Components of Happiness
DIY Happiness: building your model of happiness — some assembly required
I was listening to a book that had a short section on happiness and its psychological and neurological aspects. The author splits sustained happiness into three parts:
Engaging in pleasurable activities
Engaging in work that gets you into a flow state
Having and aligning your actions to a purpose—a guiding function
Despite my personal belief that being fulfilled is more important than being happy, this breakdown stood out to me as something I could relate to. And yet, there was a nagging feeling that something in this model was a bit off.
These are concepts I have re-discovered and seen firsthand changing my life and mindset in the last year. As I build an understanding of different ideas—how they manifest in my life, how I act on them—the meaning of these and the related systems keeps evolving in my mind. I've been building mental models I can latch onto, and this list is in conflict with them. I had to try and break it down to find the source of that discomfort.
Here is my current hypothesis: while I strongly believe in the power of finding and having a purpose driving your actions, in the moment-to-moment it might not always be at the forefront of everything you do. While I want to do better and be better in everything, being more efficient with …1 you need to maintain the right level of eustress (positive stress / pressure) and not go overboard. Purpose is enduring, especially if you subscribe to a humanistic approach to purpose and self actualization.2 Flow feels good when you're in it and is worth getting into more often. Pleasurable activities are nice too, but here's where my mindset has shifted in the last year—I no longer think they are necessary.
Hear me out. Finding pleasure in the moment or in your work is nice, but it can feel like a crutch. We build habits and behaviors to get dopamine hits and a continuous stream of rewards. Once you understand yourself better—how your brain works and what activities you use to satisfy those needs—you can start exercising more control over what gives you that satisfaction. Just like rewiring habits involves messing with the cue, trigger, action3 with the easiest approach being to keep everything the same but change the action—you can get the same benefit without chasing specific pleasurable activities. Similarly with flow4, it feels like a second-order effect or system rather than a fundamental construct.
A fundamental construct would either help you learn and understand something better, perform actions that advance your goals, or act as a feedback loop to refine your understanding:
Learning and understanding
Actions
Achieve goals
Refine or update understanding
Since pleasurable activities and being in flow are means to an end—efforts to create the conditions that aid these fundamental constructs—they can be replaced, optimized, or even removed. Hence, they feel like second-order systems to me.
From another lens: purpose is goal setting and alignment, a guiding function, a reward function in itself. Pleasurable activities and flow are more like outcomes or intermediary states that, with greater awareness, we can control and have more choice over.
This leads me to think about happiness in two models: the original three components (pleasure - flow - purpose), and a second model where you have more control. In the second, you understand yourself better and replace pleasure and flow with other mechanisms that aid purpose. Perhaps you end up back at pleasure - flow - purpose, but now the possibility space is much larger. When the first model stops working, you know you can update it to work better for you.
A simpler way to categorize these models is as static or dynamic:
Static model - works for the majority who haven't invested much in self-discovery, psychology, or neuroscience, and want quick results.
Dynamic model - works when you start understanding yourself better: your habits, your triggers, what drives you, why you do things. It fits when you want to exert more control and intentionally design your life. You still have multiple factors that come together to create happiness, but you have a larger say in what those factors are.
Before we wrap up, and in the spirit of falsifiability, if the first model doesn't quite work for me, it's fair to assume the second model might not work for someone else. So when would this new model be worse?
First, in the updated model, the possibility space is very large, so exploring and learning is expensive, in time and energy. There's more work required to arrive at an optimal solution for an individual, and where time is limited, this may not be the best approach to converging on happiness. Second, if this is applied to a large group, the complexity increases. You would need a toolkit of techniques to help people find their levers and the right settings for themselves. In organizations, there may be overlaps or conflicts between purposes and missions, so finding alignment becomes a more complex, multivariable function. For example, playing games or binge-watching shows might once have been your chosen pleasurable activity, but you could replace them with hitting personal bests at the gym, completing 10,000 steps a day, journaling, or genuinely connecting with other people to get that same sweet hit of accomplishment and dopamine.
To conclude, and to solve the mystery that nagged me at the start: writing these thoughts down has given me more clarity on my initial discomfort. It stemmed from the simple prescription of the static model, which doesn't account for the depth and agency of the individual in shaping their own mind and behaviors. Looking at the problem through different lenses and levels of abstraction yields a richer, more dynamic equation. That complexity allows for greater control and customization. So perhaps start with the simple model and finding purpose, and when your progress starts to slow, open the box and begin fiddling with the cogs and levers.
All the best on the journey of finding purpose, happiness and fulfillment.
Footnotes
I was going to make a dad joke here but realized that everything I came up with I could get better at, yes including the time spent on the porcelain throne, my spouse would definitely appreciate that.
Aligned with parts of the Humanistic theory and Maslow's hierarchy of needs - (Humanistic Theory – The Whole Child: Development in the Early Years)