Happiness: The Elusive State of Mind

Happiness: The Elusive State of Mind.

 Family and community seem to have a more important impact on our happiness, than money and health. People with strong families, who live in tight-knit and supportive communities, are significantly happier than people, whose families are dysfunctional and who have never found a community to be a part of, -writes Yuval Noah Harari in his book on Humankind: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. How true it is can be understood, only by the people who have experienced it. Almost two decades ago, my son Prashanth’s high school mate visited us in Bengaluru, India.  After spending two weeks with us, he told us that the most impressive observation he had made during his brief stay with us, was the family togetherness. It is true even to this day. It has been over half a century since I left India, even to this day, I feel excited and happy when I meet my close relatives. But to describe the feeling of happiness, or to put it into words this feeling is difficult.

Anyway, what is happiness? The Dalai Lama tells, - that happiness is the very purpose of life; the very notion of our life is toward happiness. How to get or how to feel that experience has always been elusive. Because, happiness means different things, different experiences, depending upon who you are? Love and compassion are the very essential prerequisites for happiness. Let me explain this with an example. A very rich individual may give lots of money to charities. This act of compassion may or may not make him/her happy. On the other hand, if he/she does the same thing in a way, he/she experiences the relief that charity brings to other human beings or communities the feeling will be different from giving wealth to unknown charities. If you really want to experience this in real life, you should watch (The Kindness Dairies): ‘Kindness one and Kindness two’ video’s made by Leon Logothetis for Netflix. Of course, it shows the random acts of kindness and how the author or actor in this case rewards, those who show kindness to him, with unusual gifts to better their lives. In doing so, the happiness he experiences, and those who receive his kindness experience, make any viewer feel emotionally happy. In other words, happiness should be earned by an act of kindness or goodwill. Having said that, I am sure you have come across people, who seem to be always happy all the time and others, who are never happy. How do we explain this phenomenon?

As a biologist I believe, that all emotions including happiness are determined or modulated by a complex of nerves, neurons, synapses and various biochemical agonists, such as serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and anandamide. All our lives, we keep thinking that we will be happy when we get this or that but, when you really get those things, you may or may not feel happy. Even if you did, it is momentary and not long lasting. Is it possible that we are confused about the definition of happiness? We were in Bhutan a couple of years ago. We were made aware of the Bhutan Gross National Happiness (GNH) Index. Center for Bhutan Studies with the help of Oxford University researchers, developed the GNH Index to measure the progress of Bhutanese society. Bhutan is famously the only country in the world to rank ‘Gyalyong Gakid Palzon’ or Gross National Happiness above GDP, which is the usual measure of prosperity worldwide. This is decided according to the holistic tenet, designed to measure and protect the collective happiness and well-being of the population. Since its inception a decade ago, the census has been taken three times and the latest census reports that “91.2 percent of Bhutanese were narrowly, extensively, or deeply happy.” Ironically, though Bhutan ranked 97 out of 156 on the 2018 World Happiness Report. Therefore, measures of happiness even at the level of the population depends on the question you ask or the way you define happiness. In Bhutan, “Happiness (GNH) is defined as satisfied with what you have.” According to the World Happiness Report 2019, Finland is the happiest country in the world, with Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and the Netherlands holding the top next positions (Bhutan #97, India 133).

Bhutan is a landlocked country, with Buddhist culture and philosophy, with a guiding principle based on four central pillars- equitable social development, cultural preservation, conservation of the environment and promotion of good government. From a philosophical perspective, measuring the happiness of a population is misleading, because happiness is an individual trait. Gratitude seems to be one of the essential traits. One has to truly appreciate everything one has, in order to be satisfied with it. Happy people have present focus (Mindfulness). They tend to live for the present and not very much concerned with the past or the future. Truly happy people typically find humor in almost anything. Having faith in your own abilities makes one less stressed in life. Happy people are adapted to finding their way around any obstacle in life. Optimists find the best in everything and aren’t consumed with the need to search for faults. Happy people are not obsessed with rewards or destinations. Happiness is not about reaching a destination or achieving a certain goal, but staying grateful for what you have, focused on the present with a positive attitude towards life.

Economic inequality is rising rapidly worldwide. One percent of the U.S rich individuals own 40% of the nation’s wealth. Even in a developing country like India, according to a recent report, the number of billionaires has increased rapidly. India has the third highest number of billionaires in the world. It has 121 billionaires. To some extent, the happiness index developed by various indexing agencies reflects on the relative degree of the ratio between the very rich and the poor. For instance, in a country like Bhutan, the people may not see that much of economic disparities and hence are contented with what they have. Therefore, these traits of happiness cannot be applied to the entire humanity. You cannot preach philosophy to a hungry soul. Having said that, how to make or create an equitable playing field. There is a great ongoing debate about the ‘Equity and Equality”, It is interesting to note that the experts on this subject are of the opinion that unless this disparity between the ‘haves and have nots’ is reduced, the disconnect that exists at the population level cannot be bridged. Having said that, there seems to be no simple ‘rule of thumb’ or ‘one size fits all’ type of solution for this growing social menace.

Since I am a researcher working in the area preventive medicine, we think in terms of individual health, community health, and population (global) health. With that kind of thinking, when addressing the topic of happiness, I strongly feel that we should look at the individual, community, and the population as a whole. We tried to discuss in brief the satisfaction, contentment with life, and collective happiness, at the population level. Let us see what it takes to attain this state at the individual level. The prestigious National Institutes of Health, USA organized a Round Table Meeting in April of 2018 at Bethesda on this very topic; - Emotional Well-Being: Emerging Insights and Questions for Future Research. The collective thoughts on this subject was that. “Emotional well-being has been defined as an overall positive state of one’s emotions, life satisfaction, sense of meaning and purpose, and ability to pursue self-defined goals. Elements of emotional well-being include a sense of balance in emotion, thoughts, social relationships, and pursuits. The relative importance of each construct will vary across subpopulations and developmental stages.”

What’s your definition of happiness? Do you feel the need for a definition of what happiness is? We know when we feel it and then we realize that there are many states of happiness, like when you see an innocent child, when you see the beauty of nature, -when you do a good act of kindness or even when you do some positive things in the day to day life. At the end of the day, you have to find yours and hang on to it. In general, happiness is a sense of well-being, joy or contentment, a feeling that comes when you know your life is good, you are contented with what you have, a feeling you find when you learn to enjoy the simple day to day pleasures of life. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. - Robert Green Ingersoll. True happiness is…. to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future. – Lucius Annaeus Seneca.

Gundu H. R. Rao, Potomac, Maryland, May 1, 2019.