The three types of unhappiness (Part 1)

You’ve no doubt heard people say that happiness is a choice. And perhaps, like me, you shrugged your shoulders and mumbled ‘maybe for you, it is’. But what if we’ve misunderstood what they meant? Perhaps, they didn’t mean we can choose to be happy no matter what life throws at us. This notion is not only ridiculous, it can also be upsetting and offensive for people experiencing grief, trauma or severe pain. Perhaps, instead, they meant we can choose how to define what happiness is and the value and meaning we place on happiness in our lives. This idea, which modern psychologists call framing, has its roots in the 2,000 year-old teachings of the Roman Stoics, as William Irvine explains:

‘How we mentally characterise a situation has a profound impact on how we respond to it emotionally. The Stoics realised that we have considerable flexibility in how we frame the situations we experience.’

Before I discuss unhappiness, I think it’s useful to define what we mean by happiness. The ancient Greeks gave us two words for happiness. Hedone is the doctrine that pleasure is the highest good and we should devote our life to pursuing it. In everyday parlance, hedonism can conjure up visions of all-night benders and drug-fuelled orgies. But as a philosophy of life, hedonism simply means that we seek at all times to maximise our pleasure and minimise our pain. I suspect that, for many of us, this is our default version of happiness (even if we wouldn’t necessarily call ourselves hedonists in the orgiastic sense…)

Sometimes, perhaps inspired by the books we read, the films we watch, or the company we keep, we might equate hedonism with selfishness. This is wrong. One’s greatest source of pleasure might be to see their loved ones happy and free of pain. This is clearly a hedonistic view but hardly a selfish one. But where I think we run into trouble with hedonism is if we take it to its logical extreme and believe we can pursue a blissful, carefree, idyllic life, free of all risk and responsibility. Is such a state attainable? I’d argue, no. This form of happiness is both elusive and illusionary: it exists only in Hollywood, lifestyle magazines and on your Instagram feed. Can you truly imagine a life without any problems? If you believe you have no problems, no problems at all, I suggest you check your pulse.

Not satisfied with hedonism? Fortunately, the Greeks also gave us eudaimonia for happiness. The School of Life Untranslatable Words renders eudaimonia as ‘the deepest kind of fulfilment, often comprising a flourishing work and love life’. So far, so good. But then, the definition continues, ‘eudaimonia can go hand in hand with lots of day-to-day frustration and pain’. This is a long way from the blissful idyll of hedonism.

Another way to think about this distinction is between pleasure and enjoyment. Pleasure, according to psychologists Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is ‘the good feeling that comes from satisfying homeostatic needs such as hunger, sex, and bodily comfort’. Enjoyment, on the other hand, refers to the good feelings we experience when we break through these bodily limits and do something that ‘stretches’ us beyond what we were, for example, ‘in an athletic event, an artistic performance, a good deed or a stimulating conversation’. Enjoyment, eudaimonia, fulfilment or whatever we want to call it is not simply satisfying our needs but is something flawed and difficult; it is happiness as something to be earned through work, love and effort. I think poet Mary Oliver captured this beautifully in her short yet life-affirming essay, Staying Alive:

‘I don’t mean [life is] easy or assured; there are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. But there is, also, the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing one does, the needle one plies, the work … that is, to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.’ (my emphasis).

Continued in Part 2