September 21, 2025
Happiness, like being in love, can be difficult to define– if someone were to ask us to describe it, we would sound ridiculous, fumbling our way through one whimsical cliché after another: “it’s magical, it’s like my soul is getting a hug, it’s electric, it’s….well, it’s an indescribable feeling and it’s just the best, dammit!”
Happiness seems to vibrate on a very similar frequency to all types of love, so we can confidently establish that the correlation is strong between the two. Both of these feelings are interwoven, sharing many of the same effects that we may or may not attempt to define; and the absence or loss of either happiness or true love can be overwhelmingly painful (in ways that are equally difficult to define).
It is widely acknowledged that being in love can cause one to be happier; yet, we often overlook the reverse of this: when happiness allows us to love; which begs the question, “How is love different from happiness?”, and maybe more importantly, “Why are they both so damn hard to find?”
Can’t Buy Me Love
First we’d have to determine what type of love we’re talking about: being “in love” implies that there is some sort of intimacy being shared between (usually) two people; which is not quite the same as “loving” a painting of a flowery meadow, a pile of nachos or our grandmother. Although I did see a dude getting pretty intimate with a pile of nachos at a baseball game once…and I can’t unsee it.
This is where things become a little murky, because both happiness and love can often seem to exist on a sliding scale; and we can be quite subjective in our natural understanding of them. For instance, we can’t express our love for a painting in the same way we can for our partner, just as we can’t loooove nachos the same way we love our grandma…I mean, we can, but it would be quite inappropriate or just downright nasty.
Volume of currency used to be a significant factor when weighing these highly valued meta-emotions : $5 for ballpark nachos, $500 for a painting (or prostitute), $5,000 for a wedding dress; versus our time, patience and attention. The in-kind approach has typically yielded the most profound personal results, as we’ve learned over the past couple of centuries that we can’t quantify such states of bliss, that money cannot purchase happiness.
Sadly, this simple model, which was applicable up until just a few decades ago, before the tech revolution, now seems antiquated. Even just 30 years ago we could put a price on any sin or salvation, while always having the option of returning to presence and focus; but today, even our time and energy are a commodity that is slipping out of our control and into the hands of convenient temptations everywhere we look– in the digital world. And whether or not we want to hear it, we enable this fact by choosing to take such a big chunk out of it.
Bang for Your Buck
To be completely honest, I don’t find anything inherently wrong with people wanting to connect through technology; however, I am concerned with how ignorant we may become, when using our devices, to the level at which our devices are using us; because what’s contained within the young legacy of these modern “tools” has evolved them into attention-stealing monstrosities.
They know how often we click, they keep track of our personal usage patterns (which are typically frequent) and they feed us what we’re looking for before we even type it in. This level of predictability and understanding seems eerily similar to that of a highly skilled stalker or being in a long-term relationship with someone. Yet, it only understands us for the purposes of being able to use us; sounds more like the stalker than the hubby.
Let’s try to focus on this very fact as a way of highlighting our perception of what it means to need. Do we need to be “in love”? Probably not, but I would argue that in order to feel like a complete person, we all need to feel some type of love, which requires that we are also giving altruistically. Universally speaking, if we’re aware of this notion that love is a “give and take” phenomenon, then can we apply this same equation to the notion of simply being happy?
What are we giving for our subscriptions or phone contracts? $80? $120? If we’re basing this solely on the money we spend to utilize such a product, then we’re getting a bigger steal the more time we spend on it. But in this context, our time is ever more valuable, as our attention fades into a vacuum of blue light, banter and seduction; not to mention the effect this has on our personality, how we categorize value and how we often fail at prioritizing true needs.
When we reach for our phones, it’s not so much that we’re looking to distract ourselves (as we “inadvertently” do every time we pick it up), as much as we are reaching out for something that breathes life into an otherwise banal perception of our own existence, a false need for what it means to be “us”.
We’ve made it easy to feign happiness by feeding relentless amounts of short, synthetic dopamine bursts into our brains one mindless click at a time, without consideration for the aforementioned side effects or any comprehension as to the level of greed and deceit with which the overlords of these systems function.
Instead of going to the park or a café or community gathering, we rifle through dating apps and porn sites in order to satiate our primal need to form connections and to feel something beautiful. Based on how often we use the damn things, our cell phone bill is cheap, but does that mean we should treat it as an all-you-can-eat buffet? It’s like the $5 pile of nachos, but it’s bottomless nacho day, every single day– so we spend a total of around seven hours devouring them…every single day. Talk about a case of mental diarrhea.
Wrong Place, Right Time
When we talk about what we’re giving in order to experience love or happiness, then we’re looking at that entire collection of experiences as transactional. Most would consider them needs-based, yes, but it’s not like physical sustenance, despite the fact that we may often treat it as such.
Either we eat it all up only to become sick or remain empty; or we spin a web of mythology around the idea that these coveted mental/emotional states can be difficult to track down. This is because we are searching relentlessly for them and, too often, in the places where unicorns exist…as Emoji’s.
The connection between love and happiness scarcely matters if we’re always taking the shortest and easiest route in our attempts to attain them. Some might say it requires luck or that we have to be in just the right place at the right time to be struck by its spell. If this is true, then we have to submit to the idea that digital interactions are not designed to produce any type of emotionally groundbreaking experience; they are designed to keep us clicking, watching and waiting. Hopefully, we can then ask ourselves, “does that seem like the ‘right’ place?”.
This brings us to a point I made earlier in this essay about happiness allowing for us to love. We have difficulty attempting to define how we’re affected by these beautifully complex emotions, because they contain something much bigger than what we stand to gain from them. They’re complex because they don’t involve just one person’s interest, yet we try to be in the “right place” all the time to absorb the energy that is vibrating out of a screen.
There is no altruism involved in habitually scrolling. We’ve created thousands of imaginary “needs” that can only be met through this conduct, which is by definition, selfish. Even if we occasionally stumble across a genuine opportunity to give our time, energy and attention in the digitalverse, too quickly and frequently do we become slaves to our own habits, as we swipe and click away from what could have been a meaningful connection.
If we can slow this train down and put ourselves out into the real world, then we may begin to cultivate a more authentic sense of purpose. Even just going on a hike or grabbing a coffee with a friend is exponentially more palpable than staring at Facebook while we ignore text messages from that friend.
Maybe we all have a slightly different and clumsy definition of what love or happiness mean to us; but we will stumble less each time once we begin to realize that, as cheesy as it sounds, this beauty is not difficult to find, for it resides in all of us. We just have to be willing to make space for it to come to the surface. Letting go can sometimes be the hardest part, but that’s a sure sign that it needs to happen in order for us to grow, to love and to be happier.