"What does it take to be happy?"

David Michie

What does it take to be happy? Of all the questions in the world, this is the most universal. It is also the great leveler because all of us – comfortably off or financially struggling, single or in a relationship, awkwardly overweight or elegantly slim – are equal in our desire to achieve true happiness. Not the happiness we've all experienced which comes and goes depending on circumstance, but a happiness which endures regardless of change. A happiness we feel deep down inside.

By any objective standard, our efforts to attain this simple goal have met with decidedly mixed results. As a society we now enjoy a level of affluence that would have left our grandparents breathless – but our medicine cabinets have never been so replete with sedatives, tranquilizers, and antidepressants to cocoon us from our new, "improved" reality. We have at our disposal an unprecedented range of labor-saving devices – but never have we had to work such long hours. We are succeeding in the cozy notion of creating a global village" – but never have we felt so under siege from international terrorism, volatile stock markets, viral infections and other threats. And so the list of paradoxes continues.

On an individual basis, our striving for happy, purposeful lives often doesn't fare much better. Money, relationships, and fulfillment in work are the core ingredients of most people's recipes for happiness, but if we were to send in the Happiness Auditors to check up on their effectiveness, could they really withstand close scrutiny?

Successive studies of lottery winners, for example, show that within months of multimillion-dollar wins, happiness levels return pretty much to where they were before. Amazingly adaptable creatures that we are, we adjust to new conditions so quickly that what was once fabulous soon becomes the norm, and we're back where we started, in search of fresh excitement. Even when we do achieve that much sought-after promotion, that big-ticket deal, that amazing breakthrough, all too often we are mystified to discover that we fail to experience the wonderful feelings we'd always thought we would. "Is this all?," we find ourselves wondering.

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