Happiness

When a child looks unhappy, the instinctive response is immediate: “What’s wrong?” Children are expected to be lighthearted, playful, and full of laughter. Sadness in them feels like an anomaly, something unnatural that calls for correction.

With adults, however, the same question arises in a very different context. When someone is deeply, visibly happy- smiling too broadly, laughing too freely, e world still asks, “What’s wrong?” But this time it comes with suspicion or curiosity, as though happiness in adulthood requires explanation. Perhaps there has been a promotion, a stroke of luck, or a romantic encounter. Joy, instead of being assumed, becomes something rare enough to provoke inquiry.

This inversion reveals a striking truth: happiness is our natural state, yet adulthood convinces us otherwise.

The Shift from Being to Chasing

In childhood, joy is effortless. A game, a cloud, or the simple act of being alive is enough. There is no need for possessions or reasons.

Adulthood alters this rhythm. Happiness is no longer accepted as inherent; it becomes something to be pursued, almost hunted down. The pursuit takes many forms:

- in consumerism, through new possessions and luxuries;

- in escape, through alcohol, smoking, or drugs;

- in adrenaline, through extreme sports or thrill-seeking adventures;

- in validation, through constant digital affirmation.

What was once spontaneous becomes conditional, and the search for joy is often more exhausting than the joy itself.

The Graph Towards Death

Life unfolds against an unchanging backdrop: it moves steadily toward its end. Each passing day is a point on a downward-sloping graph that leads inevitably to death. This truth, often avoided, is inescapable. From the very first breath, the trajectory is set.

Yet the tragedy is not death itself, but the way so much of life is spent postponing joy- waiting for circumstances to align, for conditions to be met, for some external permission to be granted.

The Long Silence Before

Death is not unfamiliar. For nearly 13.5 billion years before birth, existence was absent. There was no suffering, no awareness of loss, no consciousness of absence. Life is not an endless state interrupted by death; it is the opposite. Death is the long, natural silence, and life is the brief interruption.

That interruption, however fleeting, contains everything: love, fear, curiosity, beauty, and the full spectrum of human experience. Its brevity makes it no less profound; rather, it heightens its worth.

Remembering What Was Once Natural

Children embody a wisdom adults often forget. They laugh without cause, marvel without purpose, and move through the world without requiring permission to be joyful. For them, happiness is still the baseline, not the exception.

By adulthood, this simple truth is buried under layers of expectation, responsibility, and cynicism. The world treats unearned happiness as strange, while treating stress and dissatisfaction as normal. But perhaps the opposite is true.

Returning to the Origin

The pursuit of happiness may be misguided. Happiness was never something to be achieved but something remembered. To live well may mean not chasing joy in ever greater doses, but stripping away the distractions that conceal it.

Against the vast backdrop of cosmic time, where nonexistence has already been our longest state, the brief flare of consciousness that is life is extraordinary. It is too rare, too fleeting, to waste in suspicion of joy.

Happiness was the natural state once. The true task of adulthood may not be to earn it, but to return to it.