The Myth of Happiness

Happiness: A Feeling, a Practice, or a Way of Being?

Happiness is one of the most desired experiences in modern life—and perhaps one of the most misunderstood. We are encouraged to pursue it relentlessly: through success, relationships, self-improvement, and consumption. And yet, despite unprecedented comfort and choice, many people report feeling anxious, restless, or quietly dissatisfied.

This raises an important question: are we looking for happiness in the wrong places—or defining it too narrowly?

To understand happiness more fully, it helps to explore it on several levels: emotional, philosophical, and spiritual. Each offers a different lens, and together they paint a richer, more compassionate picture of what it means to live well.

The Surface Layer: Happiness as Pleasure and Positivity

In everyday language, happiness is often equated with feeling good. Joy, excitement, comfort, pleasure, ease. This version of happiness is emotional and reactive—it arises when life aligns with our desires and fades when it doesn’t.

A relaxing holiday, a compliment, a personal achievement, a moment of laughter—these experiences matter. They nourish us. But they are, by nature, temporary.

The problem begins when we expect this form of happiness to be permanent.

When happiness is defined solely as positive emotion, unhappiness can feel like failure. Stress, sadness, boredom, or grief become things to avoid or fix quickly, rather than natural parts of being human. This can create a subtle pressure to always be “okay,” always improving, always glowing.

Wellness culture sometimes reinforces this by suggesting that happiness is something we can optimize if we just try hard enough.

But deeper traditions—both philosophical and spiritual—offer a more spacious view.

The Philosophical View: Happiness as Meaning and Flourishing

The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle made a distinction that still resonates today. He described happiness not as fleeting pleasure, but as eudaimonia—often translated as human flourishing or living well.

For Aristotle, happiness was not about feeling good all the time. It was about living in alignment with virtue, reason, and purpose over the course of a lifetime.

In this sense, happiness includes:

• Growth rather than comfort
• Integrity rather than convenience
• Meaning rather than constant pleasure

A meaningful life may include struggle, uncertainty, and effort. Yet it can still be deeply fulfilling.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche echoed this idea centuries later when he wrote:

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

From this perspective, happiness is less about eliminating discomfort and more about understanding why we are willing to endure it. A life oriented toward values, creativity, service, or truth may not always feel easy—but it can feel deeply worth living.

The Spiritual Perspective: Happiness as Presence and Peace

Spiritual traditions across different cultures often take it even further. Rather than asking how to achieve happiness, they ask us to notice what obscures the happiness that is already available in the present moment.

Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh spoke often about this kind of happiness—simple, grounded, and deeply human. He wrote:

“There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.”

For him, happiness was not a future reward but a practice of awareness. To breathe consciously, to walk mindfully, to fully experience a cup of tea—these were not small things, but gateways to peace.

Another of his well-known insights reminds us:

“Peace is every step.”

In this spiritual view, happiness arises not from acquiring more, but from being more present. Much of our unhappiness, Thich Nhat Hanh suggested, comes from living in regret about the past or anxiety about the future—missing the only moment in which life is actually happening.

This kind of happiness is quieter than excitement. It feels like ease, acceptance, and connection. It does not depend on life being perfect; it depends on our willingness to meet life as it is.

Letting Go of the Chase

One of the great paradoxes of happiness is that the more aggressively we pursue it, the more elusive it becomes. When happiness is treated as a goal, we are always living slightly ahead of ourselves—believing that contentment will arrive after the next achievement, the next change, the next version of ourselves.

Spiritual teachers often point out that this endless striving strengthens the ego’s belief that something is missing. And as long as we believe that, peace remains out of reach.

This doesn’t mean we stop growing or dreaming. It means we stop postponing our right to be at ease.

A More Integrated Understanding of Happiness

Perhaps happiness is not one thing, but a relationship we build with life.

• Emotional happiness teaches us to enjoy and appreciate joy when it arises
• Philosophical happiness invites us to live with intention and meaning
• Spiritual happiness reminds us to return to the present moment, again and again.

A truly well-lived life may include laughter and sorrow, ambition and rest, longing and acceptance. Happiness, then, is not the absence of difficulty—but the presence of awareness, purpose, and compassion within it.

As Thich Nhat Hanh gently reminded us, happiness is not something to be found elsewhere.

It is something to be practiced—here, now, in the middle of our imperfect, ordinary, beautiful lives.

Sabine    Jan 2026