by Jennifer Patushka
It’s a simple question.
Too simple, almost.
Are you happy?
People ask it casually, like asking if you’ve eaten or finished your homework. It slips into conversations without warning, and most of us answer just as quickly, yeah, I’m good, I think so. The kind of answers that sound complete but aren’t meant to be examined too closely.
Because the truth is, happiness is not something we hold steadily. It’s something that flickers.
I think about happiness the way light moves across a room. In the morning, it spills in easily, soft and unearned. By afternoon, it shifts, sharpens, hides behind objects we didn’t notice before. And by night, it’s gone completely, leaving behind only the memory that it was once there.
So when someone asks, Are you happy? I don’t know which version of the day they mean.
Do they mean the quiet moment when everything feels aligned for no reason at all? When the air feels lighter, when laughter comes without effort, when you forget, just for a second, that there are things waiting to overwhelm you?
Or do they mean the other moments, the ones that last longer? The hours where happiness feels like something distant, something you’re supposed to reach but don’t quite know how?
Because I’ve learned that you can be both.
You can laugh with your friends and still feel a kind of distance inside you. You can achieve something you worked hard for and still feel like it doesn’t land the way you thought it would. You can be surrounded by noise and still notice the silence underneath it.
Happiness, then, isn’t constant. It’s not a permanent state you arrive at and stay in. It’s something more temporary, more fragile, something that appears in moments and then disappears before you can fully name it.
And maybe that’s why the question feels so difficult because we expect it to be something larger than it actually is. Something stable. Something we can claim with certainty.
But what if happiness isn’t meant to be stable?
What if it’s meant to be brief, and that’s what makes it real?
The small things, the ones we don’t always notice, might be the closest we get to an honest answer. A conversation that lingers a little longer than expected. A piece of music that feels like it understands you. The quiet relief of being alone without feeling lonely. The moment you realize you’ve stopped overthinking, even if only for a few minutes.
Those moments don’t last. But they don’t need to.
So if you asked me now, Are you happy?, I wouldn’t say yes, not in the way the question expects.
I’d say this:
Sometimes.
Art by Jennifer Patushka, “Joy“
About the Author
Jennifer loves exploring emotions through art, and spoken words. She often blends observation and imagination in her creative work.