What is Happiness?

What is happiness? Of all of life’s major questions, it feels like this question is one that is both (i) worthwhile to consider and (ii) almost impossible to answer. I have a sneaking suspicion that English is a hopelessly inadequate language to express the nuances of the different kinds of “happiness” one experiences in his or her life. You can be “happy” when you are hanging out with your friends. You can be “happy” when you are visiting a new city for the first time. You can be “happy” when you are playing a sport that you really enjoy. You can be “happy” doing meaningful work at a job that you love. You can be “happy” reading a good book or watching a great movie. All of these different states of your life can be classified with the all-encompassing “happy” descriptor, but you and I both know that these are all different feelings.

Defining what makes you happy in a work context can be even more confusing, specifically because we often confuse what we are passionate about with what could make us happy in a work context.

Are you a sports fan? You should work in the business of sports.

Do you love arguing and writing? You should become a lawyer.

Do you enjoy math and numbers? Maybe a career in finance.

But this absurdly reductive line of reasoning ignores what it means to work everyday. Take being a lawyer for instance. If you decide to become a lawyer because you love to argue in court, it is really important to know how much of your time as a lawyer is spent arguing in court. If you love arguing but hate writing, and you spend 99% of your time as a lawyer writing, you are in for some serious disappointment!

As Tim Ferriss said just the other day — “Some words are overused as to have become meaningless. If you find yourself using nebulous terms like “success,” “happiness,” or “investing,” it pays to explicitly define them or to stop using them. Answering “What would it look like if I had __?” helps clarify things. Life favors the specific ask and punishes the vague wish.”

My first post (which can be found here) discussed why it is so important to take stock of whether your life is returning enough happiness to you. But an integral part of figuring out whether your life is returning enough happiness is specifically defining what happiness means to you. You have to define what happiness means to you first, then you can figure out how to maximize it.

So then where do you start in your journey to specifically define what gives you happiness? For me, I started from a micro level and tried to work my way up. This is not to say that I have achieved happiness or nirvana — far from it. But my basic belief is that if you have happy days, and your life is made up of a collection of days, then happy days should lead to a happy life.

When I first started to construct a happy day, I started with my five essential elements of happiness: (i) love, (ii) health, (iii) work, (iv) mind and (v) spirit. Every day I wrote out my intentions for that day, and for each element I outlined a specific action I would take to feed these different parts of my life. If I hit all five elements of a happy day, then I probably had a happy day.

Under “love”, it would often be a phone call to my parents, or to my sister who lives in Australia. When you are grinding every day at a stressful job, it is easy to forget what is really important to you. For me, my family is the most important element of my life, so I always put “love” first and started my day with a phone call to my parents or to my sister. I knew that if I started the day by feeding the “love” element of my day, that it would be the best way to ensure that I had a good day. Whether it was catching up with my mom on the gossip from back home, or it was getting a chance to chat with my sister and my niece over Facetime, those conversations fed an essential element of my life and greatly contributed to my overall happiness that day.

Under the “health” element, I would usually state an intention to workout. A lot of people claim that they don’t have time to take care of themselves, but physical health is probably the most important determinant in your overall happiness (especially as you get older). It is very difficult to enjoy life if you are not healthy. The old saying goes “A healthy person has a thousand desires; a sick person only has one.” For me a good day has to include something to improve my overall health.

Under the element of “work”, this usually meant putting together a list of things that I wanted to accomplish that day at work to set me up for the next day, week or month. Regardless of how I felt about my career or my job, I still wanted to perform well at work. There was a certain level of satisfaction that I got from performing my duties to the best of my abilities, so a day that I mailed it in at work was not going to be a good day. I wanted to grow as a professional and be an asset to the team that I worked with. Most importantly, I knew that people relied on me so I had a desire to ensure that I didn’t let my teammates down. I wanted to pull my weight, be valuable and showcase my ability to do good work.

While I wanted to perform well at my job because I enjoyed the feeling of satisfaction that came from it, I wasn’t necessarily feeding my brain in the way that got me excited. I had to find this excitement elsewhere. Under the element of “mind”, I usually stated an intention to read an article about investing (which is something that I am passionate about), listen to one of my favorite podcasts, or read a good book that I had queued up in my Kindle. If I was able to spend half an hour a day on this, I found that it gave me a lot of joy. The ideas that came from these short sessions paid major dividends down the road (I got the idea for this newsletter from one of these 30 minute sessions, so you never know when inspiration will strike!).

Finally, under “soul”, I tried to work on the area of my life that focused on my mental wellbeing. This either meant having a session with my therapist, reading a fiction book that relaxed me, or trying (and usually failing) to meditate. I don’t know what it is about meditation, but I can’t for the life of me ever manage to meditate. Too many thoughts, too many ideas, too many anxieties. But I figure the more I try, the more I marginally get better at it. There must be something to it if everyone keeps talking about its virtue.

At the end of the day, I would check off each of the elements that I had managed to hit that day. Most of the time I would hit three or four of the five. Life tends to get in the way of putting together an ideal day. But I found that even taking stock at the end of each day made me appreciate the day that I had just lived. While doing things that made me happy was important, the other half of the battle was recognizing that I had done things I had enjoyed that day.

What does this all mean? Again, the framework I put together above is not something that needs to be followed by everyone, because what makes you happy is going to be different than what makes me happy. The point I am trying to make is that it is important to start small. Tackling something so meta and macro as “HAPPINESS” is going to stress even the calmest person out.

So start small and think about what you actually enjoy doing. And then figure out how you can do more of it. Plan your life around what you enjoy doing. Be intentional about how you spend your time. The hard work is figuring out what you enjoy doing. My hunch is that many of you will find that you’re already doing things that make you happy, which is great because that means you just have to figure out how to carve out more time for the things that you are already enjoying.

Being aware of your own happiness is just as important as being happy. For those of you who feel anxiety about the future and what it holds, it should give you a more peaceful mindset about where you are today. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), happiness is intensely personal, and that means only you can define what it means to you. Only you can do the work that is necessary to define it. Like your finances, don’t let someone else define what happiness means to you.

Taking it all the way back to what “happiness” looks like at work, I think it is best to figure out what you enjoy doing everyday, and then find a job that lets you do that every day. And once you find a job or a career that enables you to be happy, you can make more informed decisions about the types of risk you want to take with your finances. You can be intentional about the financial decisions you make. Ultimately, that is what I think we should all strive to be: more intentional about the decisions we make in life. You only get one of them, so you might as well live the life you want to live.

^{Disclaimer: Nothing contained in this website and newsletter should be understood as investment or financial advice. All investment strategies and investments involve the risk of loss. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Everything written and expressed in this newsletter is only the writer's opinion and should not be considered investment advice. Before investing in anything, know your risk profile and if needed, consult a professional. Nothing on this site should ever be considered advice, research, or an invitation to buy or sell any securities. Rohan Muralidhar is not a licensed securities dealer, broker or US Investment adviser or investment bank. This newsletter is not an offer to buy or sell, nor is it a solicitation of an offer to buy or sell or to participate in any advisory services or trading strategy.}