Happiness, identity and emotions

To have a discussion about “happiness” we should probably come to some understanding of what that word actually means. It’s a significantly subjective word. Does it mean having all of your basic needs met? Is it the top of Maslow’s Pyramid? A huge yacht? A huger yacht than the dude docked next to you? A submarine? A better ending to Lost? Because it is so subjective, let’s zoom out a bit and frame “happiness” as simply an emotion (at least for right now). I am sure that there is someone who would choose to disagree with me about this just to be deliberately combative, but I am willing to bet that most could agree on this very basic idea that happiness is an emotion. 

So what are emotions? Glad you asked.

Perhaps it is a bug in the English language, but emotions have come to define a person. Think about it. “I am sad.” “I am happy.” “I am angry.” We don’t feel emotions. We become them. We are them. And while talking about our emotional state may just be a flaw in language or even just a shortcut, our words become how we define our identity. We become the aggregate of our emotional states. We define ourselves by our emotions. We no longer feel our emotions. We become our emotions. 

But this is not the case. Emotions are not who we are. They are not our identity. Remembering that our brains our evolutionary machines that care about the survival and propagation of the species, our emotions are language that our brains use to propel us to action.  

In his book Everything is F*CKED: A Book About Hope, Mark Manson explains:

“Our emotions are instrumental in our decision making and our actions. We are moved to action only by emotion. Action is emotion. Anger pushes your body to move. Anxiety pulls it into retreat. Joy lights up the facial muscles. Sadness attempts to shade your existence from view. Emotion inspires action, and action inspires emotion. The two are inseparable.” 

Framing emotions as one’s identity can be risky. It creates an attachment to emotions that are fleeting and fickle. More damaging, however, is that it ignores the signal that your body is trying to communicate. An emotion becomes an anchor and not a call to action. And this is why so many people probably feel stuck. They have stopped listening to their own soul, and thus have become resigned to a life of inaction and being defined by their seemingly arbitrary emotions. I’ll dive into this a bit more later, but for now let’s frame emotions such as happiness simply as the language that our brains use to communicate.