Thoughts on happiness

For a couple of years now I've been reading/watching everything that fell into my hands about happiness. I gathered a lot of ideas, but it's such a broad and subjective topic, that it's really hard to summarize. This article is my attempt at making that summary.

I believe each one of us finds happiness in different ways at different moments of their lives. Back in Romania, in my student times, I thought happiness was being really good at what I did and making enough money to have a high quality life. Which is certainly part of the equation, but with time (aka age) I realized things were more complex. Happiness can be found in the smallest things like sharing a cup of warm tea in the mountains with a friend or having a great conversation over lunch with a work colleague. There's a database of happy moments (that I did my best to visualize on a globe) where most of those moments are small things in people's lives. However, there's another side of happiness (I call it "the long term one") which is rooted in the grander scheme of things that drives us in our small daily tasks. A meaning derived from a set of core values we truly believe in, that guide us in selecting our activities and the people we hang out with.

There are two areas of our life that particularly influence and shape our happiness: how we spend our time and who we spend it with: (and the good news is that we are in full control of both of these areas)

The activities

In a nutshell, we spend most of our time working, doing home-related chores or enjoying our hobbies together with our family, close friends and other colleagues, be it from work or our hobbies.

Work is a very important part of our life. The most common question when we first meet someone is: what do you do for a living? I like to ask people what makes their heart beat faster (and just to make sure we're on the same page: from excitement, not from anxiety). This might not necessarily be what they work on, even though ideally it would be. The question might as well be: why do you wake up in the morning? And this brings me to this very important concept:

The reason to live sounds so overwhelming, I used to think that it should be something big and important, something that changes the course of humanity. To have a meaningful life I have to be the best at what I do so I can make important decisions that affect many people's lives, have influence and do well financially. I'm not sure if it's because I'm growing old, but now I look at these ideas and feel that pursuing them for the sake of being successful is wrong. But I do think they might eventually come as a consequence of finding my ikigai.

In this book ikigai is presented as an activity that:

• motivates us because the world needs it. An example: Fulanita works in a restaurant and she cooks amazing dishes with fresh and healthy ingredients. Through her work she helps people eat healthy and incredibly tasty food. Apart from that, customers spend an enjoyable moment in the restaurant together with their family and friends. All the food that remains goes to people who need social help. We can all agree that the world needs Fulanita's work.

• we love doing. When we work on it, we don't know when time flies. Is there anything that makes you feel like that? If not, then you have plenty of time to try things out and find it. For example getting so caught up in a book that we can't put it down, editing photos, finding a solution to a complex problem, going down the rabbit hole when fixing a bug. While we're here, we have to talk about the elephant in the room: the concept of flow, a mental state in which a person is fully immersed in a feeling of focus and full involvement in the process of an activity. Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi discovered and named the concept in his quest for finding what makes a life worth living. In the book on ikigai they give some tips and tricks on how to practice entering the state of flow:

• we're good at. I'm a strong believer that we can learn whatever we set our mind to. Training those neural networks in our brains can get us a long way, it's all a matter of acquiring those thousands hours of practice. But I also believe that some things come easier to some people because they're naturally inclined to them or because they were exposed to them a lot as children. It's true that we learn things as children much faster than we do as adults, but we should never stop learning (even if we'll need twice as much time as we needed as kids). In this podcast Andrew Huberman explains how the brain works when learning things and how to apply a growth mindset when we want to learn something.

• we get paid for. This is the tricky part and it's where most of us get lost. Many activities that are important are poorly paid because society doesn't always appreciate the most meaningful work. I always give the example of a farmer producing food versus a software engineer coding a like button for some social media application. As of 2025, we all know who gets more money and which work is more important. Without food none of us could survive, but without a like button I think most of us would live quite ok (maybe even better).

One thing I found interesting is that our ikigai can change over the course of a life-time and that's ok. Especially in our fast paced society, where today's highly valued skills become obsolete tomorrow. The most valuable skill is (and has always been in my opinion) our capability to acquire new knowledge and adapt to new situations.

Ikigai is a concept that can be found in various cultures, not only in the Japanese one. Finding meaning is one of the most powerful forces that can drive us and help us pull through the hard times. Viktor Frankl built a therapy method called logotherapy based on this theory. His drive to do research in psychology and to share his ideas on logotherapy is a big part of how he managed to survive Nazi concentration camps. In his book "Man's search for meaning", he writes:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

I always thought it's a good thing to be so passionate about work, that it takes up most of our time. But ideally, we'd find a balance between activities that help us recharge, that are fun, that we need to do and that are meaningful. This documentary on the Blue Zones (where most people live up to 100 years) is a great source of inspiration for such activities.

Here's a chart of our 168 weekly hours along with some advice on how to spend them from this book on ikigai: Normally our brain tends to get lazy and is happy doing the same things over and over again. It's good to take it out of the comfort zone now and then: learn something new, play games, take a new way back home and try to orient yourself without a map etc. Socializing is important even to the most introverted: try to meet new people (in connection to our hobbies or our work is the easiest) and train those socializing brain muscles. I think we should forget all those rules about how to influence people and just be genuine, so we can attract the people that share our values and hobbies and we can have a real connection, not a made up one. Keep our body in shape, find that sport that we really like, the one where we could wake up at 6am full of enthusiasm to practice it. Add some nice people to the mix and we're ready to wake up at 5am. One thought I've been having is that maybe we should do sports that also bring us something: ride a bike as a way to commute, do gardening to get some fresh vegetables, help out on a farm in exchange for milk... some food for thought.

The people

As social human beings, our happiness is greatly influenced by the quality of our relationships. Surrounding ourselves with positive, supportive, and loving people is key to our well-being. Marian Rojas Estapé calls them "vitamin people" and I love this concept: vitamin people are the ones that make us feel warm and cozy when they're around (even in our bad moments).

Having our vitamin people around makes our cortisol levels go down and the levels of oxytocin (the hormone linked to relationships, empathy and well-being) go up. Knowing that we have the support of vitamin people when we're in need is a great feeling. However, being the vitamin person of someone else can feel even better! In the book of joy, one main idea is that helping others is what makes us happy. This is why voluntary work is good for the people that get help, but it's also beneficial to the people that offer their help. In general, I think we should practice more empathy and watch out for each other more.

In my opinion, in our society we put a lot of value on family and couple relationships, but not enough on friendships. I think friendships are necessary and I'd go further and say that a group of friends that we meet on a weekly basis can become like our extended family. From this video on loneliness, I found this idea very interesting: in the past, people who weren't part of a community wouldn't manage to survive. In these modern times, being alone and independent is a virtue. I grew up thinking that being strong means not needing anyone. But in the past years I've come to think otherwise: the real challenge and what makes us a strong person is finding those vitamin people that will unconditionally help us out and that we want to help out in hard times. I recently read this blog post that called these people the 3am friends: those that we'd call at 3am and (provided that they don't turn off their phones when they sleep) they'll be happy to help us out. But it's not just about the hard times. In our daily lives, being surrounded by family or extended family (or both) is essential. It's all about doing all the activities we talked about above in person. Being connected online to people who are far away is great, but that shouldn't replace the real connection. Another aspect is that the further away (in the geographical sense) our extended family is, the harder it is to keep in touch. A family needs time to build up and grow, so trying to build such a connection with people far away will take a lot of planning and effort. One issue here is that it's very hard to live close to your friends in cities where finding a flat is difficult in the first place. But I think it's worth trying!

So cool that you made it until the end, let me know what you think about all these ideas :) Unless you got here because you scrolled in despair wondering why this blog post is so long. And oh... in case you were wondering, I stole these ideas from the following books and videos:

📘 Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life 📘 Awakening Your Ikigai: How the Japanese Wake Up to Joy and Purpose Every Day 📘 The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World 📘 Encuentra tu persona vitamina 📘 Cómo hacer que te pasen cosas buenas 📹 TED 2004 - Flow, the secret to happiness 📹 Kurzgesagt - Loneliness 📹 Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones 📝 3a.m. friends, Charles Vogl