I find psychology particularly interesting; I believe it is one of the most important science known to man, for man. I can bet you that if you ask most people about their “one wish”, it would always lead to one thing… happiness!

Psychologists are experts in happiness. Like most scientists, they tend to invent theories and difficult terms to make the matter more “academic”. However, if this would lead to man’s one wish, I believe it’s worth exploring. They categorize happiness into “life satisfaction”, which is the overall assessment of feelings and attitudes at a particular time, and “subjective wellbeing”, which is the snapshot of your happiness at the moment. They are dedicated to fixing you if you are not able happy, through therapies and medication: they run electricity into the body, apply a magnetic field on the brain, or a combination of these; they do miracles of modern science to kill the sadness within.

Happiness is one of those things that people feel deeply about, and each individual would have their own thoughts, interpretation and philosophies. A survey showed that people over the age of 60 have higher level of life satisfaction than of those in their 40s, and naturally, subjective wellbeing is higher among youths than others. However, what is puzzling is how they conclude such results without a clear definition of happiness! They described different states of happiness… this is like saying that water is liquid and sometimes it becomes ice – solid! It gets worse when they analyze or further define happiness as chemical reactions in the brain! Is that it? Our “one wish”, all we are hoping for, meditations, massages, music, relationships, marriage, kids, and enduring all the hardships and agony just to make the environment in our body conducive to ignite this chemical reaction so we feel happy? Who is happier to you – a person who could take a deep “baby” nap in the middle of a construction site, or the sleepless one in a palace? A person who is laughing with his 12 kids not knowing if he can feed them tomorrow, or the someone who can’t have quality time with his only kid?

Let’s look at this from a different angle: depression pills are prescribed to lift the mood and to enhance the subjective well being… they do that by stimulating the same chemical reaction in the brain. So, would you regard this as fake happiness? It is the same person with the same brain, but a different simulator, but does it make it unreal? I would bet that both yes and no answers to this question lead to the conclusion that that happiness is fake! We normally accept masquerading the truth by fancy interpretation such as “Well, this is subjective”. Are we seriously “wasting” our energy and precious time chasing a “kick” that can be attained by a pill or a joint? You could argue that happiness is not momentary… it is experience, surroundings, environment and interaction. However, to others, it might mean being alone listening to music, not caring about tomorrow. Here is where the subjectivity kicks in, and both will not feel happy till the chemicals kicks in. To cut the long story short, I feel more like we are living in the “matrix”, except that in the matrix, we are controlled by a computer program and machine code, and here, by chemistry.

I am not suggesting that illegal drugs be legalized, or that one be on depression pills or get high whenever a tragedy or hardship strikes… absolutely not! I am just trying to analyze happiness down to a science by attempting to identify the basic anatomy of it; so then we might discover that it is not our “one wish” after all, or another set of chemicals in our brain would have much better “feeling” than happiness is yet to be discovered.

The United Nations declared March 20th as the “International Day of Happiness” and Dubai recently appointed a Happiness Minister in their government. The whole world is acknowledging the importance of well-being, but is this a phantom? Is it a tool to achieve the economical paradox “keep them unhappy” to “sell” happiness? Next time I laugh, I will try to ease my mind and let chemistry do its magic, since I desperately need this to be real; or can it be?