All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast. –  US journalist John Gunther 

Happiness might be broadly defined as a subjective sense of wellbeing and can be wide ranging, from simple contentment to intense joy. 

We crave it because it feels nice and brings a whole lot of good stuff in its wake, like good health and its attendant benefits. What exactly produces it is less clear, however. For all you know, it’s yak butter: the Bhutanese are said to be the “happiest” society on earth. 

There are weirder definitions. One of the Beatles’ best songs was the attention-grabbing Happiness Is A Warm Gun, a lunatic sentiment shared by all mother-loving, apple-pie eating, flag waving members of the US’ National Rifle Association. 

John Lennon saw the headline in a gun magazine and thought it an “utterly mad, fantastic” thing to say. In itself, that is doubly poignant given the circumstances of his death: a “warm gun” being one that’s recently been fired. 

There are also upside-down ideas about the feeling. A puritanical religious group for example, might be haunted by a constant fear that someone, somewhere was having fun in the country and was, therefore, treacherously happy.  

You can almost always find farce between the tragic and the absurd.  Who’d have thought it would belong to Bo Derek: “Whoever said money can’t buy happiness simply didn’t know where to shop.” Sort of reminds you of one RM, doesn’t it? And I don’t mean Ringgit Malaysia either.

Along the same lines, journalist and diplomat Clare Booth Luce observed that while “money can’t buy happiness, it can make you awfully comfortable while you’re being miserable.” 

The English comic Spike Milligan merely wanted an opportunity: “All I ask is a chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.” 

For all her novels about love, regret and loss, the English novelist Jane Austen was brutally pragmatic in real life: “A large income is the best recipe for happiness that I’ve heard of.” 

For the comedian Rodney Dangerfield, it was about marriage. “For 20 years, my wife and I were blissfully happy. Then we met.” Ditto for the journalist Max Kaufman: “I never knew what real happiness was until I got married; and by then it was too late.”

To the actress Mae West, it was simply her irrepressible joie de vivre:

“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.” 

Then there is the cynical view. One axiom of the human condition goes like this: “On a beautiful day like this it’s hard to believe anyone can be unhappy – but we’ll work on it.” And who’d imagine Albert Schweitzer as a cynic: “Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.”

But for really shrewd observations of the human experience, we should listen to English entertainer Bob Monkhouse: “Real happiness is when you marry a girl for love and find out later she has money.” 

It could also be sitting with a warm pizza box on your lap in front of the television. To wise, old Benjamin Franklin, it was beer because it proved “God loves us and wants us to be happy.”  

And to the Peanuts’ Lucy van Pelt, always an astute observer of life, it was a “warm puppy.”

You can’t top that.

ENDS