Quirkbag Collection #40 – 17.04.26
We like to say that our life goal is to be happy. With children, we not only wish for their happiness, but we do things to try and create it in their childhood. In adulthood, it seems to just be something people say; then it’s back to work.
Over the past months, I have been trying to pursue and understand that elusive state of being known as happiness.
Happiness can be simple. For some people, it does not take much. A decent lifestyle, comfort food and a not-so-boring job. Fair enough. When I was in the army, I loved a simple cup of tea on the weekend afternoon with zero agenda for the day. That was happiness in hindsight.
But the thing about happiness, like every other emotion, is that it cannot be defined with metrics. It’s a feeling you get when you look back but one you don’t feel in the moment.
Key Factors For Happiness
Based on a Yale Course about the Science of Well-Being which I took, the two most important factors that affect your mood directly are exercise and sleep. Yes, no surprises there. And it’s research-based! Once you have a healthy amount of both in your lifestyle, happiness starts to reach a baseline. It helps to build the foundation with rest and exercise.
Certainly, money plays a part. Happiness levels rise with income as per the World Happiness Report. Beyond a threshold however, money starts having a diminishing impact on happiness. Money can buy most of your way toward happiness in terms of needs and experiences. But to be ap, it seems money has limited utility.
Just think, the best presents you have received are probably not $50 cheques (they are nice, yes, but not necessarily totems of happiness.)
On The Common Fallacy
In the book ‘The Courage To Be Disliked’, we learn that we may expect too much of ourselves. Not that it’s wrong to try and reach Mars, but maybe we’re just too hard on ourselves all the time.
Of course, it is not always due to our own ambition, but in part the tidal push that is the accelerating pace of life in modern society. We’re influenced to want more, to do more, and achieve more. But it does not really add to our ‘happiness rating’, does it?
We’re unconsciously raised to buy into the belief that ‘I’ll be happy when I (insert achievement)’. It’s the arrival fallacy.
We won’t be exactly as we imagine ourselves to be when a particular event happens. We won’t feel exactly as we think we might. Ali Abdaal mentions this too. The arrival fallacy tricks us into thinking happiness is around the corner of our milestone, after the next exam, the next promotion, the next something. It’s not.
It never will be.
And as any hard-working student will say, the emotion is more relief than joy, more liberation than excitement.
The Open Secret – Gratitude
Self-help has made gratitude the go-to practice for increasing positivity and happiness. In fact, a similar practice was also mentioned in the Yale course I took. What’s the deal with gratitude? Is that truly the key to being so happy everyday?
Well, the practice of gratitude only became self-help advice in the modern era. But the root concept may be far older. Stoicism offers the advice of “negative visualisation” – picturing how your reality would be without certain objects, privileges, opportunities or even people. In perceiving an alternate reality where we are definitively “worse off”, it puts what we actually do have into a more pleasant frame.
An extreme example involves imagining a sad (but inevitable) scenario in which your loved ones no longer exist – how you would feel, act, behave and think in that moment. Then, as a soothing reminder, you remember and notice that you live in a reality in which they do exist. That sense of relief and “thank god” is likely the point of “gratitude” in self-help. How’s that for reframing?
But the idea of gratitude is less about forcing yourself to thank something or someone. It’s a trigger to reflect about the way things panned out, perhaps to realise that while it may not be ideal, it is not all that bad either. And considering the possibilities, our circumstances might have been a steal.
I tested this gratitude journalling idea by reflecting about the things I am grateful for each day. To truly reap the benefits of this gratitude practice, I think it is less about having tokenistic acknowledgements of random events but the realisation that not all is lost.
Comparison Is A Thief
In the pursuit to be happier, comparison is not helpful. In fact, most comparisons here end poorly, an outcome easily exacerbated by social media today.
The World Happiness Report 2026 had a tighter focus on the impacts social media usage has on happiness and well-being. The result is almost predictable.
Happiness Is Fleeting
Happiness is fleeting. You can’t really define or predict when happiness occurs. It’s not a particular event with fixed time markers.
Happiness exists in moments. Overthink and you’ll miss it.
If you recall the last time you felt truly happy, even though it is sort of a vague feeling to describe, I will bet it’s not really a thing that made you happy. The Science of Well-Being course from Yale reveals that experiences have greater impact on happiness levels than objects do when measured over a period of time.
For me, the happy moments exist as a period or an experience in my memory. It’s hard to create these moments because they just…happen. The moments are not forced. They are lived. It’s when you are truly in the moment – without thinking about what the moment means, or when it will end, or what comes after. It’s what people might call “the good old days”.
And delivered in a dramatically astute fashion, “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”
Chasing the moment to ‘find’ happiness is like a dog chasing its tail. You won’t find ‘happiness’ by wondering why you aren’t happy when you are in the middle of a vacation. It seems to not be something you can “manifest”.
The Pursuit Of Happiness
I saw this video by YouTuber Lindsiann on the distinction between existing and living. It illuminates that dull, numb underlying feeling I get sometimes when there is no big reason for unhappiness.
The crux lies in the spark in certain moments. The feeling of being alive. Indeed, feeling alive for a moment in your day spikes all your emotions at once.
It’s that fear before doing something new or wild, that thrill of trying it, that courage of actually even being there, the openness to your life’s possibilities in that moment. The video offers the advice of ‘saying yes’ to new experiences more often to combat a monotonous existence.
As far as advice goes, it’s not half bad to seek new adventures every so often. It surely helps broaden your experiences and staves off the boredom of routines.
The pursuit of happiness is certainly not a short one. I often wonder if there are those who spend their lifetime searching and never knowing what true peace and happiness in their life feels like. Ironically, the harder we try to find happiness, the more it evades us.
And perhaps, upon accepting that fact, we. the overthinkers, can finally put to rest the endless quest for a formula to reliably create happiness.
Conclusion
You may not be happy for a multitude of reasons. But most likely, it’s because you pine too much over something beyond your control or over-attribute your happiness to material items. You may also be a victim of insufficient rest, exercise, nutrition. Most importantly, you can’t find happiness by just chasing it like a to-do goal. It’s an elusive shadow that appears, then you realise.
The world is not optimised for happiness. It’s optimised for collective progress and productivity. I find myself inching closer to the uncomfortable conclusion that happiness is something you live towards. There is no universal formula. You can’t buy it. And it means you cannot control it.
But you can tweak your life to increase your chances of meeting it. Much like a sunrise, happiness is fleeting and uncontrollable, but you can catch it if you are present in the moment.
Go ahead, read my other posts!
Hi! I’m Zac, the guy behind this serendipitous, quirky blog. I’m currently on a quest to find out more about myself before Uni begins – who I am and what life has to offer. This blog is my little space where I step out of my comfort zone to share my thoughts and life experiences. I hope you enjoy reading the weekly posts. Share them if you like, or not.
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