A bit like life itself, happiness is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. It’s often expressed as an interaction with something:
Expression of happiness is often just an acknowledgement of a good decision made. The most obvious is the rather bland “My wedding day was the happiest day of my life”, when what they really mean is “my decision to get married was the best one of my life”.
The common thread among happy activities is a conscious and free decision to allocate time in a certain way.
Think back to your childhood, where most decisions were made for you – going to school, on holiday, how to spend weekends etc. You are told they are good for you (and mostly they probably were), and also told you are ungrateful if you don’t express appreciation in the appropriate way. But the small moments you grabbed to do an activity yourself (arranging toys in your bedroom, climbing a tree or whatever), you probably experienced bigger feelings of happiness.
As an adult, you have more agency over the broad strokes of activity, but the specifics are often dictated by others. You might be happy to be a plumber, but when called at 2am to fix a flooding house, you might prefer to be elsewhere. The relentless demands of life can make moments of respite feel more precious. So something as simple as going to the pub with your mates makes you happy.
We all have different amounts of money, but the same amount of time each week. It’s the one asset that depreciates before our very eyes, and it can feel overwhelming if we are unable to allocate it as we would wish.
Money does not make you happier, but the ability to allocate time however you choose certainly will. This is the main driver for putting plans in place to become financially independent.
I have been allocating time exactly as I wish since 2019 – really for the first time in my life. My own experience is that it gets better every year. I don’t claim that this is the happiest period of my life, but I would say that the decision to stop work was one of the best I’ve ever made.