What does happiness — in the ordinary, conventional sense — actually depend on?
Some days we get up in a good mood. We feel happy and energetic, we appreciate the small pleasures, the comfortable coffee in the morning, and the routine feels like a refuge rather than a sentence. Other days we feel tired and besieged, dissatisfied, with the same routine grinding us down.
The intensity, persistence, nature and frequency of these states differ from person to person. Some people are conventionally happy most days; others tend toward a more melancholy baseline; others again are a roller coaster of dissonant, apparently random emotion.
But what does it depend on?
Two answers
From the Buddhist point of view we already know the answer: it all comes from within, and the aim is in some sense to stop being conditioned by external realities — because a happiness that is conditional is not happiness in the absolute sense.
But I do not want to go deeper into the Buddhist framing here. I would rather look at this from the direction of psychotherapy. Does happiness really come exclusively from inside? Or is it conditioned by the external experiences we meet day to day?
It is worth noticing where a therapist actually stands on this. Most therapists work from the premise that the unhappiness a patient brings into the room is not caused by society but produced, at least in part, by the patient — that the patient is at least partly responsible for the dissatisfaction they feel. The therapist will generally be explicit that they are not in a position to alter society, change the patient’s past, or intervene in the patient’s life. What they offer is understanding. And implicit in that offer is an assumption: that the understanding is an internal one, about what the patient has brought to the situation that then created the unhappiness, or at least intensified it.
Which is not to dismiss what happened to you
Obviously the experiences we meet across a life mark us in all sorts of ways. Many people carry traumas that torment them for the whole of their lives. People form emotional scars that alter their personality and how they will relate to similar situations in future — the ones who find it hard to trust, or hard to be intimate, because of painful experiences in their past.
The argument for inner happiness is not meant to strip value from physical reality. Of course it would be better if everyone had an emotionally healthy life, and nobody had to experience abuse or a traumatic event.
But as with the therapist, our control over those external realities is limited. We are conditioned to some degree by these experiences, and while we can act to avoid and prevent them, past a certain point we cannot, because they are part of the nature of our reality.
The remaining alternative
So, given that external suffering is to some extent inevitable, the alternative left to us — and the unconditional one — is inner healing.
We cannot entirely change society, our past experiences, or our present situation. But we do have control over our interior, and over how we relate to each of those experiences. And while we may not be able to rid ourselves completely of conflicting emotions, we can at least reduce them, and encourage the positive ones at the same time.
Where it starts
The starting point for inner healing is self-understanding.
Because once we know why, and how we react, and on what basis the suffering is generated, and what its nature and extent are — then we have the tools we need for internal change.
That the things we thought were enormous and supremely important are actually hollow, and of no importance at all. That many of our worries and our feelings of being overwhelmed are self-inflicted. That we frequently take up a position of self-torture without even noticing we have done it. That the opinions of others often carry no sense or value, and in many cases have no impact whatsoever on our physical reality — and that the pain exists only in our own mind.
So: we can be our own therapists. We have the capacity to be happier even when nothing in our external life has changed. We have the power to direct our inner experience wherever we want it to go.
All that is needed is the initial willingness to start down the personal path of self-therapy.