I made tuna fish salad over the weekend. I’ve always liked tuna fish. As a kid, I would eat tuna straight from the can, which grossed out my sister for some reason. Later I learned that mixing it with other gunk like mayonnaise and relish makes for the more rotund flavor of tuna fish salad, and my world was never the same.

As I was mixing up the stuff for sandwiches, I was thinking how fortunate I was that I could walk into a store literally in the middle of the night and buy tuna. That is utterly amazing. I figured that this sort of magic should make anyone happy, and certainly it made me happy. How can you live in a land of abundant tuna fish and not be happy?

No, wait—after I began eating the sandwiches, that’s when I was happy. The smooth seafood texture and the crunch of the toast. I enjoy eating tuna even more than I like making it. Truly this was bliss. This was happiness.

Wait, no, not quite. After I finished the sandwiches, I was sitting in my living room reading a book, pleasantly full from just having eating. Lounging around after a good meal, imbibing some knowledge. That other stuff was just leading up to this. Now I’m happy—until my dryer rang, alerting me to the fact that I have clothes to fold. Now I’ve been inconvenienced.

What is happiness?

I’ve only recently become aware of the fact that I’m emotionally deficient. In the past, I’ve joked with friends that I only really have two emotions: amusement and frustration. Happiness, of course, was a subset of amusement, the idea being that when one is amused, one is happy. Laughing feels good, and from what I’ve seen in all popular media, laughing equals happy. The other emotion, frustration, leads to all the “negative” emotions, notably anger, which, for reasons still unknown to me today, I emote improperly.

As part of an ongoing self-therapy, I’ve been trying to monitor my feelings at any given point during the day. One fascinating thing which I have never consciously noticed before a few weeks ago is that almost every single time I am around another person, I am annoyed. Annoyed at having to stand there and talk to them. Annoyed that they get some fact wrong. Annoyed that they make fun of me, however jokingly. I’m with Sartre, on this one; people are annoying. In fact, I believe I can define “friend” this way: people I can be around without feeling annoyed.

More to the point, I realize I’m fortunate to be easily amused. This means I tend to go around feeling pretty good most of the time, even if I’m not sure exactly what the emotion should be called. However, when it comes to shades of similar emotions existing in temporal proximity, things become vague.

Which brings me to a series of surveys I’ve been seeing. According to one, about 85% of Americans consider themselves very or mostly happy. However, an entirely different survey proclaims that Americans are not content. Specifically, about 66% (2/3rds) of Americans say they would be much better off if they could make just 15% more income. People often live above their means and subsequently they’re not happy.

Well, they can’t both be right. And that’s when I made the following connection: eating tuna fish gives me pleasure, but it doesn’t make me happy.

Had I not read of those surveys where they asked “average” Americans (whatever that means) how happy they were, I would have simply acknowledged this distinction and assumed my lack of emotional awareness here as being a result of Asperger’s. However, after giving it some thought, I think the discrepancy between 85% happy yet 66% discontent can be explained by the majority of people not making a distinction between pleasure and happiness.

Eating gives one pleasure, but the act of eating does not inherently make one happy. Five hours later you’re hungry again. Television stimulates the brain in such a way as to release a slight flow of adrenalin, thus making it a quite literal addiction. In fact, all potentially addictive substances—television, smoking, alcohol, coffee—all serve the same function: they are pleasurable to some degree. But in any of these cases do these things make one happy? Given the level of regret expressed almost universally following a binge of any of these, I would have to say, no.

This in itself is telling. What is the difference between pleasure and happiness, and why should we even make a distinction between “pleasure giving” and “being happy”? The difference is one of tense.

Things which give you pleasure do so now, in the present. The television, cigarette, or beer (or drugs, the internet, computer games, food, exercise, etc) all do something on an ongoing basis which make you feel good in some way. The problem is when its turned off, you no longer feel as good, and may, in fact, feel pretty bad. Such a fleeting experience can hardly be called happiness, even if it’s correct to say it makes you happy for the span of time in which you’re indulging. (Television, however, presents an even greater problem in that it only ever makes one satisfied. It promises a lot more than this, but doesn’t deliver, ultimately leading people to watch more and more of it to catch up on what they think they’re missing.)

Happiness, on the other hand, is security about the future. It’s money in the bank. It’s knowing that when you come out of your drunken stupor or turn off the TV, you still have a solid foundation on which to live your life. The Prince and the Princess lived happily ever after—off into the future, in perpetuity.

With such a working definition in mind, these apparently contradictory polls make a bit more sense. Americans are 66% discontent—not only unsatisfied with what they have now, but unsure about what they’ll be able to acquire in the future. The 85% of Americans who say they are happy now are, for the most part, not happy at all. They’re entertained.

-Ted