I used to think happiness was something you reached. A moment where things finally made sense, where effort softened into ease. But the longer I sit with the question-what is happiness?-the less convincing that idea becomes. Happiness, if it exists at all, does not seem to wait at the end of the road. It walks beside us, often disguised as struggle.
The happiness we think of is often elusive; we can grasp it for a, or moments, but it is gone just as quick as we got ahold of it. We are in an eternal struggle to catch the next fix of happiness allotted to us. This struggle for happiness is in our human nature, we crave it - long for it. But is it anything more than an intense battle with struggle. A struggle with no permenant end.
In the meantime, of searching for happiness we suffer, we struggle, we are in pain - the opposite of happiness, but without these feelings, there could be no such thing as happiness. If we had never felt sad, pain, sorrow, we couldn't even comprehend what happiness is in the slightest. But because we do there is a chance for us. A chance for happiness.
But perhaps this happiness that we all chase is really a culmination of the pain that brought us there. A respite of sorts, the pain, sorrow, etc. doesn't just disappear but instead is masked by something more tolerable, something we put up with even in the face of our immense weight we carry.
Happiness itself is absurd in essence, it's just an emotion but one with so much meaning. Why do we suffer for its sake, why go through pain for it too?
Life offers no clear instructions. There is no visible blueprint explaining why we suffer, fail, or lose what we love. We want meaning, but the world does not answer in language we can understand. And yet, despite this silence, we continue. We wake up, we try again, we carry our weight uphill even when it rolls back down.
What strikes me is that happiness doesn’t disappear in this confrontation—it changes shape.
There is a kind of happiness that comes from resistance. Not the loud, celebratory kind, but the quiet satisfaction of standing upright in a world that does not bend for us. To keep going without illusions, without guarantees, requires a certain inner strength. And in that strength, there is something deeply alive.
Pain, too, plays an uncomfortable role. We are taught to avoid it, to see it as proof that something has gone wrong. But pain often marks the moments when we are most engaged with life—when we are growing, risking, choosing. A life without friction might be comfortable, but it would also be shallow. Happiness cannot be reduced to comfort without losing something essential.
I’ve come to think that happiness is less about what happens to us and more about how we respond. Do we shrink from difficulty, or do we let it shape us? Do we resent the weight we carry, or do we claim it as ours? There is a subtle joy in realizing that even when circumstances are unfair or absurd, our response still belongs to us.
This doesn’t mean forcing optimism onto a broken situation. It means clarity. Seeing the world as it is, stripped of false promises, and choosing to live anyway. There is dignity in that choice. Even beauty.
Perhaps happiness is not the feeling that life is easy, but the realization that life is worth engaging with—even when it hurts, even when it makes no sense. It is found in effort, in persistence, in saying “yes” to existence without demanding that it justify itself first.
So when I ask myself what happiness is, I no longer imagine a final state of peace. I imagine movement. Struggle. Awareness. The steady act of living honestly.
And maybe that is enough.