“Happiness comes from between.”

Why it was said

Jonathan Haidt uses this phrase as the title and the answer of the tenth chapter of The Happiness Hypothesis, near the end of the book. After testing ancient ideas about happiness against modern psychology, he concludes that happiness is neither found only inside oneself nor acquired from outside.

What it actually means

Two old answers compete. One says happiness comes from within, as Buddhist and Stoic teachers held; the other, which most of modern life assumes, says it comes from getting the right things outside. Haidt's answer is that both are incomplete. People flourish when the right relationships are in place: between themselves and others, between themselves and their work, and between themselves and something larger than themselves. You cannot pursue happiness directly, much as you cannot make a plant grow by pulling on it. What you can do is tend the conditions: close relationships, absorbing work, a sense of belonging to something bigger. Then happiness tends to arrive on its own.

How to use it

1. 1Check the three connections: who you are close to, what work absorbs you, what larger thing you are part of. Pick the weakest and give it one hour this week.
2. 2Instead of asking 'what would make me happy?', ask 'which relationship in my life needs attention?'
3. 3Newly moved to İzmir for work, Elif joins a Saturday volunteer group cleaning the shore in Karşıyaka; within a month she has friends, a routine and a reason to get up.