Enjoyment, Satisfaction and Meaning

I was listening to the Huberman Lab episode The Art of Happiness and one idea stuck with me: the happiest people tend to have three things in their lives — enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning.

It also made me wonder if we think about happiness the wrong way. We usually imagine happiness and unhappiness on the same axis:

unhappy  <--------------->  happy

More of one means less of the other. But I’m not sure that is how it actually works. I kept stumbling across this idea every once in a while but was never able to put it into a clear perspective

Maybe they are separate dimensions. You can have discomfort, frustration or even pain and still be very happy about what you are doing. Take running a marathon. You train for months, wake up early, run when you don’t want to and somewhere near the end of the race start questioning every decision that brought you there.

Then you finish. Everything hurts, you say, “I am never doing this again” and somehow you are also incredibly happy.

So maybe happiness is less like a single score and more like a combination of things:

Happiness ≈ f(enjoyment, satisfaction, meaning)

Some experiences are enjoyable in the moment. Some are satisfying because we had to work for them. And some are meaningful enough that we are willing to be uncomfortable for them.

The interesting part is that none of those require unhappiness to be zero. Maybe a good life is not one where we minimize every unpleasant feeling but one where enough of those unpleasant moments are attached to things we actually care about.