what does happiness mean essay

What Is Happiness Essay

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What is happiness? We can ask hundreds of people, and each of them would probably give different answers. One would say that happiness is to be with a loved one, the second would say that happiness is the stability, and the third, on the contrary, would say that happiness is the unpredictability. For someone, to be happy is to have a lot of money while for others – to be popular. All in all, there are plenty of different understandings of happiness.

Personally, I consider happiness as simplicity and peace when my family and friends are healthy and happy as well. I recognize that they all are dear to me and able to understand what is going on inside me. I know that they will support me in any situation doing everything that depends on them. In return, I am also ready to do much for them. What we do for others, helping them when they need our help, advice, or support and obtaining appreciation, is happiness because helping others, we are doing something very significant and necessary.

What does it mean to be happy? I think it is, primarily, a state of mind, it means to have harmony with yourself and the people around. Happiness is multi-faceted. Perhaps, the word “love” is the most appropriate one to describe my happiness as love is driven by our world. People create wonderful things concerning their job, hobby, or family. Love is life, and I am happy when I realize that I live up to the hilt.

However, some people might be unhappy even though they should be. For example, teenagers who have everything to live a happy life, including healthy family, close friends, and enough money to satisfy basic needs, ask their parents to buy the latest model of IPhone. In the case, parents could not afford it, some teenagers tend to feel unhappy. After all, one can be a successful leader and have millions as well as prestige, but do not have a loving family and emotional harmony.

In my opinion, material values are not a true measure of happiness. Happiness is the ability to be optimistic in spite of difficulties and the ability to overcome them successfully. Finally, challenges should be taken as the lessons that life presents us. Even the negative things teach something, give a new experience, or refer to the correct direction.

I believe that happiness is not a gift and not a given right as every person has its own happiness inside. Moreover, it is never too late to become happy. We can inspire and motivate ourselves and others to be happy. A stranger’s passing smile, warm rays of the sun penetrating the window, or a cup of freshly brewed coffee – happiness is in detail. Everyone chooses and prefers different sources. It is of great importance for people to enjoy moments of life, even the most insignificant ones.

We need to appreciate every moment in our lives remembering that happiness is within us. After all, time passes, and we are getting hurt by the fact that we did not appreciate the time when we had a chance. Therefore, living in peace and harmony with others, helping those who need your help, and avoiding things that you would regret about in future are paramount ways to find happiness and make others happy.

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What Is Happiness and Why Is It Important? (+ Definition)

It seems like an odd question, but is it? Do you know how to define happiness? Do you think happiness is the same thing to you as it is to others?

What’s the point of it all? Does it even make a difference in our lives?

In fact, happiness does have a pretty important role in our lives, and it can have a huge impact on the way we live our lives. Although researchers have yet to pin down the definition or an agreed-upon framework for happiness, there’s a lot we have learned in the last few decades.

This article will dive into the science of happiness, what it actually is, and why it matters.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Happiness & Subjective Wellbeing Exercises for free . These detailed, science-based exercises will help you or your clients identify sources of authentic happiness and strategies to boost wellbeing.

This Article Contains:

A Look at the Oxford English Dictionary’s Definition of Happiness

What is the Meaning of Happiness in Positive Psychology?

The psychology behind human happiness, 8 examples that describe what a happy life looks like, why is happiness so important, 6 videos that explain happiness, a take-home message, a look at the oxford english dictionary ‘s definition of happiness.

First, let’s take a look at the definition of happiness so we’re all on the same page. Oxford English Dictionary ’s definition of “happiness” is a simple one: “ The state of being happy .”

Not exactly what we were looking for, was it? Perhaps we need to dive a little deeper. Oxford English Dictionary ’s definition of “happy” is a little more helpful: “ Feeling or showing pleasure or contentment .”

That’s better! So, happiness is the state of feeling or showing pleasure or contentment. From this definition, we can glean a few important points about happiness:

Happiness is a state, not a trait; in other words, it isn’t a long-lasting, permanent feature or personality trait, but a more fleeting, changeable state.
Happiness is equated with feeling pleasure or contentment, meaning that happiness is not to be confused with joy, ecstasy, bliss, or other more intense feelings.
Happiness can be either feeling or showing, meaning that happiness is not necessarily an internal or external experience, but can be both.

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The meaning of happiness in Positive Psychology really depends on who you ask.

Happiness is often known by another name in positive psychology research: subjective wellbeing, or SWB.

Some believe happiness is one of the core components of SWB, while others believe happiness is SWB. Regardless, you’ll frequently find SWB used as a shorthand for happiness in the literature.

And speaking of the literature, you will find references to SWB everywhere. A quick Google search for the word “happiness” offers over 2 million results (as of January 6th, 2019). Further, a scan for the same term in two of psychology’s biggest online databases (PsycINFO and PsycARTICLES) returns 19,139 results from academic and other journals, books, dissertations, and more.

Is it difficult to define scientifically?

With so many takes on happiness, it’s no wonder that happiness is a little difficult to define scientifically; there is certainly disagreement about what, exactly, happiness is.

According to researchers Chu Kim-Prieto, Ed Diener, and their colleagues (2005), there are three main ways that happiness has been approached in positive psychology:

Happiness as a global assessment of life and all its facets;
Happiness as a recollection of past emotional experiences;
Happiness as an aggregation of multiple emotional reactions across time (Kim-Prieto, Diener, Tamir, Scollon, & Diener, 2005).

Although they generally all agree on what happiness feels like—being satisfied with life, in a good mood, feeling positive emotions , feeling enjoyment, etc.—researchers have found it difficult to agree on the scope of happiness.

However, for our purposes in this piece, it’s enough to work off of a basic definition that melds the OED ‘s definition with that of positive psychologists: happiness is a state characterized by contentment and general satisfaction with one’s current situation.

Pleasure vs. happiness

Couples and Happiness as a Social Component.

The association between the two makes sense, and it’s common to hear the two words used interchangeably outside of the literature; however, when it comes to the science of positive psychology, it is important to make a distinction between the two.

Happiness, as we described above, is a state characterized by feelings of contentment and satisfaction with one’s life or current situation. On the other hand, pleasure is a more visceral, in-the-moment experience. It often refers to the sensory-based feelings we get from experiences like eating good food, getting a massage, receiving a compliment, or having sex.

Happiness , while not a permanent state, is a more stable state than pleasure. Happiness generally sticks around for longer than a few moments at a time, whereas pleasure can come and go in seconds (Paul, 2015).

Pleasure can contribute to happiness, and happiness can enhance or deepen feelings of pleasure, but the two can also be completely mutually exclusive. For example, you can feel a sense of happiness based on meaning and engagement that has nothing to do with pleasure, or you could feel pleasure but also struggle with guilt because of it, keeping you from feeling happy at the same time.

Happiness vs. meaning

Happiness and meaning have an even more distinct line between the two. Rarely are happiness and meaning confused or used interchangeably, and for good reason—they describe two very different experiences.

Humans may resemble many other creatures in their striving for happiness, but the quest for meaning is a key part of what makes us human, and uniquely so.

Roy Baumeister et al. (2013)

Unlike happiness, meaning is not a fleeting state that drifts throughout the day; it’s a more comprehensive sense of purpose and feeling of contributing to something greater than yourself.

As the quote from Baumeister and colleagues (2013) suggests, there are important distinctions between the methods of searching for and the benefits of experiencing happiness and meaning. Scott Barry Kaufman at Scientific American (2016) outlines these distinctions that Baumeister and his fellow researchers found between the two:

Finding one’s life easy or difficult was related to happiness, but not meaning;
Feeling healthy was related to happiness, but not meaning;
Feeling good was related to happiness, not meaning;
Scarcity of money reduced happiness more than meaning;
People with more meaningful lives agreed that “relationships are more important than achievements;”
Helping people in need was linked to meaning but not happiness;
Expecting to do a lot of deep thinking was positively related to meaningfulness, but negatively with happiness;
Happiness was related more to being a taker rather than a giver, whereas meaning was related more to being a giver than a taker;
The more people felt their activities were consistent with the core themes and values of their self, the greater meaning they reported in their activities;
Seeing oneself as wise, creative, and even anxious were all linked to meaning but had no relationship (and in some cases, even showed a negative relationship) to happiness (Kaufman, 2016).

Basically, although the two overlaps and each can contribute to the experience of the other, the two can be mutually exclusive (Baumeister et al., 2013).

Relevant reading: 19 Cliché Happiness Quotes & The (Lack Of) Science Behind Them

The origins and etymology of happiness (Incl. root words)

According to Etymology Online (n.d.), the word for “happy” in most languages came from the word for “lucky.” This suggests an interesting trend—perhaps our ancestors believed that happiness was largely a by-product of luck?

It also points to a possible difference of general opinion between earlier generations and our own 20th and 21st-century generations: that happiness was not a vital factor in a good life, but essentially a bonus that some lucky individuals got to experience.

Here’s what author Darrin McMahon writes about the origins and root words of the word “happiness:”

“It is a striking fact that in every Indo-European language, without exception, going all the way back to ancient Greek, the word for happiness is a cognate with the word for luck. Hap is the Old Norse and Old English root of happiness, and it just means luck or chance, as did the Old French heur, giving us bonheur, good fortune or happiness. German gives us the word Gluck, which to this day means both happiness and chance.”

(McMahon, 2006)

What does self-happiness mean?

Although the term is not used very often, “self-happiness” refers to a sense of happiness or satisfaction with one’s self. It is often associated with self-confidence, self-esteem, and other concepts that marry “the self” with feeling content and happy.

In general, it means that you are pleased with yourself and your choices, and with the person that you are.

Happiness can be defined as an enduring state of mind consisting not only of feelings of joy, contentment, and other positive emotions, but also of a sense that one’s life is meaningful and valued (Lyubomirsky, 2001).

Happiness energizes us and is a highly sought after state of being. But, what components make up happiness?

Martin Seligman (2002) argued that happiness has three dimensions that can be cultivated:

The regular experience of pleasantness (the pleasant life)
The frequent engagement in satisfying activities (the engaged life)
The experience of a sense of connectedness to a greater whole (the meaningful life)

Although each dimension is important, the happiest people tend to be those who pursue the full life— they infuse their life with pleasure, engagement, and meaning (Seligman et al., 2005).

Building on Seligman’s three dimensions of happiness, Sirgy and Wu (2009) added the balanced life dimension.

According to these authors, balance in life is another key factor contributing to happiness because the amount of satisfaction derived from a single life domain is limited. One needs to be involved in multiple domains to satisfy the broad spectrum of human needs. As a result, cultivating a sense of balance is crucial for juggling these life domains.

Now that we know what happiness is, let’s dive a little deeper. What does psychology have to tell us about happiness?

There are many different theories of happiness, but they generally fall into one of two categories based on how they conceptualize happiness (or well-being):

Hedonic happiness/well-being is happiness conceptualized as experiencing more pleasure and less pain; it is composed of an affective component (high positive affect and low negative affect) and a cognitive component (satisfaction with one’s life);
Eudaimonic happiness/well-being conceptualizes happiness as the result of the pursuit and attainment of life purpose, meaning, challenge, and personal growth; happiness is based on reaching one’s full potential and operating at full functioning (AIPC, 2011).

Some theories see happiness as a by-product of other, more important pursuits in life, while others see happiness as the end-goal for humans. Some theories state that pursuing happiness is pointless (although pursuing other important experiences and feelings may contribute to greater happiness), and some assume that happiness can be purposefully increased or enhanced.

Although they differ on the specifics, these theories generally agree on a few points:

It’s good to be happy, and people like being happy;
Happiness is neither a totally fleeting, momentary experience nor a stable, long-term trait;
At least some portion of our happiness is set by our genetics, but the amount varies from about 10% up to 50%;
The pursuit and attainment of pleasure will rarely lead to happiness;
There are many sources that contribute to or compose happiness (AIPC, 2011).

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What sources create true personal happiness?

Taking together all the various theories and findings on happiness, we know that there are at least a few factors that are very important for overall happiness:

Individual income;
Labor market status;
Physical health;
Social relationships;
Moral values;
Experience of positive emotions (AIPC, 2011).

All of these factors can contribute to a happy life, but research has found that good relationships are a vital ingredient (Waldinger & Schulz, 2010).

When we are happy in our most important relationships (usually our spouse or significant other, our children and/or our parents, other close family members, and our closest friends), we tend to be happier.

We have some control over how our relationships go, so that leads us to an interesting and important question: can we increase our own happiness?

Can individuals learn how to be happy?

The answer from numerous studies is a resounding YES—you CAN learn how to be happier.

The degree to which you can increase your happiness will vary widely by which theory you subscribe to, but there are no credible theories that allow absolutely no room for individual improvement. To improve your overall happiness, the most effective method is to look at the list of sources above and work on enhancing the quality of your experiences in each one of them.

For example, you can work on getting a higher salary (although a higher salary will only work up to about $75,000 USD a year), improve your health , work on developing and maintaining high-quality relationships, and overall, find ways to incorporate more positive feelings into your daily life. This does assume basic access to safety as well as social equality.

Of course, what it looks like will depend on the individual—a happy life for one person may be another’s nightmare!

However, there are a few examples that can display a wide range of lives that can be conducive to happiness:

A woman who lives alone, has excellent relationships with her nieces and nephews, gives to charity, and finds meaning in her work;
A man who is happily married with three healthy children and a relatively low-paying job;
A widow who enjoys regular visits with her children and grandchildren, along with volunteering for local charities;
A cancer patient who has a wonderful support system and finds meaning in helping others make it through chemotherapy;
A social worker who works 70-hour weeks with no overtime pay, to ensure the children on her caseload are in good hands;
An unmarried man in a monastery who has no earthly possessions and no salary to speak of, but finds meaning in communing with his god;
A teenager in a foster home who has several close friends and enjoys playing football on his school’s team;
A man who lives with several pets, enjoys a high salary, and loves his job.

Each of these was pulled from real-world examples of people who are happy. They may not seem like they have it all, but they all have at least one of the ingredients from the list of sources mentioned earlier. We don’t need to have everything we want in order to be happy—true happiness can be obtained by finding joy in what we already have, however much or little that may seem.

What are some visions you associate with happiness? Are there any similarities with these dreams?

You might be wondering why happiness is considered such an important aspect of life, as there are many components of a meaningful life.

In some ways, science would agree with you. It appears that life satisfaction , meaning, and well-being can be linked with happiness, but happiness is not necessarily the overarching goal for everyone in life. It is still important because it has some undeniably positive benefits and co-occurring factors.

June Silny at Happify outlines 14 answers to the question, “ What’s so great about happiness, anyway? ”

Happy people are more successful in multiple life domains, including marriage, friendship, income, work performance, and health.
Happy people get sick less often and experience fewer symptoms when they do get sick.
Happy people have more friends and a better support system.
Happy people donate more to charity (and giving money to charity makes you happy, too).
Happy people are more helpful and more likely to volunteer—which also makes you happier!
Happy people have an easier time navigating through life since optimism eases pain, sadness, and grief.
Happy people have a positive influence on others and encourage them to seek happiness as well, which can act as reinforcement.
Happy people engage in deeper and more meaningful conversations.
Happy people smile more, which is beneficial to your health.
Happy people exercise more often and eat more healthily.
Happy people are happy with what they have rather than being jealous of others.
Happy people are healthier all around and more likely to be healthy in the future.
Happy people live longer than those who are not as happy.
Happy people are more productive and more creative, and this effect extends to all those experiencing positive emotions.

The relationship between mental health and happiness

As you can probably assume from the list above, there is a strong relationship between mental health and happiness! When happy people are healthier, have better relationships, make friends more easily, and find more success in life, it’s easy to see why happiness and mental health are related.

The sources that contribute to happiness are the same as those that provide people with a buffer or protection against mental illness, which explains the close relationship between the two.

A recent study explored the association between happiness and mental health in college students and found that a relatively strong, positive correlation connects the two factors (Shafiq, Nas, Ansar, Nasrulla, Bushra, & Imam, 2015). This correlation held, even when gender and socio-demographic variables were added to the mix.

The close tie between mental health and happiness is reason enough to make happiness an important priority for parents, educators, researchers, and medical professionals alike, along with the simple fact that we all like to feel happy!

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If you’re interested in learning more about happiness from a scientific perspective, there are a few videos you might want to check out, including:

Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness by Professor Tal Ben-Shahar from WGBH Forum.

Shawn Achor – The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance TEDTalk from TEDx Talks

Positive Psychology – Happier by Professor Tal Ben-Shahar, Ph.D. from FightMediocrity

How to be Happy – The Science of Happiness and Feeling Positive in Life from Memorize Academy

The Surprising Science of Happiness TED Talk by Dan Gilbert from TED

How to Be Happy – The Secret of Authentic Happiness – Martin Seligman from Practical Psychology

I hope this piece was helpful and informative for you, and that you learned something new about the scientific study of happiness. It’s a fascinating area of research, and new findings are coming out all the time. Make sure you stay up to date on the happiness literature , as the findings can be of great use in helping you to live your best life!

What are your thoughts on happiness? Would you define it differently? What do you find is the most important ingredient for your own happiness? Let us know in the comments section below!

Thanks for reading, I hope you are all finding happiness in all your life journeys.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Happiness Exercises for free .

AIPC. (2011). Happiness and positive psychology. Australian Institute of Professional Counsellors Article Library . Retrieved from https://www.aipc.net.au/articles/happiness-and-positive-psychology/
Baumeister, R., Vohs, K. D., Aaker, J. L., & Gabinsky, E. N. (2013). Some key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 8 , 505-516.
Joseph Sirgy, M., & Wu, J. (2009). The pleasant life, the engaged life, and the meaningful life: What about the balanced life? Journal of Happiness Studies, 10 , 183-196.
Kaufman, S. B. (2016). The differences between happiness and meaning in life. Scientific American . Retrieved from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-differences-between-happiness-and-meaning-in-life/
Kim-Prieto, C., Diener, E., Tamir, M., Scollon, C. N., & Diener, M. (2005). Integrating the diverse definitions of happiness: A time-sequential framework of subjective well-being. Journal of Happiness Studies, 6 , 261-300.
Lyubomirsky, S. (2001). Why are some people happier than others? The role of cognitive and motivational processes in well-being. American Psychologist, 56(3) , 239.
McMahon, D. (2006). Happiness: A history . Grove Press.
Online Etymology Dictionary (n.d.). Happy . Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/
Paul, M. (2015). The difference between happiness and pleasure. Huffington Post: Life . Retrieved from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-difference-between-happiness-and-pleasure_b_7053946
Seligman, M. E. (2002). Authentic happiness: Using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment . Simon and Schuster.
Seligman, M. E., Steen, T. A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist, 60(5) , 410.
Shafiq, S., Naz, R. A., Ansar, M., Nasrulla, T., Bushra, M., & Imam, S. (2015). Happiness as related to mental health among university students. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 5 , 124-132.
Silny, J. (n.d.). What’s so great about happiness, anyway? (The answer: plenty!). Happify Daily . Retrieved from https://www.happify.com/hd/whats-so-great-about-happiness/
Waldinger, R. J., & Schulz, M. S. (2010). What’s love got to do with it?: Social functioning, perceived health, and daily happiness in married octogenarians. Psychology and Aging, 25 , 422-431.

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What our readers think.

His article was extremely helpful and enabled me to grasp the concept of the confusing question of what it means to be happy and the general meaning of happiness. I’m so glad I found this article to be honest.

I disagree with your comment that ‘Happiness is not a state but a trait.’ I see happiness as a purely internal construct. I choose to be happy regardless of the people or things going on around me. Those people who look for happiness in others, outside of themselves, bounce back and forth between some fleeting form of happiness and unhappiness. If they would instead see happiness as an internal construct, man vs himself, they wouldn’t be dependent on someone else for their personal feelings of happiness. Because really, you don’t have the power to change others… But you do have all the power you need to change how you choose to see and react to what’s around you. The ball of your happiness is 100% in your court.

The article was very helpful and informative

Just finished your article on happiness, or SWB and meaning . As stated in your article, happiness is fleeting and subject to feel good material goods and personal objectives. Having sex, kids, buying a new car, an opioid response. However, I thought life was supposed to have meaning that would contribute to my happiness. I chose a career based on what I thought I could contribute to my own and others lives. Rather naïve on my behalf and futile at this stage. I’m 72 years old and understand less now about the world as it is than ever before. I’ve seen the horrors of war and have moved forward from those days to marrying, having a family and building a career, the dopamine response, however I’ve lost the meaning of life and find myself unhappy, angry, reclusive and frustrated. I have done drugs, tried meditation and read books searching for meaning and happiness, which has been elusive at times. Your article helped put certain expectations of others and myself in perspective and what I need to do to achieve happiness and meaning. Thank you!

Thanks for this article. Nowadays, i do gratitude exercice in the morning, midday and before sleep. It’s help me stay more in positive thoughts. I like soo much.

I write: I am grateful for … ( 10x )

Thank you so much for this very insightful article. It really taught me a lot.

Thank you very much for the article. I think it will help me a lot. It has given me clear ideas of how I can try and attain some degree of happiness, and hence greater contentment. Happiness is important in individuals – I believe it is a key to tolerance and a stable society.

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3 Happiness Exercises Pack [PDF]

1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology

Philosophy, One Thousand Words at a Time

Happiness: What is it to be Happy?

Author: Kiki Berk Category: Ethics , Phenomenology and Existentialism Words: 992

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Do you want to be happy? If you’re like most people, then yes, you do.

But what is happiness? What does it mean to be “happy”? [1]

This essay discusses four major philosophical theories of happiness. [2]

1. Hedonism

According to hedonism, happiness is simply the experience of pleasure. [3] A happy person has a lot more pleasure than displeasure (pain) in her life. To be happy, then, is just to feel good. In other words, there’s no difference between being happy and feeling happy.

Famous hedonists include the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus and the modern English philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. [4] These philosophers all took happiness to include intellectual pleasures (such as reading a book) in addition to physical pleasures (such as having sex).

Although we associate being happy with feeling good, many philosophers think that hedonism is mistaken.

First, it’s possible to be happy without feeling good (such as when a happy person has a toothache), and it’s also possible to feel good without being happy (such as when an unhappy person gets a massage). Since happiness and pleasure can come apart, they can’t be the same thing.

Second, happiness and pleasure seem to have different properties. Pleasures are often fleeting, simple, and superficial (think of the pleasure involved in eating ice cream), whereas happiness is supposed to be lasting, complex, and profound. Things with different properties can’t be identical, so happiness can’t be the same thing as pleasure.

These arguments suggest that happiness and pleasure aren’t identical. That being said, it’s hard to imagine a happy person who never feels good. So, perhaps happiness involves pleasure without being identical to it.

2. Virtue Theory

According to virtue theory, happiness is the result of cultivating the virtues—both moral and intellectual—such as wisdom, courage, temperance, and patience. A happy person must be sufficiently virtuous. To be happy, then, is to cultivate excellence and to flourish as a result. This view is famously held by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. [5]

Linking happiness to virtue has the advantage of treating happiness as a lasting, complex, and profound phenomenon. It also explains how happiness and pleasure can come apart, since a person can be virtuous without feeling good, and a person can feel good without being virtuous.

In spite of these advantages, however, virtue theory is questionable. An important part of being virtuous is being morally good. But are immoral people always unhappy? Arguably not. Many bad people seem happy in spite of—or even because of—their unsavory actions. And a similar point can be made about intellectual virtue: unwise or irrational people aren’t always unhappy, either. In fact, some of these people seem happy as a direct result of their intellectual deficiencies. “Ignorance is bliss,” the saying goes!

But virtue theorists have a response here. Maybe some immoral people seem happy, on the surface; but that doesn’t mean that they are truly happy, at some deeper level. And the same thing can be said about people who lack the intellectual virtues: ignorance may lead to bliss, but that bliss isn’t true happiness. So, there seems to be some room for debate on these issues.

3. Desire Satisfaction Theory

According to the desire satisfaction theory, happiness consists in getting what you want—whatever that happens to be. A happy person has many of her desires satisfied; and the more her desires are satisfied, the happier she is.

Even though getting what you want can be a source of happiness, identifying happiness with desire satisfaction is problematic.

To start, this implies that the only way to become happier is by satisfying a desire. This seems wrong. Sometimes our happiness is increased by getting something we didn’t previously want—such as a surprise birthday party or getting stuck taking care of a neighbor’s cat. This implies that desire satisfaction is not necessary for happiness.

Desire satisfaction is not always sufficient for happiness, either. Unfortunately, it is common for people to feel disappointed when they get what they want. Many accomplishments, such as earning a degree or winning a tournament, simply don’t bring the long-lasting happiness that we expect. [6]

So, even if getting what we want sometimes makes us happy, these counterexamples suggest that happiness does not consist in desire satisfaction. [7]

4. Life Satisfaction Theory

According to the life satisfaction theory, happiness consists in being satisfied with your life. A happy person has a positive impression of her life in general, even though she might not be happy about every single aspect of it. To be happy, then, means to be content with your life as a whole.

It’s controversial whether life satisfaction is affective (a feeling) or cognitive (a belief). On the one hand, life satisfaction certainly comes with positive feelings. On the other hand, it’s possible to step back, reflect on your life, and realize that it’s good, even when you’re feeling down. [8]

One problem for this theory is that it’s difficult for people to distinguish how they feel in the moment from how they feel about their lives overall. Studies have shown that people report feeling more satisfied with their lives when the weather is good, even though this shouldn’t make that much of a difference. But measuring life satisfaction is complicated, so perhaps such studies should be taken with a grain of salt. [9]

5. Conclusion

Understanding what happiness is should enable you to become happier.

First, decide which theory of happiness you think is true, based on the arguments.

Second, pursue whatever happiness is according to that theory: seek pleasure and try to avoid pain (hedonism), cultivate moral and intellectual virtue (virtue theory), decide what you really want and do your best to get it (desire satisfaction theory), or change your life (or your attitude about it) so you feel (or believe) that it’s going well (life satisfaction theory).

And if you’re not sure which theory of happiness is true, then you could always try pursuing all of these things. 😊

[1] This might seem like an empirical (scientific) question rather than a philosophical one. However, this essay asks the conceptual question of what happiness is, and conceptual questions belong to philosophy, not to science.

[2] Happiness is commonly distinguished from “well-being,” i.e., the state of a life that is worth living. Whether or not happiness is the same thing as well-being is an open question, but most philosophers think it isn’t. See, for example, Haybron (2020).

[3] The word “hedonism” has different uses in philosophy. In this paper, it means that happiness is the same thing as pleasure (hedonism about happiness). But sometimes it is used to mean that happiness is the only thing that has intrinsic value (hedonism about value) or that humans are always and only motivated by pleasure (psychological hedonism). It’s important not to confuse these different uses of the word.

[4] For more on Epicurus and happiness, see Konstan (2018). For more on Bentham and Mill on happiness, see Driver (2014), as well as John Stuart Mill on The Good Life: Higher-Quality Pleasures by Dale E. Miller and Consequentialism by Shane Gronholz

[5] For more on Plato and happiness, see Frede (2017); for more on Aristotle and happiness, see Kraut (2018), and on the Stoics and happiness, see Baltzly (2019).

[6] For a discussion of the phenomenon of disappointment in this context see, for example, Ben Shahar (2007).

[7] For more objections to the desire satisfaction theory, see Shafer-Landau (2018) and Vitrano (2013).

[8] If happiness is life satisfaction, then happiness seems to be “subjective” in the sense that a person cannot be mistaken about whether or not she is happy. Whether happiness is subjective in this sense is controversial, and a person who thinks that a person can be mistaken about whether or not she is happy will probably favor a different theory of happiness.

[9] See Weimann, Knabe and Schob (2015) and Berk (2018).

Baltzly, Dirk, “Stoicism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

Berk, Kiki (2018). “Does Money Make Us Happy? The Prospects and Problems of Happiness Research in Economics,” in Journal of Happiness Studies, 19, 1241-1245.

Ben-Shahar, Tal (2007). Happier . New York: McGraw-Hill.

Driver, Julia, “The History of Utilitarianism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

Frede, Dorothea, “Plato’s Ethics: An Overview”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

Haybron, Dan, “Happiness”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

Konstan, David, “Epicurus”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

Kraut, Richard, “Aristotle’s Ethics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).

Shafer-Landau, Russ (2018). The Ethical Life: Fundamental Readings in Ethics and Moral Problems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vitrano, Christine (2013). The Nature and Value of Happiness. Boulder: Westview Press.

Weimann, Joachim, Andreas Knabe, and Ronnie Schob (2015). Measuring Happiness . Cambridge: The MIT Press.

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Dr. Kiki Berk is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southern New Hampshire University. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the VU University Amsterdam in 2010. Her research focuses on Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s philosophies of death and meaning in life.

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happiness , in psychology , a state of emotional well-being that a person experiences either in a narrow sense, when good things happen in a specific moment, or more broadly, as a positive evaluation of one’s life and accomplishments overall—that is, subjective well-being. Happiness can be distinguished both from negative emotions (such as sadness, fear, and anger) and also from other positive emotions (such as affection, excitement, and interest). This emotion often co-occurs with a specific facial expression: the smile .

People from around the world tend to have a similar concept of happiness and can recognize happiness in others. As a result, the specific emotion of happiness is often included as one of a small number of basic emotions that cannot be broken down into more fundamental emotions and that may combine to form other, more complex emotions (in fact, it is sometimes the only positive emotion that is considered to be basic). Thus, happiness is an important concept for researchers who study emotions.

An entire field of research has developed around the more inclusive concept of subjective well-being, which is characterized by a broad collection of happiness-related phenomena rather than a specific momentary emotion. As one might expect, people who are happy in this way tend to experience frequent positive emotions and infrequent negative emotions. This broader form of happiness is not purely emotional, however: it also has a cognitive component. When happy people are asked to think back on the conditions and events in their lives, they tend to evaluate these conditions and events positively. Thus, happy people report being satisfied with their lives and the various domains in their lives.

Interestingly, these different components of happiness do not always co-occur within the same person. It is possible that someone could experience a great deal of negative emotions yet still acknowledge that the conditions of his or her life are good ones. For example, someone who works with the poor, the sick, or the destitute may experience frequent negative emotions but may also feel satisfied with life because the work is worthwhile. Similarly, people who spend lots of time engaging in hedonistic pleasures may experience frequent momentary positive emotions, but they may also feel that life is empty and meaningless. Subjective well-being researchers are interested in the various factors that influence these distinct components.

Psychologists are interested in happiness for two reasons. First, psychologists study happiness because laypeople are interested in happiness. When people from around the world are asked to list the things that are most important to them, happiness consistently tops the list. People rank attaining happiness as being more important than acquiring money, maintaining good health, and even going to heaven. Psychologists believe that they can help people achieve this goal of being happy by studying the factors that are associated with happiness.

A second reason why psychologists study happiness is because a person’s evaluative responses to the world may provide information about the basic characteristics of human nature . One of the most basic principles guiding psychological theory is that people and animals are motivated to approach things in the world that cause pleasure and to avoid things in the world that cause pain . Presumably, this behavior results from adaptive mechanisms that guide organisms toward resources and away from dangers. If so, the evaluative reactions of many people about the world should be useful and revealing. For instance, some psychologists have suggested that human beings have a basic need to experience strong and supportive social relationships. They point to evidence from the field of subjective well-being to support their claim—a person’s social relationships are reliably linked to his or her happiness. Thus, cataloging the correlates of happiness should provide important information about the features of human nature.

The results of scientific studies reveal several trends. For instance, when researchers ask people to report on their happiness, their answers tend to be consistent over time: people who say they are happy now also tend to say that they are happy when asked again in the future. Because the conditions in people’s lives don’t usually change that frequently, the stability of happiness measures provides support for the idea that these measures truly do tap this important construct. In addition, research shows that when life events do occur, people’s reports of happiness change in response.

Perhaps more importantly, when psychologists try to assess happiness in a variety of different ways, these measures all seem to converge on the same answer. For instance, when researchers ask people to provide self-reports of happiness, they tend to agree with informant-reports of happiness—that is, ratings provided by friends and acquaintances. Furthermore, psychological tests—such as those that ask subjects to list as many positive memories as they can within a minute—may also determine who is happy without even asking for an explicit judgment of happiness, and, again, these measures tend to agree with self-reports. Psychologists can even find evidence of happiness in the brain: certain patterns of brain activity are reliably associated with happiness.

When psychologists track people’s levels of happiness, most people report being in mildly positive moods most of the time. In addition, when psychologists ask people to rate their overall life satisfaction, most people report scores that are above neutral. This research finding is not limited to relatively well-off samples (like the college students who are often asked to participate in psychological studies). Instead, it has been replicated in many different populations in many nations around the world. Thus, when psychologists study the correlates of happiness, they are usually looking for factors that distinguish the very happy from the mildly happy rather than the happy from the miserable.

Psychologists have arrived at several surprising conclusions in their search for predictors of happiness. Many of the factors that may first come to mind do not seem to play a major role in happiness. For example, although people strive to acquire high-paying jobs and dream about winning the lottery, income is not strongly correlated with happiness. Wealthy people are happier than poorer people, but the difference is not very large. As one might expect, the association between money and happiness is strongest among very poor groups and among poor countries. Income leads to smaller and smaller gains in happiness as income levels rise.

Health also plays a role in subjective well-being, but the associations are, again, surprisingly small. Surveys of representative populations show that objective measures (including doctors’ reports, hospital visits, and lists of symptoms) are very weakly correlated with happiness. Subjective reports (such as a person’s own evaluation of his or her health) tend to correlate more strongly, but even these associations are, at most, moderate in size. In addition, although people with major health problems, such as paralyzing spinal-cord injuries, are quite a bit less happy than uninjured people, the difference is not as large as some might expect. Even people with very serious illnesses tend to report happiness scores that are above neutral.

The factor that has been most closely linked to high levels of happiness is social relationships. Research consistently shows that people who have strong social relationships tend to report higher levels of well-being. As with other domains, subjective reports of relationship quality and relationship satisfaction tend to exhibit the highest correlations with subjective well-being. But even more objective measures, including the number of close friends a person has, the number of social organizations to which the person belongs, and the amount of time the person spends with others, all show small to moderate correlations with happiness. As one might expect based on this research, specific types of social relationships are also important for subjective well-being. For instance, marital status is one of the strongest demographic predictors of happiness. Married people consistently report higher levels of happiness than single people, who report greater happiness than the widowed, divorced, or separated. Interestingly, however, it does not appear that marriage itself causes higher levels of subjective well-being. Longitudinal studies show that people only receive a small boost in happiness around the time they get married, and they quickly adapt to baseline levels. The differences between married and unmarried people are due primarily to the lasting negative effects of divorce and widowhood, along with selection effects that might actually predispose happy people to marry.

Other demographic characteristics also show weak associations with happiness. Religious people tend to report greater happiness than nonreligious people, though the size of these effects varies depending on whether religious beliefs or religious behaviors are measured. Factors such as intelligence, education, and job prestige are also only slightly related to well-being. Happiness does not seem to change dramatically over the course of the life span, except perhaps at the very end of the life when declines are somewhat steep. In addition, sex differences in subjective well-being are not large.

In contrast to the relatively weak effects of external circumstance, research shows that internal factors play a strong role in subjective well-being. Individual differences in happiness-related variables emerge early in life, are stable over time, and are at least partially heritable. For instance, behavioral genetic studies show that identical twins who were reared apart are quite a bit more similar in their levels of happiness than are fraternal twins who were reared apart. This suggests that genes play an important role. Most estimates put the heritability of subjective well-being components at around 40–50 percent for positive emotional states and between 30–40 percent with respect to the negative emotional states of depression and anxiety .

Personality researchers have shown that at least some of these genetic effects may be due to the influence of specific personality traits on happiness. For example, the stable personality trait of extraversion is moderately correlated with positive affect (that is, the feeling of a positive emotion) and, to a lesser extent, with life satisfaction and negative affect (that is, the feeling of a negative emotion). People who are outgoing, assertive , and sociable tend to report more intense and more frequent positive emotions. This association is so robust that some psychologists have even suggested that the two constructs—extraversion and positive affect—are controlled by the same underlying physiological systems. Similarly, researchers have shown that the basic personality trait of neuroticism is moderately to strongly correlated with negative affect (and again, to a lesser extent, with life satisfaction and positive affect). This and other research on the links between happiness and traits (including factors such as optimism and self-esteem) show that personality plays a strong role in people’s subjective well-being.

There is a popular notion that the way that people view the world should influence their happiness. Some people always look for the silver lining in things, and presumably this positive outlook shapes the emotions that they feel. Psychologists, too, believe that the way that one thinks about the world is related to characteristic levels of happiness. A great deal of research has been conducted to examine the cognitive processes that affect a person’s subjective well-being.

For instance, many researchers examine the role that social comparison processes play in happiness. Initially, psychologists thought that people evaluated the conditions in their own lives by comparing them with the conditions in other people’s lives. Those individuals who are worse off than the people around them (in other words, people who experience upward comparisons) should experience unhappiness; those individuals who are better off than the people around them (in other words, people who experience downward comparisons) would experience happiness. Although this effect can occur, other research suggests that the processes are a bit more complicated. For one thing, both upward and downward comparisons can lead to either increases or decreases in happiness. People may look to someone who is better off and think either that they are performing terribly in comparison or that the other person serves as an example of an achievement toward which they can strive . Obviously, these two interpretations should lead to different effects on happiness. In addition, research shows that happy and unhappy people often choose different people for comparison. Happy people may choose comparison people who serve to maintain their happiness; unhappy people may choose comparisons that lead to less happiness. Thus, social comparison affects happiness in complicated ways.

Psychologists have also shown that goals and aspirations influence happiness. Not surprisingly, people who are rapidly approaching a goal tend to experience higher levels of happiness than people who are approaching a goal more slowly. But research also shows that simply having important goals is associated with greater happiness. Presumably, the sense of purpose that these goals create may protect people from the negative effects of temporary setbacks. Interestingly, the specific goals that people choose may also affect their happiness. Research suggests that choosing goals that are a challenge but not unachievable is important.

Although people tend to think about happiness as an outcome that they desire rather than as a tool that can be used to achieve additional goals, psychologists have begun to ask what function happiness serves. One of the best known theories, developed by American psychologist Barbara Fredrickson in 1998, posits that the function of happiness (or more precisely, the function of positive emotions) is to broaden one’s thinking and to build one’s resources. According to this theory, positive emotions lead people to think creatively and to try new things. As a result, happy people can develop new ways to approach the world, new interests, new social relationships, and even new physical skills. All of these effects lead to positive outcomes in people’s lives.

Psychologists have begun using experimental and longitudinal studies to determine whether positive affect plays a role in future positive outcomes. These studies provide evidence that happy people are more sociable and cooperative than unhappy people, are healthier than unhappy people, and earn more money than unhappy people. A number of studies have even shown that happy people live longer than unhappy people (and this is not just due to the fact that happy people tend to be healthy). Thus, although most people want to be happy because it feels good, this desired goal may lead to other positive outcomes in their lives.

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What Does Happiness Mean to You

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Embracing inner fulfillment, fostering connection and compassion, finding joy in the present, conclusion: a unique tapestry of happiness.

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There are roughly two philosophical literatures on “happiness,” each corresponding to a different sense of the term. One uses ‘happiness’ as a value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing. The other body of work uses the word as a purely descriptive psychological term, akin to ‘depression’ or ‘tranquility’. An important project in the philosophy of happiness is simply getting clear on what various writers are talking about: what are the important meanings of the term and how do they connect? While the “well-being” sense of happiness receives significant attention in the contemporary literature on well-being, the psychological notion is undergoing a revival as a major focus of philosophical inquiry, following on recent developments in the science of happiness. This entry focuses on the psychological sense of happiness (for the well-being notion, see the entry on well-being ). The main accounts of happiness in this sense are hedonism, the life satisfaction theory, and the emotional state theory. Leaving verbal questions behind, we find that happiness in the psychological sense has always been an important concern of philosophers. Yet the significance of happiness for a good life has been hotly disputed in recent decades. Further questions of contemporary interest concern the relation between the philosophy and science of happiness, as well as the role of happiness in social and political decision-making.

1.1 Two senses of ‘happiness’

1.2 clarifying our inquiry, 2.1 the chief candidates, 2.2 methodology: settling on a theory, 2.3 life satisfaction versus affect-based accounts, 2.4 hedonism versus emotional state, 2.5 hybrid accounts, 3.1 can happiness be measured, 3.2 empirical findings: overview, 3.3 the sources of happiness, 4.1 doubts about the value of happiness, 4.2 restoring happiness to the theory of well-being, 4.3 is happiness overrated, 5.1 normative issues, 5.2 mistakes in the pursuit of happiness, 5.3 the politics of happiness, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the meanings of ‘happiness’.

What is happiness? This question has no straightforward answer, because the meaning of the question itself is unclear. What exactly is being asked? Perhaps you want to know what the word ‘happiness’ means. In that case your inquiry is linguistic. Chances are you had something more interesting in mind: perhaps you want to know about the thing , happiness, itself. Is it pleasure, a life of prosperity, something else? Yet we can’t answer that question until we have some notion of what we mean by the word.

Philosophers who write about “happiness” typically take their subject matter to be either of two things, each corresponding to a different sense of the term:

A state of mind
A life that goes well for the person leading it

In the first case our concern is simply a psychological matter. Just as inquiry about pleasure or depression fundamentally concerns questions of psychology, inquiry about happiness in this sense—call it the (long-term) “psychological sense”—is fundamentally the study of certain mental states. What is this state of mind we call happiness? Typical answers to this question include life satisfaction, pleasure, or a positive emotional condition.

Having answered that question, a further question arises: how valuable is this mental state? Since ‘happiness’ in this sense is just a psychological term, you could intelligibly say that happiness isn’t valuable at all. Perhaps you are a high-achieving intellectual who thinks that only ignoramuses can be happy. On this sort of view, happy people are to be pitied, not envied. The present article will center on happiness in the psychological sense.

In the second case, our subject matter is a kind of value , namely what philosophers nowadays tend to call prudential value —or, more commonly, well-being , welfare , utility or flourishing . (For further discussion, see the entry on well-being . Whether these terms are really equivalent remains a matter of dispute, but this article will usually treat them as interchangeable.) “Happiness” in this sense concerns what benefits a person, is good for her, makes her better off, serves her interests, or is desirable for her for her sake. To be high in well-being is to be faring well, doing well, fortunate, or in an enviable condition. Ill-being, or doing badly, may call for sympathy or pity, whereas we envy or rejoice in the good fortune of others, and feel gratitude for our own. Being good for someone differs from simply being good, period: perhaps it is always good, period, for you to be honest; yet it may not always be good for you , as when it entails self-sacrifice. Not coincidentally, the word ‘happiness’ derives from the term for good fortune, or “good hap,” and indeed the terms used to translate it in other languages often have similar roots. In this sense of the term—call it the “well-being sense”—happiness refers to a life of well-being or flourishing: a life that goes well for you.

Importantly, to ascribe happiness in the well-being sense is to make a value judgment : namely, that the person has whatever it is that benefits a person. [ 1 ] If you and I and have different values, then we may well differ about which lives we consider happy. I might think Genghis Khan had a happy life, because I think what matters for well-being is getting what you want; while you deny this because you think a life of evildoing, however “successful,” is sad and impoverished.

Theories of well-being—and hence of “happiness” in the well-being sense—come in three basic flavors, according to the best-known taxonomy (Parfit 1984): hedonism, desire theories, and objective list theories. Whereas hedonists identify well-being roughly with experiences of pleasure, desire theorists equate it with the satisfaction of one’s desires— actually getting what you want, versus merely having certain experiences. Both hedonism and desire theories are in some sense subjectivist, since they ground well-being in the individual’s subjective states. Objective list theorists, by contrast, think some things benefit us independently of our attitudes or feelings: there are objective prudential goods. Aristotelians are the best-known example: they take well-being ( eudaimonia ) to consist in a life of virtuous activity—or more broadly, the fulfillment of our human capacities. A passive but contented couch potato may be getting what he wants, and he may enjoy it. But he would not, on Aristotelian and other objective list theories, count as doing well, or leading a happy life.

Now we can sharpen the initial question somewhat: when you ask what happiness is, are you asking what sort of life benefits a person? If so, then your question concerns matters of value, namely what is good for people—the sort of thing that ethical theorists are trained to address. Alternatively, perhaps you simply want to know about the nature of a certain state of mind—happiness in the psychological sense. In this case, some sort of psychological inquiry will be needed, either philosophical or scientific. (Laypersons often have neither sort of question in mind, but are really asking about the sources of happiness. Thus it might be claimed, say, that “happiness is being with good friends.” This is not a view about the nature or definition of happiness, but rather a theory about the sorts of things that tend to make us happy. It leaves unanswered, or takes for granted, the question of just what happiness is , such that friends are a good source of it.)

In short, philosophical “theories of happiness” can be about either of at least two different things: well-being, or a state of mind. [ 2 ] Accordingly, there are essentially two bodies of philosophical literature about “happiness” and two sets of debates about its nature, though writers often fail to distinguish them. Such failures have generated much confusion, sometimes yielding bogus disagreements that prove to be merely verbal. [ 3 ] For instance, some psychologists identify “happiness” with attitudes of life satisfaction while remaining neutral on questions of value, or whether Bentham, Mill, Aristotle, or any other thinker about the good life was correct. Such researchers employ the term in the psychological sense. Yet it is sometimes objected against such claims that life satisfaction cannot suffice for “happiness” because other things, like achievement or knowledge, matter for human well-being. The objectors are confused: their opponents have made no claims about well-being at all, and the two “sides,” as it were, are simply using ‘happiness’ to talk about different things. One might just as sensibly object to an economist’s tract on “banks” that it has nothing to say about rivers and streams.

Which use of ‘happiness’ corresponds to the true meaning of the term in contemporary English? Arguably, both. The well-being usage clearly dominates in the historical literature through at least the early modern era, for instance in translations of the ancient Greeks’ ‘ eudaimonia ’ or the Latin ‘ beatitudo ’, though this translation has long been a source of controversy. Jefferson’s famous reference to “the pursuit of happiness” probably employed the well-being sense. Even later writers such as Mill may have used the term in its well-being sense, though it is often difficult to tell since well-being itself is often taken to consist in mental states like pleasure. In ordinary usage, the abstract noun ‘happiness’ often invites a well-being reading. And the locution ‘happy life ’ may not naturally take a psychological interpretation, for the simple reason that lives aren’t normally regarded as psychological entities.

Contrast this with the very different meaning that seems to attach to talk of “ being happy.” Here it is much less clear that we are talking about a property of a person’s life; it seems rather to be a property of the person herself. To be happy, it seems, is just to be in a certain sort of psychological state or condition. Similarly when we say that so-and-so “is happy” (as opposed to saying that he is leading a happy life). This psychological usage, arguably, predominates in the current vernacular. Researchers engaged in the self-described “science of happiness” usually do not take themselves to be making value judgments when they proclaim individuals in their studies to be happy. Nor, when asserting that a life satisfaction study shows Utahans to be happier than New Yorkers, are they committing themselves to the tendentious claim that Utahans are better off . (If they are, then the psychology journals that are publishing this research may need to revise their peer-review protocols to include ethicists among their referees.) And the many recent popular books on happiness, as well as innumerable media accounts of research on happiness, nearly all appear to take it for granted that they are talking about nothing more than a psychological condition.

Henceforth ‘happiness’ will be used in the long-term psychological sense, unless otherwise specified. Note, however, that a number of important books and other works on “happiness” in recent decades have employed the well-being sense of the term. Books of this sort appear to include Almeder 2000, Annas 1993, 2011, Bloomfield 2014, Cahn and Vitrano 2015, Kenny and Kenny 2006, McMahon 2005, McPherson 2020, Noddings 2003, Russell 2013, White 2006, and Vitrano 2014, though again it is not always clear how a given author uses the term. For discussion of the well-being notion, see the entry on well-being . [ 4 ]

2. Theories of happiness

Philosophers have most commonly distinguished two accounts of happiness: hedonism , and the life satisfaction theory. Hedonists identify happiness with the individual’s balance of pleasant over unpleasant experience, in the same way that welfare hedonists do. [ 5 ] The difference is that the hedonist about happiness need not accept the stronger doctrine of welfare hedonism; this emerges clearly in arguments against the classical Utilitarian focus on happiness as the aim of social choice. Such arguments tend to grant the identification of happiness with pleasure, but challenge the idea that this should be our primary or sole concern, and often as well the idea that happiness is all that matters for well-being.

Life satisfaction theories identify happiness with having a favorable attitude toward one’s life as a whole. This basic schema can be filled out in a variety of ways, but typically involves some sort of global judgment: an endorsement or affirmation of one’s life as a whole. This judgment may be more or less explicit, and may involve or accompany some form of affect. It may also involve or accompany some aggregate of judgments about particular items or domains within one’s life. [ 6 ]

A third theory, the emotional state view, departs from hedonism in a different way: instead of identifying happiness with pleasant experience, it identifies happiness with an agent’s emotional condition as a whole, of what is often called “emotional well-being.” [ 7 ] This includes nonexperiential aspects of emotions and moods (or perhaps just moods), and excludes pleasures that don’t directly involve the individual’s emotional state. It might also include a person’s propensity for experiencing various moods, which can vary over time, though several authors have argued against this suggestion (e.g., Hill 2007, Klausen 2015, Rossi 2018). Happiness on such a view is more nearly the opposite of depression or anxiety—a broad psychological condition—whereas hedonistic happiness is simply opposed to unpleasantness. For example, a deeply distressed individual might distract herself enough with constant activity to maintain a mostly pleasant existence—broken only by tearful breakdowns during the odd quiet moment—thus perhaps counting as happy on a hedonistic but not emotional state view. The states involved in happiness, on an emotional state view, can range widely, far more so that the ordinary notion of mood or emotion. On one proposal, happiness involves three broad categories of affective state, including “endorsement” states like joy versus sadness, “engagement” states like flow or a sense of vitality, and “attunement” states like tranquility, emotional expansiveness versus compression, and confidence. Given the departures from commonsensical notions of being in a “good mood,” happiness is characterized in this proposal as “psychic affirmation,” or “psychic flourishing” in pronounced forms.

A fourth family of views, hybrid theories , attempts an irenic solution to our diverse intuitions about happiness: identify happiness with both life satisfaction and pleasure or emotional state, perhaps along with other states such as domain satisfactions. The most obvious candidate here is subjective well-being , which is typically defined as a compound of life satisfaction, domain satisfactions, and positive and negative affect. (Researchers often seem to identify happiness with subjective well-being, sometimes with life satisfaction, and perhaps most commonly with emotional or hedonic state.) The chief appeal of hybrid theories is their inclusiveness: all the components of subjective well-being seem important, and there is probably no component of subjective well-being that does not at times get included in “happiness” in ordinary usage.

How do we determine which theory is correct? Traditional philosophical methods of conceptual or linguistic analysis can give us some guidance, indicating that some accounts offer a better fit with the ordinary concept of happiness. Thus it has been argued that hedonism is false to the concept of happiness as we know it; the intuitions taken to support hedonism point instead to an emotional state view (Haybron 2001). And some have argued that life satisfaction is compatible with profoundly negative emotional states like depression—a suffering artist might not value emotional matters much, and wholeheartedly affirm her life (Carson 1981, Davis 1981b, Haybron 2005, Feldman 2010). Yet it might seem counterintuitive to deem such a person happy. At the same time, people do sometimes use ‘happiness’ to denote states of life satisfaction: life satisfaction theories do seem faithful to some ordinary uses of ‘happiness’. The trouble is that HAPPINESS appears to be a “mongrel concept,” as Ned Block (1995) called the concept of consciousness: the ordinary notion is something of a mess. We use the term to denote different things in different contexts, and often have no clear notion of what we are referring to. This suggests that accounts of happiness must be somewhat revisionary, and that we must assess theories on grounds other than simple fidelity to the lay concept of happiness—“descriptive adequacy,” in Sumner’s (1996) terms. One candidate is practical utility: which conception of happiness best answers to our interests in the notion? We talk about happiness because we care about it. The question is why we care about it, and which psychological states within the extension of the ordinary term make the most sense of this concern. Even if there is no simple answer to the question what happiness is, it may well turn out that our interests in happiness cluster so strongly around a particular psychological kind that happiness can best, or most profitably, be understood in terms of that type of state (Haybron 2003). Alternatively, we may choose to distinguish different varieties of happiness. It will be less important how we use the word, however, than that we be clear about the nature and significance of the phenomena that interest us.

The debate over theories of happiness falls along a couple of lines. The most interesting questions concern the choice between life satisfaction and affect-based views like hedonism and the emotional state theory. [ 8 ] Proponents of life satisfaction see two major advantages to their account. First, life satisfaction is holistic , ranging over the whole of one’s life, or the totality of one’s life over a certain period of time. It reflects not just the aggregate of moments in one’s life, but also the global quality of one’s life taken as a whole (but see Raibley 2010). And we seem to care not just about the total quantity of good in our lives, but about its distribution—a happy ending, say, counts for more than a happy middle (Slote 1982, Velleman 1991). Second, life satisfaction seems more closely linked to our priorities than affect is, as the suffering artist case illustrates. While a focus on affect makes sense insofar as we care about such matters, most people care about other things as well, and how their lives are going relative to their priorities may not be fully mirrored in their affective states. Life satisfaction theories thus seem to fit more closely with liberal ideals of individual sovereignty, on which how well my life is going for me is for me to decide. My satisfaction with my life seems to embody that judgment. Of course a theory of happiness need not capture everything that matters for well-being; the point is that a life satisfaction view might explain why we should care so much about happiness, and so enjoy substantive as well as intuitive support. [ 9 ]

But several objections have been raised against life satisfaction views. The most common complaint has already been noted, namely that a person could apparently be satisfied with her life even while leading a highly unpleasant or emotionally distressed existence, and it can seem counterintuitive to regard such a person as happy (see section 2.2). Some life satisfaction theorists deny that such cases are possible (Benditt 1978), but it could also be argued that such possibilities are part and parcel of life satisfaction’s appeal: some people may not get much pleasure out of life because they don’t care particularly about affective matters, and a life satisfaction theory allows that they can, in their own fashion, be happy.

Two other objections are more substantive, raising questions about whether life satisfaction has the right sort of importance. One concern is whether people often enough have well-grounded attitudes of life satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Evaluating one’s life as a whole can be a complicated business, and there is some question whether people typically have well-defined attitudes toward their lives that accurately reflect how well their lives measure up relative to their priorities. Some research, for instance, suggests that life satisfaction reports tend to reflect judgments made on the spot, drawing on whatever information comes readily to mind, with substantial influences by transient contextual factors like the weather, finding a dime, etc. (Schwarz and Strack 1999). Debate persists over whether this work undermines the significance of life satisfaction judgments, but it does raise a question whether life satisfaction attitudes tend to be well-enough grounded to have the kind of importance that people normally ascribe to happiness.

The third objection is somewhat intricate, so it will require some explaining. The claim is that a wide range of life satisfaction attitudes might be consistent with individuals’ perceptions of how well their lives are going relative to what they care about, raising doubts about the importance of life satisfaction (Haybron 2016). You might reasonably be satisfied when getting very little of what you want, or dissatisfied when getting most of what you want. One reason for this is that people tend to have many incommensurable values, leaving it open how to add them up. Looking at the various ups and downs of your life, it may be arbitrary whether to rate your life a four out of ten, or a seven. A second reason is that life satisfaction attitudes are not merely assessments of subjective success or personal welfare: they involve assessments of whether one’s life is good enough —satisfactory. Yet people’s values may radically underdetermine where they should set the bar for a “good enough” life, again rendering the judgment somewhat arbitrary. Given your values, you might reasonably be satisfied with a two, or require a nine to be satisfied. While it may seem important how well people see their lives going relative to what they care about, it is not obviously so important whether people see their lives going well enough that they are willing to judge them satisfactory.

If life satisfaction attitudes are substantially arbitrary relative to subjective success, then people might reasonably base those attitudes on other factors, such as ethical ideals (e.g., valuing gratitude or noncomplacency) or pragmatic concerns (e.g., comforting oneself). Shifts in perspective might also reasonably alter life satisfaction attitudes. After the funeral, you might be highly satisfied with your life, whereas the high school reunion leaves you dissatisfied; yet neither judgment need be mistaken, or less authoritative.

As a result, life satisfaction attitudes may be poor indicators of well-being, even from the individual’s own point of view. That people in a given country register high levels of life satisfaction may reflect nothing more than that they set the bar extremely low; they might be satisfied with anything short of pure agony. Another country’s citizens might be dissatisfied with their lives, but only because they set the bar much higher. Relative to what they care about, people in the dissatisfied nation could be better off than those in the satisfied nation. To take another example, a cancer patient might be more satisfied with his life than he was before the diagnosis, for he now looks at his life from a different perspective and emphasizes different virtues like fortitude and gratitude as opposed to (say) humility and non-complacency. Yet he need not think himself better off at all: he might believe himself worse off than he was when he was less satisfied. Neither judgment need seem to him or us to be mistaken: it’s just that he now looks at his life differently. Indeed, he might think he’s doing badly, even as he is satisfied with his life: he endorses it, warts and all, and is grateful just have his not-so-good life rather than some of the much worse alternatives.

For present purposes, the worry is that life satisfaction may not have the kind of significance happiness is normally thought to have. This may pose a difficulty for the identification of life satisfaction with happiness: for people frequently seem to use happiness as a proxy for well-being, a reasonably concrete and value-free stand-in that facilitates quick-and-dirty assessments of welfare. Given the discovery that someone is happy, we might infer that he is doing well; if we learn that someone is unhappy, we may conclude that she is doing poorly. Such inferences are defeasible: if we later find that the happy Ned’s wife and friends secretly hate him, we need not decide that he isn’t happy after all; we simply withdraw the conclusion that he is doing well. So long as happiness tracks well-being well enough in most cases, this sort of practice is perfectly respectable. But if we identify happiness with life satisfaction, then we may have a problem: maybe Sally is satisfied only because she values being grateful for the good things in life. This sort of case may not be merely a theoretical possibility: perhaps the very high rates of self-reported life satisfaction in the United States and many other places substantially reflects a broad acceptance of norms of gratitude and a general tendency to emphasize the positives, or perhaps a sense that not to endorse your life amounts to a lack of self-regard. It is not implausible that most people, even those enduring great hardship, can readily find grounds for satisfaction with their lives. Life may have to be pretty hard for a person to be incapable of affirming it.

Despite these concerns there is significant intuitive appeal in the idea that to be happy is to be satisfied with one’s life. Perhaps a different way of conceiving life satisfaction, for instance dispensing with the global judgment and aggregating particular satisfactions and dissatisfactions, would lessen the force of these objections. Alternatively, it is possible that idealized or qualified forms of life satisfaction would mitigate these concerns for some purposes, such as a theory of well-being. [ 10 ]

A second set of issues concerns the differences between the two affect-based views, hedonism and emotional state. The appeal of hedonism is fairly obvious: the pleasantness of our experience is plainly a matter of great significance; many have claimed it to be the only thing that matters. What, by contrast, motivates the emotional state account, which bears obvious similarities to hedonism yet excludes many pleasures from happiness? The question of motivation appears to be the chief worry facing the emotional state theory: what’s to be gained by focusing on emotional state rather than pleasure?

One argument for taking such a view is intuitive: some find it implausible to think that psychologically superficial pleasures invariably make a difference in how happy one is—the typical pleasure of eating a cracker, say, or even the intense pleasure of an orgasm that nonetheless fails to move one, as can happen with meaningless sexual activity. The intuitive distinction seems akin to distinctions made by some ancient philosophers; consider, for instance, the following passage from Epictetus’s Discourses :

‘I have a headache.’ Well, do not say ‘Alas!’ ‘I have an earache.’ Do not say ‘Alas!’ And I am not saying that it is not permissible to groan, only do not groan in the centre of your being . ( Discourses , 1.18.19, emphasis added).

The Stoics did not expect us never to feel unpleasant sensations, which would plainly be impossible; rather, the idea was not to let such things get to us , to impact our emotional conditions.

Why should anyone care to press such a distinction in characterizing happiness? For most people, the hedonic difference between happiness on an emotional state versus a hedonistic view is probably minimal. But while little will be lost, what will be gained? One possibility is that the more “central” affects involving our emotional conditions may bear a special relation to the person or the self , whereas more “peripheral” affects, like the pleasantness of eating a cracker, might pertain to the subpersonal aspects of our psychologies. Since well-being is commonly linked to ideas of self-fulfillment, this sort of distinction might signal a difference in the importance of these states. Another reason to focus on emotional condition rather than experience alone may be the greater psychological depth of the former: its impact on our mental lives, physiology, and behavior is arguably deeper and more pervasive. This enhances the explanatory and predictive significance of happiness, and more importantly its desirability: happiness on this view is not merely pleasant, but a major source of pleasure and other good outcomes (Fredrickson 2004, Lyubomirsky, King et al . 2005). Compare health on this score: while many think it matters chiefly or entirely because of its connection with pleasure, there are few skeptics about the importance of health. As well, emotional state views may capture the idea that happiness concerns the individual’s psychological orientation or disposition : to be happy, on an emotional state theory, is not just to be subjected to a certain sequence of experiences, but for one’s very being to manifest a favorable orientation toward the conditions of one’s life—a kind of psychic affirmation of one’s life. This reflects a point of similarity with life satisfaction views of happiness: contra hedonism, both views take happiness to be substantially dispositional, involving some sort of favorable orientation toward one’s life. But life satisfaction views tend to emphasize reflective or rational endorsement, whereas emotional state views emphasize the verdicts of our emotional natures.

While hedonism and emotional state theories are major contenders in the contemporary literature, all affect-based theories confront the worries, noted earlier, that motivate life satisfaction views—notably, their looser connection with people’s priorities, as well as their limited ability to reflect the quality of people’s lives taken as a whole.

Given the limitations of narrower theories of happiness, a hybrid account such as a subjective well-being theory may seem an attractive solution. This strategy has not been fully explored in the philosophical literature, though Sumner’s “life satisfaction” theory may best be classified as a hybrid (1996; see also Martin 2012). In any event, a hybrid approach draws objections of its own. If we arrive at a hybrid theory by this route, it could seem like either the marriage of two unpromising accounts, or of a promising account with an unpromising one. Such a union may not yield wholesome results. Second, people have different intuitions about what counts as happiness, so that no theory can accommodate all of them. Any theory that tries to thus risks pleasing no one. A third concern is that the various components of any hybrid are liable to matter for quite different reasons, so that happiness, thus understood, might fail to answer to any coherent set of concerns. Ascriptions of happiness could be relatively uninformative if they cast their net too widely.

3. The science of happiness

With the explosive rise of empirical research on happiness, a central question is how far, and how, happiness might be measured. [ 11 ] There seems to be no in-principle barrier to the idea of measuring, at least roughly, how happy people are. Investigators may never enjoy the precision of the “hedonimeter” once envisaged by Edgeworth to show just how happy a person is (Edgeworth 1881). Indeed, such a device might be impossible even in principle, since happiness might involve multiple dimensions that either cannot be precisely quantified or summed together. If so, it could still be feasible to develop approximate measures of happiness, or at least its various dimensions. Similarly, depression may not admit of precise quantification in a single number, yet many useful if imprecise measures of depression exist. In the case of happiness, it is plausible that even current measures provide information about how anxious, cheerful, satisfied, etc. people are, and thus tell us something about their happiness. Even the simplest self-report measures used in the literature have been found to correlate well with many intuitively relevant variables, such as friends’ reports, smiling, physiological measures, health, longevity, and so forth (Pavot 2008).

Importantly, most scientific research needs only to discern patterns across large numbers of individuals—to take an easy case, determining whether widows tend to be less happy than newlyweds—and this is compatible with substantial unreliability in assessing individual happiness. Similarly, an inaccurate thermometer might be a poor guide to the temperature, but readings from many such thermometers could correlate fairly well with actual temperatures—telling us, for instance, that Minnesota is colder than Florida.

This point reveals an important caveat: measures of happiness could correlate well with how happy people are, thus telling us which groups of people tend to be happier, while being completely wrong about absolute levels of happiness. Self-reports of happiness, for instance, might correctly indicate that unemployed people are considerably less happy than those with jobs. But every one of those reports could be wrong, say if everyone is unhappy yet claims to be happy, or vice-versa, so long as the unemployed report lower happiness than the employed. Similarly, bad thermometers may show that Minnesota is colder than Florida without giving the correct temperature.

Two morals emerge from these reflections. First, self-report measures of happiness could be reliable guides to relative happiness, though telling us little about how happy, in absolute terms, people are. We may know who is happier, that is, but not whether people are in fact happy. Second, even comparisons of relative happiness will be inaccurate if the groups being compared systematically bias their reports in different ways. This worry is particularly acute for cross-cultural comparisons of happiness, where differing norms about happiness may undermine the comparability of self-reports. The French might report lower happiness than Americans, for instance, not because their lives are less satisfying or pleasant, but because they tend to put a less positive spin on things. For this reason it may be useful to employ instruments, including narrower questions or physiological measures, that are less prone to cultural biasing. [ 12 ]

The discussion thus far has assumed that people can be wrong about how happy they are. Is this plausible? Some have argued that (sincerely) self-reported happiness cannot, even in principle, be mistaken. If you think you’re happy, goes a common sentiment, then you are happy. This claim is not plausible on a hedonistic or emotional state view of happiness, since those theories take judgments of happiness to encompass not just how one is feeling at the moment but also past states, and memories of those can obviously be spurious. Further, it has been argued that even judgments of how one feels at the present moment may often be mistaken, particularly regarding moods like anxiety. [ 13 ]

The idea that sincere self-reports of happiness are incorrigible can only be correct, it seems, given a quite specific conception of happiness—a kind of life satisfaction theory of happiness on which people count as satisfied with their lives so long as they are disposed to judge explicitly that they are satisfied with their lives on the whole. Also assumed here is that self-reports of happiness are in fact wholly grounded in life satisfaction judgments like these—that is, that people take questions about “happiness” to be questions about life satisfaction. Given these assumptions, we can plausibly conclude that self-reports of happiness are incorrigible. One question is whether happiness, thus conceived, is very important. As well, it is unlikely that respondents invariably interpret happiness questions as being about life satisfaction. At any rate, even life satisfaction theorists might balk at this variant of the account, since life satisfaction is sometimes taken to involve, not just explicit global judgments of life satisfaction, but also our responses to the particular things or domains we care about. Some will hesitate to deem satisfied people who hate many of the important things in their lives, however satisfied they claim to be with their lives as a whole.

In a similar vein, the common practice of measuring happiness simply by asking people to report explicitly on how “happy” they are is sometimes defended on the grounds that it lets people decide for themselves what happiness is. The reasoning again seems to presuppose, controversially, that self-reports of happiness employ a life satisfaction view of happiness, the idea being that whether you are satisfied (“happy”) will depend on what you care about. Alternatively, the point might be literally to leave it up to the respondent to decide whether ‘happy’ means hedonic state, emotional state, life satisfaction, or something else. Thus one respondent’s “I’m happy” might mean “my experience is generally pleasant,” while another’s might mean “I am satisfied with my life as a whole.” It is not clear, however, that asking ambiguous questions of this sort is a useful enterprise, since different respondents will in effect be answering different questions.

To measure happiness through self-reports, then, it may be wiser to employ terms other than ‘happiness’ and its cognates—terms whose meaning is relatively well-known and fixed. In other words, researchers should decide in advance what they want to measure—be it life satisfaction, hedonic state, emotional state, or something else—and then ask questions that refer unambiguously to those states. [ 14 ] This stratagem may be all the more necessary in cross-cultural work, where finding suitable translations of ‘happy’ can be daunting—particularly when the English meaning of the term remains a matter of contention (Wierzbicka 2004).

This entry focuses on subjective well-being studies, since that work is standardly deemed “happiness” research. But psychological research on well-being can take other forms, notably in the “eudaimonic”—commonly opposed to “hedonic”—literature, which assesses a broader range of indicators taken to represent objective human needs, such as meaning, personal growth, relatedness, autonomy, competence, etc. [ 15 ] (The assimilation of subjective well-being to the “hedonic” realm may be misleading, since life satisfaction seems primarily to be a non -hedonic value, as noted earlier.) Other well-being instruments may not clearly fall under either the “happiness” or eudaimonic rubrics, for instance extending subjective well-being measures by adding questions about the extent to which activities are seen as meaningful or worthwhile (White and Dolan 2009). An important question going forward is how far well-being research needs to incorporate indicators beyond subjective well-being.

The scientific literature on happiness has grown to proportions far too large for this article to do more than briefly touch on a few highlights. [ 16 ] Here is a sampling of oft-cited claims:

Most people are happy
People adapt to most changes, tending to return over time to their happiness “set point”
People are prone to make serious mistakes in assessing and pursuing happiness
Material prosperity has a surprisingly modest impact on happiness

The first claim, that most people are happy, appears to be a consensus position among subjective well-being researchers (for a seminal argument, see Diener and Diener 1996). The contention reflects three lines of evidence: most people, in most places, report being happy; most people report being satisfied with their lives; and most people experience more positive affect than negative. On any of the major theories of happiness, then, the evidence seems to show that most people are, indeed, happy. Yet this conclusion might be resisted, on a couple of grounds. First, life satisfaction theorists might question whether self-reports of life satisfaction suffice to establish that people are in fact satisfied with their lives. Perhaps self-reports can be mistaken, say if the individual believes herself satisfied yet shows many signs of dissatisfaction in her behavior, for instance complaining about or striving to change important things in her life. Second, defenders of affect-based theories—hedonistic and emotional state views—might reject the notion that a bare majority of positive affect suffices for happiness. While the traditional view among hedonists has indeed been that happiness requires no more than a >1:1 ratio of positive to negative affect, this contention has received little defense and has been disputed in the recent literature. Some investigators have claimed that “flourishing” requires greater than a 3:1 ratio of positive to negative affect, as this ratio might represent a threshold for broadly favorable psychological functioning (e.g., Larsen and Prizmic 2008). While the evidence for any specific ratio is highly controversial, if anything like this proportion were adopted as the threshold for happiness, on a hedonistic or emotional state theory, then some of the evidence taken to show that people are happy could in fact show the opposite. In any event, the empirical claim relies heavily on nontrivial philosophical views about the nature of happiness, illustrating one way in which philosophical work on happiness can inform scientific research.

The second claim, regarding adaptation and set points, reflects well-known findings that many major life events, like being disabled in an accident or winning the lottery, appear strongly to impact happiness only for a relatively brief period, after which individuals may return to a level of happiness not very different from before. [ 17 ] As well, twin studies have found that subjective well-being is substantially heritable, with .50 being a commonly accepted figure. Consequently many researchers have posited that each individual has a characteristic “set point” level of happiness, toward which he tends to gravitate over time. Such claims have caused some consternation over whether the pursuit and promotion of happiness are largely futile enterprises (Lykken and Tellegen 1996; Millgram 2000). However, the dominant view now seems to be that the early claims about extreme adaptation and set points were exaggerated: while adaptation is a very real phenomenon, many factors—including disability—can have substantial, and lasting, effects on how happy people are. [ 18 ] This point was already apparent from the literature on correlates and causes of happiness, discussed below: if things like relationships and engaging work are important for happiness, then happiness is probably not simply a matter of personality or temperament. As well, the large cross-national differences in measured happiness are unlikely to be entirely an artifact of personality variables. Note that even highly heritable traits can be strongly susceptible to improvement. Better living conditions have raised the stature of men in the Netherlands by eight inches—going from short (five foot four) to tall (over six feet)—in the last 150 years (Fogel 2005). Yet height is considered much more heritable than happiness, with typical heritability estimates ranging from .60 to over .90 (e.g., Silventoinen, Sammalisto et al . 2003). [ 19 ]

The question of mistakes will be taken up in section 5.2. But the last claim—that material prosperity has relatively modest impacts on happiness—has lately become the subject of heated debate. For some time the standard view among subjective well-being researchers was that, beyond a low threshold where basic needs are met, economic gains have only a small impact on happiness levels. According to the well-known “Easterlin Paradox,” for instance, wealthier people do tend to be happier within nations, but richer nations are little happier than less prosperous counterparts, and—most strikingly—economic growth has virtually no impact (Easterlin 1974). In the U.S., for example, measured happiness has not increased significantly since at least 1947, despite massive increases in wealth and income. In short, once you’re out of poverty, absolute levels of wealth and income make little difference in how happy people are.

Against these claims, some authors have argued that absolute income has a large impact on happiness across the income spectrum (e.g., Stevenson and Wolfers 2008). The question continues to be much debated, but in 2010 a pair of large-scale studies using Gallup data sets, including improved measures of life satisfaction and affect, suggested that both sides may be partly right (Kahneman and Deaton 2010; Diener, Ng et al . 2010). Surveying large numbers of Americans in one case, and what is claimed to be the first globally representative sample of humanity in the other, these studies found that income does indeed correlate substantially (.44 in the global sample), at all levels, with life satisfaction—strictly speaking, a “life evaluation” measure that asks respondents to rate their lives without saying whether they are satisfied. Yet the correlation of household income with the affect measures is far weaker: globally, .17 for positive affect, –.09 for negative affect; and in the United States, essentially zero above $75,000 (though quite strong at low income levels). For more recent discussions of empirical work, see Jebb et al. 2018 along with relevant chapters in Diener et al. 2018 and the annual World Happiness Reports from 2012 onward (Helliwell et al. 2012). Research on the complex money-happiness relationship resists simple characterization, but a crude summary is that the connection tends to be positive and substantial, strong at lower income levels while modest to weak or even negative at higher incomes, and stronger and less prone to satiation for life evaluation than emotional well-being metrics. But again, these are very rough generalizations that gloss over a variety of important factors and admit of many exceptions across both individuals and societies.

In short, the relationship between money and happiness may depend on which theory of happiness we accept: on a life satisfaction view, the relationship may be strong; whereas affect-based views may yield a much weaker connection, again above some modest threshold. Here, again, philosophical views about the nature and significance of happiness may play an important role in understanding empirical results and their practical upshot. Economic growth, for instance, has long been a top priority for governments, and findings about its impact on human well-being may have substantial implications for policy.

It is important to note that studies of this nature focus on generic trends, not specific cases, and there is no dispute that significant exceptions exist—notably, populations that enjoy high levels of happiness amid low levels of material prosperity. Among others, a number of Latin American countries, Maasai herders, Inughuit hunter-gatherers, and Amish communities have registered highly positive results in subjective well-being studies, sometimes higher than those in many affluent nations, and numerous informal accounts accord with the data. [ 20 ] Such “positive outliers” suggest that some societies can support high levels of happiness with extremely modest material holdings. The importance of money for happiness may depend strongly on what kind of society one inhabits. An interesting question, particularly in light of common environmental concerns, is how far the lessons of such societies can, or should, be transferred to other social forms, where material attainment and happiness are presently more tightly coupled. Perhaps some degree of decoupling of happiness and money would be desirable.

So the role of money in happiness appears, at this juncture, to be a mixed bag, depending heavily on how we conceive of happiness and what range of societies we are considering. What (else), then, does matter most for happiness? There is no definitive list of the main sources of happiness in the literature, partly because it is not clear how to divide them up. But the following items seem generally to be accepted as among the chief correlates of happiness: supportive relationships, engagement in interesting and challenging activities, material and physical security, a sense of meaning or purpose, a positive outlook, and autonomy or control. [ 21 ] Significant correlates may also include—among many others—religion, good governance, trust, helping others, values (e.g., having non-materialistic values), achieving goals, not being unemployed, and connection with the natural environment. [ 22 ]

An illustrative study of the correlates of happiness from a global perspective is the Gallup World Poll study noted earlier (Diener, Ng et al . 2010; see also Jebb et al. 2020). In that study, the life satisfaction measure was more strongly related to material prosperity, as noted above: household income, along with possession of luxury conveniences and satisfaction with standard of living. The affect measures, by contrast, correlated most strongly with what the authors call “psychosocial prosperity”: whether people reported being treated with respect in the last day, having family and friends to count on, learning something new, doing what they do best, and choosing how their time was spent.

What these results show depends partly on the reliability of the measures. One possible source of error is that this study might exaggerate the relationship between life satisfaction and material attainments through the use of a “ladder” scale for life evaluation, ladders being associated with material aspirations. Errors might also arise through salience biases whereby material concerns might be more easily recalled than other important values, such as whether one has succeeded in having children; or through differences in positivity biases across income levels (perhaps wealthier people tend to be more “positive-responding” than poorer individuals). Another question is whether the affect measures adequately track the various dimensions of people’s emotional lives. However, the results are roughly consonant with other research, so they are unlikely to be entirely an artifact of the instruments used in this study. [ 23 ] A further point of uncertainty is the causal story behind the correlations—whether the correlates, like psychosocial prosperity, cause happiness; whether happiness causes them; whether other factors cause both; or, as is likely, some combination of the three.

Such concerns duly noted, the research plausibly suggests that, on average, material progress has some tendency to help people to better get what they want in life, as found in the life satisfaction measures, while relationships and engaging activities are more important for people’s emotional lives. What this means for happiness depends on which view of happiness is correct.

4. The importance of happiness

Were you to survey public attitudes about the value of happiness, at least in liberal Western democracies, you would likely find considerable support for the proposition that happiness is all that really matters for human well-being. Many philosophers over the ages have likewise endorsed such a view, typically assuming a hedonistic account of happiness. (A few, like Almeder 2000, have identified well-being with happiness understood as life satisfaction.)

Most philosophers, however, have rejected hedonistic and other mental state accounts of well-being, and with them the idea that happiness could suffice for well-being. [ 24 ] (See the entry on well-being .) Objections to mental state theories of well-being tend to cluster around two sets of concerns. First, it is widely believed that the non-mental conditions of our lives matter for well-being: whether our families really love us, whether our putative achievements are genuine, whether the things we care about actually obtain. The most influential objection of this sort is Robert Nozick’s experience machine case, wherein we are asked to imagine a virtual reality device that can perfectly simulate any reality for its user, who will think the experience is genuine (Nozick 1974). Would you plug in to such a machine for life? Most people would not, and the case is widely taken to vitiate mental state theories of well-being. Beyond having positive mental states, it seems to matter both that our lives go well and that our state of mind is appropriately related to how things are. [ 25 ]

A second set of objections concerns various ways in which a happy person might nonetheless seem intuitively to be leading an impoverished or stunted life. The most influential of these worries involves adaptation , where individuals facing oppressive circumstances scale back their expectations and find contentment in “small mercies,” as Sen put it. [ 26 ] Even a slave might come to internalize the values of his oppressors and be happy, and this strikes most as an unenviable life indeed. Related worries involve people with diminished capacities (blindness, Down Syndrome), or choosing to lead narrow and cramped or simpleminded lives (e.g., counting blades of grass). Worries about impoverished lives are a prime motivator of Aristotelian theories of well-being, which emphasize the full and proper exercise of our human capacities.

In the face of these and other objections most commentators have concluded that neither happiness nor any other mental state can suffice for well-being. Philosophical interest in happiness has consequently flagged, since its theoretical importance becomes unclear if it does not play a starring role in our account of the good.

Even as happiness might fail to suffice for well-being, well-being itself may be only one component of a good life , and not the most important one at that. Here ‘good life’ means a life that is good all things considered, taking account of all the values that matter in life, whether they benefit the individual or not. Kant, for example, considered both morality and well-being to be important but distinct elements of a good life. Yet morality should be our first priority, never to be sacrificed for personal happiness.

In fact there is a broad consensus, or near-consensus, among ethical theorists on a doctrine we might call the priority of virtue : broadly and crudely speaking, the demands of virtue or morality trump other values in life. [ 27 ] We ought above all to act and live well, or at least not badly or wrongly. This view need not take the strong form of insisting that we must always act as virtuously as possible, or that moral reasons always take precedence. But it does mean, at least, that when being happy requires acting badly, one’s happiness must be sacrificed. If it would be wrong to leave your family, in which you are unhappy, then you must remain unhappy, or find more acceptable ways to seek happiness.

The mainstream views in all three of the major approaches to ethical theory—consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics—agree on some form of the priority of virtue. Where these views chiefly differ is not on the importance of being good, but on whether being good necessarily benefits us. Virtue ethicists tend to answer in the affirmative, the other two schools in the negative. Building virtue into well-being, as Aristotelians do, may seem to yield a more demanding ethics, and in some ways it does. Yet many deontologists and consequentialists—notably Kant—advocate sterner, more starkly moralistic visions of the good life than Aristotle would ever have dreamt of (e.g., Singer 1972).

Happiness, in short, is believed by most philosophers to be insufficient for well-being, and still less important for the good life. These points may seem to vitiate any substantial role for happiness in ethical thought. However, well-being itself is still regarded as a central concept in ethical thought, denoting one of the chief elements of a good life even if not the sole element. And there are reasons for thinking happiness important, both practically and theoretically, despite the worries noted above.

Even if happiness does not suffice for well-being—a point that not all philosophers would accept—it might still rate a privileged spot in theories of well-being. This could happen in either of two ways.

First, happiness could be a major component of a theory of well-being. Objective list theories of well-being sometimes include happiness or related mental states such as enjoyment among the fundamental constituents of well-being. A more ambitious proposal, originated by L.W. Sumner, identifies well-being with authentic happiness —happiness that is authentic in the sense of being both informed and autonomous (Sumner 1996). The root idea is that well-being involves being happy, where one’s happiness is a response of one’s own (autonomous), to a life that genuinely is one’s own (informed). The authenticity constraint is meant to address both experience machine-type worries and “happy slave” objections relating to adaptation, where happiness may be non-autonomous, depending on manipulation or the uncritical acceptance of oppressive values. Since these have been the most influential objections to mental state accounts of well-being, Sumner’s approach promises to considerably strengthen the position of happiness-centered approaches to well-being, and several philosophers have developed variants or close relations of the authentic happiness theory (Brülde 2007, Haybron 2008a, Tiberius and Plakias 2010, Višak 2015). The approach remains fairly new, however, so its long-term prospects remain unclear. [ 28 ]

A second strategy forsakes the project of giving a unitary theory of well-being, recognizing instead a family of two or more kinds of prudential value. Happiness could be central to, or even exhaustive of, one of those values. Shelly Kagan, for instance, has suggested that welfare hedonism could be correct as a theory of how well a person is doing, but not of how well a person’s life is going, which should perhaps be regarded as a distinct value (Kagan 1992, 1994). In short, we might distinguish narrow and wide well-being concepts. An experience machine user might be doing well in the narrow sense, but not the wide—she is doing well, though her life is quite sad. Happiness might, then, suffice for well-being, but only in the narrow sense. Others have made similar points, but uptake has been limited, perhaps because distinguishing multiple concepts of prudential value makes the already difficult job of giving a theory of well-being much harder, as Kagan pointedly observes. [ 29 ] An interesting possibility is that the locution ‘happy life’, and the corresponding well-being sense of happiness, actually refers to a specific variety of well-being—perhaps well-being in the wide sense just suggested, or well-being taken as an ideal state, an ultimate goal of deliberation. This might explain the continued use of ‘happiness’ for the well-being notion in the philosophical literature, rather than the more standard ‘wellbeing.’

The preceding section discussed ways that happiness might figure prominently even in non-mental state theories of well-being. The question there concerned the role of happiness in theories of well-being. This is a different question from how important happiness is for well-being itself. Even a theory of well-being that includes no mention at all of happiness can allow that happiness is nonetheless a major component or contributor to well-being, because of its relation to the things that ultimately constitute well-being. If you hold a desire theory of well-being, for instance, you will very likely allow that, for most people, happiness is a central aspect of well-being, since most people very much desire to be happy. Indeed, some desire theorists have argued that the account actually yields a form of hedonism, on the grounds that people ultimately desire nothing else but happiness or pleasure (Sidgwick 1907 [1966], Brandt 1979, 1989).

Happiness may be thought important even on theories normally believed to take a dismissive view of it. Aristotelians identify well-being with virtuous activity, yet Aristotle plainly takes this to be a highly pleasant condition, indeed the most pleasant kind of life there is (see, e.g., NE , Bk. I 8; Bk. VII 13). You cannot flourish, on Aristotelian terms, without being happy, and unhappiness is clearly incompatible with well-being. Even the Stoics, who notoriously regard all but a virtuous inner state as at best indifferent, would still assign happiness a kind of importance: at the very least, to be unhappy would be unvirtuous; and virtue itself arguably entails a kind of happiness, namely a pleasant state of tranquility. As well, happiness would likely be a preferred indifferent in most cases, to be chosen over unhappiness. To be sure, both Aristotelian and Stoic accounts are clear that happiness alone does not suffice for well-being, that its significance is not what common opinion takes it to be, and that some kinds of happiness can be worthless or even bad. But neither denies that happiness is somehow quite important for human well-being.

In fact it is questionable whether any major school of philosophical thought denies outright the importance of happiness, at least on one of the plausible accounts of the matter. Doubts about its significance probably owe to several factors. Some skeptics, for example, focus on relatively weak conceptions of happiness, such as the idea that it is little more than the simple emotion of feeling happy—an idea that few hedonists or emotional state theorists would accept. Or, alternatively, assuming that a concern for happiness has only to do with positive states. Yet ‘happiness’ also serves as a blanket term for a domain of concern that involves both positive and negative states, namely the kinds of mental states involved in being happy or unhappy. Just as “health” care tends to focus mainly on ill health, so might happiness researchers choose to focus much of their effort on the study and alleviation of unhappiness—depression, suffering, anxiety, and other conditions whose importance is uncontroversial. The study of happiness need be no more concerned with smiles than with frowns.

5. The pursuit and promotion of happiness

The last set of questions we will examine centers on the pursuit of happiness, both individual and collective. Most of the popular literature on happiness discusses how to make oneself happier, with little attention given to whether this is an appropriate goal, or how various means of pursuing happiness measure up from an ethical standpoint. More broadly, how if at all should one pursue happiness as part of a good life?

We saw earlier that most philosophers regard happiness as secondary to morality in a good life. The individual pursuit of happiness may be subject to nonmoral norms as well, prudence being the most obvious among them. Prudential norms need not be as plain as “don’t shoot yourself in the foot.” On Sumner’s authentic happiness view of well-being, for instance, we stand to gain little by pursuing happiness in inauthentic ways, for instance through self-deception or powerful drugs like Huxley’s soma , which guarantees happiness come what may (Huxley 1932 [2005]). The view raises interesting questions about the benefits of less extreme pharmaceuticals, such as the therapeutic use of antidepressants; such medications can make life more pleasant, but many people worry whether they pose a threat to authenticity, perhaps undercutting their benefits. It is possible that such drugs involve prudential tradeoffs, promoting well-being in some ways while undermining it in others; whether the tradeoffs are worth it will depend on how, in a given case, the balance is struck. Another possibility is that such drugs sometimes promote authenticity, if for instance a depressive disorder prevents a person from being “himself.”

Looking to more broadly ethical, but not yet moral, norms, it may be possible to act badly without acting either immorally or imprudently. While Aristotle himself regarded acting badly as inherently imprudent, his catalogue of virtues is instructive, as many of them (wit, friendliness, etc.) are not what we normally regard as moral virtues. Some morally permissible methods of pursuing happiness may nonetheless be inappropriate because they conflict with such “ethical” virtues. They might, for instance, be undignified or imbecilic.

Outwardly virtuous conduct undertaken in the name of personal happiness might, if wrongly motivated, be incompatible with genuine virtue. One might, for instance, engage in philanthropy solely to make oneself happier, and indeed work hard at fine-tuning one’s assistance to maximize the hedonic payoff. This sort of conduct would not obviously instantiate the virtue of compassion or kindness, and indeed might be reasonably deemed contemptible. Similarly, it might be admirable, morally or otherwise, to be grateful for the good things in one’s life. Yet the virtue of gratitude might be undermined by certain kinds of gratitude intervention, whereby one tries to become happier by focusing on the things one is grateful for. If expressions of gratitude become phony or purely instrumental, the sole reason for giving thanks being to become happy—and not that one actually has something to be thankful for—then the “gratitude” might cease to be admirable, and may indeed be unvirtuous. [ 30 ]

A different question is what means of pursuing happiness are most effective . This is fundamentally an empirical question, but there are some in-principle issues that philosophical reflection might inform. One oft-heard claim, commonly called the “paradox of hedonism,” is that the pursuit of happiness is self-defeating; to be happy, don’t pursue happiness. It is not clear how to interpret this dictum, however, so that it is both interesting and true. It is plainly imprudent to make happiness one’s focus at every moment, but doubtful that this has often been denied. Yet never considering happiness also seems an improbable strategy for becoming happier. If you are choosing among several equally worthwhile occupations, and have good evidence that some of them will make you miserable, while one of them is likely to be highly fulfilling, it would not seem imprudent to take that information into account. Yet to do so just is to pursue happiness. The so-called paradox of hedonism is perhaps best seen as a vague caution against focusing too much on making oneself happy, not a blanket dismissal of the prospects for expressly seeking happiness—and for this modest point there is good empirical evidence (Schooler, Ariely et al . 2003, Lyubomirsky 2007).

That happiness is sometimes worth seeking does not mean we will always do a good job of it (Haybron 2008b). In recent decades a massive body of empirical evidence has gathered on various ways in which people seem systematically prone to make mistakes in the pursuit of their interests, including happiness. Such tendencies have been suggested in several domains relating to the pursuit of happiness, including (with recent surveys cited):

Assessing how happy we are, or were in the past (Haybron 2007)
Predicting (“forecasting”) what will make us happy (Gilbert 2006)
Choosing rationally (Kahneman and Tversky 2000, Gilovitch, Griffin et al . 2002, Hsee and Hastie 2006)

A related body of literature explores the costs and benefits of (ostensibly) making it easier to pursue happiness by increasing people’s options; it turns out that having more choices might often make people less happy, for instance by increasing the burdens of deliberation or the likelihood of regret (Schwartz 2004). Less discussed in this context, but highly relevant, is the large body of research indicating that human psychology and behavior are remarkably prone to unconscious social and other situational influences, most infamously reported in the Milgram obedience experiments (Doris 2002, 2015, Haybron 2014). Human functioning, and the pursuit of happiness, may be more profoundly social than many commentators have assumed. [ 31 ]

Taken together, this research bears heavily on two central questions in the philosophical literature: first, the broad character of human nature (e.g., in what sense are we rational animals? How should we conceive of human autonomy?); second, the philosophical ideals of the good society and good government.

Just a decade ago the idea of happiness policy was something of a novelty. While it remains on the fringes in some locales, notably the United States, in much of the world there has been a surge of interest in making happiness an explicit target of policy consideration. Attention has largely shifted, however, to a broader focus on well-being to reflect not just happiness but also other welfare concerns of citizens, and dozens of governments now incorporate well-being metrics in their national statistics. [ 32 ]

Let’s consider the rationale for policies aimed at promoting well-being. In political thought, the modern liberal tradition has tended to assume an optimistic view of human nature and the individual’s capacities for prudent choice. Partly for this reason, the preservation and expansion of individual freedoms, including people’s options, is widely taken to be a central goal, if not the goal, of legitimate governments. People should be freed to seek the good life as they see it, and beyond that the state should, by and large, stay out of the well-being-promotion business.

This vision of the good society rests on empirical assumptions that have been the subject of considerable debate. If it turns out that people systematically and predictably err in the pursuit of their interests, then it may be possible for governments to devise policies that correct for such mistakes. [ 33 ] Of course, government intervention can introduce other sorts of mistakes, and there is some debate about whether such measures are likely to do more harm than good (e.g., Glaeser 2006).

But even if governments cannot effectively counteract human imprudence, it may still be that people fare better in social forms that influence or even constrain choices in ways that make serious mistakes less likely. (Food culture and its impact on health may be an instructive example here.) The idea that people tend to fare best when their lives are substantially constrained or guided by their social and physical context has recently been dubbed contextualism ; the contrary view, that people do best when their lives are, as much as possible, determined by the individuals themselves, is individualism (Haybron 2008b). Recent contextualists include communitarians and many perfectionists, though contextualism is not a political doctrine and is compatible with liberalism and even libertarian political morality. Contextualism about the promotion of well-being is related to recent work in moral psychology that emphasizes the social character of human agency, such as situationism and social intuitionism. [ 34 ]

Quite apart from matters of efficacy, there are moral questions about the state promotion of happiness, which has been a major subject of debate, both because of the literature on mistakes and research suggesting that the traditional focus of state efforts to promote well-being, economic growth, has a surprisingly modest impact on happiness. One concern is paternalism : does happiness-based policy infringe too much on personal liberty? Some fear a politics that may too closely approximate Huxley’s Brave New World, where the state ensures a drug-induced happiness for all (Huxley 1932 [2005]). Extant policy suggestions, however, have been more modest. Efforts to steer choice, for instance in favor of retirement savings, may be paternalistic, but advocates argue that such policies can be sufficiently light-handed that no one should object to them, in some cases even going so far as to deem it “libertarian paternalism” (Thaler and Sunstein 2008). [ 35 ] The idea is that gentle “nudges,” like setting default options on hiring forms to setting aside money for retirement, interfere only trivially with choice, imposing little or no cost for those who wish to choose differently, and would very likely be welcomed by most of those targeted.

Also relatively light-handed, and perhaps not paternalistic at all, are state efforts to promote happiness directly through social policy, for instance by prioritizing unemployment over economic growth on the grounds that the former has a larger impact on happiness. Other policies might include trying to reduce commute times, or making walkable neighborhoods and green space a priority in urban planning, again on happiness grounds. Some may deem such measures paternalistic insofar as they trade freedom (in the form of economic prosperity) for a substantive good, happiness, that people value unevenly, though it has also been argued that refusing to take citizens’ values like happiness into consideration in policy deliberation on their behalf can amount to paternalism (Haybron and Alexandrova 2013).

A related sort of objection to happiness-based policy argues that happiness, or even well-being, is simply the wrong object of policy, which ought instead to focus on the promotion of resources or capabilities (Rawls 1971, Nussbaum 2000, Quong 2011, Sen 2009). Several reasons have been cited for this sort of view, one being that policies aimed at promoting happiness or well-being violate commonly accepted requirements of “liberal neutrality,” according to which policy must be neutral among conceptions of the good. According to this constraint, governments must not promote any view of the good life, and happiness-based policy might be argued to flout it. Worries about paternalism also surface here, the idea being that states should only focus on affording people the option to be happy or whatever, leaving the actual achievement of well-being up to the autonomous individual. As we just saw, however, it is not clear how far happiness policy initiatives actually infringe on personal liberty or autonomy. A further worry is that, happiness isn’t really, or primarily, what matters for human well-being (Nussbaum 2008).

But a major motivation for thinking happiness the wrong object of policy is that neither happiness nor well-being are the appropriate focus of a theory of justice . What justice requires of society, on this view, is not that it make us happy; we do not have a right to be happy. Rather, justice demands only that each has sufficient opportunity (in the form of resources or capabilities, say) to achieve a good life, or that each gets a fair share of the benefits of social cooperation. However plausible such points may be, it is not clear how far they apply to many proposals for happiness-based policy, save the strongest claims that happiness should be the sole aim of policy: many policy decisions are not primarily concerned with questions of social justice, nor with constitutional fundamentals, the focus of some theories of justice. Happiness could be a poor candidate for the “currency” of justice, yet still remain a major policy concern. Indeed, the chief target of happiness policy advocates has been, not theories of justice, but governments’ overwhelming emphasis on promoting GDP and other indices of economic growth. This is not, in the main, a debate about justice, and as of yet the philosophical literature has not extensively engaged with it.

However, the push for happiness-based policy is a recent development. In coming years, such questions will likely receive considerably more attention in the philosophical literature.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

World Database of Happiness , Erasmus University of Rotterdam.
Positive Psychology Center , University of Pennsylvania.
The Happiness and Well-Being Project , with Suggested Readings and links to Funded Research , Saint Louis University.

Acknowledgments

For helpful comments, many thanks are due to Anna Alexandrova, Robert Biswas-Diener, Thomas Carson, Irwin Goldstein, Richard Lucas, Jason Raibley, Eric Schwitzgebel, Stephen Schueller, Adam Shriver, Edward Zalta, and an anonymous referee for the SEP. Portions of Section 2 are adapted from Haybron 2008, “Philosophy and the Science of Subjective Well-Being,” in Eid and Larsen, The Science of Subjective Well-Being , and used with kind permission of Guilford Press.

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What Is Happiness?

Reviewed by Psychology Today Staff

Happiness is an electrifying and elusive state. Philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and even economists have long sought to define it. And since the 1990s, a whole branch of psychology— positive psychology —has been dedicated to pinning it down. More than simply positive mood, happiness is a state of well-being that encompasses living a good life, one with a sense of meaning and deep contentment.

Feeling joyful has its health perks as well. A growing body of research also suggests that happiness can improve your physical health; feelings of positivity and fulfillment seem to benefit cardiovascular health, the immune system, inflammation levels, and blood pressure, among other things. Happiness has even been linked to a longer lifespan as well as a higher quality of life and well-being.

Attaining happiness is a global pursuit. Researchers find that people from every corner of the world rate happiness more important than other desirable personal outcomes, such as obtaining wealth, acquiring material goods, and getting into heaven.

Happiness is not the result of bouncing from one joy to the next; researchers find that achieving happiness typically involves times of considerable dis comfort. Genetic makeup, life circumstances, achievements, marital status, social relationships, even your neighbors—all influence how happy you are. Or can be. So do individual ways of thinking and expressing feelings. Research shows that much of happiness is under personal control.

Regularly indulging in small pleasures, getting absorbed in challenging activities, setting and meeting goals , maintaining close social ties, and finding purpose beyond oneself all increase life satisfaction. It isn't happiness per se that promotes well-being, it’s the actual pursuit that’s key.

For more, see How to Find Happiness.

Happy people live with purpose. They find joy in lasting relationships, working toward their goals, and living according to their values. The happy person is not enamored with material goods or luxury vacations. This person is fine with the simple pleasures of life—petting a dog, sitting under a tree, enjoying a cup of tea. Here are a few of the outward signs that someone is content.

Is open to learning new things
Is high in humility and patience
Smiles and laughs readily
Goes with the flow
Practices compassion
Is often grateful
Exercises self-care
Enjoys healthy relationships
Is happy for other people
Gives and receives without torment
Lives with meaning and purpose
Does not feel entitled and has fewer expectations
Is not spiteful or insulting
Does not hold grudges
Does not register small annoyances
Does not angst over yesterday and tomorrow
Does not play games
Is not a martyr or victim
Is not stingy with their happiness

For more, see How To Find Happiness.

Misperceptions abound when it comes to what we think will make us happy. People often believe that happiness will be achieved once they reach a certain milestone, such as finding the perfect partner or landing a particular salary.

Humans, however, are excellent at adapting to new circumstances, which means that people will habituate to their new relationship or wealth, return to a baseline level of happiness, and seek out the next milestone. Fortunately, the same principle applies to setbacks—we are resilient and will most likely find happiness again.

Regarding finances specifically, research shows that the sweet spot for yearly income is between $60,000 and $95,000 a year, not a million-dollar salary. Earnings above $95,000 do not equate to increased well-being; a person earning $150,000 a year will not necessarily be as happy as a person earning a lot less.

The type of thoughts below exemplify these misconceptions about happiness:

"I’ll be happy when I’m rich and successful."
"I’ll be happy when I’m married to the right person."
"Landing my dream job will make me happy."
"I can’t be happy when my relationship has fallen apart."
"I will never recover from this diagnosis."
"The best years of my life are over."

For more, see The Science of Happiness.

Positive psychology is the branch of psychology that explores human flourishing. It asks how individuals can experience positive emotions, develop authentic relationships, find flow, achieve their goals, and build a meaningful life.

Propelled by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman , the movement emerged from the desire for a fundamental shift in psychology—from revolving around disease and distress to providing the knowledge and skills to cultivate growth, meaning, and fulfillment. For more, see Positive Psychology.

Every person has unique life experiences, and therefore unique experiences of happiness. That being said, when scientists examine the average trajectory of happiness over the lifespan, some patterns tend to emerge. Happiness and satisfaction begin relatively high, decrease from adolescence to midlife , and rise throughout older adulthood.

What makes someone happy in their 20s may not spark joy in their 80s, and joy in someone’s 80s may have seemed irrelevant in their 20s. It’s valuable for people to continue observing and revising what makes them happy at a given time to continue striving for fulfillment throughout their lifetime.

For more, see Happiness Over the Lifespan.

Health and happiness are completely intertwined. That’s not to say that people with illnesses can’t be happy, but that attending to one’s health is an important—and perhaps underappreciated—component of well-being.

Researchers have identified many links between health and happiness—including a longer lifespan—but it’s difficult to distinguish which factor causes the other. Making changes to diet , exercise, sleep, and more can help everyone feel more content.

For more, see Happiness and Health .

What unique challenges do people in the adoption constellation face?

If you're surrounded by people who curse a lot in their tweets, you probably live in an unhappy town, a recent study reports.

By accepting life's impermanence and practicing emotional resilience, one can find inner harmony and liberation in a constantly changing world.

Is gossip harmless or harmful? Here's how to tell the difference and discover powerful ways to rise above it when negative gossip targets you.

Tapping into your capacity for zest, hope, and gratitude can enhance inner peace, which may be the first step toward a more peaceful world.

In life, most people set goals that they know they can achieve. Setting the occasional impossible goal can help us push beyond our preconceived limits and accelerate our growth.

Professional life is uncertain; personal life doesn’t need to be. Civility improves the ability to accept change.

Personal Perspective: Always on the go like a hamster on a wheel? A Japanese phrase convinced me to jump off for a break.

Discover how dopamine impacts your mood, motivation, and mental health—and learn simple ways to naturally boost it for a happier, more rewarding life.

Feeling the sting of backhanded compliments or constant criticism? It might be jealousy at play. Discover how to spot the signs and protect your peace.

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Happiness Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on happiness.

Happiness is something which we can’t describe in words it can only be felt from someone’s expression of a smile. Likewise, happiness is a signal or identification of good and prosperous life. Happiness is very simple to feel and difficult to describe. Moreover, happiness comes from within and no one can steal your happiness.

Can Money Buy You Happiness?

Every day we see and meet people who look happy from the outside but deep down they are broken and are sad from the inside. For many people, money is the main cause of happiness or grief. But this is not right. Money can buy you food, luxurious house, healthy lifestyle servants, and many more facilities but money can’t buy you happiness.

And if money can buy happiness then the rich would be the happiest person on the earth. But, we see a contrary image of the rich as they are sad, fearful, anxious, stressed, and suffering from various problems.

In addition, they have money still they lack in social life with their family especially their wives and this is the main cause of divorce among them.

Also, due to money, they feel insecurity that everyone is after their money so to safeguard their money and them they hire security. While the condition of the poor is just the opposite. They do not have money but they are happy with and stress-free from these problems.

In addition, they take care of their wife and children and their divorce rate is also very low.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Happiness Comes from Within

As we now know that we can’t buy happiness with money and there is no other shortcut to happiness. It is something that you feel from within.

In addition, true happiness comes from within yourself. Happiness is basically a state of mind.

Moreover, it can only be achieved by being positive and avoiding any negative thought in mind. And if we look at the bright side of ourselves only then we can be happy.

Happiness in a Relationship

People nowadays are not satisfied with their relationship because of their differences and much other reason. But for being happy in a relationship we have to understand that there are some rules or mutual understanding that keeps a relationship healthy and happy.

Firstly, take care of yourself then your partner because if you yourself are not happy then how can you make your partner happy.

Secondly, for a happy and healthy relationship give you partner some time and space. In addition, try to understand their feeling and comfort level because if you don’t understand these things then you won’t be able to properly understand your partner.

Most importantly, take initiative and plan to go out with your partner and family. Besides, if they have plans then go with them.

To conclude, we can say that happiness can only be achieved by having positive thinking and enjoying life. Also, for being happy and keeping the people around us happy we have to develop a healthy relationship with them. Additionally, we also have to give them the proper time.

FAQs about Happiness

Q.1 What is True Happiness? A.1 True happiness means the satisfaction that you find worthy. The long-lasting true happiness comes from life experience, a feeling of purpose, and a positive relationship.

Q.2 Who is happier the rich or the poor and who is more wealthy rich or poor? A.2 The poor are happier then the rich but if we talk about wealth the rich are more wealthy then the poor. Besides, wealth brings insecurity, anxiety and many other problems.

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Definition Essay: Happiness

Happiness. It is not measurable, profitable, nor tradable. Yet, above all else in the world, it is what people seek. They want to have happiness, and want to know they have a lot of it. But happiness, like air or water, is a hard thing to grasp in one’s hand. It is intangible. So how does one know if they have it? Is it just a feeling? And if someone does not feel happy, how can they go about achieving that feeling?

Happiness is not measured by material wealth. A new car or television, a waterskiing boat or a three-level house does not equate to joyful feelings. They are status symbols, surely, and ones that make others assume a person is happy, but they do not guarantee a happy life. The clichéd phrase, “money can’t buy happiness,” is heard often… because it is true. People who have wealth can be unhappy, just as the poor can be living on cloud nine. Possessions can be gained and lost, and with that comes fear. And fear rarely leads to happiness.

So if it isn’t ‘stuff’ that achieves happiness, then what can? Well, goals can. People need to have a sense of purpose. It is no coincidence that Peanuts creator Charles Schultz died a week after ending his famous comic strip. Without a purpose, he was lost. But people that have a sense of purpose in their life often have a feeling of satisfaction about them. They sense they were put on this planet for a reason. To each person, this purpose can be different. Maybe they were meant to teach. Maybe they were meant to mother. Maybe they were meant to learn. And goals can be small things, like taking an extra moment each day to breathe. But having progress in life, a feeling of forward motion, can make people feel happy.

But taking that forward motion too far can be a bad thing. Success at the expense of everything else, for example, leads to the opposite of happiness. Life requires balance. And people that understand that there is a balance to work and play, strife and joy, are more in tune with the universe and, therefore, better able to achieve happiness. Life with a dose of humor is more pleasant. Comedians, compared to any other profession, live the longest because they understand that laughter adds the spice to life, and makes daily progress worth the minor tribulations.

So people can be happy if they have something to strive for and something to laugh about. But is that it? Can people with goals and a sense of humor still be unhappy? Well, yes. After all, the final key to happiness is the decision to actually be happy. Human nature can see negative energy anywhere. People can fixate on problems instead of solutions. So at the end of the day, “happiness depends upon ourselves.” (Aristotle). As Lincoln said, “Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

Being happy with who you are and what you have, is a decision that has to be consciously made. Goals can help lead to happiness. Finding laughter in life is important. But at the end of the day, a person needs to make a choice about happiness. They need to agree they want it, deserve it, and have it.

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What is Happiness? Why is Happiness Important?

January 2022
In book: Happiness—Concept, Measurement and Promotion (pp.1-14)

Monash University (Australia)

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July 3, 2018

"The pursuit of happiness" means more in the Declaration of Independence than simply chasing a fleeting feeling.

3 ways to pursue 'thick' happiness

First, the most important thing is to realize that the happy life is about more than just me: my health, my wealth, my safety and security.

A robust understanding of human flourishing means it is for all and that means that our “pursuit” of happiness must transcend narrow nationalisms and thin tribalisms.

We would not permit, say, one political party to flourish and deny the chance for another to do the same. Or, to shift the imagery, we would not want our daughters to flourish but not our sons. Why, then, are we satisfied to let some neighborhoods in a city languish, or some schools in a district fail? Why are we willing to let some countries deteriorate?

Not because we are committed to the “unalienable right” of happiness, but only because we are selfishly committed to a narrow, individualized understanding of localized hedonism. But, as the positive psychology literature shows (and the biblical book of Ecclesiastes knows this too), more pleasure or more “stuff” will never bring true happiness and flourishing.

So, first and foremost, we have to think more globally, more organically. In the republic, all citizens should flourish, and in the global village, all persons should flourish — including those that aren’t (yet) citizens!

Second, thinking about happiness as a “global village” issue shows that human flourishing will only be achieved if we take better care of our world.

This is a truly transnational issue. All humans share this planet and therefore all humans — and all governments — must take responsibility for its care, particularly in redressing the lack of care that we have exercised for far too long. Without doing so, there will simply be no place for humans to flourish. Could it be any more simple?

Third, despite the important role played by governments and law, it is increasingly clear that important things like food, medicine and safe living conditions cannot always wait for the slow movements of governments.

Positive psychology has highlighted the crucial role of positive institutions , including — when they function at their best — families, workplaces and communities of faith. These must be ready to do the hard work of helping others flourish when the government proves ineffectual (as it often does).

When the government is effective and rightly functioning as one such positive institution, I firmly believe we will see far less “enforcement,” whether via the police or military, and far more “empowerment.” I myself believe these are related: more empowerment of people — facilitating their flourishing — will mean enforcement just won’t be needed anymore. It will become passé !

In the Bible, the prophet Isaiah has a vision along these very lines: a time where everyone will turn in their weapon and melt them all down to make more farm equipment (Isa 2:4). That is not a bad vision of thick happiness: for both humanity and the world!

Editor's note: Since this interview was originally published on June 30, 2014, it has consistently ranked among the most-read articles in the Emory News Center. As the Fourth of July holiday again approaches, we spoke with Professor Brent Strawn about why a "thick" understanding of "the pursuit of happiness" may be even more important in our current political climate. His additional answers appear at the end of the interview.

More than just fireworks and cookouts, the Fourth of July offers an opportunity to reflect on how our founders envisioned our new nation — including the Declaration of Independence's oft-quoted "unalienable right" to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

But our contemporary understanding of "pursuit of happiness" is a thinner, less meaningful shadow of what the Declaration's authors intended, according to Brent Strawn, who teaches religion and theology in Emory's Candler School of Theology and Graduate Division of Religion.

"It may be that the American Dream, if that is parsed as lots of money and the like, isn't a sufficient definition of the good life or true happiness. It may, in fact, be detrimental," notes Strawn, editor of "The Bible and the Pursuit of Happiness: What the Old and New Testaments Teach Us About the Good Life." (Oxford University Press, 2012)

As we celebrate Independence Day, Strawn discusses what "pursuit of happiness" is commonly thought to mean today, what our founders meant, and how a "thick" understanding of happiness can be a better guide for both individuals and nations.

What 'happiness' means

The Declaration of Independence guarantees the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." What do you think the phrase "pursuit of happiness" means to most people who hear it today?

I think most people think "pursuit" in that phrase means "chasing happiness" — as in the phrase "in hot pursuit." This would mean that "the pursuit of happiness" has to do with "seeking it" or "going after it" somehow.

How does this differ from what our nation's founders meant when the Declaration of Independence was written?

It differs a lot! Arthur Schlesinger should be credited with pointing out in a nice little essay in 1964 that at the time of the Declaration's composition, "the pursuit of happiness" did not mean chasing or seeking it, but actually practicing happiness, the experience of happiness — not just chasing it but actually catching it, you might say.

This is demonstrated by documents that are contemporary with the Declaration, but also by the Declaration itself, in the continuation of the same sentence that contains "the pursuit of happiness" phrase. The continuation speaks of effecting people's safety and happiness. But the clearest explanation might be the Virginia Convention's Declaration of Rights, which dates to June 12, 1776, just a few weeks before July 4. The Virginia Declaration actually speaks of the "pursuing and obtaining" of happiness.

Why does this difference matter?

Seeking happiness is one thing but actually obtaining it and experiencing it — practicing happiness! — is an entirely different matter. It's the difference between dreaming and reality. Remember that the pursuit of happiness, in the Declaration, is not a quest or a pastime , but "an unalienable right." Everyone has the right to actually be happy, not just try to be happy. To use a metaphor: You don't just get the chance to make the baseball team, you are guaranteed a spot. That's a very different understanding.

Unalienable rights and the role of government

The next part of the sentence in the Declaration of Independence states "to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men." What does it mean to say, as you have written, that "the Declaration makes that obtaining and practicing of happiness a matter of government and public policy, not one of individual leisure or pleasure"?

I think it means, at least in part, that the happiness of which the Declaration speaks is not simple, light and momentary pleasure à la some hedonic understandings of happiness ("do what feels right"; "if it makes you happy…"). In the Declaration, "the pursuit of happiness" is listed with the other "unalienable rights" of "life" and "liberty." Those are qualities of existence, states of being. You are either alive or dead, free or enslaved.

Governments have something to say about those states by how they govern their citizens. If happiness is akin to life and liberty —as the Declaration and the original meaning of "the pursuit of happiness" say — then we are not dealing with momentary pleasurable sensations ("I'm happy the sun came out this afternoon") but with deep and extended qualities of life (the happiness one feels to be cancer-free, for instance).

According to the Declaration, the extended quality of happiness — what we might call the good or flourishing life — is or should be a primary concern of government. That means it isn't just about my happiness, especially idiosyncratically defined, but about all citizens' happiness.

If the founders' understanding of the "pursuit of happiness" does, indeed, have "profound public policy ramifications, and thus real connections to social justice," what are some specific examples of actions the government does or should take to secure that right today?

If we operate with a thick definition of happiness, then we have to think beyond simplistic understandings of happiness — as important as those are — and think about the good life more broadly. It may be that the American Dream, if that is parsed as lots of money and the like, isn't a sufficient definition of the good life or true happiness. It may, in fact, be detrimental.

Empirical research in happiness has shown that more money does not, in fact, make a significant difference in someone's happiness. The ultra-rich are not any happier than the average middle-class person (and sometimes to the contrary). So, moving beyond just the hedonic aspects of happiness, researchers have demonstrated the importance of positive emotions, positive individual traits (e.g., virtues), and positive institutions.

Governments could (and should, according to the Declaration) enable such things. To lift up just two examples that I think a lot about myself, the government needs to take action to guarantee all citizens' health and safety. A thick definition of happiness certainly includes many things — and sick people can in fact be very happy, can live flourishing lives — but positive institutions that keep us healthy and safe are, to my mind, specific and concrete ways the government can help a country's "gross national happiness" index (the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan actually measures its country's GNH!).

Food, medicine, safe living conditions — those are a few important building blocks of a happy life that governments can address.

Your book focuses on what the Bible teaches us about the pursuit of happiness, and you also note the current role of positive psychology as our society's primary arena for asking what "happiness" means. What is the most important lesson we can learn from both of those sources to help us understand and pursue happiness now?

Just this — that both the Bible and positive psychology give us a very thick understanding of the word "happiness." It is not about breakfast being yummy. It is about human flourishing, the good life, the obtaining and experiencing of all that can be glossed with the word "happiness," but only carefully and usually with a few sentences of explanation required to flesh it all out.

A thick understanding of "happiness" means that we have to think beyond only pleasurable sensations or think about redefining "happiness" altogether if "pleasure" is the only thing it means. If that's the only thing "happiness" means anymore, then we have a case of "word pollution" and we need to reclaim or redefine the word or perhaps use a different one altogether, at least for a while.

Redefining simplistic, thin definitions of "happiness" means that we come to terms that the happy life does not mean a life devoid of real problems and real pain. Those, too, are part of life and can even contribute to human growth and flourishing, which means they can and must be incorporated into a thick notion of happiness. As one positive psychologist has said: The only people who don't feel normal negative feelings are the pathologically psychotic, and the dead. Or, according to the biblical book of Psalms, the only people who live lives of constant comfort and pleasure are the wicked!

So, positive psychology speaks of post-traumatic growth — a kind of growth only experienced (and only able to be experienced) after grief. Or, to think about the New Testament, when Christians call the day Jesus was crucified "Good Friday," they certainly do not mean by that that it was a fun-filled day.

Instead, that is a very thick use of the word "good" and that is the kind of thick use that we must have when we speak of "happiness" — one that can encompass sorrow; that includes social concerns like food, health, and safety; and that is about experiencing the good, flourishing life, not just hoping for it.

Pursuing happiness in today's world

(Update) Does the current political climate in the United States impact the need for a “thick” understanding of the pursuit of happiness?

Since this article first appeared, I admit that I am even more struck now, in 2018, by the need for the government to help people attain — pursue and actually reach — key elements of human flourishing: food, safety, medicine and the like.

Politically, of course, people will differ on these issues and how they are best achieved, but it is clear that in recent years in this country we have had vicious political debates over things that are, at root, profoundly connected to these elements of happiness and who will gain access to them. Take, for example, the debate over universal health care. Or debates over gun violence and gun control. Or immigration. Each is complicated and multifaceted.

People who are for stricter immigration laws are likely concerned about their own safety and well-being. This is fully understandable. And yet, if happiness is a universal right, which is what the Declaration of Independence states, then that means we must consider the safety and well-being of others, too — including the safety and well-being of immigrants and refugees who would otherwise be turned away at our borders.

In this regard, the biblical story of Ruth the Moabitess is rather remarkable. Had she been turned away at the border, then Israel would have never had its greatest king, David, since he was her great-grandson. Or, to continue the lineage a bit further, without Ruth there is not only no David, there is also no Jesus, since, according to the New Testament, he is a direct descendant from Ruth, the Moabite refugee.

Or, to switch topics, one might like to stockpile weapons in order to feel safe, but one must ask about the effects of gun culture, the proliferation of guns, and if all that is, in fact, a truly safer way of life for the flourishing of all people. Statistics from other modern industrialized countries in the world that do not have the same gun obsession as America suggest, in fact, that it is not necessarily a safer way — or at least, such data indicate that the proliferation of weaponry is certainly not the only way to think about safety and well-being.

So, now, in 2018, I continue to think that the thickest and best definition of “the pursuit of happiness” means we must think about facilitating the achievement of others’ happiness, and not be inordinately or exclusively self-obsessed with our own.

Such a regard for others and their happiness would have certainly resonated with the early founders of our country, many of whom were themselves immigrants, and who were concerned not simply with their own well-being but with all those who would come after them in the United States.

The happiness of other, future generations was insured, as it were, in the Declaration and its claim regarding this “unalienable right.” Concern for other people’s happiness is also unquestionably true for the Bible where, among many examples, one might cite Jesus' instruction to his disciples: "No one has greater love than to give up one's life for one's friends" (John 15:13, Common English Bible).

I have to admit, however, that I am less sanguine now, in 2018, about the government’s interest in and ability to produce widespread happiness of the thickest variety for all people. The vast majority of what comes across the news scrawl these days seems remarkably parochial if not downright tribalistic. The “happiness” that is being sought is typically up for sale to the highest bidder with the most power (including firepower).

Such a vision of “happiness” is truly thin and can never lay appropriate claim to the Declaration’s grand vision of flourishing. But the Declaration’s grand vision is still there! And that gives me hope that good peoples throughout the world and throughout society and government may yet seek the greatest good for all humanity. May it be so!

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What Does Happiness Mean to You? (1,155 Answers with 11 Examples)

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Our survey on the meaning of happiness

Raffi bilek – director and therapist at the baltimore therapy center, traci shoblom – ms. in psychology, certified whole health educator and personal development coach, emma donovan – m.a., lpc, therapist and coach, dana avey – licensed marriage and family therapist at fulfillment counseling and life coaching, amrita madhusudan – neuroscientist, emotional wellness practitioner, and productivity coach, kahlil king – professor teaching psychology at hofstra university and economics, wendy jones – life design coach at the optimists journal, lauren cook – master’s of marriage and family, kellie zeigler – certified applied positive psychology practitioner, carla manly – clinical psychologist and happiness expert, hugo – founder of tracking happiness, closing words.

If you were asked to describe what happiness means to you without actually using the word “happiness”, what would you answer? We asked this question to over a thousand people and recorded the answers.

We asked them the following question:

Of the following words, which 5 words do you associate most with “happiness”?

Each respondent had to pick 5 words that they felt most associated with the word happiness.

Here’s which words they associated most with “happiness”:

word association study tracking happiness featured

These results showed us how differently people think about the meaning of happiness. (If you want more details on our results, you can find them here! )

💡 By the way : Do you find it hard to be happy and in control of your life? It may not be your fault. To help you feel better, we’ve condensed the information of 100’s of articles into a 10-step mental health cheat sheet to help you be more in control. 👇

Don’t Miss Out On Happiness

Find happiness with this 10-step mental health cheat sheet.

What does happiness mean to you?

So it’s clear that the meaning of happiness varies from person to person. In fact, it even changes over time. What made me happy as a kid probably won’t make me happy as I get older.

That means that no one will share my exact meaning of happiness. Sure, some people will agree with what happiness means to me, but when you get into the details, my definition of happiness is as unique as I am myself.

That’s why I rounded up a handful of different people, with varying backgrounds and personalities, and asked them this simple question:

Here are their answers:

What happiness means to…

Happiness means you can recognize and appreciate the good things.

Happiness is when you can recognize and appreciate the good things in your life without letting the bad things overshadow them. For the vast majority of us, the good in our life far outweighs the bad. Has your back been hurting lately? Consider that the rest of your body feels fine today.

Life is imperfect, filled with pluses and minuses. Focusing on the positives and savoring them is what happiness is about.

Happiness is when one’s behavior is in alignment with their values.

Happiness is when one’s behavior is in alignment with their values. In other words, if you are a person who values family, and you invest time, resources, and spend time with your family you are happy. If you are a person who values health, you’re happiest when you’re engaged in activities that promote health. So, the core element of happiness is knowing what you value and then adding those things into your life. A happy life is a series of happy moments strung together.

Happiness means embracing the messiness that comes from being a flawed human in an unpredictable world.

I used to believe that I could earn happiness by maximizing my full potential, both personally and professionally. What I’ve realized, though, is that failure, disappointment, personal shortcomings, and uncomfortable emotions are part of life.

Happiness is not about transcending them through accomplishment, but rather embracing the messiness that comes from being a flawed human in an unpredictable world. Happiness is not achieved, it is lived as I embrace each moment.

Happiness means the ability to experience gratitude and meaning amidst all experiences.

Happiness is the ability to experience gratitude and meaning amidst all experiences. Happiness isn’t a life full of perfection but rather finding the good or the purpose within whatever the circumstances – as flawed and as imperfect as they may be. That is what generates happiness.

Life will give us all sorts of experiences, but if we can exercise a grateful heart within it, we can have happiness in any given moment and to have happiness in each moment, is to have it fully. We can never have total control over what happens to us, so if we can find an ounce of gratitude and meaning in all scenarios, we can thrive and be happy regardless.

Happiness means enjoying the simple things in life.

When I think of happiness, I think of being curled up with a cup of tea and a good book on a rainy afternoon. I think of the smell of my mum’s freshly baked chocolate cake. I think of cuddling my sleeping baby and feeling the softness of his cheek against mine. Happiness is dark chocolate, good friends, and clean clothes fresh from the dryer. I think of freshly fallen snow and rainbows, the rumble of the waves at the beach, and the birds calling at dawn. Happiness is meeting my husband’s eyes across the room and feeling cocooned in his love.

Happiness is the culmination of my life – good and bad.

Happiness is self-care and mental wellbeing. Having the autonomy to make my own decisions on how I can contribute to the well-being of others. Happiness is a balance of hedonistic and personal growth endeavors that make me a better person, and enjoy myself while doing it! Happiness is the culmination of my life – good and bad. Everything that has made me who I am has made me, in its own way, happy.

Happiness is a mindset that is within our control.

Happiness is found when we can be content exactly where we are today and have the conviction to go after what we want tomorrow. It’s found in the moments of calm when our vision is clear, and in learning to savor the small things like a sunset, our favorite coffee, or a great conversation. We all want to be happy, so it’s best when we train our minds to find it in the things that happen almost every day.

Above all else, happiness is a mindset that is within our control, it just takes self-awareness to access it so spend some time getting to know yourself and your definition of happiness will follow.

Happiness means when you are living in accordance with your values.

Happiness is when you are living in accordance with your values. It’s when you know what matters in your life (which many people struggle to actively define) and you are in the active pursuit of those values. It does not mean that you are always successful in your pursuits; rather, you are intentional about how you place your time and energy.

Happiness also comes when we practice gratitude on a daily basis. It’s when we appreciate not only the aspects of our life that have gone “right,” but when we give thanks for the struggle as well. Even when we’re in pain, we are growing and there is just as much beauty in that experience.

Happiness means being at peace with my past, optimistic about my future, and enjoying the present.

Happiness for me is about being at peace with my past, optimistic about my future, and enjoying the present. This means I can look back on my past with gratitude for what has happened. I can look to my future and feel hopeful about what is to come and the experiences I want to create. In the present I use mindfulness, gratitude, savoring, meaning, and purpose to experience frequent positive emotions.

Happiness means exploring and being in touch with our best selves.

I have found that happiness comes from exploring and being in touch with our best selves. When we consciously devote time and energy to being attuned to that which provides peaceful, lasting internal joy, we tend to be happier in the long term. As well, those who are happiest tend to focus on the present – being in the here and now – rather than getting stuck in the past or being anxious about the future. Indeed, those who learn that happiness exists in this very moment – not in the future or in the past – tend to radiate with joy.

To me, happiness means finding the perfect balance between long-term and short-term happiness. Short-term happiness can be found in the simple joys of life, like going on a nice date with my girlfriend, running outside, laughing with my friends, or even just enjoying a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning. On the other hand, I find long-term happiness in following my purpose in life , being free and stress-free, and working actively towards a better future.

In short, my meaning of happiness is enjoying my life as it is right now, while not having to worry about my happiness in the future!

💡 By the way : If you want to start feeling better and more productive, I’ve condensed the information of 100’s of our articles into a 10-step mental health cheat sheet here. 👇

This Cheat Sheet Will Help You Be Happier and More Productive

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There you have it: 11 different examples of what happiness can mean to you. What this article proves, once again, is that happiness is different for everybody. What makes me happy doesn’t necessarily have to make you happy as well. It’s what makes happiness such a beautiful thing to learn about.

With that said, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below! What does happiness mean to you?

Founder of Tracking Happiness, with over 100 interviews and a focus on practical advice, our content extends beyond happiness tracking. Hailing from the Netherlands, I’m a skateboarding enthusiast, marathon runner, and a dedicated data junkie, tracking my happiness for over a decade.

4 thoughts on “What Does Happiness Mean to You? (1,155 Answers with 11 Examples)”

Thank you for all the good thoughts about happiness!

I agree with all of the positive aspects mentioned (meaning, gratitude/appreciation, acceptance, hedonism, short-term long-term, true to self’s values, etc.) but I also take another angle at the subject which none of your experts directly mentioned: the absence or reduction of the things which make us unhappy.

If happiness is an enhanced state of wellbeing, what are the things that diminish this state? Or in other words, what are the things that make us unhappy? If we removed or reduced the things that produce our unhappiness, would we by default be happier?

For myself, I’ve compiled a list of over 50 things that contribute to my diminishing state of wellbeing. I call them my Termites of Happiness (from behavioral and cognitive patterns, self-worth issues, guilt, anxiety, areas of dissatisfaction, and many other things). I have found as I eliminate or reduce these termites, I have become happier.

How do you remove guilt, shameful/embarrassing memories, anxiety, self-worth issues, and all the other things that diminish happiness? If you personally resolve these, wouldn’t you experience your best and happiest life?

Thank you for your efforts towards a happier world!

Tom Gregoire

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Tom!

In my opinion, it really depends on who you are as a person.

There are always some factors in your life that you can directly control. For me, one of those is the amount of sleep I get. I am 99% responsible for how much “tiredness” impacts my happiness, which is why I focus on getting enough sleep.

But some things are beyond my control, and I believe they should be. It’s got something to do with your comfort zone/bubble of happiness. You may be able to remove all negative factors from your life, but that would mean that you’ll be living in a bubble without any risk, thrills or excitement.

In the end, no matter how hard you try, unhappiness is a part of life. I find it’s best to embrace this part, and learn to go with the flow.

Being aware of this part really helps here though, hence why I track my happiness. 🙂

Thanks again for sharing!

I am basically a happy person but things that increase my happiness are the things I accomplish. I know what things make me feel happier and yet I don’t always do them. At 72 I have spent a lot of time doing things that I had to do to earn a living and raise a family. Now in life if I take time to watch tv read play games on electronics look at emails and texts and not accomplish tasks it is ok. But I do feel better about having balance in my life where I accomplish tasks and still do the downtime things.

That is great. I think you have a good balance between short and long-term happiness. Watching TV and playing games might not make you feel productive, but if you enjoyed it and don’t over-indulge, then it’s nothing to feel bad about! 🙂 It’s all about finding your balance.

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Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

Why People Quit Religion—and How They Find Meaning Again

Religion has long been a central part of life for many. But recent trends in the United States have revealed that increasingly more people are leaving religion . By 2070, many project that Christianity will no longer be the majority religion in America . And among those who don’t identify as religious—called “nones”— more than three-quarters are religious “dones,” having left a religion they were raised in.

In other words, the landscape of religion is changing. People are walking away from religion and seeking new ways to find meaning, deepen connection, and experience a flourishing life. But why are people leaving, and what happens after they do?

In my recent book, Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion , I discuss these processes in depth. Whereas most other books in this area are autobiographical memoirs, Done weaves together cutting-edge data from empirical science with practical applications to directly help people who are experiencing religious change. Whether you have personally experienced a shift in your religious beliefs or behaviors, or know and love someone who has, learning more about these processes can help people navigate the change and build an authentic and meaningful life.

Why are people leaving religion?

The reasons why people leave are deeply personal, but research I’ve collaborated on suggests there are at least four primary motivations. First, some people leave because of cultural stagnation: They are getting more ideologically progressive, but their religious organizations are not. Often, people report intellectual reasons for leaving religion, or mention they simply outgrew their faith. Other times, respondents indicate that they cannot endorse the values of their previous religious organization, including their views on LGBTQ+ individuals, stances on gender or sexuality, or pervasive sexism and racism.

Second, some people leave because of religious or spiritual trauma or abuse. Some people have experienced this abuse firsthand, whereas others have witnessed people they love experience trauma. Still others have left organized religion because of abuses perpetrated at an institutional level (for example, by Catholic priests). For many, walking away is a bold act of courage.

Third, some walk away from their faith because of suffering. Many have been given “theologically thin” accounts for the existence of evil in the world or insufficient explanation for why adversity strikes. They cannot make sense of what they were taught and their life experiences, especially if their previous beliefs were framed in a just-world belief system , which teaches that people get what they deserve. After all, if life is fair, if something bad happens to me, does that mean that I’m bad and deserved it? Simplistic views of suffering can lead people to leave religion.

Fourth, some people no longer identify as religious because they find the label problematic. Some don’t like the term “religion,” and others no longer espouse the term “evangelical.” Especially after 2016, “evangelical” has taken on a new meaning. A recent poll indicated that more than 40% of self-identified evangelicals do not believe in the deity of Jesus (a longstanding central tenet of evangelicalism), suggesting that this has become a sociopolitical identity marker as well as a religious one.

And while there may be additional reasons why people leave, all of these reasons share a common underlying feature: They involve cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the disorienting feeling when our beliefs don’t line up with other beliefs or our actions. For many, what they believed could no longer fit with their experiences of the world. Although some are able to fit these discrepant beliefs into existing belief structures, if the discrepancy is too great, many will change their beliefs altogether.

The process of leaving religion

Just like the reasons for leaving religion are personal, so too is the process of leaving religion. Everyone starts from a different place, where religion means something different to each person. But for many, this process of leaving religion starts with religious deconstruction : People experience doubt around their beliefs, practices, and identity; begin to question their existing belief frameworks; experience a heightened sense of struggle and anxiety; and eventually revise their beliefs and identity into something that feels authentic. As one participant recounted:

When my great-aunt died I started to question my life, existence, and religion. I couldn’t understand why God would take away my aunt, among too many other things. I started to even question the existence of God. I eventually quit going to church, and thought about things on my own.

Many describe it as incredibly destabilizing, and it’s often lengthy and emotionally taxing. People can feel anxiety, guilt, anger, confusion, and fear, as well as awe, curiosity, and freedom. It’s a mixed emotional bag. And there’s no one single way to deconstruct, nor a rigid timeline for how long it takes. For some, it’s a years-long process, especially if religion was a central part of their identity for most of their life. One participant detailed this lengthy and emotionally challenging process:

I slowly watched my grandfather die of Alzheimer’s and Lewy body disease over the course of seven long and painful years . . . I stopped believing in a god. What god that I had grown up learning about could ever be real and allow those things to happen[?] This was seven years ago and I still haven’t been able to put myself back together.

Where people land when they revise their beliefs will play a large role in their future trajectory. If people revise their beliefs and identity and stay within the confines of a religion, they have undergone religious reconstruction . Although these beliefs are different, and their own identity has likely shifted, they haven’t walked away from religion. Many who reconstruct embrace more progressive or open views of religion; some switch religions entirely. Others report feeling more spiritually mature or say they have experienced spiritual growth. Although reconstruction can still feel destabilizing, it is often less so than it could be, as people reassemble some structures to provide them with security. For example, one participant captured this reconstruction, saying, “I don’t identify with or trust any churches, even though I still believe in God and Jesus.”

If people land outside of religion, they have experienced religious deidentification . They likely no longer identify as religious on at least one of four major components of religion . Some disbelieve in core tenets of their theological or religious worldviews. Perhaps they now identify as an atheist or agnostic. Others disengage from emotional connection with the divine or transcendent. Here, they may no longer experience a relationship with God, spirits, ancestor, or whatever they consider sacred and spiritual. Some discontinue following religion’s moral mandates on behavior that they once did. For example, they may abandon restrictions around food (like eating kosher) or sexuality (like purity culture or abstinence) and find new maps of morality. And others disaffiliate from their social communities that offered belonging. They may no longer attend mosque, church, or temple, and look for new sources of social support. For example, someone from our studies shared:

I was raised Catholic, but when I went to college I stopped going to church and realized that it was just no longer a part of my life. I replaced my time on Sundays by volunteering at animal shelters and found that to be more personally rewarding.

When people walk away, perhaps the biggest challenge to this process is a psychological phenomenon called religious residue . Religion is sticky. It lingers after people deidentify from it. People continue to think, feel, and act in ways that resemble their formerly religious selves. Put differently, even though people have moved on, religion persists. Your religious history matters, and it’s nearly impossible to simply walk away and make a clean break. Cognitively, religion has etched deep paths in people’s thinking, leading them to continue to think and behave in ways that are more strongly religious than people who have never been religious.

Behaviorally, religion often involves rituals that become habits, which are hard to change. Research has found that this residue shows up in values , morals , beliefs , and even how people spend their money . But it has also revealed that, with enough time, the residue decays. Eventually people adjust, though some residue remains.

Life after religion

After leaving religion, people often report a conflicting set of experiences. On one hand, they may feel more freedom and awe from seeing the world in a new way, untethered by their previous religious beliefs and identity. On the other hand, they may feel anxiety and fear from being untethered from such a security-providing worldview, and feel groundless and unmoored. They may feel anger toward their previous religious upbringing for decisions they made because of beliefs they no longer hold. They may feel guilt and shame for having believed, behaved, or identified in certain ways in the past. In short, they may experience a host of thoughts and feelings that can be hard to sort out.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of navigating life after religion is coming to terms with some of life’s biggest questions, or existential concerns . Each human has to find some way of making sense of deep, pressing questions: Who am I? Am I all alone in the world? What is the meaning of life? What happens after I die?

Because religion used to answer these questions, those who have left religion are uniquely predisposed to anxiety around these concerns. Having had the answers and no longer being able to rely on them to provide comfort and security, religious dones feel a unique sense of loss that those who were never religious do not likely experience—not just a lack of presence, but a palpable loss or absence. If they were raised in a high-control, authoritarian upbringing, they might not have had the opportunity to develop the skills required to assemble a coherent worldview that addresses these ultimate concerns. If someone simply told you what to believe, you might be looking for that again. For religious dones, existential anxiety is usually quite high, and it can be incredibly unsettling.

Of course, this also takes place in the backdrop of navigating relationships with people who may not understand someone’s religious change, and striving to find a new authentic identity apart from religion. These are formidable challenges.

Finding flourishing

Many people continue to find religion to be a source of strength and meaning in their lives. But for the increasing number of those who do not, there are still pathways toward flourishing after leaving religion.

Some people may find it challenging to relate to friends and family who do not share their nonreligious identity. Many feel excluded and hide their nonreligious identity . This can be particularly stressful if religion is extremely important to someone you’re especially close to, such as a romantic partner. In these situations, setting (and holding) boundaries, interacting with humility, and leading with empathy are key. Remember, you once held similar beliefs, so treat them with compassion.

Some work lies in crafting a life and identity after religion . Here, the goal is to go past being defined by what you are not , such as non- or anti-religious, and move toward a sense of self defined by you are . Consider your core values and strive to align your life around these values, so you can live them out with integrity.

And some, though not all, find new pathways toward spiritual connection apart from organized religion. Some find transcendent meaning in nature, the cosmos, or other humans, or by living with integrity.

The process of leaving religion can feel isolating and lonely—but you are not alone. And it doesn’t mean that you have to abandon hope. Indeed, my hope is that each person will find a meaningful and flourishing life, with or without religion.

About the Author

Daryl R. Van Tongeren

Daryl R. Van Tongeren, Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology and director of the Frost Center for Social Science Research at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, and the author of Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion (American Psychological Association Books, 2024).

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