Not feeling happy doesn't necessarily mean we're unhappy. Sometimes we're just OK.

Most of us have plenty of days when nothing is wrong, but nothing feels especially great, either.

Sometimes it's the pressure to feel happier, rather than how we actually feel, that makes us feel worse.

Imagine someone asks you at the end of an ordinary Tuesday, “Are you happy?”

You think about it and decide that nothing is particularly wrong. You go through the checklist in your mind—work was fine, you answered some emails, picked up groceries, made dinner, watched television. There was no crisis, and you aren’t sad, angry, anxious, or distressed. But happy? Maybe not exactly.

That answer can feel strangely unsatisfying in a world that emphasizes the pursuit of happiness. Even an everyday saying like “happy camper” is usually assessing whether we’re just OK, not necessarily whether we’re actually happy. Instead of accepting that we’re OK, or pretty neutral, and that this neutrality may even be our baseline, we may start wondering why we aren’t happier. Somehow, a perfectly acceptable emotional state has become something we feel compelled to put under a microscope and analyze further.

We tend to talk about our emotional lives as though there are two basic categories: happy and unhappy, even though there’s an enormous amount of territory between them. We can feel neutral, OK, or simply unremarkable—neither particularly good nor particularly bad. I suspect many of us spend quite a bit of time there.

Neutrality can become more complicated when happiness is what we expect to feel. If happiness is the standard we use to judge everyday life, then “I’m not happy right now” can begin to sound an awful lot like “I’m unhappy,” even though the two don’t necessarily mean the same........

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