I was having a conversation with someone I care about deeply. It started as a disagreement, nothing dramatic, just one of those moments where two people are trying to navigate something real and not quite landing in the same place. Somewhere in the middle of it, this question came up: What is happiness?
Not what makes you happy, or what do you want out of life, but what actually is happiness?
We both stumbled on it. You’d think that’s something we’d all be able to define, considering how often it gets talked about. But the more we tried to answer it, the more abstract it felt. Like we could recognize happiness when we experienced it, but putting it into words? That was a different story.
Later that night, I wrote it down on my phone: What is happiness?
I knew I wanted to come back to it. Not because I thought I’d find some universal truth, but because it felt worth unpacking. Slowly, honestly, and from a place that’s been shaped more by experience than by theory. Not as a philosopher. Not as a therapist. Just as a man who’s been through some things, and who wants to get this one right.
This is my attempt.
Reading the Greats
Once I started sitting with the question, I did what I usually do. I went to the source material. I started reading through what some of the old minds had to say. Not to copy their answers, but to see how people who actually spent their lives thinking about this stuff tried to define it.
I’ve always liked Stoicism. I’ve spent time reading Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, and a lot of what they say holds up. They treated happiness not as a feeling, but as a kind of internal stability. A calm you earn by living with discipline, clarity, and self-control. That always resonated with me. It makes sense to put your energy into what you can control and not get spun up by the chaos around you. I’ve lived by that more often than not.
But even that didn’t feel like the whole picture.
I kept digging. Aristotle talked about happiness as a kind of long-term fulfillment, only achieved through a life of virtue. Epicurus leaned into simplicity and the absence of pain. The Buddha talked about letting go of attachment altogether. Viktor Frankl said happiness isn’t something you pursue. It’s what shows up when your life has meaning. I could appreciate all of it. There’s wisdom in those ideas.
Then I came across Nietzsche, and something clicked. He said happiness is the feeling that power increases, that resistance is being overcome. That stopped me for a second. Because I’ve felt that. I’ve felt something close to joy in the middle of hard moments. Not comfort. Not peace. Just that sense that I was pushing through something heavy and still moving forward. That what I was doing meant something.
And that was the first time I started to think that maybe happiness isn’t supposed to feel soft. Maybe it’s not the result of everything going right. Maybe it’s what shows up when you’re carrying real weight, doing something that matters, and you realize you haven’t lost yourself in the process.
Still, as much as I respected the great thinkers, none of them gave me something I could carry forward on its own. None of them described happiness in a way that matched what I’ve seen and lived. That doesn’t make their definitions wrong. It just meant I needed to keep going. The answer I was looking for wasn’t going to come from a quote. It was going to have to come from experience.
A Working Definition
After all the reading and reflection, I kept circling the same question. Not just what happiness is, but what it feels like when it’s real. When you’ve lived through enough to know it’s not just comfort or convenience. When you’ve seen the things that strip away illusions and still want to find something solid underneath.
Here’s what I landed on.
Happiness is not the absence of struggle, but the presence of love, clarity, and strength. The kind that lets you wake up with purpose and still smile at the quiet moments.
That’s what made sense to me. It isn’t soft. It isn’t loud. It doesn’t mean you’re floating through life untouched by pain. It means you have something worth waking up for. You know what you believe in. You know who you care about. And even if the weight doesn’t go away, you’re strong enough to carry it and still feel some of it lift when you see someone you love smile for real.
There was a moment that brought this into focus for me. It came during one of the lowest points in my life. A stretch of time where I was barely holding it together, just surviving one miserable day at a time. But even then, I wasn’t alone. I was fortunate to have someone beside me who had known me before it all came apart. She stayed through the worst of it.
One night, we were watching some show where a hotel maid folded the edge of a toilet paper roll into one of those neat little triangles. We both laughed and wondered why anyone bothers doing that. I said something like, maybe it’s just a small way to show effort. A sign that if someone cares enough to do the little things right, they probably care about the big things too.
A few mornings later, after a night where I’d barely slept and a week where I couldn’t afford much more than cheap groceries and pride, I got up before dawn to head out for work. And there it was. The edge of the toilet paper roll had been folded into a triangle.
It broke me. Not because of what it was, but because of what it meant. In the middle of all that pressure and survival mode, someone I loved had taken the time to do something so small and thoughtful, just so I’d see it. It hit me harder than any gesture ever had. I felt seen, cared for, and for the first time in a long time, like I might actually be okay. It was the most overwhelming feeling of love I’d experienced, all wrapped up in something so simple it could have been missed.
I don’t think I said anything about it at the time. I just stood there in that tiny bathroom, half-awake, holding back tears. It was one of those moments that doesn’t need to be talked through. You just feel it. And somehow, even in the middle of one of the worst stretches of my life, I felt loved. Fully, unmistakably loved.
That person is no longer with us. But that moment has stayed with me. Not just because of what it said about her, but because of what it revealed about happiness. It doesn’t always show up in the big scenes. Sometimes it’s a quiet act in the dark, meant to be found by someone trying to pull themselves together before the sun comes up.
This version of happiness doesn’t reject hardship. It just refuses to let hardship be the only story. It leaves space for laughter in the middle of chaos. For gratitude after loss. For connection in the middle of fatigue.
It’s not about being in control of everything. It’s about being at peace with what you’re carrying, and who you’re becoming while you carry it.
For me, that’s what happiness is. And once I finally saw it for what it was, it didn’t feel vague anymore. It felt earned.
Conclusion
I don’t claim to have figured this out. I don’t think anyone really does. All I know is that I’ve spent time with the question. I’ve lived through enough to know that happiness isn’t simple, and it definitely isn’t one-size-fits-all. What makes me feel anchored might not land the same way for anyone else, and that’s okay. That’s part of the point.
Your definition won’t be mine. It shouldn’t be. Happiness looks different depending on who you are, what you’ve carried, and what you value when everything else falls away. For some people, it’s peace. For others, it’s forward motion. For some, it’s the absence of pain. For others, it’s the presence of love, even when the pain is still there.
What I’ve shared here isn’t a theory or a set of instructions. It’s just one person’s attempt to understand something that’s easy to feel, but hard to put into words. I started down this path because the question came up in a conversation that meant something to me. It stuck with me. So I followed it.
Maybe that’s all this is…a place to begin.
This is my attempt.
What’s yours?
-Gino