Contemplating Happiness and Unhappiness

[chiefoperator]

I've found recently that my thinking vis-a-vis happiness is evolving

Comments

[siderea]

A wise woman once defined happiness to me as "accepting where you are", and I think there's a lot to that -- but it also opens the door on a problem with happiness: when people are too accepting of their present condition, does this leave us with insufficient incentive to work for changes that would actually be worthwhile?I think conflating the happiness/unhappiness spectrum with the satisfaction-with-conditions/dissatisfaction-with-conditions spectrum is a fundamental error. Many people find the happiest moments in their lives when they are actively engaged in attempting to remediates a dissatisfying-making condition, from the Open Source hackers' "scratching an itch" to engaging in work which advances social justice

[chiefoperator]

I'm not sure I fully understand the distinction you're trying to elucidate -- not having the technical perspective that you bring to bear. Certainly I can understand that a potter can be happy in her work, while engaged in an ongoing struggle to make the clay behave -- to choose a simplistic example.

But I guess to me, it looks like the same kind of mechanism in play, but at different levels of scope: micro vs. macro, or tactical vs. strategic. If we are happy with the pot, we don't keep trying to change it, but even if we are not satisfied with the pot and keep working on it, we can still be happy with our life as a potter. Am I far out of line to think of this as akin to the distinction you refer to between feeling-level-happiness and mood-level-happiness?

Or perhaps I'd be better off just coming right out and asking: "How do YOU define happiness?"

(P.S., what is a " 'conceptual' definition"?)