The Curious Case of Happiness

Not a whodunit, but a what-if...the search for happiness begins with the ache beneath our desires.

It was a dark, rainy night. The only light in the room came from the glow of a candle — smoke curling upward — competing with the flicker of the TV screen where a niece and an aunt played out an age-old drama. Not in shadowy black-and-white, but in the lush hues of HBO’s The Gilded Age.

Onscreen, Marian sighed that perhaps she’d be happier as a spinster. Her Aunt Ada recoiled in horror, insisting that life without love was a sentence no woman should wish upon herself.

And then the true heroine of this story — me — reached for the remote and hit pause.

A mystery as old as time sat in front of me, waiting to be solved. What is happiness? Is it love, as Aunt Ada insisted? Is the key to happiness really as binary as be in love, or be miserable?

I can’t relate.

Don’t get me wrong, I do love love. I’m a Pisces after all. But for me it’s less about coupledom and more about depth and closeness of friendships, sisterhood, family, the people who meet you where you actually are. I’ve never felt the same urgency many women around me carry - the fervent hunt for a partner as the missing puzzle piece.

And this is exactly why I started this investigation. I mean, Merriam-Webster hasn’t even cracked the case.

Happiness, it says, is ‘a state of well-being and contentment.’

But what does that even mean? Contentment with what? Well-being according to who? To me, it’s giving elusive—like smoke slipping through your fingers. Easy to sense, impossible to hold. Harder still to name.

For a long time, my version of happiness looked like beautiful things and having the money to collect them. Shoes, handbags, skincare — the little altars I built on my shelves. I liked money because it made getting the things I love simpler. It felt like proof that life was working.

Then I lost a lot in quick succession. And then I decided to let go of what I once worshipped. That’s when the floor dropped out on the myth. None of it — not the romances that came and went, not the job title, not the steady deposit, not the pretty things — filled the space I was actually aching to fill.

I used to argue that money could definitely make you happy. For sure, it can make life easier; it can soften the edges of worry. But is ease the same as joy? When my income slowed, I was sure my panic would vanish the minute it returned. It didn’t. Money came back in small streams and the sadness still held me close, unbothered.

So I’m asking different questions now.

What I’ve deducted is that the real work is learning to locate the feeling beneath the desire and practice generating it from within. To sit still long enough to hear what the ache is actually asking for. To become the one who chooses you, who centers you, who says I belong to me.

And here’s the part I almost overlooked: joy.

Happiness gets all the attention, but joy has been the quieter, mightier companion all along. Happiness is often fleeting - a spark tied to circumstance. But joy…joy bubbles from somewhere deeper, steady even when life isn’t. It isn’t earned or bought or given by someone else. It’s mined - like a baby flame, delicate at first, asking to be nurtured and fanned, but once it catches, unstoppable.

So if you’re pining over a boyfriend, a promotion, a number on a scale, a pair of shoes - pause. Touch the want underneath the want. Ask it what it’s really pointing to.

Because I promise you: it isn’t the bag. It isn’t the man. It isn’t the money.

It’s you. Case closed…for now.