Happiness Doesn’t Exist

Happiness is slippery. It doesn’t like to stick around. We know we’ve had it before, but it’s gone away, and we know there are certain things we have to do to find it again. Certain ducks have to be in a row. After all, if you didn’t have to do anything to be happy, you wouldn’t do anything at all. It can’t be too hard to find. Other people seem to be finding it all right.

Yet for all our efforts, we never seem to get this happiness problem nailed down, and there’s a very good reason for that.

When we start talking about solving the problem of unhappiness, it’s hard to avoid the topic of Buddhism. I know not everyone is a fan, but they have lain some important groundwork, even for those of us who like the idea of improving our quality of life but aren’t prepared to buy the whole package, with all its baldness and orange robes. Despite its promises of peace and enlightenment, I haven’t leapt in with abandon, so don’t worry, this article doesn’t delve into pratitya-samutpadas and tathagatagarbhas. It’s about a plain-jane concept you know very well: happiness.

Buddhism developed as a response to mankind’s search for happiness. In the simplest terms, it’s not a belief system but a methodology for being happy. Yet Buddhist literature is known for focusing much more on suffering than happiness. Its curious preference for morbid subject matter has led some to describe Buddhism as preoccupied with negativity.

The reason suffering has become Buddhism’s primary focus, rather than happiness, is that happiness, as we conceive of it, doesn’t really exist — at least not in the same way suffering does. What we refer to as happiness is really just what the absence of suffering feels like.

Although it’s become the favorite term for the concept, “suffering” is really not an adequate word. The Buddhists call it dukkha. Suffering is perhaps the most common English substitution, but I’ve also seen anguish, unease, dissatisfaction, stress, discomfort, or unsatisfactoriness. None of them are quite right, and so many writings in English will use dukkha.

I avoid the casual use of Sanskrit or Pali words in my articles because I think they make a lot of readers tune out, as they sense they’re being led into an esoteric religious discussion. Books and articles about Buddhism can get pretty dry and cryptic, scaring away readers who would otherwise be fascinated by the very same concepts if they weren’t presented in such stuffy, user-unfriendly language. But for the rest of this article I’ll use dukkha, if it hasn’t scared you off yet.

“Unease” might be the best of the English translations of dukkha. The original word was meant