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What makes you happy? Receiving a gift? The first smile of your baby? Finding money in the pocket of your old jeans? Or more gratifying things like getting good grades, getting your dream job or winning a lottery? Does success make you happy or being healthy?
Possibly all of this. Or none of it. Maybe you’ll only be happy when you achieve world peace.
So can happiness ever be distilled into one simple definition that fits all?
We are certainly less happy today than we were even a decade ago.
The United Nations celebrates 20th March as the International Day of Happiness since 2012. The World Happiness Report 2018 conducted by Sustainable Development Solutions Network ranked India at a very poor 133 among 156 nations.
In this situation, what if someone offers you the mantra to happiness, all packaged in a neat course?
You’ll jump at it, right?
In February 2018, Delhi government planned to introduce a course in happiness for students from nursery to Class 8. Yale University introduced the course a few months earlier.
Yale University in the United States started its most popular course ever - one on happiness, reported The New York Times.
Dr Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology, takes this course. At one of the most prestigious universities in the United States, rates of anxiety and stress are extremely high. The professor believed the high school students had put happiness on the back-burner while trying to get into the university and now they are struggling to get it back.
The New York Times reported the Yale course focuses both on positive psychology and behavioural change. It teaches students how to apply those lessons in real life. For their final assignment, they have to take on a ‘self-improvement’ project.
Happiness today is largely defined as subjective well-being, a scale coined by Ed Diener and his team. When psychologists define happiness, they measure how people think and feel about their lives based on:
So, someone who is really satisfied in their life and has great positive effect, will have high levels of subjective well-being.
But can happiness really ever be taught? We put this question to a professor of psychology at Ashoka University.
He further explains:
We are bringing up our children in a world ridden with anxiety. India has one of the highest rate of teen suicides in the world, according to a Lancet 2012 report. And in a situation where your life’s value is measured by success in school or work, anxiety and depression is rampant.
So shouldn’t these happiness courses be made mandatory?
Can you achieve happiness or ananda through meditation or by controlling your breathing? More and more people, unsatisfied by their lives, seeking more meaning and understanding, are looking to new age gurus for answers.
Places like the Art of Living, run by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar in the outskirts of India’s Silicon Valley, Bengaluru, teach what they call ‘Happiness Courses’. We asked them how do they define happiness?
Yikes. That’s a whole lot to achieve by anyone in one lifetime right? Practically how does one achieve this? They believe yoga, meditation and breathing exercises is the answer.
So should we all be enrolling ourselves in courses on happiness, taught by top psychologists, or by following ancient wisdom? Will Delhi’s children or Yale University grads, the next generation, grow up to be more happy, satisfied individuals?
Possibly not. But if they grow up to be more empathetic or understanding of happiness in others, it won’t be a wasted effort, right?
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)
Published: 08 Feb 2018,02:24 PM IST