Are you happy?

Are you happy?

In the Jesuit school where I was raised, it was one of the recurring questions asked when reflecting on our lives and what we wanted to do with them. Happiness was also the theme of Jennifer Aaker's PoST class on Wednesday.

When you ask people about happiness, many view it as something from the past. We tend to rewrite our past, our childhood for example, and remember perfect times when we could do whatever we wanted, when we wanted. Even more people view happiness as something in the future: they might not like what they are doing now, but it will bring them happiness later.

In the present, we struggle with the meaning of happiness. Coming with a definition is as personal as it is hard, especially when you realize that your view on happiness changes every 5 years. Try filling the blanks for each age range in this mad lib; you will realize how your goals have changed and will change.

We start _________ (11-14), but soon fill up with _________  (15-18), and feelings of _________ (19-22) until we leave those behind to go _________ (23-26), before gradually trading ambition for _________ (27-30), developing an appreciation for our _________ (31-35) and our _________ (31-35), and evolving a sense of _________ (36-40), for which we feel _________ (36-40), then _________ (41-49), _________ (41-49), and finally _________ (50+).

The key insight in all this? Don't spend too much time worrying whether the decisions you make will make you happy: what makes you happy changes all the time.

So, how can we be happy now? A good place to start is to surround ourselves with happy people. Emotions are contagious. Spend time with the people that make you feel good and pay attentions to those moments. One of the keys to happiness is reflecting on the happy moments instead of taking them for granted and focusing on the not-so-happy ones.

But how can we focus on those? We have to turn them into sticky memories. We want those moments to be the first ones to surface when we think about our lives. Typical sticky memories are spontaneous moments, surprises and even more so, traditions. Traditions, such as the one we have with our families, can have their specific flavor, their specific rituals: they can have their own brand. Let me give you an example, for every birthday, my grand-parents used to have a special dinner party with all my cousins and I. No parents. They had their brand "le diner des cousins" (the cousins dinner) and rituals: too much food and wine bottled the same year the birthday boy or girl was born. Those dinners are amongst the best memories of my life.

How does happiness tie in with social media and social good? First of all, I feel that social media have focused a lot on sharing happiness. Whereas traditional media keep showing in more and more details the scariest and depressing pieces of news, social media are about sharing the good things that happen to us, showing photos of happy people, sharing tips to be even happier. When tragedies happen, social media are used to provide help and express sympathy not to show the most gruesome images of the catastrophe.

Here is the class' dragonfly model for social media campaigns: Focus + Grab attention + Engage + take action. What better way to achieve the two middle goals than making people happy? In order to do that, you have to know what make you happy and share it and also reflect on what make the users you want to reach happy.

Let me give you the "average" answer to the mad lib.

We start simple (11-14), but soon fill up with angst (15-18), and feelings of confinement (19-22) until we leave those behind to go conquer the world (23-26), before gradually trading ambition for balance (27-30), developing an appreciation for our bodies (31-35) and our children (31-35), and evolving a sense of connectedness (36-40), for which we feel grateful (36-40), then happy (41-49), calm (41-49), and finally blessed (50+).

Why was yours different?