A brilliantly reductive book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck by Mark Manson, summarizes happiness as coming from solving problems. Seems too simple for it to be true. I thought long and hard attempting to disprove it. While it requires a lot of context (why he wrote a book, not just a sentence) it does seem to fit into the world that I observe.
The most popular stories are by far mysteries. What is a mystery other than a problem (crime) being solved? Romance? How do I find love (solution) with so many things (problems) working against me? You can go through every genre, story type, writing style, and you will find little more than problem solving. That is because readers, often incapable of solving the problems in their own life, seek the fictional world where problems do get solved. This lets them know it is possible, and gives them hope. Hope itself is not happiness. In fact some believe that hope is the root of unhappiness because it so often leads to disappointment.
What Mark Manson so eloquently explains is how to choose what solvable problems to keep in your life, and to not give a f*ck about the rest of them. We do this in our stories. We give our characters seemingly unsolvable problems, then we walk them through the fires toward solving them. That’s because we, and our readers, want them to find happiness. They don’t always get there, but it is the direction that matters. True in the fictional world, true in the real world.
Writing is one of the best jobs in human history because it is a never ending string of solvable problems being solved. We can solve anything because we can invent the solution without any regard to the laws of physics or the constraints of time and money. Creativity is free. Happiness is a choice.