Five For Your Hive: The Secret To Happiness
The Secret To Happiness, Calvin & Hobbes, Losing Your Life To Find It, The Catastrophe of Success, Francis Ford Coppola, Personal Thoughts on Happiness
The Secret to Happiness
At the forefront of our minds today is the question: What is the secret to happiness? What can I do to be happier? Why are others happier than me? Why don’t I feel happy at all? Psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky began her quest to find the answer in 1989. At the time, it was not a popular topic for scientists as it was considered ambiguous and unscientific. “Even though there was very little scientific research on happiness at the time,” she explains, “there were lots of people talking about it—in books, magazine articles, and so on.” As she delved deeper into the material, she began to realise that this question predominantly occupied the minds of people in Western countries such as the United States, Europe, and Australia. “We have the luxury to worry about our happiness,” Lyubomirsky says. “If your basic needs aren’t being met, if you’re living with a lot of uncertainty and instability, you just don’t have the time in your day to think, ‘Oh, am I happy? What should I do to be happier?’ I think that’s the source of a lot of unhappiness.”
This reminded me of the theory of “blissful unawareness”—a state where people live in a bubble of vigour and passion. They have an abundance of food, material wealth, and luxury, and their lives become a race toward the goal of happiness. Yet, they remain unaware of this because it feels great to wake up and keep going even if the world around them is awful. In contrast, “depressive realism” describes a state where depressed individuals, and therefore less-happy people, having lost something valuable (money, identity, loved ones), see the world more authentically as they are more realistic about how fragile and difficult life can be. For them, chasing happiness is not a priority, rather, to survive and hope for a better life. The way I see it, you can exist in either BU or DR and still be happier or less happy.
By thinking about happiness on your own terms, guided by a philosophy aligned with your values and purpose—that’s the idea for today.
Writing Every Word And Penning Every Stroke
Before Calvin & Hobbes became an international sensation, Bill Watterson worked at a local advertising agency. When not designing grocery store ads, he would draw comic strips and submit them to newspaper agencies. Eventually, after five years of rejection and drawing strips for free, he landed a syndication. He quit his full-time job and spent all his time in small-town Ohio, where his wife organised their lives so that he could do nothing but draw Calvin & Hobbes all day. “To endure five years of rejection to get a job,” Watterson would later reflect, “requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion, or a love of the work.”
Between 1985 and 1995, Watterson published a total of 3,160 strips. The comic was featured in over 2,000 newspapers and went on to sell over 50 million books. There were offers to produce merchandise and turn his work into a TV show. He was also invited to meet with Steven Spielberg to discuss the potential for a film and to visit Skywalker Ranch to meet George Lucas. If all these opportunities had been realized, the combined intellectual property value would have been at least $400 million.
But he turned it all down, and on December 31, 1995, Watterson drew his final strip before walking away.
When asked about his decision to stop doing what he loved, Watterson said, “By the end of 10 years, I'd said pretty much everything I had come there to say. It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another 5, 10, or 20 years, the people now grieving for Calvin & Hobbes would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent.”
To Watterson, his philosophy of fulfilment stemmed from his belief in the purest form of artistic expression: to sit by his work desk with a piece of paper and pencil, writing every word and penning every stroke. “The intensity of pushing the writing and drawing as far as my skills allowed was the whole point of doing it,” Watterson said. “Drawing comic strips for five years without pay drove home the point that the fun of cartooning wasn't in the money; it was in the work. This turned out to be an important realisation when my break finally came.”
Detachment From The World
In Christian theology, the concept of loss and depression is not so much about the absence of the lost objects but about our attachment to them. “In other words,” Dr. Archibald D. Hart writes in Unmasking Male Depression, “depression continues because we will not let go of the loved object.” Whether it is money, fame, or our dreams, “we will not free it to be dead, lost, removed or not materialised… we cling to possessions, ideas, reputations, and people, and we experience losses very deeply, and the ensuing depressions are unnecessarily painful and prolonged. We simply won’t let it go.” In the book of Matthew, Jesus sets out a very clear pathway to true fulfilment: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?” Though not literally, Jesus was implying that if a person desires to be attached to Him and the Father, they must go through a process of detachment from the world—to let go of all accumulated treasure and security. And so, with fewer things to be taken away from us, we could be less prone to depression and therefore find ourselves towards a life of true fulfilment.
The Heart of Man, His Body and His Brain
The playwright and Broadway superstar Tennessee Williams found fame and fortune with his play, The Glass Menagerie. However, after three years of living in stardom and its luxuries, he became disenchanted and depressed. “The sort of life that I had lived previous to popular success,” Williams writes in The Catastrophe of Success, “was the sort of life for which the human organism is created.” Before his break came, life was hard and mundane. He was juggling menial jobs—a factory worker, a theatre usher, an elevator operator, and a manual labourer—earning minimum wage, “which covered my [rent] and left me seven dollars for meals.” Like Bill Watterson, while not working his day job, Williams was writing stories and plays. “I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed,” he writes. Williams had everything the average man could dream of—basking in the life of parties, women, wealth, and fame, with a never-ending stream of people offering to do things for him—yet the more he immersed himself in this sort of life, the more he began to isolate himself from family and friends, see people at their worst, disconnect from his work, and resent it for bringing the extravagance he once wished for. Happiness and fulfilment, he realised after being imprisoned by the world and unable to break free, lay in “the heart of man, his body and his brain, forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict, and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies; that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door, and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to.” With success, there may not be fulfilment. With fame and fortune, there may come a wave of emptiness. But with the detachment from struggles and the vitality that goes with them, Williams concluded, there is no happiness.
That’s How I Keep My Wife In My Life
The director Francis Ford Coppola [Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, The Black Stallion] recently lost his wife of 60 years. In the midst of grief, at an incredibly low point, he came across a Marcus Aurelius quote that transformed his idea of loss. If you lose a loved one, it said, honour them by being more like them, and they will live in your actions. “My wife was very good,” he explained. “If someone was alone or sick or something, she’d call them up and be comforting to them. And I’m not like that, you know? So I started to do that. People that I know, some guys my age who have no grandchildren, I call them up and say, Hey, how are you? And they are so pleased and so kind. And that’s how I keep my wife in my life.”
My Thoughts on Happiness
Happiness, at its core, will reside in your heart, body and brain the moment you are grateful for what you have—your health, career, family, friends—the obvious blessings that are easy to appreciate. And what about the bad stuff? The struggles? The late nights with a crying baby? The business deal that fell through? The falling out with a friend, or a marriage that didn’t last?
Yes—even those.
Especially those.
Because, as the Christians would say, it’s in those moments, devout of energy and vitality, when the struggles and anxiety doesn’t seem to end, that you discover the hidden opportunities for joy. When you remove the “I” from the equation and start putting others ahead of yourself, to live for something bigger and to strive for a mission far beyond your own pursuits—when you’re not obsessing over whether you’re happy or not!—you’re existing as life was meant to be lived: with a little resistance, a little pain, a little discomfort tethered to keep you moving forward. And as you grow, your endurance develops, you become perfect and complete, needing nothing.
That, to me, is the secret to happiness.