What is happiness and why does it make us happy? There are several things in life that make me happy, but I never really noticed them until I thought about them. Is it the people I'm around? Or is it the activities that I'm apart of? For everyone this is a very different answer, but happiness is a feeling. According to Merriam-Webster the definition of Happiness is "a state of well-being and contentment: joy or a pleasurable of satisfying experience". As you can see this could mean really anything that we perceive to make us happy.