Happiness

A very good feeling. Those were my exact words. But they weren’t enough to satisfy her.

A week ago, an orkut ‘friend’ invited me to a chat (on Gmail). We chatted about happiness, tossing the subject forwards and backwards, citing examples from our lives, trying to figure out if it (i.e. happiness) was an illusion (her view) or it existed (my view).

She questioned if happiness could be defined and, apart from suggesting ‘a very good feeling’, I really couldn’t think of anything more intelligent to say. We agreed that happiness was most likely a ‘temporary’ feeling, something ‘momentary’, and decided to leave it at that.

I sulked over this for a week and decided to write this post.

I thought about what the great philosophers like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle had to say about happiness. I remembered that they had tried to explain happiness as something independent of health or wealth. They believed happiness was a whole-life concept, not something that depended on the ups and downs of everyday life. They believed that happiness was not episodic.

If this is true, then can happiness be temporary or momentary as we believe? And, if this is true, then can happiness really be illusive to some of us?