Chapter 2 Subjective happiness

Very often we hear that pop stars, cover girls and movie stars get into low water in life and sometimes even try to commit suicide. According to the theory of chapter 1, they should be happy however with high marks for sex life, financial situation and artistic activities.

So there is more than objective happiness, which we call subjective happiness. How happy we are is partly dependent on how we experience our happiness. These subjective factors are mainly inside us, whereas the objective factors can be seen from the outside as well.

So we did not take into account yet the following five subjective factors:

1. Energy

2. Experience

3. Equilibrium

4. Loneliness

5. Other individual subjective factors

Energy

All people have a certain level of lifeblood they can use during the day. Unfortunately, the amount available is not fixed and differs substantially per person. Roughly seen, there are two types of persons.

First, there are hyperactive people, who are always busy and cannot sit silent for just a second. Many of those people smoke or have other strange customs needed to get rid of their energy.

On the other side, there are people who have to be kicked to move around. Those people never have appetite in anything and always look at the disadvantages first. They are often gloomy and do not try out anything without knowing what it is. Their being gloomy is not always part of their character, but often just a shortage of energy.

Unfortunately, energy is neither equally distributed over people, nor equally distributed over the day. Some people are night owls, whereas others are only functioning well in the morning. Personally, I hate afternoons when I am usually down in the dumps. Even when I slept well the night before, I can make a nap in the afternoon easily. My subjective happiness is therefore strongly dependent on the time of the day.

Energy is a very important factor in determining the scores for objective happiness. Passing the day implies working, loving, being creative, sporting, investing etc. A lot of energy is needed to do these things. Happy and young people do all these things hardly noticing the efforts. But when they grow older and have less energy at their disposal, people realise how much energy they need only to keep their happiness on the same level.

When we start working, most of us have much less energy to do other things. Modern man only becomes active during holidays and in the weekend. Some of the happiness factors are being neglected and life passes by at high speed. Sometimes, we become unhappy because we do not invest enough in what we have already reached.

A small side-step to the realm of economics, how boring it may be, can be useful. Family relations, savings, love and artistic skills are basically forms of capital. In economic science we distinguish between physical and human capital. Depreciation is needed for both forms of capital, as both machines and knowledge grow older and need to be updated.

The same is true for relations and happiness. They are also stocks that can deteriorate, like foodstuffs in the fridge that are left there for a year without restocking.

Hence you need energy to be able to invest in objective happiness. Take a young woman in her thirties having everything, a nice family, a good job, a beautiful house, interesting hobbies and some savings. When this woman does not have enough energy to invest in these things, the husband will run away, the kids become drug addicts, the house dilapidates and she will be fired from her job. And when she is a workaholic, she will probably not be fired, but the other factors will then even faster deteriorate.

Life is a battle for energy. What a pity therefore that energy is so difficult to control. It seems unexplainable that one day we feel good and have appetite to do anything, even in the evening after work, whereas the next day we only can sit in front of the TV. When we start doing things in this mood it is a kind of self-punishment. All those energy gurus telling us to do it and to do it now have no idea how difficult it is to work against your energy level.

In fact, I myself have no energy right now. I want to go to bed instead of translating this stupid web site, that nobody will read. Why do I go on, what tricks do I use except coffee, to continue typing. We will come back to that later, when you have the energy to keep on reading this website.

Experience

We now come to experience. This second subjective happiness factor makes that people can experience the same level of happiness in a completely different way than other people. One person will feel rich with 10.000 dollars in his bank account, whereas another person will think he is bust. One girl will be happy with a particular boy friend, whereas another girl would rather strangle the guy than to spend one minute with him.

Experience here stands for the things people have experienced in their lives. If someone has gone through very rough times and then comes back to normal times, this person will experience happiness more easily than someone in a similar situation. He or she knows what it means to be unhappy; how it feels to be without money, friends and work. If you did not have this experience it is in fact rather difficult not to be bored about all that happiness. It happens very often that without any clear reason couples that have a happy relationship for many years, suddenly become dissatisfied and sometimes even divorce.

Hence, people who are spoilt in their youth or had few problems in their lives will be less able to appreciate happiness. They are brought up in luxury, did not have to care about anything and meet themselves later.

Experience is not only positive. It may also include that sweeping incidents occurred in someone's live that left terrible scars. Someone having experienced incest, or who had to let off the hand of a good friend hanging in the ravine may have more difficulties being happy, even when rich and happily married. Experience can be the main happiness-determining factor, both in positive and negative sense.

Fortunately, people are able to forget and the impact of experience on happiness will change with the time. Sometimes, bad experiences will first influence happiness in a negative and later in a positive way. On the other hand, war veterans can be first happy again and later, in their old age, memories start coming back and make life hell again.

Concluding, experience can be a very determining factor, is difficult to value from the outside and hard to predict.

Equilibrium

The third subjective factor is equilibrium. Concern about a loved one, a pinching financial situation or sexual frustrations are examples in which a mental disorder disrupts all activities in one's life. The longer the disorder lasts, the more the equilibrium in one's life is being disturbed. A few weeks without cash may perhaps be exciting, but a whole life without money is frustrating. A summer without friends can be fruitful, but years without a social life is simply lonely. A few hours without sex is ok, a few days is simply unbearable.

This reminds me of a scene from Dutch political cabaret where the guy (Finkers) discusses a message from the official Information Service about aids: "Be prudent when you do not always have sex with the same partner". It seems logical, but he then starts to think whether this slogan applies to him: "No, I do not always have sex with the same partner. Sometimes we have to stop to eat or drink something". He then continues saying that an alternative would be to always have sex with different partners, but that is too costly and above all it won't solve your problem that sometimes you'll have to eat. Most secure would be to never have sex with almost everybody.

In any case I would like to underline here that not enough equilibrium will lead to disorder. In the first stage this may result in an energy surplus, but in the longer run most probably to a lack of energy.

And when somebody has found equilibrium in his or her life, this can influence happiness in a positive way. A person with a little money, a nice partner, good friends and a rewarding job can be quite satisfied, especially when he was a junk before.

Loneliness

The fourth subjective factor is loneliness. This does not include social life mentioned before as an objective factor of happiness. Even when we have enough friends to whom we can tell everything, it is possible that we have a deep sense of loneliness. This deep sense of loneliness has to do with the fact that nobody can take our place in this world. We will always have to deal with our own thoughts and feelings. The big puzzle why we are here and why we are like we are is something nobody can ever solve for us. Despite all our money, our friends and our labour we can alienate and estrange from the world around us. We start feeling lonely.

A good religious consciousness can do a lot in this field and contribute to our happiness. I do not include fundamental Muslims, orthodox Jews or Christian fanatics in this category, who are only afraid of dying or want to have a lot of attention. They do not understand life at all. No, it rather includes people who know what is the destiny in their lives, who can accept the fact that life is finite and who realise that there is much which we will never understand. Recognising this, sometimes thinking about it and letting it be part of your life is more or less what I define as religious feeling. The more we have this feeling, the more we can put things in perspective. 

Own subjective factors

The fifth factor is that subjective that I forgot about it. I call it the own subjective feeling. It includes the factors related to your character. Perhaps you are schizophrenic or symmetry makes you happy or you have a very good feeling for humour.

The five factors mentioned above are included in the interactive list of questions where you can attach values to them. When you are on average below zero, you don't feel happy at all. If your outcome is positive, you probably feel happy.

But in order to get a complete picture, we will have to combine the objective and subjective factors, which we will do in the next chapters 3 and 4

Home (questionnaire)
Chapter 1: objective happiness
Chapter 2: subjective happiness
Chapter 3: combining objective and subjective happiness
Chapter 4: six types of happiness 
Chapter 5: Influencing subjective happiness
Chapter 6: Investing in objective happiness