Episode 156: What Is Happy?
In this episode, I decided to ask some of the people in my life—my mom, my second mom, my nephews, and my friend Andrew, who is a philosophy professor at Otterbein University—what they think about happiness.
What is happy?
This is a loaded question—but it’s something I want to explore in this episode because happiness is the #1 thing my clients say they want. But how do we get to happiness? What is the path there?
Lately, I’ve been on a quest to go deeper. To ask questions. To get clear.
In episode 153, I explored how asking and studying into a question helps you to really get to the heart of the issue.
What does happiness look like?
What does happiness feel like?
How will we know when we’ve reached happiness?
For this episode, I decided to ask some of the people in my life—my mom, my second mom, my nephews, and my friend Andrew, who is a philosophy professor at Otterbein University—what they think about happiness and you’ll hear their ideas throughout the show.
As you’re listening to this episode, I challenge you to ask yourself: what is happy for you?
Listen to the full episode to find out:
How happiness is fleeting and is a feeling we have, just like sadness and anger. It isn’t a state of constant being
How to give ourselves grace and relieve ourselves of the pressure that we should be happy all the time—and if we aren’t happy, there must be something wrong with us
Examples of what makes people happy from reading in peace, creating something, and spending time with family
Resources mentioned:
+ Read the Transcript
Nancy: What is happy. This is a topic I want to explore because the number one thing my clients say, they want more happiness. Don't we all. And lately I've been a bit on this quest to go deeper. As I alluded to a couple of weeks ago, I want to start asking the question under the question. And so in this episode, we're diving deeper into the question.
What is happy? What does it look like? How do you know when you're experiencing it? You're listening to the happier approach. The show that pulls back the curtain on the need to succeed, hustle, and achieve at the price of our inner peace in relationships. I'm your host, Nancy Jane Smith. I began my journey, figuring out what is happy by asking my family, what did they consider happy to be?
And I didn't give them much notice. I just came down to my mom's house for a socially distanced family gathering and said, Hey, what do you think happy is? And recorded their answers. And their answers were fascinating to me, the variety, and yet the similarities I'll be sprinkling. Those answers throughout the show.
And as you're listening, I challenge you to ask yourself what is happy for you? First let's hear from my nephew, Aaron, as he talks about gratitude.
Nancy: Tell me Aaron, how would you define happy? What is happy to you?
Aaron: I try and be a grateful person. I think when I'm grateful for things that I do every day. Stop to think about a moment that I appreciated. It makes me happier.
Nancy: My nephew and I have talked about his gratitude practice in the past. He's in his early twenties and he's in nursing school and he learned about it in one of his classes. They encouraged him to set an alarm on his phone and every day to practice naming the things he's grateful for that day.
And I love how he shares how his gratitude practice has changed over time.
Aaron: I do gratitude every day at 10:00 PM. I started with the big things, thankful for family and healthy and happiness. And now I just do things that happen during the day. So just three small things that could have happened during the day that I go back into.
Nancy: And so since practicing that, would you say you're happier? I definitely would say so. Yeah. I've been doing it for about two years now. So at first it was focusing in at 10. And think about your gratitude. But now when I go around just living my normal life, I can appreciate things as I go. Just makes you think more about being grateful for little, the moments.
Nancy: Of course, I couldn't do an episode on what is happy without researching happiness. And so I typed in what is happy into Google and upped popped an article from the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. All about happiness, which immediately led me to my friend, Andrew Mills, who is a philosophy professor at a local university here in Columbus.
Andrew. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Andrew: Sure. I am a philosophy professor at Otterbein university, which is located in Westerville, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus. I've been teaching there for about 21, 22 years, and I teach undergraduate classes on the history of philosophy, introduction to philosophy, environmental philosophy classes.
A general education class I teach cause it's called happiness and the good life. And that's a course where we serve, they different approaches to happiness and the good life going all the way back to the ancient Greeks. People like Socrates, but up to the modern day people like Martin Luther king and contemporary folks who were working.
Yeah. Living simply environmental approaches as well
Nancy: . So what is happy when you're looking at it from a philosophy standpoint?
Andrew: that's a great question. One question, so that I think about a lot is the distinction between a happy life and a good life. I think a lot of the philosophical literature going all the way back to people like Socrates thought about.
Not so much the psychological state of being happy of feeling. Moment to moment, but about whether one's life is going well. And so is one leading a good life. And a lot of philosophers would try to define what the conditions are for leading a good life. Does a good life require that.
Engage in one's community and be politically active and seek to make the world a better place. Is that what a good life is? Even if doing that might involve long stretches of stress and worry and agitation and states that we might not think of happy because it's hard work. So people like civil, activists might think that they're engaged in the good fight or religious lives. Monastic lives of devotion to God might be seen as good lives, but don't involve the sort of pleasures that many of us think a part of living happily. So I spent a lot of time trying to tease that apart and the other side.
What we think of as being like states of psychological happiness of just what a good feeling might accompany lives that we think are from a, I dunno, moral point of view, pretty miserable, right? Because you're acting in rapacious, evil, horrible ways in order to surround yourself with luxuries and fancy food and find wine and all the rest of it.
So that's one thing I try to do is tease apart that psychological state feeling well from living a good life. Not that the two can't go together.
Nancy: So as I was talking with Andrew, I had this aha around. Wow. So many of us, when we think about happiness or what is happy or achieving happy. So often we think about this feeling of permanent happiness that I will achieve a state of happy or a common refrain.
I hear my clients talk about a lot is and myself as well. I should be happy. What's wrong with me. I should be happy as if it is a permanent space. That we can achieve. And what was so fascinating in this conversation with Andrew was pulling apart those two concepts of happy as a psychological state and a good life.
And what does that mean? Having a good life? So
Andrew: that's another way you could think about happiness in this hedonistic. He don't, ya are just the Greek word for pleasure. So the momentary pleasures, and you might think are you happy right now? No, I just stubbed my toe. I just dropped a brick on my foot.
Of course I'm in lots of pain. Which is the opposite of happiness. But then. People say let's pull back. Don't just think about this immediate second where you're suffering pain, but look at your life. How's it going this week or this month or this year? How's your life been altogether? And you think less about the stub toes and more.
Do I have a relative balance of pleasure over pain as my life been mostly pleasant with, moments of grief or sorrow or sadness. And so sometimes people, when they think about happy. Encourage us to think more broadly, not about today, but about this year or this period of my life. The hedonism is a really interesting view.
I was just teaching this last week that the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus we got our term Epicurean. He was an advocate. Hedonism. He sought the good life is a life filled with pleasure, the best life, not just psychologically best, but like morally best. The best way to live your life is to feel it with as much pleasure as possible.
But he understood pleasure in this really interesting way. He didn't understand pleasure as the states of excitation. It wasn't orgasms and massages and what it's like to have the best chocolate cake you've ever had. Every philosopher who teaches hedonism has to spend like 10 minutes. Saying, here's what you understand by hedonism because you're a person who lives in the 21st century and here's how philosophers understand hedonism.
And I use this, I found this there's some resort in the Caribbean. Maybe that's called hedonism too. And it's like clothes optional, like very, sybaritic kind of. Party resort place. And I just offer this up and say this is not what philosophers mean by hedonism for Epicurus. The state of pleasure was a state of, he called it Arthur Roxy was the Greek term contentment and not being troubled.
And so for him, pain is a deficit you're hungry or you're too cold or you're thirsty, or your leg hurts. And so pleasure is a state of. Suffering any of that stuff. So how do you get pleasure? Look around what pains do you have? What hungers or thirsts or aches or mental worries or agitation or stress or anxiety.
And then pleasure is a state of that. And can you get to the state where you're not hungry? You're not thirsty, you're not cold. You're not worried. You're not agitated. And then, and so it's not, if you're hungry, what you need is food. You don't need expensive food, you just need grass. And if you're thirsty, you just, a glass of water is fine.
You don't need to find the fanciest bottle of wine and you just need some water. And so for him, that opened up a whole avenue to saying the good life is actually the pretty simple life. You just need a few things to be in that state of contentment. You need shelter and you need friends and you need food, but you don't need fancy.
And in fact, the struggle for fancy causes all kinds of stress because we've got to work really hard to afford all the fancy stuff and to pay for the new house and the yacht and the bottles of wine. And so in the end of the day, it's not worth the price. So it was interesting, like he's thought about pleasure psychologically, opened up a kind of view about here's what the good life is.
Exactly. You don't need that much to live in a state of contentment or what you need is pretty easy to access for most people. But nowadays of course, we have this term Epicurean and there's like magazines have that term and that, or there's a person I described as a real Epicurean and it's a misunderstanding or just a different understanding of Epicurus his own view.
It's not fancy. It's not high end. It's not. Lobster Thermidor, if you are satisfied with the, not just the bare necessities, but the sort of simple, the simple life. Yeah. And, there's all kinds of social benefits to the ad, right? We're not all fighting with each other to get the fancy stuff and trying to keep up with the Joneses.
Life gets a little easier maybe if, from that point of view, if you're that kind of hedonism is hard. If what you want is excitement and, I dunno, orgasmic kind of all the time, like the thrill seeking, understanding of happiness, like that's hard because there aren't enough roller coasters in the world.
To help you get to that next thrill.
Nancy: So of course, this got me thinking about my own model and the ideas I have around the characters in our head and the monger and the BFF and the biggest fan and how for many people that I work with and myself included was the struggle of the lack of drama that comes when you are listening to the biggest.
That lack of excitement that Andrew is talking about. That biggest fan voice is the voice of simple living of looking back and seeing the good life. And we have been sold this idea that it needs to be dramatic and fun and exciting. And that idea that happy will get us there. And that is the lie.
The myth that our monger comes in to say, you should be happy. What's your purpose? And the BFF brings in that hedonistic, our traditional sense of what we think hedonism is that's the voice of the BFF. And it is so much more exciting to live in that place. It's also so much more painful, so much more exhausting, so much more drama filled and so much more conflict filled.
And when we can find that ease and that place of the biggest fan, we can find that simple life that Epicurus is talking. What also struck me about Epicurus is our tendency, as humans is to simplify everything down Epicurus means avoid pain and find simple pleasures. So looking at that, we tend to simplify everything down, but in reality, it's so much deeper than that.
It's so much more nuanced. And so we can find that richness in the nuance of it. After I hung up the conversation with Andrew, I was thinking about grief and how that is the ultimate thing that all of us have to go through the death of a loved one, and that can hurt our happiness because we're in grief.
And so I was curious on how Epicurus dealt with that. Andrew had suggested that I look up some of Epicureans teachings. And so I of course, went into Google again. And in his bat, a can saying number 66, he talks about let us show feeling for our friends who have died, not by lamenting, but by reflection, grieving that engages with our memories of the deceased in a positive way, can lead us to a greater appreciation of how they enriched our lives and the lives of others.
Such positively focused reflection. Albeit inevitably tinge with sadness should help us remember them with pleasure. It may even help us discover in ourselves a more mature attitude towards the inevitability of death. This is surely a positive, not a negative experience. What struck me about that is a, Epicurus believed that we're all going to die.
It's inevitable, nothing you can do about it. So you might as well accepted. And they also had the idea that if you're grieving one way to deal with that grief and to accept it is to be thinking of the memories of the person that you love and talk about them and keep them alive with their memories.
Which brings me to my next definition of what is happy by my dear friend and who I call my second mother? Yeah.
What is happy to you, Norma?
Norma: Happy to me. He is when the people around me that I love my family, my extended family, when everything is good with them, when they're achieving or they're not, but we're all sticking together and sharing it makes me happy.
It's what I need in my life. To have people that I love that much. And then I know they love me that much.
Nancy: And is this something that you experienced in memories of connecting with them or does it have to be face-to-face happening?
Norma: No, it's since the moment I knew them or even before I knew them because they weren't born yet.
It's just remembering and having those memories that I can tune into now at this age in particular, I'm doing a lot of sitting by myself and I can sit and think about all the fun times and everything. And it makes me happy.
Nancy: And as you can hear at the end and of that conversation, she was getting a phone call from one of those people that are so near and dear to her heart.
And I love the idea of Epicurus because as I said before, it reminds me so much of the biggest fan. And to me, it is the biggest fan. And yet, if there's anything this past year has taught me, it is the power of privilege and how it can keep us warped in happy. And how it's that definition of.
Happiness and simple pleasures isn't available to everyone. And so I asked Andrew about that and we got into this idea of what's. What else is there in the philosophy world that addresses those ideas of social justice?
Andrew: It's interesting. I was talking about that with my students. Cause he, again, he was, he didn't think a lot about justice, but he did think that for one, there's a reason, self interestedly for you to be just because the, if you don't commit crimes, his thought was, you're not afraid of being caught.
And so you're not wrapped with guilt of being apprehended, but of course, we live in a world where people get killed. Or are accused of doing things because of the way they look or because of their social position, that they didn't do anything, but they're apprehended by the police. And so they're people who live in all kinds of fear for their lives and they can't get away from that fear if simply by not doing the crimes because they're right.
You look this way and so the police bring you in. And so it was interesting that if you think that's happening in the world, Which I think it is, then you've got a motivation to maybe fix the world to enable all those people to live without fear. If we can get rid of the injustices in the world that will allow other people to, live without the constant fear of their oppression or getting arrested for something they didn't do or being attacked by folks.
So the social justice piece is hard for someone like Epicurus. Yeah. Philosopher John Stuart mill. He was this Victorian English philosopher. He also built was a hedonist in different sense from Epicurus, but he was a big social justice campaigner. And his thought was our goal in life is to produce as much pleasure as possible, not just for ourselves.
For everyone, right? Let's make society full of people who are happy. And so that you can see if that's your goal that motivates social justice. Let's make life better for people. And whether that's welfare state stuff, whether that's correcting unjust political systems, whether that's dealing with them.
Poverty, let's do things to make the lives of people as pleasant as possible. Not just egoistically, I'm going to get as much pleasure for me. If I can. Some of the social justice folks have that motivation, there's people suffering and let's fix the world. So those people don't have so much pain in their lives anymore.
Nancy: So the idea that happiness is not only about the simple pleasures and the good life and looking at your life from a whole. But it's also about getting out of your own selfishness and seeing the world through other people's eyes and seeing what is happening for other people and how can we all be achieving happiness together.
And I think that is such a great way of thinking about it. That gets us out of our own process, which is so often what happens in psychology and especially so often for those of us with anxiety, we really get stuck in our own heads and in our own processes. And so being able to think about, yeah, What is happy for other people and how can I help them achieve that level of happiness and myself?
How can I level the playing field so that we all are looking at this good life and able to achieve the good life, whatever that means for each of us individually. And so now I'm going to share what my mom said in her definition of what is happy.
What is happy to you, mom?
Jane: having my family come. Any reason, but to celebrate today, we had a get together and it was a great time of sharing around the dining room table.
It's also happy to me that I can be here in my own home and sit on my breezeway and read in peace and quiet.
I appreciate how my mom brought in two things that make her happy or the, her definition of happy. And I think this fits for a lot of us, it's obviously more than just one thing, but the idea of having connection and family and gathering together, and then the idea of having alone time and having space to, to read and do the things that bring us joy in our own brains in our own time.
And I think being able to be able to tap in and tap out of togetherness and being alone and togetherness and being alone. I think for a lot of us, that is a true essence of happy. It's a much more complicated answer than just one thing. This is what happened. And there are definitely times I'm sure for my mom that when she's sitting outside in her beautiful home, she wishes she was someplace else or she wishes she was doing other things.
That's what I loved about Epicurus as Andrew was talking about him was the idea that it's looking across your whole life. It's looking at what is the good life overall for me? How can I achieve that level of happy? When I look back on my life and I see my life as well. And how can I manage the times where it's tough and hard and I'm struggling, as Andrew said, I stubbed my toe or I've, just really my anxiety is through the roof.
How can I manage these times in an appropriate, positive, helpful way, and give myself that grace and kindness that will get me through this. Okay. So here's my last interview with my nephew Parker. Who's in his mid twenties on what his definition of happy is.
Parker: I'd say my, definition of happy kind as a two-prong I find it in two areas of my life, I'd say, and what I'm creating and making something just active.
Generating something from my myself and getting to know myself more. So the self-actualization of sorts as well as from connection with other people, is really the theme is connection in a lot of ways. And I feel connected to myself or to others. That's happiness to me. You're right where you need to be.
Nancy: So how often do you experience that? It's something we say we want, but it's not a state we can keep.
Parker: Yeah. I think that I experienced. I guess rarely it's not a sustained state. I can picture the moments when I'm happy, but typically these moments are fleeting or I never realized that I'm happy in that moment.
It's right afterwards. I'm like, I'm happy. And then you just settle with it and you're calm.
Nancy: And so Parker reminds us that it isn't a permanent state, but it isn't something you can achieve and you have figured out how to be happy. It's something we will continually be striving for and looking for, unless you go back and look at the big picture of you as a Paris talks about and what is a good life.
And then we can take a deeper look at that, covering what John Stuart mill says, how I can help other people achieve that as well. So getting out of our own way, I hope that in this episode, you got to think about happy in a different, more nuanced way. When I talk with my family, they had common answers, what struck me the most about it was the simplicity to bring it back to Epicurus the simple pleasures.
And when I think about the answers my family had, they were relatively simple answers. And I think we have two beliefs about happy that we know are wrong, but we insist on believing or at least our Mongo convinces us. We should keep believing. One that is a permanent state of being and two, that it is something complex and out of reach as if we really have to struggle to find that.
Our Monger keeps those beliefs alive. She encourages us to keep pushing because once we achieve, she tells us we'll be happy. And then our BFF steps in to tell us we can only achieve happiness through hedonism, the typical traditional sense of hedonism, like going to hedonism to, for example, when in reality, the real happy comes in that drama free nuanced form of our biggest fan, the place that says, Hey, sweet pea. How you doing today? That's where real happiness lies. So we will continue the quest. We will continue the conversation on what is happy. And I'd love to hear from you. Let me know how you would answer that question. What is happy to you?