Happiness is a fleeting feeling

By Madison McNew

Happiness is opening a bag of fruit snacks to find only the blue ones, it’s your best friend
knocking at your door, it’s the smell of the air after a good rain, it’s a warm cup of coffee with a
dash of whipped cream in the middle of January, it’s that first bite of your favorite pizza.
For me, happiness is simply an increase in positive emotions with minimum negative emotions.
It’s when I experience so much joy that sadness and/or frustration become irrelevant.
The other day I took my dog to the park. It had just rained, so she decided to swim in the muddy
puddles and turn her white spots brown.
The happiness she exhumed in that moment immediately
fleeted as soon as she saw me walking toward the hose.
Instant terror and dread entered her mind.
The joy she had been feeling…vanished.
We all have moments like these where we wish so badly
the immense joy we feel at a certain time would last
forever. But it never does.
Why is that? Why can we only experience a sudden rush
of happiness without any negative feelings?
Well, it’s psychology. It’s how we are wired. It is not a
complicated answer, but rather one that seems far too
simple.
Psychology claims there are two dimensions of happiness:
hedonistic and eudaimonic.
Hedonistic is an extremely joyful feeling, but one you can
recognize and understand. It is like taking that bite of the
pizza you have been craving for weeks. The emotions are
at an all-time high and you can perfectly pinpoint why. This is the simple reason as to why you
feel happiness.
Now for eudiamonic. Eudiamonic happiness is an overall feeling that you carry with you day
after day. It’s an idea that you are calm and content with your life. This happiness does not focus
on a single moment, but rather all of your moments.
For example, say you are very proud of your religious beliefs and the morals set within them.
You go about your days displaying these morals and values within your everyday life, and you
feel that they play a big part in your experiences. If this is something that you appreciate and
value, then this would bring you eudiamonic happiness.
You may be thinking, if people are so happy in their daily routines, then how can happiness be so
fleeting? Science tells us it is because
The reality of it is, we all have moments in life where no matter how content we feel at a certain
time, something will come up and knock us down. In that way we are more similar than
different.
But, for those who experience eudiamonic happiness, these “downer” moments never last for
long and they are brought back to the phase of contentment.
Whether you are someone who only feels intense joy from finally getting a fruit snack bag full of
blue ones or someone who is deeply rooted and proud in their morals, happiness is a fleeting
emotion, but that doesn’t mean it will never return.