📕 Part 1: Happiness

This episode's vocabulary

Absence (noun) - the non-existence or lack of.

Ill feeling (noun) - angry feelings between people

Abundance (noun) - a very large quantity of something

Exhilaration (noun) - a feeling of excitement, happiness, or elation.

Gut feeling (noun) - a feeling that you are certain is right, although you can give no good reason why.

Awry (adj.) - away from the usual or expected course; amiss.

To conflate (verb) - combine (two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, etc.) into one.

Impetus (noun) - a force that helps something to happen or develop more quickly

Glimmer (noun) - a soft weak light that is not steady

To air on the side of caution (idiom) - to be especially careful rather than taking a risk or making a mistake.

To scaffold (verb) - to support something with a framework.

Feisty (adj.) - (of a person, typically one who is relatively small) lively, determined, and courageous.

Limelight (noun) - the focus of public attention.

To crave (verb) - to feel a powerful desire for (something).

To get back in the saddle (idiom) - to return to something after an absence; to make another attempt after suffering a failure; to return to something that is familiar.

To pinpoint (verb) - find or identify with great accuracy or precision.

To tackle (verb) - make determined efforts to deal with (a problem or difficult task).

Under the radar (idiom) - not getting attention : unnoticed.

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Questions and Answers

Maria: Rory, how would you define happiness?

Rory: Well, there are two parts to it, in my view. The first is an absence or relatively lower level of ill feeling, and the second is an abundance or a relatively higher level of positive emotions about a situation. I think you need both to be truly happy.

Maria: What usually makes you happy?

Rory: Snuggles? No, seriously, when I stop working for a second and reflect on my life and how far I've come and everything I've achieved and all of the great things that are happening right now, I almost can't describe the feeling of exhilaration that I feel. And then when I get to enjoy the benefits, like the ability to sleep in on a Saturday morning, not today when we're recording, but usually... and then I get to help people all over the world. It's bliss. I love it.

Maria: What would you do to make you happy?

Rory: Well, I'm already quite happy. So it becomes a case of how to maintain that, which isn't very difficult. It's things like avoiding difficult situations. And I have enough life experience to foresee potential problems. It's almost like a gut feeling, now. You can kind of look at a situation and see when things are going awry or could potentially go awry. And if we speak about maximizing happiness, maybe it would be meeting and sustaining life goals, like, having a family and finding joys in that develop. This is in addition to seeing my circle of friends. They make me pretty happy, even though they're all very different people.

Maria: Do you think people in your country are generally happy people?

Rory: I think that most people, most places, most of the time are quite happy, or at least they're satisfied with their lives. The two are often conflated, actually. It can't be a 100 percent. Otherwise, there's no impetus to move forward. Despite everything. We're living in quite an extraordinary time with great potential for improvement and development. I think I read somewhere that people in the West, which is where Scotland is, are less happy than they used to be for varying reasons. And you can see elements and glimmers of this when people speak about mental illness and dissatisfaction with the way things are more often. But it could be that we're just more aware of these things. So I'd like to air on the side of cautious hope in this case. I think we're quite happy people.

Maria: What kinds of things make people in your country happy?

Rory: Things like family and material comfort and a sense of meaning that scaffolds all of that, these are pretty universal things. But if you want me to pick something specific about Scotland, we had this reputation for being a bit feisty and working hard to get what we want. And when we do it under these conditions, then we're happy. That's my opinion. Others might beg to differ , of course! Russian people are quite feisty, for example.

Maria: Are people in your country happier now than they were 30 years ago?

Rory: Well, people said that rates of happiness were going down, but my understanding is that they're probably about the same, but for different reasons. And the threats to happiness have probably changed as well. We're more individualistic now, so individual achievement is more likely to produce happiness. We're also in the limelight a lot more on social media. So this plays a role in determining how happy people are, whereas before it didn't because you weren't... it didn't exist. It's sort of a paradox, because while we all want to be seen as individuals, we crave the approval of the crowds to keep going. However, since more people are looking after their mental health, now, I think we are happier despite some counter indications.

Maria: What makes you feel unhappy?

Rory: Well, any kind of physical or emotional pain, the worst for me is that I feel like I'm unable to progress further. So I was a little down a couple of weeks ago because I hurt my ribs at the gym. I thought I had actually cracked my ribs, but it turns out I just had a spasm, so I had to lay off it for a little while, which retarded my progress a bit. But I recovered because I reminded myself that it's not a race and I got back in the saddle easily enough.

Maria: What do you do when you are unhappy?

Rory: I try to analyze the situation and see what the problem is. Obviously, there's like this initial reaction of like, oh, I'm unhappy, but then you can't just stay there. You have to move forward. And usually I can just avoid being upset by things, by reciting a few mantras in my head. I suppose sometimes if the unhappiness is more persistent is because I haven't eaten or slept in a while and I'm hungry and tired as a result. And when you when you understand that, you can pinpoint and tackle the cause. Um, and of course, I'll vent to my friends. Everybody does that. It's good for decompression.

Maria: What's the happiest moment in your life?

Rory: I mentioned a while back, actually, someone special met me off the plane when I came back to Russia a few years ago, and I wasn't expecting them to do that. That wasn't the reason why it was special. It was because I really loved them. It was nice, this feeling of someone caring about you and they care enough about you to set this whole thing up completely under the radar. It was like quite a surprise. And I often think about that moment. It's sad because it's over now, but I'm glad I had that feeling at least once in my life.

Discussion

Maria: Sweet. Thank you very much for your happy answers.

Rory: I hope they made you happy.

Maria: So happiness, what else can you say?

Rory: We can say sheer bliss and we can talk about being on cloud nine. It's such a cliché, but no one says this.

Maria: No?

Rory: I've never said it without any irony.

Maria: Yes, so we can kind of, like, be ironic. I'm on cloud nine, you know. Hmm. Yeah. So sheer bliss could be a synonym for happiness.

Rory: Sheer bliss is better. I'm I don't know. We don't really talk about positive emotions that much. We have a million ways to describe negative emotions, but not very many to describe positive ones.

Maria: This podcast is full of positive vibes and positive emotion.

Rory: But not positive vocabulary. We don't know the words.

Maria: No we do know the words.

Rory: Tell us the words.

Maria: Yes, I'm going to tell you the words, OK? Right. I'm satisfied with my life.

Rory: That's not happiness. That's satisfaction.

Maria: Okay fine. Contentment.

Rory: That is also not happiness.

Maria: Oh, please. Oh, you're a pain in the neck.

Rory: There's a good one shiny. That's a great one. They say that a lot in Firefly.

Maria: Shiny?

Rory: Yeah, I'm shiny. Yeah. That's cool. I like that one. Um it's slang though so maybe not the best for example.

Maria: OK, but again like you can kind of paraphrase like I was delighted.

Rory: There we go.

Maria: I was, uh, content or I'm content with my life because again, contentment as this feeling of satisfaction.

Rory: Oh, hyphenation. You can hyphenate your words. You could say I'm more than content. There you go. That's a that's a euphemism, not a euphemism. That's paraphrasing happiness.

Maria: I'm more than content with my life.

Rory: I'm thrilled.

Maria: I'm thrilled. Yes.

Rory: Overjoyed. Why didn't I use any of these words?

Maria: Yeah, we can say sheer happiness, sheer bliss, pure happiness, perfect happiness. You can say I'm filled with pure happiness. I cry with pure happiness.

Rory: Sheer is a good one, though. Sheer like sheer is another one for saying like completely. Um, so like sheer arrogance. Sheer happiness. It's like the maximum. Yeah. It's cool. I like that one. I'm going to use it more.

Maria: Yeah. Advanced word which colligates well with sheer bliss, sheer happiness. When you are unhappy you can say I'm dissatisfied. I'm upset. Rory, you said I was down when I cracked my ribs.

Rory: I was a bit down. I thought I'd cracked them. I didn't. I just had a muscle spasms.

Maria: Good.

Rory: Painful.

Maria: Oh poor you. Rory, you said that snuggles made you happy. That's a nice word "snuggles".

Rory: We need to tell people what snuggles means. Because people ask me about this all the time. Snuggles is like it's like cuddles, but it's like when you cuddle into someone so like you can cuddle someone normally, but then when you get close to them, it's nice.

Maria: Yes. You can snuggle down into your warm bed.

Rory: You can it's better to snuggle with someone though.

Maria: OK, right. You can snuggle into Rory's arms for example.

Rory: If i am single.

Maria: Rory can snuggle into somebody's arms. Okay. And you talked about this feeling of exhilaration.

Rory: Yeah, I can't remember when I said it, though.

Maria: You said that I can't describe this feeling of exhilaration.#nbsp;

Rory: Yeah. I talked about this with my friend John yesterday. We were talking about life and we both used to be we used to work in the most horrendous place and we always used to be like not miserable, but it wasn't great fun. The only thing that was fun about it was I had friends there that I really liked and I was just like thinking about it. And I was looking at life now compared to then. And it's like looking down the side of a mountain after you've climbed it. It feels great. So this feeling of exhilaration, it's like it's like being thrilled, but like much stronger than thrilled.

Maria: Yeah. You've climbed the Everest and you're standing right there on top feeling this feeling of exhilaration.

Rory: I do feel, I feel great about my life.

Maria: Cool!

Rory: Do you not feel great about your life?

Maria: I do. I've done things.

Rory: Vanya, do you feel great about your life? He's sitting next to me. Of course he feels great.

Maria: But we can maximize our happiness. We can also maintain our happiness.

Rory: Yes. But there are different things, because maintaining is just staying at the level, maximizing is bringing it up to the maximum.

Maria: A good allocation is a gut feeling.

Rory: Yes.

Maria: Feeling in your gut.

Rory: It is like, you know, whenever you feel like something bad is going to happen because you think you've been there before or you just start uneasy about the situation. You know, like, I don't know.

Maria: Yeah, yesterday I went to a bar and then I went out from a bar. And then I had this gut feeling that something is missing. So I don't have something. Well, it turned out I left my phone in the bar.

Rory: Yeah. When else can you have a gut feeling? Like...

Maria: When you meet a person and you are thinking oh no, this one is not for me.

Rory: Yeah, but you've never met them before. But you look at them and you're talking to them, and you're like, I'm really uncomfortable. Yeah. Like that kind of feeling.

Maria: Like intuition, right?

Rory: Yeah. I've been on a couple of dates like that. They've been perfectly nice. And then you meet them face to face and you're like, oh I'm not sure about you. So this is a gut feeling and almost always your gut feeling is right?

Maria: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. We just never listen to it.

Rory: Yeah.

Maria: Often. A good one, bad nine vocabulary is impetus.

Rory: Impetus.

Maria: Impetus. Wow. So advanced.

Rory: It's so advanced. I've completely forgotten what it means.

Maria: It's like motivation.

Rory: Is it?

Maria: Like um. Yeah. So there is no impetus to move forward. There is no motivation. Let the force be with you.

Rory: It's not motivation. Motivation is like an active thing. Impetus is. No it's not something that has conscious thought behind.

Maria: Yeah but can you say like it's a driving force.

Rory: It is. But motivation is a different. Like what, how best to describe it. Impetus and driving force is the overall umbrella term. Motivation is part of impetus. Motivation is conscious but some parts of impetus are not conscious. You just do things just because. Ha.

Maria: Wow.

Rory: Now I do know what it means.

Maria: Wow. Mister Native Speaker. So you can say like people are satisfied with their lives, it can't be one hundred percent, otherwise there's no impetus to move forward. Oh my God. Yeah. When we talk about us being happy we can say that family material comforts. Material comfort that means money, financial stability.

Rory: It can be, but it could also be just having the things that you need to have a comfortable life, like having a laptop, having a phone.

Maria: 30 pairs of shoes. OK.

Rory: Two hundred and fifty pairs of shoes.

Maria: A sense of meaning and meaningful life.

Rory: Which is arguably more important than having material cover. What was it? Was it Friedrich Nietzsche that said he who has a why can withstand any how, which is just like saying if you have a reason to live, then you can go through anything. Wow. How we got through our work because the International House.

Maria: Wow. So Nietzsche is on this podcast. Scottish people are notorious for being feisty. Feisty. Well they have fists. A fist is a fist. You know, you can he's checking the words up. You guys, he is checking the words up.

Rory: I'm not checking words up.

Maria: He's Googling it right now.

Rory: I'm Googling it. Yeah. Because they use this word a lot, but I've completely forgotten what it means again. No, feisty feisty, fisty is not what that means.

Maria: Wow,wow,wow. Does it mean like a fist?

Rory: No, feisty is like lively and determined. Usually, at least in Scotland, the collocation is like a feisty woman. You talk about women being feisty. You do and actually, there's a group of women fighting for their pension rights, and they're called the feisty women because there were changes to the law in Scotland about pensions that were grossly unfair. So the feisty women got together and they're fighting to get their pensions. So it's the name of a group of women in Scotland. My mother is one of them, and it's also an adjective to describe a person.

Maria: Ok, we can talk about the rates of happiness. So the rates of happiness in my country have declined by example.

Rory: I have no idea if they're declined or not, but the rates can decline, the rates can increase.

Maria: Yeah, yeah. Now we are in the limelight, a lot. Like it's the same as in the spotlight, right?

Rory: Yeah. Although lime in acting. Like this is from acting, limelights and spotlights are different thing. A limelight is a particular kind of light, whereas a spotlight is just a thing that shines light on a particular spot. Limelight is the colour. Spotlight is what the light is. And I think you use the colour of the limelight to bring out certain features or highlight certain features on a person's face. But the expression in the limelight is to be on stage in front of people getting attention.

Maria: In the centre of attention. Just because of this all social media, we are in the limelight and we crave the approval of the crowd to keep going. So you can say, like, what makes me happy is...

Rory: Attention.

Maria: Attention, yes, on social media. 500 likes under my post.

Rory: That's not healthy. You should have a meaningful life. No, getting attention from people is not a great way to live your life, like because the attention fades.

Maria: Well, OK. Yeah.

Rory: Craving though, is a good word. You can crave cigarettes if you smoke.

Maria: Crave alcohol and drugs.

Rory: If you're an alcoholic or a drug addict or a Scottish person. Craving is when you really want something. People have cravings when they're pregnant.

Maria: Hmm. Pickles.

Rory: Some people eat coal when they're pregnant. People, women, women eat coal when they're pregnant.

Maria: Coal?

Rory: Yeah.

Maria: Black.

Rory: This was a thing.

Maria: Coal? Oh, anyway. Yeah you can crave some food. I'm craving McDonald's. Yum yum yum.

Rory: Not when you're pregnant.

Maria: Oh I don't know, maybe Rory, when you are unhappy you prefer reciting a few mantras, right.

Rory: Yes. So a mantra is like a short phrase or expression that you say in your head over and over again.

Maria: Hummm...

Rory: That's not a mantra.

Maria: I am the best in the world.

Rory: There you go. That's a mantra.

Maria: I am the best man. I am the most gorgeous man in the world.

Rory: That's not a healthy mantra. A mantra when you're feeling down would be something like what? What was the phrase in the Bible. This two shall pass. o

Maria: After Nietzsche we are going Bible.

Rory: No, that's not Nietzsche. That's in the King James Bible, I think. And it's like just to say that everything moves on, pain is temporary. So is pleasure.

Maria: And then when Rory vents to his friends, he feels happier.

Rory: Well, I feel happier. They probably don't.

Maria: To vent to your friends. And that's actually a very common verb to use. So what does it mean if you vent to your friends?

Rory: You complain.

Maria: You winch me, me, me, me, me.

Rory: I never do this very often. Sometimes, unless I have a bad day.

Maria: It's good for decompression.

Rory: I vented to you the other day after I made that. Idiot.

Maria: Oh, yeah, yeah, sometimes Rory went to us on our telegram chat. He goes like meh meh meh, he did that and she did that. Meh, meh, meh. And we say, oh, poor you. It's OK, darling. You're strong, you're smart and beautiful. Okay, on such a high note, everybody, dearly ladies remember that happiness is the best makeup.

Rory: No, it's not. It's the best medicine and it's laughter.

Maria: Fine. And also be happy. It drives people crazy. Thank you so much for listening. Byeee!

Rory: See you next week!

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