Man is perhaps the only creature for whom it is not enough to be happy – he also needs to know whether he is happy.

We can sit in a perfectly comfortable apartment in the evening, next to a loved one, with a paid-off mortgage, a good salary, and vacation plans, and suddenly, completely unexpectedly, ask ourselves – "Am I happy?" And if the answer for some reason turns out to be less confident than we would like, everything else instantly loses its former value.

The paradox is that the very feeling of happiness has gradually transformed for modern humans from a natural experience into a kind of project. It must be found, achieved, preserved, measured, and, ideally, demonstrated to others. We read books about happiness, listen to lectures about happiness, watch videos about happiness, and sometimes even feel guilty that after all of this, we still do not feel happy enough.

At the same time, science has long abandoned the notion of happiness as a single, universal state that is the same for everyone. Modern psychology more often uses the concept of subjective well-being, which includes not only emotional experiences but also a person's assessment of their own life. Researchers also distinguish, conditionally speaking, the pleasure derived from life and the deeper sense of meaning, fulfillment, and wholeness of one's existence.

Here's an interesting thing: a person can simultaneously have reasons to consider their life prosperous and yet subjectively feel unhappy. Moreover, they are capable of comparing their state not with reality, but with some internal standard of how happy they believe they should be.

Why is it not enough to simply live, love, work, raise children, make friends, make mistakes, grow older, sometimes rejoice, sometimes be sad, and occasionally feel wonderful? Why have we decided that a normal human life must necessarily be accompanied by a sustained feeling of happiness?

From childhood, a person encounters stories in which life's difficulties have a clear structure and, what is especially important, a predictable resolution. The hero faces an obstacle, undergoes trials, overcomes danger, defeats the adversary, wins love, or regains what was lost, and after that, the story ends. We are told: "And they lived happily ever after."

The most interesting part of this formula begins precisely after the last word. What happened to them afterwards, folk wisdom for some reason prefers not to specify. What happened a few years after the wedding? How did the prince and princess cope with everyday conflicts, disappointments, financial difficulties, the birth of children, and ordinary emotional fatigue? What happened to their relationship when the need to save each other from dragons and evil sorcerers disappeared? The fairy tale does not answer these questions, because they no longer belong to the plot.

From a psychological perspective, this is significant: a fairy tale is not an instruction for psychological development and, of course, cannot by itself form a child's specific notion of happiness. However, recurring cultural narratives can contribute to the formation of so-called expectations and life scripts – ideas about how life is usually structured and what should happen to a person on the path to the desired outcome.

And in a great many stories, this sequence is strikingly similar: first comes a problem, then a trial, and only then a reward. In such a model, happiness is associated not so much with the process of life itself as with the completion of a particular stage. First, something must be changed, fixed, or overcome, and only then does one earn the right to feel good.

This logic easily carries over into adult life. A person graduates from university and tells themselves that real life will begin after landing a good job; they get the job and postpone that moment until a promotion. They achieve the promotion and start waiting for a certain income level; they earn the necessary money and set the next goal. They enter a relationship – they wait for marriage. They get married – they wait for their own home. Children arrive – they wait for the children to grow up.

It is important to understand that striving for future goals is perfectly normal in itself. Planning, motivation, and the ability to delay immediate gratification for the sake of a meaningful goal are important mechanisms of human behavior. A psychological problem arises not when a person wants to change their life, but when everything present begins to be perceived exclusively as an intermediate stage before future happiness.

In popular films, the hero rarely gets everything they need at once; first, they must lose something. They lose money, work, relationships, reputation, or their familiar life; they face betrayal, make mistakes, suffer defeat, and find themselves in a situation from which there seems to be no way out.

And then the ascent begins, in which the hero overcomes themselves, discovers inner resources, makes an important decision, defeats the adversary, regains love, achieves the goal, and receives what they had been striving for.

Of course, cinema does not set out to teach the viewer the psychology of happiness; drama is structured in such a way that the viewer finds it more interesting to observe conflict, character transformation, and resolution than the subsequent ten years of quiet family life. But the recurring cultural script can still reinforce the familiar sequence in which life must first change, and only then can a person feel happy.

If current life does not bring the expected satisfaction, then somewhere ahead lies the next goal that will finally fix everything. And the person starts searching again.

A new job, new relationships, a new income level, a new status, a new goal – everything that, as they believe, will one day allow them to feel happy.

But perhaps the problem is not that the person has not yet found their happiness, but that they have too long perceived it as a final outcome. Life, meanwhile, turns into a sequence of conditions: when I finish, when I earn, when I meet, when I buy, when I achieve – then I will be happy.

Psychologically, this construct is especially insidious because an achieved goal rarely becomes the final point. A person gets used to changes; new circumstances, new desires, and new tasks emerge. And if happiness is postponed each time to the next stage, one may one day discover that their entire life has been spent waiting for life.

Perhaps that is why happiness is worth seeking not at the end of the story, but within it. Not after all problems disappear, but alongside them; not after achieving all goals, but in the very process of moving toward them. A person still needs love, money, recognition, development, security, and meaning, but none of these circumstances should become a condition without which they do not allow themselves to live.

Because human life, unlike a fairy tale, has no final frame with the inscription: "Now you may be happy."

And perhaps the greatest mistake lies precisely in this expectation. We try so hard to become happy one day that we sometimes forget to simply be alive.

And happiness, perhaps, begins not when life finally becomes what we have imagined it to be, but when we stop postponing our own lives until ideal circumstances arrive.

Kazbek AKHMETOV,
Psychologist, Doctoral Candidate
at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University