– The Happiness Scale

by TM Garret Schmid
Januray 12, 2026

“What is happiness?” The question just bursts out of my mouth, unprompted, in the middle of driving. We are heading back from installing an LED video wall somewhere in Mississippi, and I am behind the wheel of a U-Haul truck. My helper is sitting in the passenger seat, scrolling on his phone or staring out the window or doing whatever people do when they are just ready to get home after a long workday. But he can’t run away. He is trapped. The truck is moving, the road is long, and I just caught his attention.

He looks at me. “What?”

“Happiness,” I say again. “What is happiness? Like, really. What is it?”

He thinks for a second. “I’m not sure.”

I nod. Good. That means he is actually thinking about it, not just giving me the first thing that pops into his head. I keep driving, thinking, until my thoughts have shaped into words.

“Schopenhauer framed it as: happiness is the absence of suffering. I am making it even simpler. Happiness is the absence of unhappiness.”

“Hmmm,” responds my helper, half tired, half interested. But he keeps listening.

I continue and explain that this ties in with what my therapist told me just recently when we talked about my resistance to labels and boxes others trap us in. When I asked myself for the quadrillionth time: Who am I? And usually I come up with these labels and then refuse to wear one of them because I don’t want to be totally defined by one. I am so much more than that.

My therapist said that these are just like material things. When you get stripped of all of them, what’s left when you lost everything, that’s who you are.

That’s like prison. You lose everything in the material world including all relationships. I’ve never been to prison. But my helper has.

“This absence of all this clutter. All the things that make you feel unwell, unhappy, suffer, stress. When they are gone. In case of prison involuntarily – but it’s still you who’s left. Nothing but you. And a lot of time to find yourself. Some have their come-to-Jesus moment or ‘find Jesus in prison.’ So did my helper. He turned his life around. No more crimes. No more drugs, no more alcohol. His probation sentence is almost over. He is sober and supports three children that are not his own, like they were. He works hard and is aware of his second chance.”

Silence. Only the tires hitting the road make a noise.

“So, when you did drugs,” I question him, “when you felt this high, literally. That was your 100% of happiness, right?”

He nods.

The External Scale vs Your Personal Scale

I explain it to him the way it formed in my head, probably a few weeks ago when I was thinking about drug users and depression and why some people fall harder than others.

Imagine it like a pain tolerance scale, where the physician asks you, “On a scale from 1-10, how much does it hurt?”

Without knowing your pain tolerance he won’t know what 8, for example, feels like. It could be 4 on his, because his pain tolerance is higher.

And that is how this happiness scale works. Just like in the example with the pain tolerance there are two scales. There is an external scale. A hypothetical scale of human neurochemical capacity. Zero to 100, where 100 is the maximum a human brain can experience in terms of pleasure, joy, contentment, whatever you want to call it. Zero is rock bottom. All the way down, where you hit after the fall from your high.

I guess rock bottom is universal. Everybody hits the same zero. It does not matter who you are, where you are from, how much money you have. When you hit rock bottom, it feels the same.

But then there is your personal scale. That is the scale you actually live on. It is still zero to one hundred, but it is based on your lived experience. Your 100 is the happiest you have ever been. Your zero is the worst you have ever felt. And here is the key – your one hundred might only be a 50 on the external scale or on someone else’s personal scale. But you do not know that. Because to you, it is one hundred. It is the top. You have never experienced anything higher, so how would you know there is more?

My helper is quiet now, turning this over in his head. “You’re right.”

The Deep Fall

“So, if somebody uses drugs,” I say, “and they artificially hit number x on the external scale, it feels like one hundred to them. That is their new maximum. Their personal truth. Their experience.

“But when they crash, they crash all the way back to universal zero. The same zero everybody else hits. But the distance is bigger. They fell from much higher. Somebody who never used drugs, who maxed out at fifty on the external scale, only falls 50 points. Same rock bottom. Different fall.”

He gets it. I can see it in his face.

“You know the saying: The higher you climb the deeper you fall?”

“Yes!”

“That is why drug users get so depressed,” I say. “It is not just that they are addicted. It is that they know what it feels like to be at 100, and now they are at zero, and the distance is unbearable. Even something that is 100 to us may now only be 30 to them. And to them 30% feels like nothing.”

Elevating Your Zero

We drive in silence for a while. I am still thinking. Because the real insight is not about drugs. It is about what happens when you learn to change what zero feels like.

Most people are trying to climb higher. Get to one hundred. Chase the peak. But what if the answer is not climbing? Instead of chasing the next drug high, what if the answer is to raise the floor? Flip the script. Make rock bottom not only bearable but the status quo. A feeling that feels right, instead of wrong?

I think about my own life. There was a time when I needed intensity to feel alive. Drama, conflict, chaos, falling in love, falling out of it, winning, losing, always chasing something. That was my one hundred. But I also crashed hard. Over and over. And every time I crashed, I hit the same zero everybody else hits. Rock bottom. Darkness. The feeling that nothing matters and nothing will ever be good again.

But something shifted. I do not know exactly when. Maybe it was therapy. Maybe it was Judaism. Maybe it was my recent divorce. Maybe it was just getting older and tired of the rollercoaster. But I started learning to sit in the emptiness. The zero. Not trying to fill it with something. Not running from it. Just sitting there and realizing that maybe emptiness is not the enemy.

Empty Doesn’t Mean Depression

Often, we think of depression, or that life is absent when we hit zero. We feel removed. Like all life energy is sucked out of us.

Only the highs can give us energy. Dopamine. The rewards. And empty feels uncomfortable because whenever we hit it, we fill it quickly with whatever we can find. Food, entertainment, relationships, nicotine, alcohol, drugs. We do anything, just to avoid this emptiness, that sits there staring at us when it corners us in. That feels uncomfortable. Not because it is bad. It’s because we are not used to it. The unfamiliar always feels uncomfortable. We fear what we don’t know.

When I learned to sit in it, realizing that this is how we were born, when I started being aware and consciously maintained this, the ‘me’, it felt like illumination. Even empowered. I am in control of what goes in there and what goes out.

And when I did that, something strange happened. The zero started feeling different. Not worse. Better. Like it was elevated somehow. I was not running anymore. I am not cluttered. I am empty. So now when I get filled with something small, it will feel like everything. That’s when a 5-point rise from zero can feel like 100!

Now I can sit on my front porch with a cup of coffee and my dog lying next to me, and it feels like 100. Before I had this realization it felt like 0.

Not because the external experience is objectively amazing. But because my baseline shifted. My zero is higher. So, it takes less points, less effort, less clutter to reach joy.

Raising The Floor, Not Chasing The Ceiling

We pull into the U-Haul lot. The job is done. I park the truck, turn off the engine, and sit there for a second before we get out.

“The goal is not chasing highs,” I say. “The goal is raising the floor. Because when zero feels peaceful, it does not take much to be happy. You do not need to win the lottery. You do not need to fall in love. You just need to wake up and realize you are okay. And that is enough.”

“In a religious context you could say: God reached down and elevated you from zero.”

My helper nods. He grabs his phone, opens the door, and climbs out of the truck. I sit there a little longer, staring out the windshield at nothing in particular.

I don’t know if God elevated me, or if I did it myself. The Universe. Karma. Whatever you believe in. But the result is the same: Happiness is not what you think it is, and when you are elevated you will never feel zero the same way.

Thoughts, criticism, or just want to learn more? E-Mail me at official.tmgarret@gmail.com – I’d love to hear from you.