“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of.”
– Albert Camus (1913-1960), a French writer and thinker best known for exploring what life means in a world that does not offer clear answers.
WHEN you are young, perhaps you should not spend too much time asking whether you are happy or unhappy. At that stage of life, there is still so much you do not know. You have not yet seen enough of the world, nor have you lived through its finest moments and its darkest ones. Youth is often too early for such questions because experience has not yet fully revealed itself.
As for me, I am now in my seventh decade, and I feel I have earned the right to ask two quieter, more difficult questions: am I not happy, or am I unhappy? Perhaps I am both.
Notice that I am not asking whether I am happy. That is a different matter entirely, and one I am not ready to settle here.
There is, after all, a subtle but meaningful difference between being “not happy” and being “unhappy”.
“Not happy” feels softer, almost neutral. It suggests the absence of happiness, and no deep emotion. It can simply mean mild disappointment or a quiet sense that something is missing.
“Unhappy”, however, carries weight. It speaks of dissatisfaction, sadness, or emotional distress. It is not merely the lack of joy, but the presence of discomfort. One is a silence where happiness should be; the other is a voice expressing pain.
I suppose that distinction matters to me because, at one time, I truly believed I was happy. Or at least, I believed it strongly enough that I never thought to question it.
That particular happiness was not the polite sort of “this will do” feeling. Not the quiet, well-behaved satisfaction that sits properly and doesn’t make a scene. No – this felt like the real thing. The kind that announces itself without hesitation.
Finally, I thought.
I remember the certainty of it more than the feeling itself. That sharp conviction: this is it; you’ve found it. This is what all the fuss was about. I didn’t question it. Why would I? When something feels that complete, doubt feels almost rude.
Naturally, I celebrated.
I was so young, agile, and naïve, so I jumped up and down like an idiot.
And, just as naturally, I fell straight into a ditch. Not metaphorically. Properly.
One moment I was elevated – emotionally and physically – and the next I was staring at dirt, winded, slightly confused, and already feeling the edges of that perfect happiness dissolving like sugar in rain.
It didn’t shatter. That would have been dramatic, almost dignified.
My happiness just … evaporated.
Gone before I’d even had the chance to describe it properly to myself.
And then, as if to make the point unnecessarily clear, life arrived. Years passed, and I moved away from our village, pursuing what I thought was a more modern and sophisticated way of life.
Surely, I would find happiness somewhere, I thought. Instead, happy moments were rare, crowded out by more responsibilities than I could count – and shoulder.
Bills, first. Always bills. Quiet, persistent, entirely unimpressed by my emotional breakthroughs.
Then sickness, because apparently the body likes to join in once the mind has had its brief moment of optimism.
And just like that, whatever I had called happiness turned into something else. Not even the opposite – nothing so clean. Just a dimming. A slow slide into something heavier, less negotiable.
Darkness is perhaps too strong a word, but it will do. It sounds better than “extended inconvenience with philosophical undertones”.
More years passed.
That is the annoying thing about years – they never wait for you to resolve anything before moving on. They continue regardless, collecting quietly around you like unopened letters left on a table, each carrying something unfinished inside.
And somewhere in all those passing years, I realised I had begun asking a different kind of question.
Not: Where is happiness? Not: Why does it leave?
But something far less practical, and perhaps far more dangerous:
What if it stayed?
What if happiness were permanent? Not a brief visitor or a passing mood, but a fixed condition. Something stable. Something dependable. A state a person could earn, secure, and keep, like a respectable position with decent pay, annual leave, and reasonable working hours.
And if such a thing were possible, then what?
What would a person actually do with permanent happiness once they had it? Would life become peaceful, or merely repetitive? Would ambition disappear? Would longing? Would anything meaningful remain once the search itself had ended?
I remember asking a friend about this. The same friend as before – still carrying that irritating level of confidence that only certain people manage to preserve into adulthood.
“What if happiness is permanent?” I asked him. “What if there’s something specific you can do to earn it? Then what happens afterwards?”
He did not pause for even a second.
He laughed.
Not cruelly, and not kindly either. Just instantly, as though I had accidentally said something fundamentally absurd.
“You’re insane,” he said.
Which, to be fair, may have been the most efficient answer available.
But I kept thinking about it.
Because the question doesn’t go away just because someone dismisses it.
If happiness were permanent, it would stop being noticeable. It would flatten into the background, like everything else that stays too long.
It would become … normal.
And if it became normal, it would no longer feel like happiness.
It would just feel like life.
Which is, I suppose, the trick no one bothers to point out.
I am now in what people politely describe as my semi-golden years – a phrase meant to sound warm, dignified, and reassuring, while quietly admitting that whatever once gleamed brightly has begun to fade a little, losing some of its shine without entirely disappearing.
And I find that I don’t really care anymore.
Not in a dramatic, defeated sense. Not the sort that demands sympathy or poetic language.
Just … a gradual loosening of interest.
The question of happiness no longer feels urgent to me. It no longer sits at the centre of my life the way it once did, demanding answers and refusing to be ignored. There was a time when I treated it almost like a problem to solve, as though life itself depended on reaching some clear and permanent conclusion about it.
Now, it has drifted quietly to the side.
It feels more like a general idea than a destination. Something people refer to in conversation, the way they might speak about pleasant weather in another country – interesting, desirable perhaps, but distant and not entirely relevant to the business of ordinary living.
I exist.
That can sound bleak if said with too much emphasis, but I do not mean it bleakly. There is something unexpectedly stable about simply existing. I wake up each morning. I move through the day. Things happen. Most are ordinary enough to be forgotten by evening. Some are mildly pleasant. A few are irritating enough to linger for an hour or two before fading away.
And then the next day arrives.
No grand emotional arcs. No dramatic revelations. No sustained moments of triumph.
Just continuity.
Years ago, I would have found that disappointing. I thought life was supposed to feel more intense than this, more meaningful, more clearly shaped by joy or sorrow. Instead, much of it turns out to be repetition softened by small variations.
And here is the part I would once have dismissed entirely: I am alive.
Still reasonably healthy.
Nothing is urgently wrong.
And, rather improbably, I can continue one of my childhood hobbies – climbing trees. There are several good ones around my farm, solid and reliable enough for the purpose. It turns out that being able to climb trees in your seventies is not trivial. In fact, it is probably worth appreciating more than I do.
It does not feel like happiness, at least not in the dramatic way people often describe happiness. It does not glow. It does not announce itself. It certainly does not tempt me into dancing dangerously close to ditches out of emotional excitement.
But it holds.
That may be the important part.
It stays.
It does not vanish the moment I notice it, or dissolve the instant I begin asking questions about it.
Perhaps that is the quiet exchange life makes with us without ever properly explaining the terms. You spend years chasing bright, temporary moments, calling them happiness and demanding that they remain. You believe permanence is possible if only you understand yourself well enough or organise your life correctly.
And eventually, you grow tired of chasing.
Not because you have succeeded.
Not because you have finally understood anything profound.
But because you begin to notice something else entirely – something quieter, steadier, and far less impressive at first glance. Something that asks very little from you and does not need to be pursued at all.
If someone had told me earlier in life that I would one day arrive here – no longer especially concerned with happiness, no longer trying desperately to define it or secure it – I would have considered that a form of defeat. Emotional resignation. A slow surrender.
Now, I am no longer certain.
It does not feel like surrender.
It feels more like stepping away from an argument that was never going to end no matter how intelligently it was discussed.
I still remember that moment by the ditch all those years ago – the certainty, the ridiculous enthusiasm, and the immediate collapse afterwards. For a long time, I thought of it as a joke at my own expense.
Now it feels more like a demonstration.
A perfectly timed illustration of how life tends to work.
You think you have arrived somewhere permanent.
You celebrate.
You fall.
You stand up again.
And eventually, you stop expecting the ground to become anything other than ground.
Happiness, as I understand it now, is not something I can keep. Not because I have failed, but because it was never designed to be kept in the first place. It appears for a while. Then it disappears. Life continues regardless, mostly indifferent to whether I manage to name those moments correctly.
So here I am.
Not happy. Not unhappy.
Just here.
Alive. Functional. Still moving through life one ordinary day at a time.
And, somewhat annoyingly, that seems to be enough.
The views expressed here are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of the Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at www.hayhenlin@gmail.com
