Are people happy? One man has been asking, and this is what he learned

Five years ago, filmmaker Atdhe Trepca quit his job and drove across the country with a camera, asking strangers if they were happy.

People seemed surprised by his question, but most answered earnestly.

“Ever since I had my kid, I’ve been happy,” one person said. “He makes me happy.”

One man said, “Of course I’m happy.” When asked what makes him happy, he said, “Not much. Everything. Food, lunch. Fresh air. Good weather. Bad weather.”

Another attributed his happiness to eating pickles everyday.

A man who worked as a salesperson and a model in Miami said he wasn’t happy because the pace of city life is too fast. “I don’t feel any sense of accomplishment, I guess,” he explained.

Trepca found the answers enlightening, so he started posting the videos on TikTok.

“Little did I know that a week later, we would have reached 10 million people. And today, we reach about 15 million people a month,” Trepca said.

Back in 2020, it was just him and occasionally his brother helping him out. Now Trepca has a team of videographers and editors who produce social videos for the series, which tries to peel back the layers of what makes people happy. He doesn’t define happiness, or a good life, instead leaving that up to each person.

Each brief interaction begins with the videographer approaching a stranger and asking if they can ask them a question for a documentary. Then, without a lot of preamble, they ask, “Are you happy?”

Often there’s a thoughtful pause before people respond.

“When people get asked that question, they kind of, like, fan through all the things that they’ve been thinking about, all the things in their life. And in that moment, they will decide if those things are defining them as unhappy or as happy,” Trepca said.

“I feel like the difference between happy people and unhappy people is the ability to say, you know what, despite the fact that I’m down on my luck, despite the fact that I might not have things, this sandwich is really making me happy,” Trepca said.

After years of doing this, he has come to believe that happiness is often a choice. Trepca has spoken to people facing terminal illness and hardship but still looking for joy.

“It’s almost like happiness is a muscle, right?” Trepca said. “If you work that muscle, you start to sort of change the chemistry in your brain to turn negatives into positives, and turn unexpected changes in your life into positives. You’re working that muscle. And then eventually, that’s just who you become.”

Fuschia Sirois is a professor of psychology at Durham University in Britain. She’s done a lot of research on gratitude, particularly among people dealing with difficult circumstances, such as chronic illness or pain.

“One of the things that I found in that research was that even people dealing with really distressing chronic conditions can have an optimistic viewpoint,” Sirois said.

She said that this positive mindset can be cultivated and strengthened, and it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“It is about training your mind to notice the positives,” Sirois said. She knows that many people have heard of gratitude journaling and dismissed it, but “it actually is a very powerful tool because what you’re doing is you’re resetting your thinking.”

Both Sirois and Trepca acknowledge that there are serious problems that can’t be changed with a mindset shift. Grief, loneliness, depression and other mental health struggles may require professional help. But even then, thinking positively can help people seek solutions. Hope can mobilize people to take action and seek out help if they need it.

In Trepca’s documentary, there’s a scene in which he asks a man if he’s happy, and he says, “Some days.” The man shares that he has Stage 4 cancer.

“I was happy to make it through the first year,” he adds. He gestures toward his son, whom he’s been watching skateboard. “I’m happy I even get to sit here and watch him do all this and everything, because I never thought I’d see a lot of this.”

Once Trepca saw how many people he was reaching with his videos, he wanted to do something more tangible with his newfound platform. He started working with nonprofits to help them raise money, recruit volunteers and grow their reach on social media.

“We identified a special-needs school that had no means of transportation for their students,” Trepca said. “Our community raised about $60,000 to buy them a handicapped-accessible bus.”

He realized that the following he had built on social media through “Are You Happy?” was a community of people eager to learn how they could make the world a better place.

When asked if he is happy, Trepca said that he was — but not because of his professional success or his TikTok following. He said it was mostly because he feels grateful for his family.

“I’ve got my family, and I think that people maybe take that for granted,” he said. “But if you have that, you really are, I think, in the top 1 percentile of the happiest people in the world.”