What is Happiness?
What is Happiness?
September 2011
Webster’s dictionary defines happiness as a “state of well-being and contentment.” But what exactly is that state of well-being? Columbian College faculty members representing a cross section of disciplines were asked to define what happiness means to them. Here’s how they responded:
“Happiness is the absence of regret, acceptance of how matters are, finding that the things you have to do are the things you’d want to be doing anyway. Good family, good food, a Scrabble board, a soccer ball, making music or mathematics with friends.”
—Daniel Ullman
Professor of Mathematics
Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies
“Happiness is an energizing state of well-being that empowers a person to undertake good works in the world. For me, happiness stems from enjoying a close, loving relationship with my children, other loved ones, friends, students and colleagues, and making useful contributions to them and to our broader community. My hope is that happiness is contagious and that the composite of our useful contributions enriches the lives of people in communities across the world.”
—Kathryn Newcomer
Director, The Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration
“This is an inquiry into the very nature of human reality because one must have experienced happiness in order to be able to define it. However, as Plato noted, to believe one is happy is not the same as actually being happy. Appearances are often belied by reality.Over the centuries, the question of happiness has spawned much debate among philosophers. For example, is happiness a qualitative or quantitative phenomenon or perhaps some mixture of the two? While early utilitarians, such as Jeremy Bentham, argued that “units of happiness” could be ascribed to different types of activities that result in pleasure or pain (more pleasure = more happiness, more pain = more unhappiness), his successor, John Stuart Mill, insisted that happiness requires qualitative analysis, for, ‘it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig
satisfied.’ Mill suggested that Socrates’ lifelong search for truth and knowledge, even if ultimately unfulfilled, yields a genuine, lasting form of happiness that can’t be compared to the more fleeting, sensory happiness of the pig (or person) who has just enjoyed a good meal.
In my opinion, the qualitative vs. quantitative debate is a lot like the nature vs. nurture discussion, with the best answer acknowledging the importance of both factors. Hence, the type of happiness one is experiencing matters, but so does the amount of happiness one attains in life. The most fortunate of individuals are those who achieve happiness in the many different facets of their lives: through caring relationships with family, friends, and the larger community, through pursuit of the most lofty as well as the most mundane of daily activities, through achievement of both short-term and long-term personal and professional goals, and through the knowledge one acquires of the meaning of life along the way.
—Gail Weiss
Chair, Department of Philosophy
“Happiness is sitting at the kitchen table with my wife, reflecting on a day of hard work, saying goofy things, leaving cares behind for the evening, cracking open a good bottle of wine, and deciding which episode of NCIS we'll watch. I'll refrain from defining it; I’d rather just embrace it.”
—Christopher Cahill
Professor of Chemistry
“Being a student of 18th-century literature, I thought immediately of Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, in which the prince leaves his pampered and stultifying life in the Happy Valley to search the world for true happiness. Everywhere he goes, his initial conviction that he has at last found the secret becomes another disillusionment: The party people in Cairo are masking mindlessness with performative cheer; the rich landowner says his appearance of happiness is delusive, for he lives in fear of jealous competitors; the happy hermit suddenly resolves to return to society; neither the married nor the single are happy because 'marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures.' Eventually, the prince and his party return to Abissinia, determined to make their own happiness. So perhaps that's the answer: happiness is what you make for yourself and give to others, being neither situational nor a given, neither an entitlement nor a permanence.”
—Tara Wallace
Professor of English
Associate Dean for Graduate Studies
“Happiness is the ability to self-actualize, to move forward without fear. The first day of every class I teach, I ask my students to visualize their greatest dreams. I then go on to say that no dream becomes a reality without first letting go of fear—the fear of familial and societal judgment, the fear of failure, the fear of loss, the fear of the unknown. To me, happiness is that joyous leap of faith that propels us beyond doubt in order to live out our desires.”
—Dana Tai Soon Burgess
Chair, Department of Theatre and Dance
“In many of the world’s religious traditions, happiness is focused less on how one feels and more on how one acts and perceives the world. Typically, the first step toward happiness is the recognition that perceptions do not represent ultimate reality. The second step comes from living in accordance with the true reality that one has discovered (or that has been revealed). In the western religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, this means living according to the will of a just and merciful deity rather than according to societal practices or one’s own desires. For example, the earliest Christian writings describe those who are happy as those who are merciful, who make peace, who are pure of heart, and who stand up for justice.
These traditions—whether we are religious or not—teach us that the mania of everyday life does not necessarily represent the entirety of our reality. We should periodically step back, reflect on our true values and those things that really matter to us, and live accordingly. Viewed in this way, happiness is not a warm and fuzzy feeling but instead a way of living one’s life.”
—Paul Duff
Professor of Religion
“Many things might make me happy—an encounter with a beautiful painting or precious object, a belly laugh courtesy of Tina Fey, my first kiss in 6th grade, my daughter's smile, seeing an old friend for the first time in many years—but all in all, I've found lasting happiness to be a rather elusive state. Life today is too often marked by death, disappointment, and uncertainty. I see myself as a positive, optimistic person but to me, happiness is something so precious and so infrequent that I cannot quantify it in a few words. However, I do savor the rare occasions when I truly experience it.”
—Kym Rice
Director, Museum Studies Graduate Program
“In many ways, this is a strange time to be ruminating about happiness because of what’s happening in the world around us: global economic upheaval, soaring unemployment, famine, war, and civil unrest among an underclass that feels systemically dispossessed. But, then again, perhaps this is the perfect time to engage in a conversation about redefining happiness altogether.
In her 2011 Commencement address at Rutgers University, Nobel Prize Laureate Toni Morrison challenged young people to reshape their dreams of individual happiness into visions of collective well-being: ‘I know that happiness . . . informs your choice of companions, the profession you will enter, but I urge you: please don’t settle for happiness. It’s not good enough. . . .[for]personal success devoid of meaningfulness, free of steady commitment to social justice—that is more than a barren life, it is a trivial one. It’s looking good instead of doing good.’
Like Morrison, I suggest happiness become a synonym for a commitment to the work of justice. It is that work that makes all other sources of happiness—love, children, a good book, dancing, a walk in the woods just as the autumn leaves are peaking—sources that are both ordinary and extraordinary, that much richer.”
—Jennifer James
Director, Africana Studies Program
“Happiness is having work to do that I enjoy and that brings value to other people’s lives. That and having the love of family and friends makes me happy. Also, as an avid horseback rider, I believe Winston Churchill said it best: ‘There's something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.’”
—Randall Packer
Professor of Biology
Associate Dean for Special Projects
“A critical component of happiness is a strong sense of fairness, justice, and equitable access to whatever amenities—tangible or intangible, psychological or concrete—that are generally available in a community. In the book The Spirit Level, the authors examine various measures of well-being (e.g. mental and physical health, educational performance, crime rates) in the U.S. and in other developed western nations. They found that income level does not impact these measures but inequality is a major predictor. That is, it is not the absolute level of money and other resources that determine well-being; rather, it is unequal distribution of them. Given these dynamics, the increasingly imbalanced distribution of income and wealth over the past 30 years among industrialized nations suggests that levels of happiness have not improved much, if at all. And, the increasingly acrimonious nature of our politics may be symptomatic of rising discontent.”
—Gregory Squires
Professor of Sociology and of Public Policy and Public Administration
“There can be no doubt, happiness is floating in the ocean.”
—Ivy Ken
Associate Professor of Sociology
