Not All Happinesses Are Created Equal: 7 Flavors You Might Encounter

What Is Happiness?

One of the reasons we struggle to find happiness is that we aren’t quite sure what it is.

Imagine two different individuals on a summer’s evening. The first is sitting in the garden trying to finish a crossword before the sun sets, a gin and tonic on the table next to her, deep in thought. The second has just jumped out of a plane and is plummeting toward the earth at terminal velocity, marveling at the views beneath him and shrieking with delight. Which of the two individuals seems happier to you?

It depends on what you think happiness is. If you would associate it with words like fun, laughter, euphoria, revelry, exuberance, exhilaration, and thrill, then the skydiver seems happier. He is visibly and audibly expressing pleasure and excitement, whereas the person with the crossword has a mild frown on her face and is biting the end of her pen in consternation. On the other hand, if you think of happiness as involving contentment, serenity, satisfaction, peace, harmony, rest, and bliss, you will be drawn to the crossword person. She is calm and relaxed rather than throbbing with cortisol. She seems at ease with herself. Her contentment is also likely to last much longer than the skydiver’s high. Then again, his experience is probably far more intense and indeed memorable than hers.

Happiness

Andrew Wilson

Andrew Wilson uniquely weaves multiple approaches to explore 6 important questions about happiness. He combines practical wisdom with a rich study of our deepest longing—a relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.

The point is not that crosswords make you happier than skydives or vice versa. Given the choice, I would jump out of a plane rather than finish a crossword every day of the week and twice on Sundays, but that’s not the point either. The point is that we use the word happiness in a wide variety of ways, some of which are strikingly different from (and even irreconcilable with) one another. We could add many other examples: the uncontrollable splutter of laughter that causes the drink to come out of your nose; the young woman in the delivery suite, tired, bruised, and bleeding, handed her baby for the first time; the tears that come during the climactic scene of a beautiful movie; the exhausted triathlete breaking the finishing tape; the young couple who visit the mountains for the first time and gaze at the night sky for an hour in silence, overwhelmed by just how many stars there really are. It seems strange that we use the word happy to describe all of these experiences. An alien sent to observe humanity from the outside would assume these reactions reflected very different emotional states, and in some ways they do. Yet from the inside, we know how similar they feel. Happiness comes in many flavors.

The Hebrew Bible, for example, has around twenty different happiness words. The Greek New Testament has fifteen or so. English, which is a very rich language, has around fifty. Admittedly, many of them are so similar as to be almost indistinguishable. (Can you describe the difference between cheer and gladness? Me neither.) But they also all have nuances that are strikingly different from many other happiness words. We all know that there is a marked difference between bliss and luck, for instance, or between merriment and flourishing, even if we would find it hard to say what it was.

So we are going to group these words together to try to identify the main flavors or shades of happiness that people talk about. (For obvious reasons we will be doing this in English, but all the languages I know of have equivalents of each of them.) I think there are about seven.

Seven Flavors

To start with, there is happiness as joy, delight, pleasure, gratification, gladness, felicity, or enjoyment.¹ This is the most basic sense of the word for most people reading this, I imagine. Admittedly, there is a vocal evangelical tradition of distinguishing joy (deep, serious, lasting) from happiness (light, trivial, fleeting), but there is no biblical basis for this distinction.² And it disappears altogether when you think about other European languages: The English say, “Happy birthday,” while the French say, “Joyeux anniversaire,” the Spanish say, “Feliz cumpleaños,” and the Greeks use “Charoumena genethlia” (chara is the word for joy in the Greek New Testament). Happiness, joy, and delight can be used interchangeably; to be happy is to rejoice (1 Kings 4:20), and to have “fullness of joy” is to experience “pleasures forevermore” (Ps. 16:11). So there is no need to believe that happiness is flippant or that real joy is so deep as to be invisible. As a friend of mine once put it, we want a joy that reaches the face.

The second flavor is what happens when the first flavor is made manifest. When people put their joy, delight, pleasure, and felicity on display, we use more expressive language, like merriment, cheer, gaiety, glee, mirth, exultation, celebration, jubilation, revelry, rejoicing, or hilarity. In that sense, the difference between the first and second flavors is that between feeling an emotion and showing it: the difference between sadness and lament or between appreciation and praise. The first is an experience, while the second is its audible, visible, and tangible expression. Often the second follows naturally from the first. But not always. Sometimes we need encouragement to act on our emotions, which is why the Bible so regularly urges us to celebrate, make merry, be jubilant, exult, and make a joyful noise (Pss. 64:10; 68:4; 95:1; 96:12; 98:4; 100:2; 149:5; Eccl. 9:7; and others). Let me hear joy and gladness! Turn your fasts into feasts! God rest ye merry, ladies and gentlemen!

We have touched on the third flavor already. This is the intense, heady, overwhelming but short-term flood of endorphins that comes in response to physical stimuli and that we might describe using words like excitement, thrill, rush, high, fun, elation, euphoria, ecstasy, and exhilaration. Unlike the first two flavors, this form of happiness is not commanded in Scripture. The Bible is continually urging us to rejoice and be glad but never to become ecstatic, let alone high. Euphoria might result from godly things (physical exercise, triumphant achievements, sex within marriage) that produce good results (fitness, diligence, children). It might result from ungodly things (substance abuse, sexual immorality, illegal drugs) with very damaging consequences (loss of self-control, idolatry, addiction), which is why the apostles continually warn people away from following their foolish passions toward destruction. Or it might result from things that are neither godly nor ungodly in themselves (music festivals, rollercoasters, sporting victories, surfing, bungee jumping) but that can be received as good gifts from a generous Father. The experience of euphoria itself is morally neutral. Its causes may not be.

The best way of introducing the fourth and fifth flavors is through a largely unknown young slave girl named Zilpah whom we meet in Genesis 30. The names of her two boys, Gad and Asher, reflect two further understandings of happiness, which were probably the two dominant ones in the years before Christ.³

When Leah saw that she had ceased bearing children, she took her servant Zilpah and gave her to Jacob as a wife. Then Leah’s servant Zilpah bore Jacob a son. And Leah said, “Good fortune has come!” so she called his name Gad. Leah’s servant Zilpah bore Jacob a second son. And Leah said, “Happy am I! For women have called me happy.” So she called his name Asher. (Gen. 30:9–13)

The reality is that not all happinesses are created equal.

Gad means fortune, luck, or chance. A modern equivalent would be the name of the former Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan or names like Felix/Felicity, which mean either “happy” or “fortunate” in Latin. In the modern West we tend to sharply differentiate between being happy and being lucky. But for many people in history, especially in the ancient pagan world, these two experiences would be indistinguishable. This perspective on happiness stands behind various biblical names—Gad (Hebrew), Felix (Latin), Tychicus and Eutychus (Greek)—and indeed behind the English word happiness itself. (Hap originally meant “luck,” which is why hapless means “unfortunate,” perhaps means “with luck,” and happenstance means “that which happens to have occurred.”) Having said that, it is worth noting that this flavor only appears in Scripture as a personal name and never as a sort of happiness to be pursued. Before a sovereign God, chance never has the final say:

The lot is cast into the lap,
     but its every decision is from the Lord. (Prov. 16:33)

Asher, by contrast, means happy in the sense of flourishing, thriving, or well-being. Think of the first line in the Psalter:

Ashe is the person
     who walks not in the counsel of the wicked. (Ps. 1:1 my translation)

And what does being asher look like?

Like a tree planted
     by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
     and its leaf does not wither.
     In all that he does, he prospers. (Ps. 1:3)

This is not a description of an emotional state or a mood. It is a holistic description of flourishing in life as a whole: thriving, prospering, experiencing wellness and vitality, living life as it is meant to be lived. That is the state of those whose “delight is in the law of the Lord” (Ps. 1:2), whatever their circumstances may be:

When peace like a river attendeth my way,
when sorrows like sea billows roll;
whatever my lot, thou hast taught me to say,
“It is well, it is well with my soul.”⁴

Scholars are divided on how best to translate the Hebrew asher into English. Some versions go with “happy.” Others opt for “blessed,” which I find less helpful because it confuses the concepts of being barak (blessed by God, as when Jacob blesses his sons) and being asher (the state of thriving, like a tree bearing fruit in season). Some versions use both. Personally I like the clarity of the word “flourishing,” even if it is a little clunky.⁵

The sixth flavor of happiness is the sense of contentment, satisfaction, serenity, bliss, peace, and rest that you experience when you have all that you need. Your desires have been met. You are not craving or seeking what you do not have but resting calmly in what you do have. A beautiful biblical picture of this comes in David’s shortest psalm:

I do not concern myself with great matters
     or things too wonderful for me.
But I have calmed and quieted myself,
     I am like a weaned child with its mother;
     like a weaned child I am content. (Ps. 131:1–2 NIV)

When little children are breastfeeding, they spend a lot of their time fussing, crying, and rooting, trying to find enough food. But when they are weaned and move on to eating solids, their need for constant feeding reduces. They can sit quietly and contentedly in their mother’s arms. That, David says, is what it feels like when you stop fussing about things above your pay grade and simply rest in the arms of God. Paul’s experience is similar: “I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation” (Phil. 4:12 NIV).

Finally, we can experience happiness as fullness, richness, wholeness, completion, perfection, fulfillment, and oneness. This is the hardest one to describe, because on this side of glory it is something we glimpse rather than grasp, although those glimpses are often among the most meaningful encounters of our lives. But you may have experienced flashes of transcendence, moments where you feel you are touching something higher or deeper than yourself, or moments where you forget yourself for a short while and are caught up in something beyond. The philosopher Charles Taylor describes it as a place where “life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worthwhile, more admirable, more what it should be,” whether characterized by “integrity or generosity or abandonment or self-forgetfulness.”⁶ Perhaps it is best explained using liquid metaphors: an experience of overflowing, bursting, gushing, whereby we are so full of something (or someone) else that there is no space left for our smallness and selfishness. I think Paul had something like this in mind when he prayed for his friends to be “filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:19).

These seven flavors of happiness—let’s call them (1) delight, (2) merriment, (3) ecstasy, (4) luck, (5) flourishing, (6) contentment, and (7) fullness—are obviously connected. There is no point in overdrawing the distinctions among them, since many of them overlap and come to us at the same time. But identifying what we talk about when we talk about happiness can still be helpful, both in identifying what we are (and are not) called to pursue, and in thinking about the practices, beliefs, and experiences that make that pursuit easier.

For example: A life spent chasing the third and fourth flavors (euphoria/ecstasy/thrill and fortune/luck/chance) will look very different from a life spent pursuing the fifth, sixth, and seventh ones (flourishing, contentment, and fullness). Put like that, it is the difference between a 1980s Tom Cruise movie and a 1990s Tom Hanks movie. But in more mundane terms, the question of which kind of happiness we are looking for faces us all the time. It comes in the daily trade-offs between time and money; in the soul-searching of a bored married man whose younger coworker is showing an interest in him; in the ordinary budgeting issues of spending and saving, buying now and paying later; in the choice between taking a more stimulating job and having more time with the children; in the amount of time we spend on a screen. We all have equivalents on a daily basis, however trivial they may seem. Should I stay, or should I go? Is this a time to build or a time to tear down? Twist or stick?

The reality is that not all happinesses are created equal. In the long run, we value the fifth and sixth flavors more than the third and fourth flavors (and arguably the seventh flavor most of all). And that is worth knowing in a world where we continually have to choose among them. Which will make us happier, we implicitly ask when we make a decision: self-expression or submission? Unconstrained individuality or thick community? More holidays or more children? The esteem of many strangers or the esteem of a few friends? Short-term experiences or long-term relationships? Distraction or transcendence? A passionate affair or a secure family? A bowl of stew or a birthright? The answer is that both may well make you happy, but they will do so in different flavors. And over time you will always value the latter more than the former.

This article is adapted from Happiness: What It Is, Where to Find It, and How to Make It Last Forever by Andrew Wilson.

Andrew Wilson (PhD, King’s College London) is the teaching pastor at King’s Church London and a columnist for Christianity Today. He is the author of several books, including Remaking the World and God of All Things. Andrew is married to Rachel, and they have three children: Zeke, Anna, and Sam.

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