what is happiness: THE SPECTRUM OF HAPPINESS

PHILOSOPHY, Coming-of-Age

Written by Rachel Jeong

Welcome back to our annual column, "what is happiness?," a continuous effort to explore what happiness means, from creative mediums of film, peers, psychology, art, and more.

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Feeling like you are in a state of happiness in your life means you have achieved a peace, but it doesn't mean you are happy all the time. In fact, it requires downs and challenges and sadness. Otherwise you wouldn’t be living.

C&C’s theme this edition is spectrum: how we can all experience two or multiple different states and feelings at once in a blur, and how different people around the world feel them differently. Yet, simultaneously, that is at the very core and beauty of the human experience.

Something that represents spectrum really well is a word that can have multiple meanings. A word like happiness.

The word happiness can be an elementary emotion that ice cream incurs. 

It could be a 

"state of well-being and contentment"

- Merriam Webster

It could be the end-goal for someone’s entire life. A life purpose. 

It could envelop the following tenets: 

• "The balance of emotions: Everyone experiences both positive and negative emotions, feelings, and moods. Happiness is generally linked to experiencing more positive feelings than negative ones.

• Life satisfaction: This relates to how satisfied you feel with different areas of your life including your relationships, work, achievements, and other things that you consider important." https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-happiness-4869755 

In fact, Greater Good Berkeley explains the difficulties of coming down to one definition to happiness, but how different contributing factors shape our understanding of the word: 

“social and cultural factors also influence how we think about happiness. For example, studies by William Tov and others have found that people from cultures that embrace more collectivist ideals think about happiness more in terms of harmony and contentment, while more individualistic-minded people connect it to feelings of exuberance and joy….Though people around the world have different ways of thinking about happiness and perhaps even experience it in different ways, most involve feeling positive generally and about life overall.”

It’s the very fact that multiple definitions can exist at once; that multiple perceptions and understandings of happiness can happen simultaneously; that different global factors can mold our perceptions; but that, ultimately, the feeling is the same at its core.

It’s the complex culmination of all these layers that intersect to form the universal happiness we so crave.

And I think it is appreciating this very dimensionality that will make us more happy.