📘 Part 3: Happiness

This episode's vocabulary

Temperament (noun) - the part of your character that affects your moods and the way you behave.

By default - happening or done because no formal choice or decision has been made.

Proverbial (adj.) - well known.

Subjective (adj.) - influenced by or based on personal beliefs or feelings, rather than based on facts.

Neurotransmitter (noun) - a chemical that carries messages between neurons or between neurons and muscles.

Sufficient (adj.) - enough for a particular purpose.

Inferior (adj.) - not good, or not as good as someone or something else.

Fleeting (adj.) - short or quick.

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Questions and Answers

M: Let's talk about happiness, Rory. How can people be happy?

R: Well, it's probably easier to list the ways they can be sad, since that always involves some sort of discomfort, whether it's emotional or physical. They can do the things that give them pleasure, or they can lose themselves in it for a few hours. That could be anything from playing action packed games to reading a very good book, people can get happiness out of just about anything, depending on their temperament.

M: Do you think failures help people feel happiness?

R: I suppose. If it helps them find the thing that gives them happiness, and avoid the thing that gives them the discomfort of failure in the future, then yes, but it wouldn't be the, or rather, it shouldn't be the first thing that we look to to achieve happiness. And I don't think that's how it works. For most people, they try and avoid failure by default.

M: How do people express happiness in your culture?

R: By singing about it from the proverbial rooftops, it seems, and that's not a criticism, since we all do it to some extent. People post things on social media, they text or they tell their friends, and they usually have smiles on their faces, it's difficult to miss.

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

R: Before I was born? I don't know. I think there have been measurements of subjective happiness that over the course of history, and apparently, measures of subjective happiness and well being are going down. So going by that people are less happy. However, I think happiness is the really difficult thing to measure. And it's probably not the most important thing.

M: And can money make people happy?

R: In and of itself? No. But money allows you to access the things that can make you happy more easily. But it's not like an automatic ticket to happiness. I mean, you still have to have the drive to go and actually get the thing and work to make the money.

M: Do you think happiness has any effect on people? And how?

R: Well we don't think now. Like, we know that the state of happiness is connected to the release of certain neurotransmitters. And usually, if you're well balanced, when someone else is happy, then you're happy for them too. Alternatively, if you're a bit of a miserable person, then you might wish something terrible would happen to them based on that alone. So it definitely has an effect on the person experiencing it and others.

M: Is it good for people to be unhappy?

R: Well, being unhappy is usually a sign that something is wrong. So that's your brain's way of letting you know that this is the case, and you should do something to fix it. So with that, in mind, unhappiness can be necessary, but not sufficient to living a good life, because you still have to fix the problem, don't you?

M: Is it important to have goals in life in order to feel happy?

R: That will depend entirely on the kind of person that you are, I would imagine. Because some people like working towards something, and that gives them meaning in life. Whereas some people like to just create a constant, stable environment that allows them to be happy, pretty much consistently all the time, that I don't think either of those is inferior to the other. It's just how life works. People are different.

M: Why do some people say happiness never lasts long?

R: Well, it could be based on personal experience, or it doesn't last long, really, when you think about it. Happiness is very fleeting. In comparison to things that are longer lasting and more beneficial, like a sense of meaning in your life. It's nice when it comes along. But it's not like the main thing. So they're probably speaking from experience, whether firsthand or secondhand.

M: And how can one define happiness?

R: That's a really good question. Because in many ways, happiness is like a shared good feeling that everyone experiences. And you don't really have to explain it that much very often. I suppose if you're a biologist, then you could probably measure the amount of neurotransmitters in someone's head, but maybe just a general positive good feeling towards all expressed throughout your person.

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