I’ve commonly been categorized as a “happy” person:

 

 

 

“Mirabeth, I want to say what a true pleasure it is to know you. As we spoke earlier tonight on how happiness can be infectious it seems to me that each time we meet you are just as happy if not more happy than the last time I saw you, and this in turn makes me happy.... Let us happy people band together changing the world one smile at a time.” (Anonymous Friend)

 

 

 

 

"You were such a happy baby. And, my job was to protect that in you." (Mom)

 

 

 

 

"Every time I see you, you always have a smile on your face and you are always laughing, which causes me to laugh and smile." (Anonymous Friend)

 

 

(Me receiving a trophy for horseback riding, circa 2003)

Mixed Perception of Happiness

 

I have mixed feelings about this well-intentioned classification from family and friends. Yes, I want to be considered “happy” because somewhere inside of me I believe in this elusive term that signifies human desire, contentment, purpose, and meaning (Ahmed).

 

Embarrassingly, I like the idea of being able to live in a state of continual peacefulness despite all of the problems of the world. I'd like to be like the Dalai Lama, who can say "Yes ... definitely" with a "quiet sincerity in his voice that left no doubt," when asked if I’m happy (Dalai Lama and Cutler 13). But, I do not.

 

 

Single Story Concerns

 

When I'm asked if I'm happy or told that I appear to be, a small part of me wonders if I'm being simplified into what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie would call a “single story” of a happy individual. In her 2009 TED Talk “The Dangers of a Single Story,” she discusses how easily people oversimplify others based on hearing and/or retelling themselves the same narrative.

 

A few of her examples consist of how her American college roommate assumed, because Adichie is from Nigeria, that she listened to tribal music and was surprised to learn that Adichie listened to Mariah Carey.

 

Furthermore, growing up, Adichie viewed her “house boy” as “very poor” because her mother continuously told her that description of him and his family.

 

Meanwhile, Adichie was stunned to see the beautiful baskets that his family created when she visited his village, which therefore expanded her awareness of this individual. The single story of a “happy” person that I feel embedded in me when I sometimes hear that adjective is one who is not in touch with reality, always cheerful, simplistically optimistic, and unintelligently unaware of life’s hardships.

 

 

 

 

Dark Thoughts on Happiness

 

As I have grown up with two humanistic psychologists as parents—both of whom received their education before the boom of positive psychology in the 1980s, but incorporate many characteristics of this branch of psychology in their practices—I have been surrounded by what New York magazine writer Jennifer Senior describes in her article “Some Dark Thoughts on Happiness”: viewing one’s self as “the shining sum of our strengths and virtues, forceful, masters of our fates.”

 

Senior argues that happiness is perhaps not as attainable as happiness researchers wish to believe. She states, “Read a positive-psychology book and what would a happy person look like? He’d look like a Moonie. He’d be empty of idiosyncrasy and the difficult passions.”

 

To further her point, she compares founder of positive psychology Martin Seligman’s views on happiness with Aristotle’s because both are concerned with the ability to lead a “fulfilling, meaningful life” through “engaging and cultivating our strengths … and by deploying our virtues” (Senior).

 

Then, she remarks that “happiness is a study that shows depressives are far more likely to be realists, while happy people are more likely to walk around in a mild state of delusion.” Does happiness have to be viewed as delusional or realistic? Does it have to be a binary?