TYPES OF HAPPINESS

Leo presents the moment of peace and fulfillment as the absolute form of happiness. I never really understood happiness' relationship with accomplishing or achieving something until I thought about when I watched Pursuit of Happiness (2006), starring Will Smith. He went through his life disappointment after disappointment, losing his wife and home because of a bad investment, but eventually succeeded at becoming a stockbroker at a prestigious firm. It's at the end of his 6 months internship that he gets his satisfaction or fulfillment of dreams. He can now start earning a salary again. Getting 'his life back' made him happy. Setting a goal of finishing the internship to start earning a salary and achieving it made him happy. With that said, this form of happiness is- The Engaged Life (According to Dr. Martin EP. Seligman.

Therefore the types of happiness in Positive Psychology are:

• Pleasant Life- A pleasant life consists of having as much pleasure as you can, as many of the positive emotions, and learning some of the dozen or so techniques that actually work for increasing the duration and intensity of your pleasures. There are shortcuts to the pleasures. You can go shopping; you can watch television; you can take drugs. These things do not lead to true happiness (agreeing with Leo about excitement).
• Engaged Life- An engaged life is being one with the music, being totally wrapped up in the people you love or what you're hearing. There are no shortcuts to the engaged life. The engaged life can only be had by first knowing what your highest strengths are, your signature strengths, and re-crafting your life to use them at work, in love, in leisure, in parenting and in friendship.
• Meaningful Life- A meaningful life consists of again knowing what your highest strengths and talents are and using them in the service of something that you believe is bigger than you are. 

Well it seems the authorities on happiness believe that pleasure and excitement are not the proverbial 'True Happiness'. However all these types of happiness describe your enter life. Therefore they are looking at how or why your life is happy.

Earlier classifications of happiness done by Greek philosophers had happiness categorized in levels. What I will not do is speak of them as stages which every human has to go through. But one must admit that based on your mindset, philosophy or better yet, your understanding of happiness, you can live in any of these types of happiness. Based on how we live any way, one might be experience multiple types of happiness at any given moment in time; simply because of the number and variety of personalities and events in his immediate 'circle'.

Hence, as extracted from the Catholic Education Resource Centre, The four Levels of Happiness, the levels of happiness are:

1. laetus: Happiness in a thing. Thus, "I see the linguini, I eat the linguini, it makes me feel good, I am happy." This kind of happiness is based on something external to the self, is short-lived and, on reflection, we do not consider that it is all there is to human happiness.
2. Felix: The happiness of comparative advantage. "I have more of this than X." "I am better at this than X." This kind of happiness results from competition with another person. The self is seen in terms of how we measure up to others. It has been called "the comparison game." Such happiness is rather unstable and, if one fails, can lead to unhappiness and sense of worthlessness. Exclusive pursuit tends to oppress others. Most people would not imagine a world as satisfactory if it was composed of only happiness #2 type people. 
3. Beatitudo: (Beatitudo = happiness or blessedness). The happiness that comes from seeing the good in others and doing the good for others. It is, in essence, other-regarding action. Happiness #3 is, in some sense, at war with happiness #2. One cannot be at the same time in competition with someone else and doing the good for and seeing the good in them. Most people would prefer a world (community, family, relationships) structured around the pursuit of happiness #3 than entirely based in happiness #2. Happiness #3 is higher than happiness #2. The problem with #3 is that it is necessarily limited. We cannot be someone else's everything. For example, we or they, will die and if our happiness is contingent upon them, it dies with them. "There must be more than this." 
4. Sublime Beatitudo: (sublime = "to lift up or elevate"). This category, the most difficult to describe, encompasses a reach for fullness and perfection of happiness. The fullness, therefore, of goodness, beauty, truth and love. So we recognize in this category, those things that are, in a sense, beyond what we are capable of doing purely on our own.

Comparing the ancient knowledge with the present classification of happiness we see that levels #1 & #2 fit under pleasant life. #3 is the engaged life and #4 is the meaningful life.

According to Abigail Tracy, staff reporter for INC., in her article, A Fascinating Look at 2 Types of Happiness, Researchers at UCLA and UNC have identified two different types of happiness; and how they impact your health. The first type, known as eudaimonic well-being, is happiness associated with a sense of purpose or a meaning in life. The second, known as hedonic well-being, is happiness as the result of “consummatory self-gratification” or happiness not associated with a purpose but rather a response to a stimulus or behavior.

Page: 1 2 3