Happiness vs. Wellbeing

These two desirable states differ in their depth. 

Happiness is not so deep as wellbeing, because it does not include anything contrary to itself. Happiness is not complicated. It is not nuanced. And it is fortunate—so fortunate as not to need the wisdom it lacks. The word is related to “happen,” because the happy person is the one to whom good fortune happens to happen. You can sense the implicit fragility of the whole thing. Tomorrow’s chance occurrences may not be so happy as today’s, but the happy person has the good sense to enjoy ease while it lasts. They may or may not also have the other sort of good sense, to take some of the possible precautions against some of the possible setbacks down the road.

Wellbeing, by contrast, includes a greater knowledge of what the good is worth. Acquainted with tragedy, with pain, with “waste, fraud, and abuse” (as they call it in government), it has learned something about the value of what is valuable: especially love, health, family, peace, friendship, success, belonging, achievement, skill, and the basic safety that frees us to attempt the rest of it. 

If happiness is like a delicious dessert, wellbeing is like a satisfying savory meal: wholesome, nutritious, and yes, tasty. The converse of happiness is, in this sense, not sorrow but depression. The way out of depression is not a fantasied, faux-omnipotent magical return to lost happiness. It is a gradual, difficult, genuine process of learning and healing, in which we come to trade our depression—avoidant, defensive, totalizing, and indignant—for the mature sorrow of legitimate grief.

This willingness to be sad is linked to a capacity for joy, and eventually, a baseline of wellbeing. In depression I’m the most persecuted person in the world, or I am the worst person in the world, or I’m nothing (so very worthless that I don’t even win the “worst person” prize, having failed at—or been cheated out of—that, too). But in grief I can just about remember that other people have suffered, are suffering, will suffer. It does not define me, nor them. It is not the whole story, nor am I its only protagonist. 

From inside depression, this sorrow seems like a scam, a lie, a minimization of the pain. But that illusion arises from the defensive function of depressive avoidance. The depressive sector of the personality is vaguely aware that grief will lead to recovery, and it is not ready to recover—so it is not ready to grieve. Committed to extremes, it is genuinely naive about the reality of compromise and ambivalence. It has forgotten about the emotional equivalent of a good meal: the healthy alternative to junk food, and to starvation.

Often depression includes an obsession with giving up, and this can be turned to good account by getting directed onto the right object. Give up, but not on life, not on love, not on you: give up on depression, instead.

In Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey there’s a formulaic bit of poetry that occurs whenever people share a meal: “They stretched out their hands to the good things that lay before them.” That’s the thing to do. What are the good things? Therapy. Nature. Art. Religion. Philosophy. Poetry. Dance. Music. Pottery. Sing-alongs. Yoga. Astronomy. Dogs. Cats. Cooking. Languages. Whatever might dilute the saturated process of repeating the awful material that has churned so long. Anything neutral-or-better that can be introduced to “the mix” of your daily experience. Without any sudden miracles, these new ingredients can improve the net result, making the next improvement just a bit clearer, more feasible, more plausible. No impossible metamorphosis is necessary. Growth is necessary.