Are You Happy?

Recently, I heard someone say that when people asked her if she was happy, she didn’t know how to answer the question. My mind immediately began to ponder for myself: am I happy? Is anyone happy? What is happiness?

The question she struggles with seems to be a recurring theme in our media. Over and over, we watch people hunt for happiness, contentment, fulfillment, redemption, purpose, connection, and identity. I watched Doctor Strange: in the Multiverse of Madness1, and several times in the movie someone asked him that same question: are you happy?

He tried to brush it off, that, of course, he’s happy. But every time the question was asked, he was a little bit slower to respond. And I think sometimes we need the repetition of asking this question so we can slowly shed the layers of deception we build around ourselves for protection. Examining if we are really happy can lead to an understanding that we are not. Though it might seem more comfortable to live in denial, that is never a good long-term solution. So we need to examine ourselves, asking the question. If we’re not happy, once we know about it, we can start to process why.

Even if we are happy—as in emotionally happy—we often find ourselves under the misconception that happiness is all that matters. We live with the goal of attaining and maintaining that joyful feeling. That’s understandable, after all, it’s a nice feeling to have. It makes us feel safe. It’s pleasurable. We feel benevolent toward others. But it creates a false sense of confidence. When it dissipates, as it inevitably does, we are left experiencing meaninglessness. So what I’m suggesting is that we want to learn that something other than the ‘happy emotion’ is actually essential to our fullness as human beings.

Isn’t that the plot of Inside Out?2 When we are taught to be happy all of the time, when we refuse to entertain other emotions, we are trained to stuff our feelings, replacing them with artificial ones, and so, we cannot truly express ourselves in our real lives. We are then anxious to share our experience with the others around us—we can be a perpetuator of the problem—always trying to keep others happy because we’ve learned to associate unhappiness with wrongness.

But that leads me to ask again: what is happiness?

If happiness is the opposite of sadness, then can any of us ever truly be happy? I don’t think we need convincing that there is sadness in the world, as we’re usually pretty in tune to it when it happens to us. But maybe the key is in the existence of sadness, pain, suffering, and the negative emotions we are taught to shy away from. Logically, if there was no negative—no sad to counterweight the happy—we wouldn’t know that happiness existed. I think we understand happiness because we know sadness is possible.

Once we understand how these two opposites reflect each other, we can learn that we have the wrong idea about happiness, contentment, and joy. Maybe the fact that we feel those emotions is really a pale echo of something else we are trying to achieve or force. Do we mistake the imitation for the real thing? When we take pleasure in good food, fun times, community, simple walks in a beautiful nature, or the exquisite book or song we are exposed to, is it the thing itself we find pleasing, or is it calling us beyond to the ultimate Creator behind those things?

Let’s talk about God since He is the Creator of the world. It is obvious, it is plain, it is unavoidable: God lets our hearts get shattered. Why does He allow sadness and pain? Are His hands bound because of sin? Are bad things a punishment for said sin? Is He trying to teach us something? I’m going to say yes, yes, and yes. But before you get too worked up about the theological implications, let me explain what I mean.

The first point is that sin is a fact in this world. As long as we are alive in it, it’s going to affect us. But that doesn’t mean God isn’t doing anything about it. He is. He did. He forgave it. He sacrificed His Son to save us from it. We live as saved beings, but we also live in the world sin is corrupting. Sin is going to be a factor, but this has nothing to do with the omnipotence or compassion of God.

That leads me to the second point. Sin is a punishment in that sin is a consequence. We all live with the consequences of our actions and, quite often, those consequences bleed over onto other people and the world around us. So, when I do something selfish, it affects more than myself. When we make foolish decisions, other people suffer. Even when we decide to accept God’s offer of forgiveness and redemption, we can’t make that choice for everyone else. We are living with the consequences of all sin throughout time, layer after layer, forgiven, but tangible. That might sound depressing, but there is an upside. Perhaps the best part is that we undergo those consequences. They are a great teacher. The first time my cat jumped onto our normally cold wood stove when it was burning was the last time. She knew never to do it again. When I get burned by my sin or someone else’s, hopefully I never do it again and I never do what they did to anyone else.

The third point is that God is wiser and greater and more in control than I can imagine. He knows what’s going to happen and He knows how to use it. I can’t pretend to understand this. God is beyond my full comprehension. But it’s pretty clear that when we go through something really hard, we can learn from it, we can help others, and we can grow stronger. I’m not saying it’s fun or pretty and I’m not sure I would have designed it that way, but, thank God I was never asked to. God does ask me to grow through my pain, just as His Son did.

Hebrews says Jesus was made perfect in suffering, and Jesus is our template to follow. Because He suffered, He can relate to us when we’re suffering. The same follows for us and our fellow inhabitants of the world. I have been blessed and encouraged and helped through so much because of what other people have gone through. Anyone who is just a little bit farther down the road from me and reaches back to lend a helping hand, is God’s gift to me. I want to be that gift to others.

But even knowing how the sadness and pain we go through can actually be helpful to us, doesn’t help us understand how to be happy. Or why we are commanded to be happy even through the difficult circumstances. That seems impossible, right?

Well, if happiness is just an emotion, yes. But not if Happiness is a person.

C.S. Lewis writes “Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for.”3

God’s goal and desire is always to point us to Him, to show us that only He can satisfy us. We try to look to anything else to do that, to feed our need for safety, for peace, for love. We attach to other people, we worship nature, we follow the latest fads, we stuff ourselves with food, drink, sex, and drugs. You know the thing that it is for you. Lewis continues: “The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God.” We do get to enjoy the abundant pleasures and beauties God has given us in this world. But, remember “Our Father refreshes us in the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”3

If we were constantly happy in this life, never in pain, had no worries about debt or finances, always healthy, in perfect relationship with those around us, then we wouldn’t know our need for God. And we do need Him. Moreover, He wants us to want Him. We were created for relationship with Him, to be partners with Him, to be in union with Himself. He demonstrates this for us, but most of the time we are too wrapped up in ourselves to see it.

Are you happy? I’m guessing no. I’m pretty sure I’m not really happy. But this is because I’m human, sinful, and alive. If I want true Happiness, then I need to embrace Happiness, and know that my goals lie outside of my life here. Everything I do is in preparation for Someone else, something else, somewhere else. When pain and sadness happen, I need to listen and pay attention to what I can learn from the circumstances that caused the emotions. They are signals, reminders that my happiness is a Person, not a state of being. I feel the emotions, I reach out for wisdom, I go through the process, and then I help as many people as I can, using the story He allowed me to have through His ineffable plan.

Life is where we learn to dance.

“All pains and pleasures we have known on earth are early initiations in the movements of that dance: but the dance itself is strictly incomparable with the sufferings of this present time. As we draw nearer to its uncreated rhythm, pain and pleasure sink almost out of sight. There is joy in the dance, but it does not exist for the sake of joy. It does not even exist for the sake of good, or of love. It is Love Himself, and Good Himself, and therefore happy.”3

1Waldren, Michael, and Jade Bartlett. 2022. Doctor Strange: in the Multiverse of Madness. United States: Marvel Studios.

2Docter, Pete, and Ronnie Del Carmen. 2015. Inside Out. United States: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

3Lewis, C.S. The Problem of Pain. New York, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 2001 edition, originally published 1940.