Why our generation struggles to just be happy
Shafiya Showkat Wani
Life starts to make more sense when we stop expecting it to be whole. Life is not a complete entity; it is fragmented, made up of episodes that never fully merge into one seamless story. Each moment belongs to a section, divided by age, by academic milestones, by emotional phases, by the person we were at that time. Perhaps we grow into better people when we stop treating life like a test, one where we must constantly perform, constantly improve, constantly prove ourselves. Episodes pass. Emotions shift. Anxiety slowly gives way to composure. That, I think, is the quiet beauty of living.
Yet guilt remains deeply wired into our minds, the guilt of not doing enough, not being enough, not being on our “best behaviour” every single day. We are taught that happiness must be controlled, that excessive joy invites consequences. I cannot be happy for a full week without feeling anxious, without anticipating loss. Somewhere along the way, my mind learned to associate happiness with sadness, as if joy must always be followed by suffering. And once the mind accepts this idea, it begins to recreate it. Happiness becomes suspicious, fragile, temporary, something to be paid for later.
We talk about mental health more openly now. People speak about depression, anxiety, and trauma, and that openness reflects growth. But what we rarely acknowledge is that no amount of therapy can make someone happy if their mind is not ready to accept happiness. If sadness is inevitable after joy, then numbness feels safer. Many people choose to feel nothing because nothingness carries no guilt. Happiness does.
This makes it even harder for our generation to pass emotional freedom to the next. We may give our children the liberties we never had. We may allow them to live life on their own terms, treat them as individuals rather than unfinished dreams. But how will they learn to embrace happiness if they never see us doing so? They may associate happiness with toys, money, or freedom, when in truth, happiness is closer to contentment, a quiet acceptance of emotions in all their forms. Sadness deserves as much space as joy. Life moves in episodes, and each episode eventually gives way to another.
The year 2025 taught me lessons I did not know I needed. It taught me self-sufficiency, how to take care of myself when I was miles away from home and no one was there to take care of me. It taught me to move through uncertainty and try things I never believed were in me to try. But the most important lesson was this: to stop chasing happiness.
As a child, I believed adulthood would make me happy. As a teenager, I waited for college. In college, I waited for a master’s degree in English literature. Then I waited for a job. Happiness was always postponed, always imagined as something that would arrive later. Even when I felt happy, I compared it to a greater happiness I believed awaited me in the future. Happiness became a race, something to be earned at the finish line. But the race is endless, and there is no certainty of ever finishing it.
Living in a hostel room, with silence and too much time to think, forced me to reflect. I realised how absurd it is to live constantly on edge, never pausing, never breathing. I have had the happiest moments of my life, and I have had the saddest ones—and none of them stayed longer than they were meant to. As I enter 2026, I hope to be content with who I am and who I once was. I don’t want to regret the awkwardness of my childhood or erase photographs because I looked strange. Every version of me, right or wrong, has led me here.
This year, I lost my grandfather. I was with him when he died. I had never seen death so closely before, and the experience frightened me. He was a quiet, kind man. When he passed, I didn’t imagine a future without him; I returned to the past, to the world when he existed in it: apples hidden in his pockets, his tired hands offering them to us, his silence, broken only when necessary, and his instinct to protect animals. What was happiness to him? Did anyone ever teach him how to be happy?
His death made me realise how often we fail to live fully in moments that later become memories. Regret does not come from loss alone; it comes from not allowing ourselves joy when it was possible.
Life is not a test. Life is a trick, a trick that convinces us that it must be endured rather than lived. It shows how many of us spend our days preparing instead of breathing, waiting instead of feeling. Somewhere along the way, we also learned to associate happiness with a “greater good,” and that greater good is often imagined as heaven. We are advised to suffer quietly, to accept pain with patience, because the reward will come later. And while the promise of heaven can offer hope, it becomes absurd when it asks us to sacrifice sixty or seventy years of living for something we are not even certain of. Hope should not demand a lifetime of denial. Heaven, if it exists, does not have to be postponed to the afterlife; it can also be created here, in moments of love, contentment, and unguarded happiness on earth.
Nothing can convince me that grief is the only path to God. Nothing can convince me that fear is holier than love. Nothing can convince me that happiness must lead to suffering.
That is the intention with which I enter 2026:
to be happier without guilt,
to love more freely,
to strive and still be gentle with myself if I fail,
to stop expecting miracles overnight,
and to finally let myself breathe.
If I were to die tomorrow, I would take nothing with me except the moments when I truly felt alive. And if even those moments were lived in fear of consequence, then I would leave empty.
So, here’s to a new year full of lived happiness, not anticipated happiness. Cheers to new beginnings, new hopes, and new kinds of happiness, whether it comes in the form of a cup of chai, a good meal, a simple poem, a book that understands you, an Instagram post, or even a meme that makes you laugh for no reason at all.
Shafiya Showkat Wani is a columnist, writer, and poet, pursuing Masters in English Literature at Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi
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