components: the feeling of the fullness of being (when we have reached the “higher” state in which there is nothing more to desire but to prolong it) and the disappearance of the feeling of passing time.
Happiness is very unstable. Unlike fear, anger, or anxiety, it has no evolutionary meaning, a luxury that we can only occasionally afford. But still, we can experience it more often and longer. Positive psychology, which has been actively developing in the world since the 1990s, argues that “subjective well-being” stems from the ability to cope with negative emotions and cultivate positive ones. An additional incentive to this may be the fact that happiness is “good for health”: optimism, strong social connections and positive emotions partly protect us from disease.
This is a luxury that we can afford only occasionally, but it is it that gives us the strength to live.
Why do we need happiness? This question, in my opinion, is very important. After all, man is the only living being who knows about his death. Realizing himself as a mortal, a person needs to find the strength to live in himself, and these forces give him happiness. As Marcel Proust so beautifully put it, happiness is that kind of “joy close to certainty” that is able of itself to make “death become indifferent to me”*.
* M. Proust. «Recovered time». Amphora, 2007.