The Concept and the Nature of Happiness as Subjective Well-Being

A widely accepted definition of happiness is: ‘the enduring appreciation of life as a whole’. This happiness is a specific type of subjective well-being. There are some conceptual complications. In colloquial language people are supposed to be happy if they have reached some perfect state. The differences between happiness and concepts like well-being and utility are sometimes ignored. Some other complications are about the nature of happiness: happiness is a subjective reality but can be measured objectively with standardized questions. Happiness as a subjective reality is a product of the interaction between two components: the affective and cognitive component. These components have their own dynamics, and are sometimes denoted as specific types of happiness. In view of this dualism we may wonder how justifiable it is to pay attention to ‘overall’ happiness, or happiness ‘in general’. It might be more appropriate to avoid this terminology, if affective and cognitive happiness are different phenomena, without any connection or mutual consistency. Another complication is that people are free to adopt different and inconsistent standards in their appreciation of life, and they may change their standards whenever they want to. This can have a negative impact on the consistency and stability of happiness, and on the comparability of the happiness of different individuals or the happiness of the same individuals in different periods of time. This is primarily a complication in cognitive happiness, but it can create complications in the consistency, stability and comparability of affective and ‘overall’ happiness, through the interaction between affect and cognition.