Happiness has a relative nature and not an absolute nature. You can only ever feel happy relative to some other point of unhappiness and vice versa. You can never feel absolutely happy all of the time. You might manage that with cheerfulness and contentment but not with happiness.

Happiness has the qualities of a standard and not of an absolute condition. You cannot simply expect to achieve a standard without creating something to judge against the standard. To sit and wish and hope and pray for happiness will never work. You must do things and create things and then you can assess your actions and results against your personal standards, the summation of which will tell you if you have achieved happiness or not relative to some prior condition or imagined condition.

Questions such as “Am I happy?” “Why am I so unhappy?” “Why can’t I find lasting happiness?” will not help you. You need to know your personal standards/rules/expectations and then assess your actions against them. If you feel unhappy or discontented for much of the time then you probably have standards too difficult to meet or else you need so many things to meet the correct standard and all at the same time that such a concurrence of events happens very rarely. This situation becomes pitifully common if your standards for happiness depend upon the actions of other people. If you can only feel happy if people, or things outside of your control meet your standards then you will almost never feel happy and you will feel a lot of anxiety because you do not have control over your welfare. If you think along the lines of, “I can only feel happy if person X does Y or if thing W does Z” then you give up control of your happiness. Instead change those rules and expectations to preferences, for example, “I prefer it if person X does Y or if thing W does Z (but I know that won’t happen all the time and I cannot control that so I don’t depend upon that for my well-being).” Then you don’t feel so devastated and insecure in your emotional well-being. Instead you begin to create a more robust approach and one more able to cope with life’s ups and downs.

“Am I happy?” Suggests that an absolute condition for this state exists but it does not. You can never always feel happy. To ask the question “Am I happy?” from the point of view of determining whether you have achieved a long-term permanent condition of happiness will almost always come up with a ‘No’ answer because you know that sometimes you don’t feel happy and so if you say ‘Yes’ you would lie to yourself. From this question you will likely come up with the answer, “No, I am not happy” and will probably feel bad about that, perhaps even some kind of failure but you defeat yourself by asking a very poorly constructed question. You need questions that allow you to assess with greater accuracy how often you feel happiness and under what conditions. You find out what creates the conditions for happiness more through inference than by direct questioning. Consider what activities and experiences bring you pleasure, consider what things that you can do by yourself that bring you pleasure, consider what combination of activities and events bring you pleasure. From this kind of analysis you start to create a picture of what creates a reaction of happiness. Once you know this then actively seek to create more of those actions and events and the time you spend feeling happy will increase. This assumes that you don’t change your standards and expectations to make the occurrence of happiness more difficult and hence less likely.

“Why am I so unhappy?” This question seeks a source of unhappiness and it assumes that unhappiness comes as a kind of default condition. This question will quickly disempower you and make you feel unresourceful because you will more than likely come up with answers that put the control of your happiness in the hands of other people or things (parents, friends, colleagues, the gods) or else you will find very negative things about yourself. The brain will always attempt to answer any question, no matter how foolish or impossible. To this question your brain has to come up with answers that can justify you current circumstances and in looking for a cause it might say “Because you’re no good. Because you’re too lazy. Because you’re too tall/short, fat/thin, young/old, rich/poor” the list has no end and although you now have an answer it doesn’t describe you or the reasons for your situation accurately and neither does it do anything to help you turn things around – probably the original motivation for asking the question.

“Why can’t I find lasting happiness?” Lasting happiness does not exist. Happiness has a relative nature and not an absolute nature. Sometimes you feel very happy, sometimes content and sometimes unhappy or very unhappy. You measure your feeling for these states relative to one another. You could have a long lasting succession of good events in your life that raise your overall levels of happiness but one event that doesn’t meet your standards, perhaps in a big way, will make you feel unhappy. Perhaps your overall standard of living remains very high but your expectation to have lasting happiness causes you to pursue the impossible and that will cause you even more trouble.

As a younger man I made ‘the search for happiness’ a big focus of my life but once I came to understand and accept the relative nature of happiness I realised that we do not need to search for happiness or pursue it. When we act with integrity, do and create good things and meet or exceed our standards of satisfaction then happiness comes to us. These days I don’t focus on happiness or its creation. Instead I seek contentment, which I describe as an underlying and long-term experience of satisfaction that comes from living life well and congruently. Through understanding myself and what causes me to act well and to act poorly and through better understanding of how the world works and how I can solve the problems that I encounter I increase my levels of competence, confidence and hence contentment. This underlying trend continues to rise upwards. Instead of thinking about happiness I think about creating more moments of fun, cheerfulness, playfulness, excitement and joy. I want to create little peaks from doing happy things and then return to my steady contentment without any feeling of disappointment. I still get troughs where I don’t get the results that I want and negative emotions well up but I now know how to deal with these succinctly through accepting the reality of those results and then quickly adjusting to deal with the underlying problem. Then I return to my steady contentment. On balance I have a high level of happiness but I don’t often stop to consider that.

I pay very great attention to words. These abstractions describe our world to ourselves and to others. When we must deal with highly abstract concepts we only have words to rely upon with which to direct the brain and its functions. Consequently the wrong word or the wrongly formed abstract concept can have a devastating impact on what we seek out and how we seek it out. In the American Declaration of Independence we have the notion that each person can have “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” and I find it very, very curious that the authors took it as a ‘given’ that all people can have life and liberty and yet those same people can only have the right to pursue happiness and not to experience it (this wording was originally based on the writings of John Locke who wrote that people should have the right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property). A pedantic point perhaps but as I explained, a poorly constructed abstract concept can have a massive impact on how people perceive that concept in their lives. America has a lot of unhappy people in it and what goes on in America often spreads to the rest of the world, first the rest of the English speaking world and then the developed world and so on. I didn’t grow up in America but a lot of my thinking and perceptions got massively influenced by what comes out of America. I too once pursued happiness and I never found it. I wonder how many other people labour away at the fruitless pursuit of happiness. Happiness falls like a shadow, cast as an image from what we create of ourselves and what we create in the world. You cannot chase shadows and expect to possess them. Happiness does not submit to its pursuit. It comes to you when you live congruently. Has the time come to change the wording of the American Declaration of Independence? It might make an awful lot of people happy very quickly and very easily…

Live well according to the rules and standards that you set for yourself and do good things and happiness will come to you. You won’t have to waste any more time pursuing happiness.