Happiness and Its Discontents

Guest Opinion

By Greg Holmes | Dec. 21, 2024

How happy were you this year? 2024 was a difficult year for many of us to feel good about, as there were a plethora of difficult things that impacted our lives.

Think about what we went through last year. Take climate change as an example. Images of forest fires, flooding, and severe weather offered dramatic evidence of the devastating impact of changing climate. To make the situation worse, the leaders of the world, like Nero before them, fiddled about and did next to nothing as the Earth burned. In October, a United Nations report concluded that countries had basically made “no progress” toward their previously agreed upon goals of lowering greenhouse gas emissions and addressing climate change.

Another major stressor with long-term consequences was last year’s election. The political posturing in the 2024 election could be charitably summarized as an ugly mess. Civil discourse? Forget about it! What we witnessed was over a billion dollars spent on viscous, often vulgar attacks on opponents. Lies and false promises were commonplace, often enabled by the “news”
media.

And then there was the seemingly never-ending geopolitical conflicts between Ukraine and Russia, and the deadly, unresolved war in the Middle East. Who among us was not affected by the nightly videos of children and families that were ravaged by war?

There are plenty of national and international problems that often can have a powerful impact on our feelings of well-being. But much closer to home many of us also struggled with personal issues, whether it be illness, loss of a loved one, or other forms of trauma. My heart goes out to those of you who have suffered any personal challenges in 2024.

It’s unlikely that any of the national and international issues mentioned above will change significantly for the better in 2025. In addition, many of us will continue to suffer stress from personal problems, the “ups and downs” of our lives. Given these probabilities, how is it possible for one to be happier in 2025?

What we do know about happiness is that it is basically an emotional state comprised of two components. The first component is feelings about what is happening to you in the here and now. For example, imagine how you feel when your favorite sports team wins a big game, or how happy you are when your child does well in a performance at school.

Now imagine the opposite outcomes and how angry and dark your moods can become when life takes a difficult turn for the worse. It can even become more troublesome once you begin to realize how dependent your happiness is on having the outcomes you expected.

No one likes to lose, but what we really lose by focusing too much on negative news and outcomes are the feelings of wonder and the awareness of the miracles that surround us. Continuing to consume an “unbalanced” emotional diet of negativity is, in effect, a way of practicing your unhappiness.

This process, if corrected, will influence the second component of happiness, which is an overall feeling of contentment, or how you feel about your life in general. Yes, there will be ups and downs and times when suffering and loss are unavoidable. However, at the same time there are plenty of good things that go unnoticed.

Not having an awareness of these good things can lead to further complications when we look back on our lives. Instead of a feeling of overall satisfaction and contentment, we often feel regret as we painfully realize that we missed out on important things.

The reasons that we don’t know what we have until it’s too late are basically two-fold. First, we don’t fully appreciate what we do have, whether that’s our life, our health, our family, etc. Most of us take these important people and things for granted, focusing instead on less important things in our daily lives.

We take life for granted and put things off because of a semi-conscious belief that we will be able to do them again some other day. Did you miss the magnificent full moon rise this past October, the “Hunter’s Moon”? No worries! You can always catch it next year…if indeed there is a next year.

Second, something very few of us think about is that sooner than later there will not be a next year, no chance to see the full moon rise, walk on the beach, or hug those we love. By continuing to put things off, opportunities will be lost, buried under the heavy weight of regret.

Perhaps we can learn from the people of Bhutan, who are some of the happiest people in the world. Why are they so happy? It’s because they are taught to think about death, sometimes as many as five times every day. Realizing that we will die can have the effect of greatly increasing our appreciation and gratitude for the life we have in the present.

Greg Holmes lives and writes in Traverse City.