A New Way to Find Happiness in Life

Most people spend their lives trying to find happiness in life, chasing goals, relationships, or achievements that promise fulfillment. Yet even after reaching those milestones, many discover that happiness fades as quickly as it arrives.

For years, I wondered why that was. Why do some people radiate peace and contentment while others, with all the same comforts, still feel restless and incomplete?

The answer, I discovered, lies in how we experience life itself.

The Philosophy of Lived Experience

In philosophy, lived experience (a term rooted in phenomenology) refers to life as it is directly experienced by consciousness before we interpret, label, or judge it. It is the raw immediacy of existing or what it feels like to be you inhabiting a moment in real time. 

When Edmund Husserl introduced the concept, he was trying to turn our attention away from abstract theories about life and back toward life itself. It includes the sensations, emotions, and meanings that arise in the act of living. A lived experience is not what happens externally, but the interior participation in that happening: the felt sense of holding a child, standing up for truth, or creating something beautiful. 

It is the meeting point between your inner world and the outer world. This is the place where meaning is born. And the more authentically that experience reflects who you truly are, the more real, whole, and fulfilling it becomes.

Every moment of life is an experience. Some moments are a more genuine experience, flowing from who we truly are, while others are experienced as more artificial, shaped by external expectations, social pressure, or fear.

To find happiness in life, we must learn how to create more authentic lived experiences. Live more of those moments that express our true nature instead of performing someone else’s idea of who we should be.

A Formula for Authentic Lived Experience

Through decades of studying meaning, motivation, and human behavior, I found a way to make lived experience more authentic. I came up with a kind of formula for creating happiness rather than waiting for it to appear.

This formula doesn’t rely on luck or external success. It starts with understanding the inner structure of your life and the part of you that naturally seeks expression. When you live in harmony with that inner pattern, every action begins to feel more coherent and alive.

Happiness then becomes less about achieving and more about being. Not in the passive sense of acceptance, but in the active sense of living meaningfully from your center.

When your inner life and outer life align, each day becomes a collection of authentic lived experiences. Over time, these moments accumulate, forming a stable foundation of contentment. You don’t have to constantly chase happiness because you’re creating it (when you can), moment by moment.

How to Find Happiness in Life Through Authentic Living

To find happiness in life, begin by noticing where your energy feels most natural and genuine. When you’re acting from your Authentic Self, life feels lighter. Time moves differently. There’s a quiet satisfaction that doesn’t depend on anyone’s approval.

Ask yourself:

• When do I feel most alive?
  
• What activities, people, or environments make me forget to check the clock?
  
• What moments leave me with a sense of internal peace, even if no one notices or praises me?
  

Once you begin noticing these authentic moments, a larger pattern starts to reveal itself. You’ll find that your happiest and most meaningful experiences are not random. They follow a certain rhythm, a consistent theme that expresses who you truly are. 

This theme shapes the way you think, love, act, and make sense of the world. In my work, I call this your Life Theme Archetype. It is the underlying current of meaning that drives your genuine self-expression. Understanding this pattern is the key to consciously shaping more of those authentic lived experiences and, in doing so, to truly find happiness in life.

The Four Life Theme Archetypes

Every person expresses their authenticity through a primary Life Theme Archetype: Love, Justice, Wisdom, or Power.

These archetypes are not personalities; they are the deep motivations that give your life meaning. Each one defines a unique path to happiness by shaping how you live and what kind of lived experiences feel most real to you.

When you consciously create more time being and doing from your Life Theme Archetype, you generate the conditions for authentic happiness to grow.

Find Happiness with The Four Life Theme Archetypes

Every person expresses their authentic nature through a primary Life Theme Archetype: Love, Justice, Wisdom, or Power. These archetypes are not personality types or roles instead they are deep emotional and symbolic forces that guide how we create meaning. When you align your being and doing with your Life Theme, you begin to consciously create more authentic lived experiences, and in doing so, you find happiness in life in a way that feels natural and lasting.

Love

BEING: To be Love is to embody compassion, warmth, and emotional generosity. These individuals feel most alive when they are connecting heart to heart, when they sense that others feel understood, valued, and safe.

DOING: To do Love means expressing care in tangible ways by listening deeply, nurturing relationships, or creating art, stories, or environments that evoke empathy and belonging. The more time Love types spend cultivating connection, the more they find happiness in life through meaningful relationships and emotional expression.

Justice

BEING: To be Justice is to feel a deep inner drive for balance and fairness. Justice people experience life through the lens of harmony and are instinctively drawn to harmony in both human and material worlds. They sense when something is uneven, incomplete, or off-balance, whether it’s in a conversation, a political play, a relationship, a piece of music, or a visual composition.

For them, beauty itself is the expression of right proportion. Justice types are often at peace when all the elements (emotional, ethical, or aesthetic) fit together in a way that feels whole and resolved. Their sense of happiness is experienced when their inner state mirrors the universe they wish to create: one of integrity, alignment, and equilibrium.

DOING: Justice expresses itself in two main ways. The first is social: restoring fairness and harmony in relationships, resolving conflict, and standing up for equality. The second is creative: bringing symmetry and coherence into the world through art, design, architecture, music, engineering, or even business innovation. Whether balancing colors on a canvas, chords in a melody, or competing interests within an organization, Justice types thrive when they turn disorder into order. Both forms of expression help them find happiness in life by shaping harmony where there was once imbalance.

Wisdom

BEING: To be Wisdom is to feel at home in the world of knowing. They enjoy seeing how things fit together, noticing patterns, and understanding ideas. Even solid facts and reliable statistics bring them a sense of peace because they confirm that the world makes sense. Their happiness comes from those moments when knowledge clicks into place and everything lines up with clarity.

DOING: To do Wisdom is to explore, study, teach, or communicate insight. Whether through philosophy, science, writing, research or quiet contemplation, Wisdom people find joy in the world of information. They find happiness in life by transforming confusion into understanding and direction for themselves and for others.

Power

BEING: To be Power is to feel purposeful, capable, and directed. These individuals come alive when they sense momentum, when they can shape events and lead others toward meaningful outcomes. Empowerment is their preferred state of being, whether they are empowering themselves or others. They also enjoy being surrounded by their unique tokens of achievement, which can be anything from money to trophies to high-quality items, degrees, vacation mementos, and like to be surrounded by this. Like to be among things that reinforce their sense of power. 

DOING: To do Power is to act. This could be launching projects, building systems, or guiding others to achieve what once seemed impossible. The more they use their energy to make real change, the more they find happiness in life through fulfillment, agency, and movement.

Each archetype holds its own way of creating authentic lived experiences. The more you consciously be who you are and do what aligns with that truth, the more happiness and contentment naturally follow.

The Challenge of Modern Life

It’s easy to lose touch with this authenticity. From childhood, most of us are taught to fit in, follow the rules, and measure success by comparison. Over time, we internalize those voices, such as the demands of family, culture, and society until they drown out the quiet rhythm of our Life Theme Archetype.

We become efficient, productive, and reliable, but we forget how to feel real.

To find happiness in life, we must reawaken the part of us that already knows how to live truthfully. Happiness is not found at the end of the journey; it is created along the way through a steady accumulation of authentic lived experiences.

Each time you live from your archetype, through the doing and the being, you align with your Authentic Self. Over time, these moments form the living pattern of a life well lived.

To find happiness in life, stop chasing it and start creating it. Live each day as an act of authenticity and happiness will no longer be something you pursue. It will be something you embody.