Is It Your Fault If You’re Not Happy?

Hi, it’s Paul Krismer, your happiness expert, and I’m coming to you this week again from Poland. We’re in the very basic little flat that we’ve been set up with and I’m here with my two sons. This is our idea of a Christmas vacation as we volunteer for an agency that’s working for Unicef, helping kids who are leaving Ukraine as refugees. The work is amazing and all-consuming. In fact, I can rarely remember times when I’ve been more exhausted, but all day we go in and we kind of help run a daycare essentially as the parents are trying to sort out how they get their way to some secure safe place to live. Most of the people we’re seeing are on their way to Germany.

The kids are coming in with all kinds of personal challenges. There are language barriers because they’re speaking Russian, Ukrainian, Romani, and of course, a lot of the people around us are speaking Polish and we speak English, so language is an issue. But of course, so much more profoundly, they’re coming from war zones. Most people are coming from Kerson right now, that’s who we’re seeing, and they’ve got basically 48 hours to process in this Refugee Center where we’re working. While the mums are figuring out where to go and how to get there, we’re kind of taking care of the kids. It’s busy, it’s exhausting days.

The thing I want to reflect on this week is that week after week, I produce a video almost always emphasizing our individual responsibilities to make our lives happier. I’m a positive psychology expert, and as a field, we are constantly talking about the things that people can do to make themselves as individuals happier. Usually, it’s similar themes: it’s meditation and mindfulness, and gratitude, good personal habits and exercise, journaling, and all these kinds of things that come up over and over again in this field. The emphasis always seems to be that there’s a responsibility that falls to we as individual people to make our lives better.

What goes unsaid in that is that it’s almost as though there’s a lack of acknowledgment for people’s circumstances. Of course, there are circumstances that make it very difficult to be happy. We sometimes call these structural considerations or external considerations. If you live in a community that’s very racist and you’re a person of color, it may be hard to be happy. If you’re living in really serious poverty, it may be hard to be happy. As we look at these people we’re working with in Ukraine, or in Poland here coming from Ukraine, you can’t help but think that there are circumstances that make happiness extraordinarily difficult.

We came here somewhat selfishly. We want to be volunteering and giving of ourselves in order to have a happy experience in our own work, and yet there’s this bittersweet component to it because of course, the work that we’re doing is with people who are really in a bad way, suffering immensely. They come with so little, a suitcase or two, sometimes people just with backpacks. They don’t know where they’re going, they don’t know how they’re going to get there, other than they’re going on a train to Germany from where we are. In the Welcome Center, that’s what we’re calling this Refugee center, there’s very little to do.

You might speak with a translator or two and maybe do a little work with the agencies that are trying to locate people’s future places to be. Having said that, most of it’s being done in the destinations where people go to. There’s so much sickness. People have been stressed out for weeks and months with the war. They’re coming with flus and colds and COVID and all manner of illnesses. We’re seeing it, in fact, all three of us are sick as well just because we’re exposed to all the germs in the daycare every day.

Even this whole place that we are, we’re in a small community called Shemess, written entirely differently. It’s kind of has a dark Soviet-era feel to it, old concrete buildings. The standard of living isn’t as high as what we know when in where we live in Las Vegas, or Victoria, or Montpellier, France, where my kids and I all exist. The conditions are tough and they’re nowhere near as tough as where people have come from in Ukraine. There’s lack of heat, lack of running water, the insecurity about whether or not you’ll be safe from the random artillery shell that gets bombed into your city.

In spite of all that, we see gratitude that’s being shared with us. Lots of warm smiles from parents who are grateful that we’re there to look after their kids, and of course, the joy of the kids themselves. I don’t know what all this video had to say this week except an acknowledgment that there are external circumstances that make happiness difficult. While we have an obligation as individuals to do what we can personally to be happier, we also, I think, have this very clear obligation to create circumstances in society where more of us can be happy.

Ideally, obviously, all of us can be happy. So that’s my wish at the close of 2022, that all of you are happy and you’re all taking steps to make yourself personally happier. Somewhere in there, a part of what your goal is for 2023 is to make the world around you a place where more people can be happier too. Wishing you all the best, bye for now.