Happiness made simple:

The 10 basic building blocks of happiness for most everyone

Dog on lap.  Fresh brewed coffee in hand.  Sunlight streaming through open window.  Good book waiting on side table.  At such times happiness seems so achingly simple.  Yet most of the time, for most of us, throughout most of human history, happiness remains elusive, evanescent, even counterintuitive.  Quirks and paradoxes involving happiness abound. 

To understand some of these nuances and paradoxes, consider the simple case of getting a pay increase.  Given the choice of (A) you getting a $20 raise and your colleagues getting a $50 raise, vs. (B) everyone including you getting a $10 raise, most people surveyed would choose option B over A.  But pure reason tells us that you’d be much better off getting $20 more per hour rather than $10 more per hour.  Yet the thought of your colleagues getting more than you, the unfairness of it (all those lazy, mediocre, slobs getting more than twice your increase!), leads most humans to opt for the lower salary increase.  Or, the case of medal winners at the Olympics.  Psychologists have surveyed medalists after winning their event.  Rationally, you’d expect the Gold winners to be happiest, followed by the Silver medalists (2nd place), and the Bronze medalists (3rd place) to be least happy.  But no.  That would be too logical!  In fact, Bronze medalists are much happier than the Silver medalists.  The 2nd place medalists are consumed with thoughts like “but for 3/1,000’s of a second, I’d be wearing the Gold right now.”  Meanwhile, the 3rd place medalists are thinking something like, “Golly Gee, I’m up here on the winners’ stand at the friggin’ Olympics, that is so cool!”  So the 3rd place winners report more happiness that the 2nd place winners.[1] 

The earliest modern psychologists, i.e., the psychoanalysts, by and large didn’t even believe that sustained human happiness was possible, as most famously exemplified in Sigmund Freud’s response to a reporter asking him what is the goal of psychoanalysis.  His reply: “to transform uncommon misery into common unhappiness.”  When asked for a definition of mental health, Freud’s reply didn’t reference happiness at all.  His answer, “To be able to love and to work.” 

Turns out that happiness, when one examines it in earnest, is seemingly so complex and elusive — like that proverbial butterfly that flits away when you try to grab it — that psychologists have even tried to rename it several times; at some point they thought to abandon the term ‘happiness’ as too subjective, replacing it with ‘well-being,’ and then ‘subjective well-being.’  But that terminological legerdemain proved not so enlightening, so they reached back to the Ancient Greeks[2] to revive the term “Eudaimonia” or even “Eudaimonian well-being”.  A lot of very enlightening work has been done but at the end of the day ‘happiness’ is intuitive and “Eudaimonian well-being” is certainly obfuscatory at best.  The humanist psychologists felt at home with the oddly inhuman term “self-actualization.”[3]  To be quite fair, many psychologists felt that the term ‘happiness’ was too close to raw hedonism, the pursuit of pure pleasure over other aspects of well-being, such as living a meaningful life, or feeling non-hedonistic joy or good fortune.[4] 

So universal is the human yearning for happiness, by whatever name we wish to call it, that every philosopher, prophet, thinker, writer, healer, pundit, or blogger throughout history has attempted to tackle this dilemma.  Based upon my own humble perch where my fellow human beings have shared their triumphs, defeats, struggles, fears, and stories with me for several decades, here is what I believe are the most fundamental elements or building blocks of happiness for the average Homo Sapiens.  The more of these you’ve attained or inherited in your life, in general the happier you’re likely to be. 

  1. Good Health.
    Overall good health; includes an absence, or relatively low levels of: worry, pain, disability, immobility.
  2. Living in a free society,
    or at least not living in a totalitarian society where you’ve got no rights and are unfree.
  3. Meaningful or engaging work.
    A healthy paycheck is good, but intrinsic rewards such believing in what you do, experiencing competence or mastery, or feeling like you’re making a difference or helping others, are more directly linked to achieving happiness.
  4. Having a viable or suitable life partner.
    As we’re currently living in what is accurately if a bit too fashionably described as “an epidemic of loneliness,” this element is less attainable for many but is nonetheless a major element of happiness, as most starkly evidenced in the fact that happily married people never commit suicide. 
  5. Accumulating a string of personal accomplishments.
    Most of us aren’t going to win a Nobel Prize or a MacArthur genius award.  But we don’t have to!  Personal accomplishments come in all shapes and sizes including educational attainment, personal bests in sport or fitness, a knack for telling a good joke that makes people smile or laugh, raising children, supporting animal rescue, keeping your lawn well-manicured, serving in the military, keeping all the kids safe on the school bus that you drive, knowing how to dress for any occasion, and so on. 
  6. Having or developing a viable philosophical or spiritual belief system.
  7. A sense of belonging or connection.
    Going on a walk in outer space might be a once in a lifetime high, but for personal happiness we need to feel much more connected, like we belong somewhere.  We can’t establish a proper sense of self or self-identity without knowing what group, family, culture, religion, or community we are a part of, and is part of us. 
  8. Repeatedly experiencing life-enhancing feelings
    of a psychological, spiritual, moral, or aesthetic nature such as: love, beauty, honor, courage, humor, redemption, connectedness, or ground truth (enlightenment). These states of experience are life-giving and life-enhancing.  They wash away the toxins of the world such as cruelty, indifference, injustice, ugliness, or death.   Without love, beauty, honor, humor, etc., people become suicidal.
  9. Memento Mori:
    the ancient Latin phrase “remember you (too) must die” speaks a perennial truth, a warning that we must not go sleepwalking through life. In literature, Zorba said, “Boss, I live each day as if I were going to die tomorrow.”[5]  In psychology, Jordan Peterson has observed that all that is necessary for a young person to end up wasting his or her life is simply to do nothing and let another day go by.  In modern philosophy, the ‘regret minimization principle’ urges us to live each day so that, at the end of a long life, we shall have the fewest possible number of regrets about what we have or have not done.  Happier people tend to view each day as a gift and strive to make the most of it.
  10. Living with purpose.
    Although it may seem on the surface contradictory to the opening sentences of this essay, people who lead happier lives tend to live with purpose, in pursuit of goals, striving for something.  Something of meaning or significance, or uniqueness or creativity.  Anyone else who tries to tell you what your purpose in life should be is probably a false prophet, for only you can determine the purpose of your life.  It is the norm for one’s purpose in life to shift at transitional times, when one of our life’s purposes has either been attained or lost.  The times when we have lost purpose in life are times of life crises, experienced by nearly everyone at one time or another.  Even that gold medal winner can go into a state of mourning or purposelessness after his or her goal has been attained. 

Happiness, or overall well-being, is the product of a quasi-mathematical equation.  Specifically, the best life is the product of both how long we live, and how good is the quality of that living.  Therefore, we should strive to live both long, and well, but not totally ignore either aspect.  A long and miserable life is not a happy one; on the other hand, a brilliant life cut way too short is certainly a kind of tragedy.  Woody Allen tells the story of two ladies complaining about the food at a restaurant; “The food here is just awful!” says the first; “Yeah, and not only that, but they give you such small portions!” adds the second.  Clearly, we want both quality and quantity.  Sequencing is important to happiness, too.  It is much preferable to begin in hardship, develop survival and resiliency skills, and end up in success that one can truly appreciate, than to be born to a life of cushy privilege and lose it all later on; think Ben Carson vs. Sam Bankman-Fried. 

The proverbial ‘search for happiness’ is made more onerous by certain mental preconditions or beliefs that we may impose upon it.  Many people, from all walks of life, grew up under personal, family, or community conditions that make them doubt that happiness is possible or even real.  One has to get over that false belief in order to make personal happiness possible.  Others are stuck on the unrelenting self-scrutiny of wondering whether they “deserve” to be happy.  Others go searching for happiness in other people or somewhere out there in the world.  And some people mistakenly believe that you’re either lucky or unlucky in life, and there’s nothing you can do or think to influence your happiness level.  Is happiness found out there somewhere, or is it created from within oneself?  How does one create it, or having experienced it, how does one sustain it?  Some question whether happiness is morally justifiable in a world where so many have suffered or perished. 

But there you have it, 10 basic elements of happiness for most of us.  The more of these elements you can bring into your life, the more happiness – or “Eudaimonia” if you prefer – you’ll achieve.  As for me, I’ll go back to my dog and my coffee now, maybe even tackle that book on the side table. 

© Larry H Pastor, M.D., October 2024

[1] Examples from Gad Saad, Ph.D.’s entertaining read, The Saad Truth About Happiness.

[2] Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, to be precise. 

[3] q.v Kurt Goldstein, or Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

[4] See Martin Seligman’s magnum opus Flourish, in which he identified 5 paths people take toward achieving a good life, including: (1) Positive emotions, (2) Engagement, (3) Relationships, (4) Meaning and purpose, and/or (5) Accomplishments, or achievements.  The acronym for flourishing has become known as “PERMA.”

[5] Nikos Kazantzakis’ wonderful, lyrical novel Zorba the Greek