The word happiness seems to appear more often when one is not happy than when one is happy. Still, I try to say it more in order to be happy.
“I am happy to have met you.”
“I am happy to hear you say you love me.”
“I am happy the child is growing well.”
“I am happy the child is healthy.”
“I am happy the child at least does not refuse to study…”
“I am happy my work is interesting.”
“I am happy I have the mental room to write.”
The last one is true. When stress comes from work or home, I cannot write. Not only can I not write, even if I turn on the television and sit blankly, my head turns into a mess. The absence of such trouble is itself happiness, but that sort of happiness seems most clearly felt in the leisure that appears after some incident has disappeared.
After being sick for a while, I do not know how long the feeling of being happy not to be in pain lasted. It was a few years ago, when I was resting at home because of COVID. Whenever I received a COVID vaccine, and also when I finally caught COVID near the end, my headache was severe. Outwardly nothing seemed wrong, and if I took fever medicine the fever dropped quickly. But even after the fever went down, the headache continued. It felt as if my whole brain were pressed against my skull and trying to swell. I sometimes have migraines, but even those do not continue like that. With no room to breathe, I could not even lie down, and I crouched face down on the floor, holding my head in both hands.
Then on Thursday, while enduring the headache as before and weakly eating dinner, my head suddenly cleared. Since the headache had made thinking impossible anyway, the fact that I felt my head clear meant I had begun to think.
“What was I thinking?”
But I could not have been thinking anything except that I wished the headache would go away. Still, I wondered for a moment whether I had forgotten something, and only belatedly realized that I had not forgotten a thought; the headache had disappeared. Then I thought, “I did not know I could be this happy just because there is no headache.”
But that happiness did not last a day. Not a day; the next morning, when a work call came from the company, irritation rushed in. Even if I had still had the headache, the call would have come, so I should have been grateful that at least the headache was gone. But gratitude and happiness were hidden behind irritation. When I answered and talked, it turned out to be something that could be solved with a rough verbal explanation. After finishing with only a few words and hanging up, I thought happiness was not somewhere else.
How fickle and light a person is.
At that time I tested positive for COVID on a Sunday afternoon, received special leave for that week, and was scheduled to return to work the following Monday. The headache that began around Monday lunchtime continued until Thursday evening. The phone rang roughly once a day. Two or three calls were because someone working with me had handled something strangely in my absence, and I would eventually have to fix it. But because the headache made thinking impossible, I gave vague answers and decided to deal with it when I returned on Monday. The rest I was mostly able to handle by phone on Friday. So Friday was the first real vacation-like day without a headache, but I still had to answer several calls. Each time I felt irritated when the phone rang, and each time I hung up I celebrated the restarting of my headache-free holiday.
Since I no longer needed to take medicine, I slept a little late on Friday. Reading until my eyes closed not from pain but from actual sleepiness, I lay in bed and thought that my rapid swing from irritation to pleasure made me like the monkeys in the story of three in the morning and four in the evening. Then, stretching the thought a little, I wondered whether I could call that happiness if the good feeling lasted only so briefly.
Can that too be called happiness?
Can one become happy by realizing, after thinking carefully, that a situation with no problems is also happiness?
Is happiness perhaps the feeling that appears when a bad situation disappears?
Perhaps there is not a “happy state” at all. Perhaps, just as there may be no addiction-state itself, only a mechanism by which one enjoys pleasure when in pleasure and looks only toward pleasure when outside it, happiness may be merely a mechanism by which one feels happy when an unstable state improves. If so, to say “I am happy,” one must imagine an unhappy situation and think one is happy because that is not the case. If that is true, we are sad beings who cannot be happy unless we have a comparative advantage created even by imagining misfortune. To maintain happiness by always looking at something worse and comforting oneself that one is better than that: how sad. Dreaming of a better future is a different topic, so I exclude it. I am speaking only of the present state.
Seen that way, we are, in existence itself, sad, unhappy, unsatisfied, selfish people. From birth, because we cannot be satisfied with the present, we must stand upon a worse past or assume a worse situation and rationally conclude that the present is better in order to be happy. Even while laughing pleasantly, we think only that we feel good, not that we are happy.
So I wondered whether, unlike expressions such as “I feel good,” “I am enjoying this,” or “I am sad,” the expression happiness itself is used from a sad state, a state dissatisfied with the present. Perhaps the concept of happiness is itself “not being unhappy,” a definition impossible without assuming unhappiness. I thought that in ordinary life the concept of happiness may not be necessary. Every day can be enjoyable, but can one always be happy?
Maybe I alone receive the concept this way. The examples of use make me feel so, unlike the concept explained in words. Perhaps it is also because I do not often use the word happiness in daily life, finding it embarrassing. Still, after thinking this way, I wondered whether I really need to say I am happy. Without comparing with another situation, the present is satisfactory. That is enough.
At this point another thought occurred. Perhaps the order between happiness and unhappiness, the state of not being happy, has been reversed. Unhappiness is long and happiness is short. Not that this is actually so, but the periods for which we feel them are so. If there is some square state - being sick, losing someone, or not obtaining what one wants - and its synonym is unhappiness, then non-square should be a state that is not square, that is, a state in which one does not feel unhappy. Perhaps happiness is not primary with unhappiness as its absence. Perhaps we are always ready to feel unhappiness, and the rare moments when we do not feel it are non-unhappiness. But instead of calling it non-unhappiness, perhaps we deceive ourselves and call it happiness.
Original Korean article: 행복과 불행