Happiness is mysterious and elusive: we like to associate it with things like wealth, status, and success, and yet we see people wealthier than us, higher status than us, and more successful than us, who don’t seem particularly thrilled with their lives. At the same time, people who have nothing are perfectly capable of just visibly shining with joy. I’ve thought a lot about joy and what are the secrets to having it in your heart. What I’ve realized is that the number one way how to be happy is: consciously decide to be happy. The rest is just details.
The reason some people can be surrounded by all the trappings of success and wealth and yet still be grumpy, is because those trappings are the focus of their attention: they never made the resolution to be happy. Once you make the resolution, once you decide to make it a conscious goal, all the other pieces will fall into place.
I’m not trying to say that there’s an inverse relationship between wealth/success and happiness. There are people who are quite well-off and also quite happy. What I’m trying to say about the relationship is, there is no relationship between happiness and wealth. There is no relationship between joy and success. Or if there’s any link at all, it’s a minor one, and it goes in the opposite way as we always think: happy people tend to be wealthier and more successful. But even that is minor. Ultimately, sheer joy at being alive is decoupled from the quantitative measures of life.
Sure, anyone who wins the lottery is gonna be pretty thrilled for a while. But that is not a permanent joy. In general, I’d classify this into the broad family of “reactive happiness”: happiness in reaction to something from outside of one’s self. Unfortunately, the lottery winner doesn’t go around the rest of their life beaming a smile. A single week is quite a generous estimate how long it’ll take for the thrill to wear off. What you notice is, when a person is sitting boredly at the table, it doesn’t matter whether they’re doing so in a luxurious mansion or a small apartment, they’ll have the same bored look on their face. We adjust to whatever levels of wealth/success/conquest there is in our lives, and after the brief adjustment period, it doesn’t matter.
Life is like a fractal game, similar at every scale: the concerns of a family struggling to survive aren’t qualitatively much different from the concerns of a wealthy family struggling to preserve their wealth. Certainly, the statuses of the two families tell us nothing of how joyful those families actually are. Even Barack Obama, the most powerful man in the world, plays a similar type of game as you and I, just at a different scale. My big worry right now is publishing a PhD dissertation; Barry’s big concern is publishing a health insurance reform package.
It’s like in the game Katamari Damacy, where the player rolls the world up in a ball, starting with things like thumbtacks and leaves and candies, and gradually working up to furniture, people, cars, cities, islands. The scenery changes as you roll, but the qualitative game play doesn’t change. A famous thought experiment is: imagine you’re zooming in on a spot somewhere, and you keep zooming and zooming, until you get down to the atomic level. Then zoom in more, but as you zoom inside the individual atom, imagine there’s a whole universe inside there. Zooming in further, you eventually find a Milky Way Galaxy hiding inside, and then a solar system, and then a habitable planet, and as you zoom in even more, you find cultures and people. The process could then be repeated indefinitely. Now, to those tiny people living inside the solar system inside the galaxy inside the atom, you are a freakin’ God. To those people, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between you and anyone you envy: at most, “a mere order of magnitude”.
It sounds almost tautological for me to say: “Decide to be happy.” No duh, right? But the big realization I had was that very often, we don’t want to be happy. If I’m in a bad mood, don’t you dare try to cheer me up! 
Human beings are so susceptible to complacency, we even become complacent in our misery. Emotional momentum builds up, and our very personalities can become “unhappy personalities”, ego’s of misery which we defend to the death. At the very least, we’re worried what people will think of us– “isn’t it a little weird to always be happy??” we think. And yet, after deciding that I wanted to be happy, and after becoming happy pretty much all the time, I noticed that all those worries were misfounded. The only people who resent happiness are people who are themselves miserable.
A good baby step for the lifelong Scrooge: make a habit of repeating this affirmation at least once a day: “I love being happy.” Whether you’re happy or not, the statement should at least technically be true– who doesn’t love being happy, however rare an occurrence that is? And yet, the affirmation is powerful. By repeating it, you burn it into your very personality. The thoughts we think shape our world, but not just the thoughts we think when we’re feeling philosophical and introspective. It’s the thoughts we think when we’re distracted, when we’re busy, the autopilot thoughts that enter our heads while our hands are full of other things. The affirmation slowly trains these autopilot thoughts, gradually shifting the very personality toward joy-seeking and happiness-loving. And that is how to be happy.
FURTHER READING
Invitation To Hedonism
10 Reasons To Be A Hedonist
100 Things That Make Me Happy
Positive Affirmations
Positive Affirmation Examples