If You're Chasing Happiness, It's Running, and You're Stressing.
It's not a thing to acquire. Can't buy it off a shelf and wrap it up.
Be happy. Be happy, BE HAPPY.
You hear it all the time.
Use to be we were all about the spouse, and the family, and the 2.5 kids. Give us a good job, and a green lawn, and a mortgage on a house with a picket fence, and we were happy.
We were selfish to want anything else.
Fall in line, pay your taxes, go to church, and die.
This was the definition of happy.
The American Dream. Stuff. All shiny and packaged and exported. Sending a flush of dopamine out into the world readily available to anyone with a credit card.
And why not?
You deserve to be happy? Of course, you do. It’s guaranteed right there in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, isn’t it?
The ‘pursuit of Happiness’ is slotted in as an inalienable right along with Life and Liberty. Don’t kill me, let me think I’m free, and I’ll chase whatever happy-inducing idea that’s marketed to me this week.
But you know. It’s not that easy. And a new study shows that thinking of happiness as a goal, or something to be acquired, can lead to stress and anxiety. Certainly not the emotions we are seeking when we think of happiness.
Do we even need to be happy?
Yes. Happiness is not fuzzy-wuzzy, head-in-the-cloud speak. It has real world consequences. Happier people perform better at work, live longer and report better mental health.
Happier people just flat out live longer.
Happiness comes with purpose and a smile. And therefore, happier people tend to be more focused on the means and not the results. You work to be better, to make the team better, to educate yourself, and to stay connected to family and friends.
Do these traits create happiness or does happiness lead to a more positive attitude that leads to success? Actually, both. It’s a chicken and an egg thing.
But since we cannot just grab and hold onto happiness, we need to focus on the work, on being better as a person, and as a friend, and as a co-worker. We focus on what we can control. This leads to success. This leads to happiness.
Happier people are more successful people. That’s happier first. Successful people - at least monetarily successful people - are not always happier. But happier people are more successful.
Happiness is not a goal you can check off.
Goal setting may help you accomplish certain key events in your life, financial security, career advancement, weight loss, the acquisition of new skills. But it won’t help with happy. A goal must be measurable, quantifiable, and timely.
Happiness can be experienced but it can’t be measured or captured. It’s wispy. Always floating away and back from one day to the next. Elusive. If your goal constantly keeps just out of reach it creates anxiety and frustration.
Plus, there isn’t an end in sight for happy. It becomes a time challenge. The more time you spend on trying to be happy the more you realize that to be happy is not a constant. You will be happy and sad and frustrated throughout your life. And all these emotions are perfectly normal. But the end goal of “happy” keeps floating away.
Setting goals and pursuing them without a realistic chance of reaching the goal leads to stress.
So just scratch it off your to-do list and move onto the next goal.
Don’t let others define happiness for you.
Everyone will tell you what happy is. Your mom, teacher, friends, grumpy old man at the keyboard.
But letting someone else define happiness for you also leads to, well, unhappiness. It’s not a shining gold piece twinkling in the sky to be snatched. It’s not your AI chat bot whispering in your ear telling you everything is okay and your fortune is sitting around the corner from your next properly worded prompt or YouTube short video idea.
Regardless of your definition, it’s not happiness that’s the problem. It’s the pursuit of Happiness.
Stop trying.
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities. — Aldous Huxley
This is very anti-hustle culture. If we try hard enough and work hard enough, we will achieve all our heart’s desires. Sorry, not true. Especially when we come to happy.
Because happiness is so ephemeral, when we chase it, we tend to chase pleasure, especially sensory pleasure. Sensory pleasure is immediate and temporarily fun. It’s easy to get. But it leads to a desire for more.
More, more, more.
One tequila shot is fun and may make you happy. Ten tequila shots are dangerous. More is not always the answer. Chasing desire is not the answer.
Stop chasing.
Goals vs. Purpose and the impact on happy.
Goals and purpose support each other. Try defining your goals clearly. Goals should be achievable and create an action guide for a daily schedule.
Purpose is a how-to-book for your life. What are your values? How will you respond to troubles, to that rude person in line behind you, to the manager that suggests a promotion is coming for those who support him?
You want to be a writer, or financially secure, or a world-traveler, or a firefighter. You want to contribute to a better world through charity work, or teaching children, or adults. These desires should be the foundation of a purpose.
You will write an hour a day, or never spend more than you make, or learn a language, or get physically fit. These are goals and measurable.
Happiness is driven by purpose not goals. Goals are stepping-stones towards purpose.
Purpose aligns goals which leads to happiness.
Goal by goal.
Self-Help vs. Self-Development.
We’re all screwed up on some level. Maybe not screwed up but incomplete. Life takes constant work and, like finding happiness, we never seem to finish.
That’s because we don’t.
They say beyond the mountains are more mountains. — Haitian Proverb via Edwidge Danticat
Instead of buying into the self-help world, let’s switch towards self-development. Learn a new skill. Invest in yourself. Read. Then write.
Self-help is someone else telling you that you are insufficient. Yes, there may be nuggets of wisdom sandwiched between paragraphs of judgmental trope but not if you don’t take action. If it doesn’t lead to change for you, it isn’t worth your time.
Self-development is action. You choose to improve yourself and learn more. You chose to study and to read. Newfound knowledge is essential to growth and accomplishing ambitious goals.
Self-development, like happiness, is ever-evolving and on-going.
Want to be happier? Buy more stuff.
Stuff won’t make you happy. Shopping won’t make you happy.
Sorry. But bullshit. A new study says that buying can lead to happiness. But there is a secret to it. You must buy things that help you achieve your goals and fulfills your purpose.
Example: If you’re a chef a new set of knives or a special pan might help you perform better and make you happier. If you’re a photographer a special lens might help. If a traveler, it might be a new efficient suitcase that neatly fits in the overhead bin.
The key is buying something that supports your goals. And you must buy it right. Don’t go into debt to buy it. Save. Add it to your goals and create a separate slush account to fund your purchase.
This is how you buy for happiness.
You need the wolf-pack.
It takes a village to raise a child?
Yes, but it takes a tribe to make for a healthy, happy life. The longest running study on happiness and longevity shows that maintaining social relationships — both family and friends- is the number one factor to a long and happy life. No worries for us introverts out there. Social is not life-of-the-party stuff. It’s meaningful relationships that are maintained over the years.
It’s a game of pickleball with the neighbors. It’s a regular coffee date with friends or a standard poker night. It’s a big family dinner with everyone around the table once a month.
It’s even a group text with your core group of friends from college. Social is social. It’s communicating with others and gets you away from all that introspective navel gazing on whether you are happy or not.
Get happy. Maintain your relationships. Or start some new ones.
The stages of life
Life runs in cycles. We graduate. We get a job. Everyone gets married around the same time, has kids, gets divorced (not all but a lot), remarries, retires, etc. Recently, I’m in the ‘Have you had a happy life?’ stage. My wife asks, my friends ask, my parents ask.
The answer is the same to all.
I don’t think about happy. Never have. I think about family and friends and improving myself. I take pleasure in my relationships with friends, and my relationship with my work, and with self-development. Some days I’m happy and smiling. Other days I’m grumpy and pissed.
And when I think about it, that makes me happy.
If you want to check out some great reading list and see which books have influenced, surprised, educated, and entertained me check out my book shop here. The lists grow monthly and I don’t recommend any books I haven’t personally read. Thanks for the read.