What is not happiness? Unhappy joy and happy sadness

To better understand what happiness is, it is necessary to distinguish between emotion and feeling.

Throughout human history, many people have reflected on the concept of happiness. Have you ever tried it? In the course of my research, I have realized that thinking about happiness (in the philosophical sense of the word) is a difficult task, because one does not know what exactly to look at.

So, it is legitimate for any thinker to ask himself.... what should I focus on and what concepts should I take into account in order to study happiness? Well, to begin a reflection on any concept, one must ask oneself about everything that is not that concept. And even more so if we are dealing with the elusive concept of happiness.

So I did and hoped that, as in a winnowing process, in which the chaff is separated from the grain by throwing the mixture into the air, the breeze would drag the balsam (that is, everything that is not happiness) and what interests us, the grain (happiness), would fall into the basket (my mind), leaving it finally uncovered to be processed (analyzed).

What is not happiness?

The first mistake is to assume that the social imaginary of "happiness" is correct..

When we think of "happiness", very colorful and bright images come to mind, of people doing activities in which they apparently have a good time, in which those people are free: pictures of smiles, rainbows, clown noses and emoticons crying with laughter. I invite you to do the test, stop reading and type in the Google Images search engine the word "happiness". What does this search teach us? Exactly what I have described, and as if that were not enough, they propose concepts that could (or should) be related, such as friend, day, birthday, love, family, wedding, Coca-Cola, and a long etcetera.

And isn't that happiness? Partly yes, but that also means that partly no. That's why we shouldn't let the media or "what everyone says" make us believe that we can only be happy on sunny days, on our birthday, or when we drink Coca-Cola.

For as long as we can remember, humans have used concepts to understand the world, and happiness is nothing more than a concept.Has no one noticed that every society modulates concepts to its own taste and convenience?

I write all this to make you see that behind the smiles there are tears, that after every day comes the night, and that, hidden under the showcase of "perfect happiness", there are many interests that our society is not interested in admitting. Although it is only now that I realize that the opposite of happiness is unhappiness, and nothing else.

I therefore propose that we doubt everything we think we know about "happiness" if we have not thought about it beforehand. if we have not thought about it before, because that leads us to a confusion that, apart from mixing concepts, leads us to live a life in search of something that we do not even know what it is.

This is how I unraveled the concept of happiness, in one of my retreats to the mountains, talking with my uncle on the subject when I realized (well, I realized) all this and the idea that I have called: unhappy joy and happy sadness. I present this idea because I feel that it should be made clear once and for all that being sad does not mean being unhappy. being sad does not mean being unhappy. They are parallel concepts that it makes no sense to compare because they are simply not part of the same plane: the first is an emotion, and the second is a feeling.

Sadness and unhappiness: a fundamental distinction.

Too often, and more so in psychology, these concepts of emotion and feeling are confused, which with examples we could understand as different things: when I go for a walk in the mountains with my dog and we see a snake, an intense mental state occurs in us that spontaneously arises in the limbic system (in charge of emotions) that makes us react with surprise and fear; two basic emotions (universal, that both animals and humans have) instinctive and adaptive that in practice have made our species have survived to this day.

When we finish the walk and I leave Simba (my dog) alone at home, he will feel sad (another basic emotion) but never unhappy, since unhappiness is a feeling that differs from emotions in that it is reached through conscious evaluation, i.e., by submitting the emotionthat is, by subjecting that emotion to thought. And that is something that for the moment only humans do, thanks (or unfortunately) to the development of the prefrontal cortex, we use reasoning that through symbols and meanings lead our mind to create lead our mind to create more complex concepts that animals cannot understand, because so far they have not needed them.

Therefore, joy is universal but happiness is subjective. We all feel the same but we don't all think the same way about what we feel.....Is that understood now?

In short, a person can be very happy but unhappy. That false "good" that we tell ourselves would be a good example. And at the same time, a person who for any unpleasant external event may feel sad at a given moment, will be confident that his inner happiness remains in the face of adversity.