‘I think I am not happy,’ I said. Boom. There it is. I said it.
It happened on a beach in Koh Phangan, Thailand. Everything around me looked like a postcard from paradise: white sand, turquoise water and my family by my side. I had fulfilled the dream of a long journey, the one I had worked toward for years. While the coronavirus was raging in Israel and the world was held up in chaos, hysteria and internal conflicts, I was in the safest and most beautiful place on the planet. I had every reason to wake up each morning and sing in gratitude.
But instead of singing, there was a lump in my throat. ‘How can this possibly be?’ I asked myself. ‘How can you not feel supreme happiness after everything you did to get here? Stop whining,’ I scolded myself.
I knew it sounded privileged and petty. I stayed quiet, but the inner battle had only just begun. ‘You are happy,’ the voices in my head insisted. ‘Just lift your head and look around.’ I tried to imagine happiness. I tried to breathe it in. But my mind refused to cooperate. ‘Where is the happiness I was promised?'
That feeling, that in the very place where I was supposed to be the happiest, I instead felt emptiness, sent me on a new journey, a journey within a journey. Years of reading, research and listening to my own consciousness led me to one startling conclusion: there is no such thing as a ‘happy person.’
Our big mistake begins with language. We treat ‘happiness’ as if it were a personality trait, a permanent state that can be adopted. We say someone is ‘optimistic,’ or ‘critical,’ or ‘smiley.’ Those are real personality traits. They are the lenses through which a person views reality.
An optimistic person holds a belief system that assumes things will turn out well. It is an information processing strategy. A critical person filters reality through constant comparison between what is and what should be. These are the "hardware components" of personality.
But happiness is not a trait. It is not a sustainable state of being. It is simply a temporary score the mind assigns to reality at a given moment. If you like, it is the "fuel gauge", not the engine.
Think of it this way: there is no such thing as a ‘full person’ as an identity or character trait. A person can be full for a moment after eating, but fullness is not who they are. It is a passing state in response to food.
In the same way, happiness is a temporary reaction of the brain when reality exceeds expectations. Trying to ‘be happy’ as a way of life is like trying to ‘be surprised’ all the time. Biologically, it is impossible.
So why do we chase it so desperately? The answer is simple and brutal: happiness is an invention of talented copywriters. It is a consumer product sold to us by giant corporations that want us to believe that if we buy the right car, take the right vacation or acquire the right home, we will become ‘happy people.’
They sell us a title that cannot be held, and leave us with a constant sense of failure when our natural, fluctuating mood returns to balance, when the euphoria fades. That may explain why our parents and grandparents were not locked in an endless pursuit of happiness, but simply lived their lives, because the advertising industry was far less developed.
So what do we do? If there is no such thing as a happy person, are we doomed to live with a sense of lack? Absolutely not.
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"Instead of chasing abstract ‘happiness,’ I began to measure 'life satisfaction'. Rozental and wife Efrat
(Photo: Private album)
Instead of chasing abstract ‘happiness,’ I began to measure 'life satisfaction'.
Satisfaction is not a passing emotion, but a measurable cognitive assessment. It does not require me to smile all day or feel constantly "high". It requires me to look reality in the eye and break it down into real parameters. The moment I stopped asking ‘Am I happy?’ and started asking ‘Am I satisfied with my life?’ everything changed.
I began breaking my life down into distinct components:
* Career and meaning: Does my work fulfill me?
* Personal development: Am I learning and growing?
* Partnership and family: Do my relationships nourish me?
* Socioeconomic situation: Does my financial situation give me peace of mind?
* Friends and community: Am I surrounded by the right people?
When I stood on that beach in Koh Phangan and declared war on my thoughts, I didn't know the war was against a faulty definition. Once I understood that I was not "supposed" to be happy, but simply to be myself, with my optimism, fears and hopes, something loosened.
Then it hit me. While my satisfaction in some parameters was at its peak (after all, we were in paradise), other parameters (such as personal development), were dragging down my overall satisfaction with life. There, I felt stuck. The emptiness I thought was a "lack of happiness" was simply a signal from the areas that required work.
This is the big message: we have no control over happiness. It happens to us or it does not, though we can help it arrive and feel happy for a moment. But we have full control over satisfaction. We can examine each parameter separately, understand where work is needed and build an action plan.
The chase is over. The reins are back in my hands. I am no longer trying to be a happy person, a title that exists only in advertisements. I choose to be a conscious person, one who examines his level of satisfaction, fixes what needs improvement and appreciates what works.
The sunset in Koh Phangan is still one of the most beautiful in the world, but today I no longer expect it to turn me into something I am not. I simply stand before it, satisfied with the path I've been through and ready for the work of tomorrow.
The author is a researcher and workshop instructor in the fields of happiness and personal fulfillment