Photo Credit: Camdiluv

Five years ago, I was walking to lunch with a summer intern at the company where I worked. As we waited at a crosswalk, she turned to me and asked, “What makes people happy?” The expression on her face was equal parts pain and desperation.

Because I knew she had an interest in positive psychology, I was not exactly caught off-guard by her question. I also suspected that she herself was not happy, as most happy people do not inquire so deeply into happiness. In my experience, happy people had unconflicted minds — or, in the words of the poet Jane Hirshfield, “to be undivided must mean not knowing you are.” I was not exactly happy, either, having battled anxiety and depression since childhood. The intern and I, therefore, spoke the same language. I knew what she was really asking: “Why are other people happy and I’m not?”

Even so, I wasn’t exactly sure how to respond. I believed that there were myriad things that enabled people to be (or become) happy. Depending on one’s belief system and lifestyle, these things might include religion/spirituality, meditation, exercise, a strong network of family and friends, gratitude, and a sense of meaning or purpose. I knew this young woman well enough to know that she didn’t want a laundry list; rather, she wanted a simple, incisive answer.

But the best I could offer was, “I don’t know.”

Her question would haunt me for the next five years. I would read books, watch videos, study Buddhism, write poetry, talk to my mom, and seek counseling and the wonders of Big Pharma, all in the name of healing my own depression and finding an answer to my friend’s question.

During that time, I thought a lot about meaning and purpose as key ingredients for happiness. Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, founded a new school of psychology, called logotherapy, based on these very principles. He himself had survived a Nazi concentration camp by finding meaning even in the direst and most miserable circumstances. My own relatives who survived the Holocaust must have shared his mindset. I later watched a documentary called Euphoria, which underscored the point that pursuing meaning could produce a bigger and more consistent dopamine “high” than drugs, which offered only peaks and valleys.

Did my own life have meaning? I wondered. Certainly. I had a plan; I had goals. I was in the midst of changing careers, studying for the LSAT and applying to law school while working full-time. Then, when I was accepted to my first-choice school, I was focused and driven, trying to learn the foundations of law so that I could serve my future clients as skillfully as possible. And, despite the rigors of “1L,” as the first year of law school is known, I continued writing poetry. As a 2L, I began working at a free legal clinic that helped people fight identity thieves and debt collectors. I was moving steadily toward the life of integrity and compassion I had always envisioned for myself.

And yet, I was not happy. I was just as anxious, depressed, and self-critical as I had been at the age of thirteen. Although I had found meaning in law and creative writing, it wasn’t enough to sustain happiness; I needed to look further. So I turned to philosophy, and more specifically, to the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. According to Wittgenstein (at least at one point in his career), philosophical problems did not exist; they were simply the byproducts of misunderstanding language.

Wittgenstein’s preoccupation with language led me to consider the language with which I was surrounded on a daily basis. So much of it, I discovered, was negative. The news stories I read heralded death, destruction, and social collapse. Even on my favorite feminist website, the articles were openly accusatory, with titles like “How You’re Hurting Others When You Oppose Trigger Warnings.” I don’t oppose trigger warnings. Jeez, lay off! Where were the articles about women supporting women? About positive things women were doing? Apparently, negativity is the driving force behind clickbait. And I was the fish with the hook through its lip.

I was also addicted to social media, which was really no better than the news and entertainment sites I frequented. Despite the veneer of positivity — you know, all those vacation and engagement photos and happy statuses bearing the imprimatur “#blessed” — social media encourages what my Buddhist friend calls “comparing mind.” When you see your peers looking euphoric and bragging about their successes, you can’t help but compare yourself to them. And that’s exactly what I was doing. Feeling miserable because my life didn’t measure up to that of Jane and John from college, who were getting married and having their first kid while I was toiling away in Criminal Procedure class. Eventually, the stress of social media began to take its toll. I was checking Facebook and Instagram constantly, like a lab rat pressing a lever for cocaine-laced water. My curiosity kept propelling me back, driving me deeper and deeper into unhappiness.

Finally, and most importantly, I began examining my interior language — how I spoke to and about myself, and about the motives of other people — and found that it was the most negative of all. I was afraid to walk down the street for fear of people judging me on my appearance. I didn’t cultivate friendships because, not only was I cynical and didn’t trust people, but I didn’t actually think anyone would want to be my friend. Even worse, I didn’t think I deserved to exist. Walking to and from class, I thought about what a loser I was, how everyone I knew was smarter, better looking, and more likeable. Everything I did was bad and wrong, because I was the one doing it.

It was ironic: I spent my life steeped in the pleasures of language, and yet language was at the root of my unhappiness. As children, most of us learned the old adage, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Modern science has proven this untrue. In fact, words can be even worse than sticks and stones; recent studies have shown that long-term exposure to microaggressions — small, seemingly innocuous comments with aggressive undertones, such as, “You’re smart for a girl” — can lead to higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol. A body constantly flooded with cortisol is more likely to develop heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. In a nutshell, words can make us sick.

Words can also cause separation between human beings where none exists — or should exist. The way people label themselves nowadays is bothersome to me, because it divides rather than unites. I could apply dozens of labels to myself, but that doesn’t help me understand my mind any better. Rather, it perpetuates the illusion that I’m different and separate from everyone around me, that I am finite. Language and labels might be just another way of masking, not solving, the problems of unhappiness, misunderstandings, and broken relationships.

I realize that I’m not the first to link happiness and language, particularly our internal language. Buddha and his followers believed that one could escape suffering in part by “taming the monkey mind,” which swings wildly from thought to thought. New-age gurus, including Osho and Byron Katie, say that you must question or even drop your thoughts. The Buddhist monk and teacher Ajahn Brahm talks about his work with prison inmates who have been labeled — and subsequently label themselves — criminals. That is why they continue to reoffend, he says, because they believe they are criminals, not simply people who have done criminal acts. Through meditation, he encourages them to move beyond this self-limiting label.

Writers, too, have explored the language-happiness connection. In Clarice Lispector’s novella The Hour of the Star, the main character, Macabea, lives a life of abject poverty but is happy nonetheless. The narrator says she doesn’t have self-recognition — like a dog that doesn’t know it’s a dog — but she is free in a way that most people aren’t. She doesn’t think about how to be happy; she doesn’t have the words for it. In fact, she doesn’t think about much of anything at all. She just is.

Reading The Hour of the Star made me think back to my undergrad anthropology classes, where I learned that language can shape one’s world, defining the universe of thinkable thoughts. In a language without the word “blue,” for instance, speakers may not experience that color; conversely, speakers of a language with twenty words for “blue” may be more attuned to that color’s various gradations. Could it be the same for people who speak languages without words for certain feelings or situations? What if I didn’t have words for my so-called problems? Would they cease to be problems?

Now that I have realized that language is possibly both the cage and the key, the problem and the solution to unhappiness, I want to tell my friend, the summer intern who dared to ask the big question, “What makes people happy?” But I can’t. Because, for her, depression was a fatal illness; she took her own life before she reached the age of twenty-one. And now I feel I must go on seeking answers in her stead, a life’s work that I gladly accept. As I write this, I picture her still alive somewhere on the other side of the world, happy, writing her poetry and gazing up at the night sky, taking her place among Pegasus and the Heavenly Waters.