Happiness feels a lot like sorrow

Several weeks ago, I overheard a painfully morbid conversation between my grandma and grandpa. "What is the point anymore? When I was younger, the kids were starting families and I wanted to be able to help them and watch our grandchildren grow up. But now, there is just no point. Why should I continue on this miserable diet?" My grandma, who has been living with diabetes for a while now and has more recently suffered from a few heart attacks, was expressing to my grandfather her unhappiness with a tasteless diet but more importantly, that she didn't feel it was worth it. Though her statement was most likely an inflammatory way for her to express her frustration and nothing more, my grandpa and I stepped in to remind her how much she meant to us. Her unhappiness with the diet has not changed over the years. But it is the opportunity cost, the "worth-it-ness" of the sacrifice, with which she is grappling. An unhappiness that she was once happy with has now become less desirable.

Around the time of this unsettling conversation, I read this article in The Atlantic about how there is more to life than being happy. In what I found to be one of the more meaningful (ha ha) journalistic pieces I've read in a while, the article creates several distinctions between happiness and meaning, one of which being that happiness is a fleeting emotion while meaningfulness is more everlasting, bridging your past and future. Happiness is categorized as shallow while meaning transcends the self. People pursuing happiness are takers, whereas people like my grandma, who identify some underlying meaning, are givers.

For the past month, due to a variety of reasons not even worth describing, I have been extremely unhappy in one aspect of my life, to the point where I would occasionally experience physiological reactions, for example heaviness in my chest and well, tears. Not knowing how to deal with this unhappiness internally, I let it pervade into all my most meaningful relationships. Every conversation with people I love, the friends and family who surround me, had turned into a session for me to unload my unhappiness. After each of these conversations, I would only feel worse about the darkness I had introduced into the other person's life, even for a moment. It was only after I spent 1 hour complaining to my dad on what happened to be his 29th wedding anniversary that I realized what I was doing. At that point, I decided that I being happy in a particular moment was not worth burdening the meaning around me. Stemming mostly from anger, my desire to be happy in the moment was clouding the beauty I see in my life by means of my relationships and my future.

This morning, as I was going for a Sunday stroll with a childhood friend, we discussed a variety of topics, including the art of photography. "I had been trying to understand for a while when a photograph is considered good," she told me. "Then I took this photography course and my teacher helped kind of shed light on that." According to her professor, that which we see in photographs only scratches the surface of what a photographer is trying to convey. The art lies in the story behind the photographs that are and aren't shared -- the meaning behind what we see and don't see.

Somewhat not surprisingly, I've been unable to forget the statement my grandmother made the other day. And while an obvious outcome is that I've been more outward in showing her how much she means to me, a side effect has been for me to reflect on what is meaningful in my life, what will connect my past to my future. Something, in my opinion, more people my age should do.

If you think about it, happiness is a lot like a photo. It's a simple, surface-level emotion. And especially as young-twenty-somethings, many of us feel entitled to happiness, probably because college paints that disillusioning surface-level picture of studying what you love in order to do something you love and well, be happy. Of course, as someone who loves to be happy, I am not at all undermining the necessity for happiness in our lives. I am merely suggesting that we also take some time to think past the emotion.

Anyway, if you're like me and find meaning in making the people around you happy, well, we will all end up being happy anyway.