Most People Don’t Pursue Happiness – But They Think They Do
Understanding this paradox will help you immensely.
If you ask most people if they’re trying to be happy in their lives, they’ll say yes. They’ll say they’re not fully there, but they’re giving it their best shot.
In almost every case, this isn’t true. They are not pursuing happiness.
Why? Because when asked a separate question: “What do you want from life?” people offer a multitude of answers:
“I want to kick butt in my career so I can make a lot of money and have a nice life.”
“I want to get into Yale.”
“I want to get married and have kids.”
“I want to reduce malnourishment in Africa.”
The one answer people seldom give?
“I want to be happy.”
The above are all things people pursue because they think they will make them happy. And none of them does. Not one.
Going to Yale won’t make you happy
Sure, when the 18-year-old gets that letter in the middle of April telling her she’s been accepted to Yale, she’s thrilled. Over the moon. And then slowly but surely that elation dissipates.
So she sets her sights on the next thing she thinks will make her happy: Doing well at Yale so she can go to Harvard Law School. She gets into HLS and is elated.
And…And…And…Thirty years later, after Supreme Court clerkships, successful runs for Congress and the Senate, she becomes president of the United States. And she’s elated…
Until U.S. troops are attacked somewhere and she needs to decide whether to retaliate, something that could send America to war. The fate of hundreds, and possibly thousands, of young American men and women, and their families, is now in her hands.
Suddenly, she’s never felt worse in her life.
Manipulating the world doesn’t work
The point? Most people don’t live their lives in direct pursuit of happiness. They spend their lives trying to manipulate the external world in a way that they think will make them happy inside.
Be successful in a career so I can feel happy inside.
Get married and have a family so I can feel happy inside.
Save the world so I can feel happy inside.
The things we pursue are influenced by a mélange of three ingredients: our upbringing (parents, siblings, teachers, friends), societal influences and our actual genetic makeup. Unfortunately, most of these pursuits do not have happiness as the primary motivation.
What is happiness?
At this juncture it’s worth defining what happiness is. Though definitions abound, I think most people would agree that happiness is a feeling of energy bounding throughout the body in conjunction with an overall state of inner peace.
Most of us experience this energy from time to time. When you win that big athletic event. Or get that promotion. Or get that letter from Yale. Or see that beautiful baby girl come into the world. But eventually life grabs ahold of us and the energy stops flowing as we fall back to earth.
Don’t get me wrong, you can do ALL of those things and still be happy. But if you’re pursuing them because you think THAT is what will make you happy, it won’t work. It can for a while, but never for the long haul.
The late great Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, captured this dynamic best when he said:
“Many people think excitement is happiness. But when you are excited, you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace.”
All those influences on us, societal, familial and otherwise, coalesce to form the ego. And it is that ego that drives us to go to Yale and be “big” and do lots of other things that the ego insidiously tells us will make us happy.
But it’s wrong. The ego is always wrong.
Which isn’t to say it’s not strong. In fact, it’s so strong that it can convince us to do things even though we know they won’t make us feel that peaceful sense of well-being.
The miserable senator
The best example I know of is my own. If you had told me in my twenties that I could be a United States senator, but that I’d feel anxious and uptight all the time, I would have taken that deal in a heartbeat. No questions asked. That is how badly my ego hungered for recognition and adulation.
At this point, many reading this will say, “Fine, I agree. Good things happen to us and we feel happy, then they wear off until the next good thing happens. That’s life. There’s no such thing as persistent, sustained happiness. To say otherwise is pie-in-the-sky fantasy.”
Happiness is attainable
No, it’s not. We can be continuously happy.
How do we achieve that? The key is to pursue happiness straight on, and not by devoting our energies to manipulating the world in ways we think will get us there.
Which leads to the $64,000 question: What must we actually do to go at happiness straight on so we can get to that place where we feel vibrant, positive energy and a sense of peace inside…not just some of the time, but MOST of the time?
Sorry to sound like a broken record, but the answer is that we need to let go of our egos. Again, it is those egos that cause us to look outside for happiness.
The takeaway
Once we chip away at the ego, there’s no need to look outside for happiness. Because it’s already there, inside.
It’s always been there. It’s just that we built up these ego dams that prevented that joyous energy from flowing.
Our life’s work is to chip away at those dams so that the joy within can flow freely.
Those darn dams...
Damn egos!