Despite the prevalence of the word in our society I haven't come across anything that dwells deep into this subject.
At best, the advice is to "be positive".... the equivalent of telling someone to "just be confident" for a presentation.
While this advice is good intentioned is it impossible to apply. It seems, happiness and confidence is the RESULT of a type of process.
In other words, it is the equivalent of telling someone to "be rich" instead of what one needs to do in order to "get rich."
With the question left unanswered, I decided to dwell further and figure out the answer to this elusive question.
My conclusion has been that happiness is a base default state. In other words, we are by default happy unless acted upon by a force.
How did I come about this answer? Largely by common sense.
Let's think about it.
As children we are by nature happy. Watch a child at play and you can see that the child naturally feels happy. You do not see children creating hoops to jump through in order to attain the feeling.
But of course, children are TOO stupid and ignorant to be unhappy...
That is where other "primitive" cultures come into play.
A similar phenomenon happens when you look into "primitive" societies. If you were to ask one of these individuals the justification for their happiness then they would look very strangely at you. The question back would be: "Why does one need a justification to be happy?"
Let's play with this question a little and see whether there is value in considering it?
Why does one need a justification to be happy?
Answer 1: Well the MAIN reason we need a justification to be happy is because of the repercussions of being happy. Do you realize the impact on human productivity if everyone in the world was happy? Why in the world would anyone lift a finger to do anything?
Interesting belief and this is indeed what the majority of the world believes me. In order to answer this question we need only to look at happy employees and control for other factors to see whether there is indeed a decrease in their productivity when happiness is present.
Of course, there are many studies that show that happy employees are indeed more productive (CLICK HERE). However, let's think about it on an intuitive level. Think of the people that you know that are happy and consider their productivity? Is it lower or higher? Overwhelmingly, if you looked at the productivity of happy people you would indeed see that they are naturally happy whether or not they are or are not practicing their craft?
How does this work? How are they motivated if they are already happy?
You see, whether someone is happy or unhappy is only one psychological distinction. There are other ways that one can analyze an individual's mental state. For example, have you ever been happy but found a project so interesting/challenging/cool that you decided to do it anyways.
Among already happy people routinely you will find that they accomplish tasks for interest, challenge, or even to contribute to the greater good.
In fact, a happy person doesn't understand the happy/unhappy frame of mind which is always on the mind of primarily unhappy individuals.
Why then are we unhappy?
Outside of a twisted scientifically unproven motivation strategy, we also experience conditional happiness because of the social conditioning under which we are exposed. After all, you're not happy because you're not wearing cool shades, or driving a sick car, etc.
Of course, as you know I am very pro-capitalism, but it is worth to consider the effect that social conditioning and consumerism has on the masses. The only way to really consider this is to control for these social conditioning mechanisms and look at societies with little exposure to these messages. Are these "primitive" societies happier or are they more unhappy? I think you may be to hear that when controlled for "primitive" woes such as: diseases/hunger/violence, etc, people in these "primitive" societies are indeed happier.
The interesting thing about happiness is that although it might hurt consumerism on a small level (after all, happy people like good things too) it would have an exponential effect on productivity and a significant decline on violence, diseases, terrorism, etc.
Look, I'm not saying that by nature you could and should feel as if you just threw the winning pass in the super bowl. This is not happiness, this is exuberance which is another emotion. Nor am I saying that if you get shot in the knee you should proclaim how happy you are. Probably, the best thing to do in the latter example is to get your ass to a hospital (not think about your emotional well being).
The point is, 70-80-90% of the time our default state is happiness. At least, our default state would be happiness (similar to the feeling of calmness) if we only slowed down and thought about this concept on a logical level.
Happiness is not something you "jump hoops for". When you reach for a goal and accomplish it we call this fulfilling a challenge or stretching ourselves (in a positive way).
Happiness, on the other hand, just is when we allow it to be.
Another way to say this is that happiness, or relaxation, is the base of other emotions. It is an emotion that is under all the other emotions. For example, you can be overall happy yet presently pissed off. You are happy/relaxed as a base state but, right now, you happen to be pissed off because it is raining on you and you are getting wet.
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