500 Words a Week - The Three Macronutrients of Happiness
Happiness is something we all want. When we go a little deeper and ask ourselves, well what is this happiness we want? We struggle to answer the question. We might arrive at some loose response that either includes achieving certain feelings or removing some form of barrier to these feelings, or a little of both.
In “Build the Life you Want” by Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey, they begin the book with a strong message. Being happy isn’t the goal. Being happier is. Happiness isn’t a destination, it’s not some mythical place far off in the distance for us to reach. Happiness is a direction. Becoming happier is available to us in the here and now. “Happier is not a state of being, but a state of doing – not a thing you wait around and hope for, but an achievable change you actively work toward.”
Arthur and Oprah talk about how a good way to define happiness is to break it up into it’s three component parts, it’s three macronutrients. Like a good meal needs a combination of macronutrients, we require a combination of the following macronutrients to become happier. The first is enjoyment. We may confuse this with pleasure, pleasure emanates from parts of the brain dedicated to rewarding us for certain activities, that in past times would have helped keep us alive. Enjoyment takes an urge for pleasure and adds communion and consciousness. Sure, having a meal out can bring pleasure, but what makes it enjoyable is when you eat with loved ones. Pleasure is easier than enjoyment to obtain, but it is fleeting and solitary. To be happier, you shouldn’t settle for pleasure, strive to make it into enjoyment through investing time and effort to be more conscious and communal.
The second macronutrient of happiness is satisfaction. It’s the thrill from accomplishing a goal you worked for. “It’s how you feel when you do something difficult, that meets your life’s purpose as you see it.” However, the joy that satisfaction can bring is temporary. Think to the last time you accomplished a major goal, how long were you satisfied with that achievement?
The third and most important macronutrient of happiness is purpose. “Without purpose … we are utterly lost, because we can’t deal with life’s inevitable puzzles and dilemmas. When we do have a sense of meaning and purpose, we can face life with hope and inner peace.”
What Arthur and Oprah want us to recognize from these three macronutrients is they all involve some form of unhappiness. “Enjoyment takes work and forgoing pleasures, satisfaction requires sacrifice and doesn’t last, purpose almost always entails suffering.” Therefore, the process of getting happier requires that we accept unhappiness into our lives as well and know it’s not an obstacle to our happiness.
We don’t look to completely remove negative emotions, but we do need “to set about making more conscious choices about how we react to them”.
This is something I’ve struggled with in terms of seeing negative emotions as a barrier to feeling happier. In turn, trying to get rid of them or not think about them. However, I’ve seen that this is futile and it’s through aspects such as above that we learn these emotions will always be part of our life, therefore we need to make more conscious choices about how we react to them.
