German gives us the word 'Gluck', which to this day means both happiness and chance. 'Hap' is the Old Norse and Old English root of happiness, and it just means luck or chance, as did the Old French 'heur', giving us 'bonheur', good fortune or happiness. It is a striking fact that in every Indo-European language, without exception, going all the way back to ancient Greek, the word for happiness is a cognate with the word for luck. Language reveals ancient definitions of happiness.
It seems that when we want to be happy all of the time, we can forget that the pursuit of happiness can entail struggle, sacrifice, even pain. This has been liberating, in some respects, because it asks us to strive to improve our lots in life, individually and collectively. Today we think of happiness as a right and a skill that can be developed. People prior to the late 17th century thought happiness was a matter of luck or virtue or divine favor. But it is also a relatively recent idea in the West which dates from the 17th and 18th centuries, a time that ushered in a dramatic shift in what human beings could legitimately hope to expect in and from their lives. We can be happy, we tell ourselves, teeth gritted. I think it is probably fair to assume that most Americans today consider happiness not only something that would be nice to have, but something that we really ought to have-and, moreover, something that's within our power to bring about, if only we set our minds to it.
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