Happiness is an emotion that comes and goes just like anger, disgust, or sadness. So I always had a difficult time when people asked about my life in general with “Are you happy?” I would think to myself, I’m happy sometimes, other times I’m sad or annoyed. However, after thinking about it I understand what it means. A happy person is someone who is content with the trajectory of their life. It doesn’t mean everything is perfect or they don’t wish for some parts of their life to be different. It means, in general, they wake up liking who they are and what their life produces.
Another definition of happiness comes from the ancient philosopher Aristotle, who suggested that happiness is the one human desire, and all other human desires exist as a way to obtain happiness. He believed that there were four levels of happiness: happiness from immediate gratification, from comparison and achievement, from making positive contributions, and from achieving fulfillment.
Happiness is something that people seek to find, yet what defines happiness can vary from one person to the next. Typically, happiness is an emotional state characterized by feelings of joy, satisfaction, contentment, and fulfillment. While happiness has many different definitions, it is often described as involving positive emotions and life satisfaction.
When most people talk about the true meaning of happiness, they might be talking about how they feel in the present moment or referring to a more general sense of how they feel about life overall. Because happiness tends to be such a broadly defined term, psychologists and other social scientists typically use the term ‘ ‘ subjective well being ‘when they talk about this emotional state. Just as it sounds, subjective well-being tends to focus on an individual’s overall personal feelings about their life in the present.
Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers — but a study found that they don’t do a lot of this:
They don’t spend a lot of time watching television. That’s what unhappy people do.
Although people who describe themselves as happy enjoy watching television, it turns out to be the single activity they engage in less often than unhappy people, said John Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of the study, which appeared in the journal Social Indicators Research.
While most large studies on happiness have focused on the demographic characteristics of happy people — factors like age and marital status — Dr. Robinson and his colleagues tried to identify what activities happy people engage in. The study relied primarily on the responses of 45,000 Americans collected over 35 years by the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, and on published “time diary” studies recording the daily activities of participants.
“We looked at 8 to 10 activities that happy people engage in, and for each one, the people who did the activities more — visiting others, going to church, all those things — were happier,” Dr. Robinson said. “TV was the one activity that showed a negative relationship. Unhappy people did it more, and happy people did it less.”
“Perhaps it is time to turn off the TV so we can live more of our own story.”
Still, he said, the data show that people who spend the most time watching television are least happy in the long run. Perhaps it is time to turn off the TV so we can live more of our own story.
