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Daniya Mozaffar
Mrs. Martin
English 110
1 October 2014
Trying not to Define Happiness
When I was three years old, I started to wonder. I wondered why the trees were so tall
and why its leaves were so green. I wondered why the sky was so blue and why the clouds were
so white. I wondered why the birds would chirp in the morning just before sunrise. I wondered
normal, mundane, average concepts every child thinks at least once in their lifetime. Then I
started wondering other things. I wondered why my father got stares at the nearby Walmart
whenever they saw Mohammad on his credit card. I wondered why my mom came home after
the 9/11 attack without a job. I wondered why my best friend from school couldnt play with me,
even though she did before the attack. I wondered why the old woman across the street wouldnt
give me a cookie when I went to her with my prayer headscarf on. I was told by my parents to
not try to understand because the world was a scary place. I was told that there was no use in
understanding, when all we could do was to just wait. And so I stopped trying to wonder. I was
afraid. That three year old was terrified of trying to understand. To this 16 year old, that is all she
has.
Curiosity had been engraved in me since as far as I can remember, its only recently have I
started accepting my want for knowledge. I use to think that knowing would only lead me to a
dead end. I was afraid of being in the dark with no support or anchor. I use to think I was happy
not knowing, but little did I know that true happiness was waiting for me past the double doors to

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the library. Knowledge for me, is like wealth for another. There is no true happiness to me than
the want to know and learn of anything and everything: from the cells in our body, to the depth
of the oceans, all the way to the farthest reaches of our galaxy. For me, knowing, and the want
for knowledge is all that has ever defined me. Because my universe never ends; it is all but just a
question, waiting to be answered.
Yet to some, knowledge isnt enough. They want more. They want riches, families,
friends, lovers: they want so much more than they can actually have. To some, that is happiness.
Happiness is something different for everyone. It can be a want, a need, an emotion, or even an
experience. Why is happiness so many things, when it is just a small 9 lettered word?
Happiness is a confusion. Sure there is a definition like almost every other word in the
world, but in the end, it doesnt matter. In Hindi, the word for happiness is khushi. While in
English we throw around the word happy like its a sack of groceries, in Hindi its rarely used.
Personally, Ive only used the word 4 times in my life. We use the word happy so much that its
lost all of its meaning. When you say Im so happy to meet you you rarely mean it. Usually
youre probably wishing you were at home, wrapped in a blanket, watching something stupid on
Netflix. Which comes down to the question: is happiness really happiness?
Scientifically, the emotion we so call happiness is controlled by the brain. Chemicals,
more specifically neurotransmitters, are what actually give us the sensations of different
emotions. The main neurotransmitters in charge of happiness are Dopamine and Serotonin
(Bergland). When looking at the brain of humans, almost everyone has the same brain (excluding
the effects of age and diseases) and generally have the same neurotransmitters. So scientifically,
a majority of us should all feel happy at the same things for the same reasons, because we all
physically have the same brain. That isnt the case though. Think of the following situation: its a

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bright summer morning and youre walking in near-by Park when you notice a bug almost the
size of Texas. If youre like me, youll probably scream bloody murder and faint right at that
spot. If youre fairly neutral to bugs, youll go along your day like nothing happened. If youre
into these sort of things, you may scream eureka and get a Nobel Peace Prize for finding the
biggest bug on planet earth. Same situation, yet they all had three different emotions. More
remarkably, only one actually felt happy. Now how is that possible?
Humans have a tendency to make believe, more specifically to imagine. The human
being is the only animal that thinks about the future (Gilbert 14) and thats where the
complications begins. Our imaginations dont just come out of thin air, as much as you think it
does. We create the future from our past and present. How we remember our past effects how we
create our future, as well as how we react to situations. The reason I would faint at the sight of a
bug is that Ive had some sort of traumatizing event in my past, more specifically, waking up to
five on my face early in the morning in India when I was seven. Because I remember bugs being
on my face in the morning as a bad thing, any bug I see now gives me the same emotions. I feel
scared rather than happy. How we remember happiness, as well as what we remember to
associate with happiness, is what happiness it to us. But heres the catch, we dont remember
exactly what we think we do.
The human mind is a magician, and a fairy good one at that, just not the best. Look at the
image below and follow the instruction. As youll quickly learn, our vision has a blind spot, one
that our brain actively tries to cover up. What you are reading right now, small parts of it,
specifically in the blind spot, your brain is actively making up by using what it sees in the
surroundings. The brain doesnt just do this with our vision though, it also does it with our
memory. If I tell you right now to remember what you ate for breakfast this morning, its a fairly

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simple task that involves you with just thinking about an hour or two ago, and you will with full
confidence probably tell me everything down to the detail. If I ask you about last month on this
day, then well youre probably a bit stumped. Your brain will go through a complex amount of
motions which include sight, smell, and maybe even frequency of what you generally have to

give me a solid answer. But that above is the actual issue; you never actually remember what it is
you had, but everything associated with it. One of the biggest one for this situation is actually
frequency. Lets say you generally have cereal for breakfast. That generalization will lead your
brain to assume that since you have it the most, you probably had it on that day. So your answer
will most likely be I think I had cereal that morning. This is your brain covering the blind spot,
making assumptions and not actually remembering, because all it really remembers is what you
actually dont need. If thats the case, how can we be sure that what we deem to be happy to us,
is really what actually makes us happy? If we cant even be sure of what we remember, how in
the world can we safely say that oh, that makes me happy? We cant.
In the book Why People Believe Weird Things, the author discusses the issue of people
who argue that the holocaust never happened. To them, in a way, the belief is their form of

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happiness. Believing that the world is not as brutal as it actually is, is them actively trying not to
understand. Some of us will think that its almost hilarious that the holocaust never happened, as
there is a world of evidence saying otherwise. We will most likely laugh at the fact that
apparently believing that something never happened could even be associated with happiness.
Society has taught us that the word happy has some sort of universality. Money, fame, power,
family, and lovers: we are trained to believe everyone wants the same things. That isnt true. Just
because she doesnt have money, doesnt mean she isnt living a good life. Just because no one
knows him, doesnt mean people dont like him. Our narcissistic nature (Page) as humans
makes us think that what we are perfect in our own way, and anyone else is nothing. What
happiness is to us, should be happiness to someone else. And yet, we have no clue how they
actually live, what they believe, and even what theyve experienced. And here we are, forcing
our happiness onto others, being the selfish living beings we are.
Around this time I realized something. I was sitting in my Advanced Composition class,
playing music on my headphones, and thinking how happy I was because it was a Friday. I
understood something that I think I wouldnt unless I was put in the situation of writing an essay
about happiness. It doesnt matter what happiness is. You can sit down on your bed like I did,
research a world of articles and books to find a miracle meaning. You can forget about sleep and
stay up for hours to try to understand the complexity of the emotion. But you will end up just like
me, suddenly realizing how selfish I was to even try to define such a word. How my narcissistic
nature lead me to believe that happiness can even come close to be generalized. And not just that,
but that I am scared. I am afraid of knowing something that I have no control over. Im afraid of
creating a generalization of something that doesnt deserve to, without even meaning to. I am
scared of knowing and changing because of it. I am terrified of being the reason happiness might

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have a meaning. My inner three year old sadly still exists, and Ive learned that now. I am still
scared of trying to understand. Maybe one day Ill come back to this essay and think about it.
Maybe by then I will be strong enough to try to understand, to make some sense of it. But for
now, I think Ill just not try to define happiness.

Works Cited
Bergland, Chrisopher. "The Neurochemicals of Happiness." Psychology Today: Health, Help,
Happiness + Find a Therapist. Web. 30 Sept. 2014.
Gilbert, Daniel Todd. Stumbling on Happiness. New York: A.A. Knopf, 2006. Print.

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Page, Clarence. "Our National Passion Is Narcissism." Chicago Tribune. 06 June 2012. Web. 01
Oct. 2014.
Samuel, A. G. "A Further Rxamination of Attentional Effects on the Phonemic Restoration
Illusion." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (1991). Web.
Shermer, Michael. Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other
Confusions of Our Time. New York: W.H. Freeman, 1997. Print.