The laugh of a small child, how magnetic!
Uncontrollable, even repetitive sometimes.
We all like to see such an uncomplicated version of happiness.
But we grew up and, along the way, some of us started looking for it constantly.
As children, we might have experienced our fair share of unhappiness, cries, and so on, but most of us rarely found ourselves asking whether we were happy.
And happiness sometimes was found in the smallest things, like an ice cream, a mushroom found in the forest, seeing a dolphin.
As adults, the conditions for happiness become considerably more elaborate and anchored to a target or a date in the calendar.
There is always another when that we condition our happiness on.
And perhaps one of the peculiarities of modern life is how extraordinarily good we have become at producing them.
Now, what about ambition? This is not an argument against ambition.
Our society has relieved many of the pressures that occupied previous generations - hunger, disease, physical danger, lack of education, limited freedom - which remain painfully real for millions of people, but have been dramatically reduced for many others.
And yet, having more possibilities has not necessarily made happiness simpler.
If anything, social comparison through social media has been affecting the contentment of many, showing us so many versions of living we could not have even imagined in the past.
This raises an uncomfortable question.
At what point did experiencing a good life become so entangled with evaluating whether our life is good enough?
Image: A joyful, spontaneous moment of childhood, image created through AI.
There is always another when that we condition our happiness on.
The Art of Happiness, the book based on conversations between the Dalai Lama and psychiatrist Howard C. Cutler, first published in the late 1990s, belongs to a very different technological moment, but its central question feels absolutely contemporary.
The book begins from the premise that happiness is not simply a fortunate circumstance that arrives when life finally gives us what we want. Our habits of mind, our relationships with others, our expectations and the way we respond to difficulty all have something to do with it.
This sounds simple.
Living accordingly is less so.
One of the ideas running through the Dalai Lama’s approach is the distinction between what we want and what we actually need.
And sometimes what modern consumer culture makes us want as an “improvement to ourselves” can genuinely improve our lives.
But if happiness is continually placed on the other side of that distance, reaching it becomes difficult by definition.
The destination moves with us.
There is another element in The Art of Happiness that feels particularly important now: the place given to other people.
Happiness, in this view, is not an entirely private achievement.
Human connection and the ability to look beyond ourselves matter.
We can work on ourselves endlessly, but there are forms of happiness that cannot be produced by looking inward.
Think of some of the moments when you have laughed hardest: there is a good chance somebody else was there.
Of course, returning to the happiness of childhood is neither possible nor necessarily desirable.
Growing up complicates happiness because growing up complicates life.
So perhaps the question is whether we can recover something children seem to possess without surrendering what adulthood has taught us.
Their ability to become absorbed in what is happening now.
Their indifference to whether an experience is productive.
Their capacity to laugh without wondering how they look while doing it.
Their willingness to find enormous pleasure in very small things.
Happiness does not always wait at the end of improvement.
Perhaps expecting to be happy is itself part of the problem.
The Dalai Lama’s perspective does not promise a life protected from suffering. Quite the opposite: suffering is treated as part of being human and something that can deepen our appreciation of happiness. Because only if we know what suffering does to us can we fully appreciate the uplifting force of happiness.
The interesting question becomes what we do with this truth.
There is a small experiment worth trying.
Think about something that made you genuinely happy recently, even for just a moment.
Perhaps someone made you laugh. The sun illuminated the clouds in a beautiful shade of orange. You cooked something good. A friend called unexpectedly. You heard a song you had forgotten.
How much did it cost?
How carefully had you planned it?
Did anyone else need to know?
Perhaps the modern world just directs our attention elsewhere.
And if so, finding our way back to happiness may require less searching than we imagine.
Not rejecting the desire to make our lives better, but simply remembering that happiness does not always wait at the end of improvement.
The question is whether we are there to notice that it is already happening.
What made you happy before you started thinking about happiness?
We would be glad to read your thoughts.