How to be happy!

Happiness, in the broad sense, is a label for a family of pleasant emotional states: joy, amusement, satisfaction, gratification, euphoria, triumph. That’s the definition I started from, and it’s less useful than it looks, because it describes the destination and says nothing about how you get there.

The more interesting question is whether any of it is under your control. Two people I’d take seriously disagree, and the disagreement is the useful part.

Csikszentmihalyi says yes

The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is therefore something we make happen.

Something we make happen. Not something that arrives. If the good moments come from being stretched to your limit on purpose, then the lever is the difficulty of what you take on.

Freud says mostly no

All humans strive for happiness, but the possibilities of achieving it are restricted because we are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from the state of things.

A bleaker reading, and I think an accurate one. You don’t feel your current circumstances. You feel the difference between them and something else. Which means a good state you’ve been in for a while stops registering at all.

Two levers, then

Read together, those give you something to actually do.

Calibrate the difficulty. Aim for work that is not more and not less than what you can do. Too much and you’re anxious, too little and you’re bored, and both are states worth avoiding for their own sake. Flow is the holy grail here and it’s rare, but the neighbouring states are good enough. You don’t have to hit it exactly to benefit from aiming at it.

Manufacture the contrast. If enjoyment comes from difference rather than from circumstances, then the difference is something you can deliberately put in front of yourself.

Two ways I find useful. Recall where you were some time ago and compare it with where you are now, which gives you a sense of progress and, more importantly, of its speed. And compare your team or company with others, which gives you a sense of level. Neither is automatic. Left alone, the mind compares today with yesterday, finds them nearly identical, and reports nothing.

The rest of the internet says

Practice smiling. Exercise. Sleep more. Help others. Meditate. Move closer to work.

I’ve no argument with any of it, and I notice that the last one is the only piece of advice on that list that requires anyone to change anything structural about their life.