Happiness

What the experts say

Happiness has been studied scientifically for about fifty years. The best-known answers in brief:

Martin Seligman: five building blocks

Seligman is regarded as the founder of Positive Psychology. In his book “Flourish” (2011) he no longer speaks of happiness but of well-being and flourishing. For him it has five building blocks: pleasant feelings, engagement in an activity, good relationships, meaning, and the accomplishment of one’s own aims. Each building block can be cultivated deliberately.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: flow

People have their best moments when they are completely absorbed in an activity. The task is demanding, and their own abilities are just sufficient. Time and the sense of self recede. Csikszentmihalyi called this state “flow” (book from 1990). It cannot be forced, but its conditions can be created.

Ed Diener: subjective well-being

Diener founded the measurement of happiness by survey. For him happiness means being satisfied with one’s own life and having pleasant feelings often and unpleasant ones rarely. It depends on temperament, relationships, health, income and culture.

Daniel Kahneman: two selves

The Nobel laureate distinguished the experiencing self, which feels the moment, from the remembering self, which judges in retrospect. The two can contradict each other. With Angus Deaton he found in 2010: satisfaction with life keeps rising with income, while everyday feeling supposedly rises only up to a limit.

Sonja Lyubomirsky: the happiness formula

In 2005 Lyubomirsky and colleagues divided happiness up: about 50 percent disposition, 10 percent life circumstances, 40 percent one’s own actions. From this follows their message: whoever acts deliberately, for example by being grateful and kind, can become lastingly happier.

Robert Waldinger: relationships

Since 1938 the Harvard Study has followed hundreds of men, and later their families, through life. Its present director Waldinger sums up the result like this: it is not wealth or fame that predicts a good life in old age, but the warmth of close relationships (book “The Good Life”, 2023).

Carol Ryff: a life that goes well

Ryff builds on Aristotle. For her, happiness is less a feeling than a life that goes well. She names six areas: accepting oneself, good relationships, independence, having one’s own life in hand, purpose in life, and personal growth (1989).

The treadmill of habituation

In 1971 Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell described how people get used to good things as well as bad ones and return to their usual level of happiness. In a well-known study from 1978, lottery winners were not happier than others. Later research showed that this level can shift lastingly after all.

Viktor Frankl: meaning instead of happiness

The Viennese psychiatrist survived several concentration camps. For him the basic force in the human being is the will to meaning. Whoever seeks happiness directly misses it. It arises as a side effect when one devotes oneself to a task or to a person (“… trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen”, 1946; in English “Man’s Search for Meaning”).

Abraham Maslow: needs and peak experiences

In 1943 Maslow described needs that build on one another: body, safety, belonging, esteem, self-actualization. Later he spoke of peak experiences, moments of the highest joy and unity.

Voices in the German-speaking world

Eckart von Hirschhausen distinguishes five kinds of happiness, with community as the foundation (“Glück kommt selten allein …”, 2009). The philosopher Wilhelm Schmid does not consider happiness the most important thing in life and places meaning above it (2007). The religious educator Anton Bucher published a handbook on the psychology of happiness (2009).

The World Happiness Report

The annual report ranks countries by a single question: how close is your life today to the best possible one, on a ladder from 0 to 10? The word “happiness” does not appear in the question. The differences are explained by social support, income, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity and little corruption.

What has not held up

Some figures are still often quoted today, although research has corrected them:

• The “40 percent” of happiness that one supposedly has in one’s own hands finds hardly any support in the data (Brown and Rohrer, 2019). In 2021 the originators conceded that these were estimates.
• The income limit of 75,000 dollars was corrected in 2023 by Kahneman himself, together with Matthew Killingsworth and Barbara Mellers. It applies only to the unhappiest group.
• The “positivity ratio” of 2.9 pleasant feelings to one unpleasant feeling was based on faulty mathematics. Its mathematical part was retracted (Brown, Sokal and Friedman, 2013).
• The famous pyramid of needs does not come from Maslow. It was drawn later in management studies (Bridgman and others, 2019).

What these answers have in common

Different as the approaches are, almost all of them agree on a few points. Happiness is asked about: people state for themselves how they rate their life and how they feel. Happiness depends on conditions, on disposition, income, health, freedom and above all on relationships. Happiness is considered something that can be increased, through practice, good habits or better policy.

And happiness is something that arises and passes away again. Even where it counts only as a side effect of meaning and devotion, with Frankl or Csikszentmihalyi, it comes and goes. It is sought in the human being, in his feelings and judgements, and in his circumstances.

This is not a flaw of this research. It carefully describes the happiness people experience when things are going well. The ancient Indian teaching knows this happiness too. But it gives it a different place.

Ananda: the bliss that does not arise

Ananda is the third term in Sat-Chit-Ananda: being, consciousness, bliss. In Sanskrit the word first of all simply means joy. In the teaching of the Upanishads, however, it does not denote a feeling that a person has. It denotes the essence of what is.

He knew: bliss is Brahman. For from bliss these beings are born. By bliss the born live. Into bliss they enter when they depart.Taittiriya Upanishad 3.6, own translation from the Sanskrit

The same Upanishad sets up a ladder of joy (2.8). It begins with a young person, healthy, strong and learned, to whom the whole earth with all its wealth belongs. That is one unit of human joy. Each step above it is a hundred times greater, up to the bliss of Brahman. And at each step it says: this bliss is also had by the knower who is not struck by desire. The highest bliss therefore does not depend on having. It grows to the degree that desire comes to rest.

The Chandogya Upanishad says it even more briefly: “What is fullness, that is happiness. In the small there is no happiness.” (7.23). Fullness, bhuman, is where one sees, hears and knows nothing else. Where there is another that one needs, there is the small. The commentator Shankara explains: the small always awakens new thirst, and thirst is the seed of suffering.

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad calls this bliss an ocean without a second and adds: all other beings live on a small part of this very bliss (4.3.32). Every ordinary joy would then be a drop from this ocean.

Sri Aurobindo developed this teaching in “The Life Divine”, in the chapters “Delight of Existence: The Problem” and “Delight of Existence: The Solution”. For him the delight of being is all-embracing, limitless and self-existent, not dependent on particular causes. Pleasure and pain are not its opposite but currents that come forth from it when consciousness limits itself in the ego. Things are not the cause of joy but its mirror. And the world is Lila, a play of the joy of one’s own being.

Ramana Maharshi answers the question of what happiness is: happiness is the nature of the Self. Happiness lies in no object. When a desire is fulfilled, the mind comes to rest for a moment and experiences the happiness that it is itself. We then attribute it to the object.

Comparison

The two views answer different questions. Placed side by side, the differences become clear:

What follows

Happiness research is right about what it describes. Good relationships, health and a meaningful task make life lighter and brighter. Whoever cultivates them does well. The Upanishads would say: this is happiness in the small, and it is a drop from the ocean.

Ananda, by contrast, does not have to be acquired, increased or secured. It is the ground from which every single joy comes. So the point is not to experience a moment of bliss, but to abide lastingly in the attitude that being, awareness and joy are always there. This possibility is open in every moment, even when circumstances are not good.

More about the ground itself can be found on the page about Satchidananda. To the Satchidananda page →