Happiness. How many times have we said that all we want is to be happy? At the end of the day, all we want is to find our happy ending, to reach a place where we are happy with ourselves and our lives. But happiness shouldn't be our end goal. There's so much more to life than finding "happiness”.

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Yet, for centuries, philosophers, psychologists, researchers, and even economists have theorized, researched, and defined happiness. There’s an entire industry built around the concept of “finding happiness” - filled with books, life coaches, and products promising us to get closer to “happiness”. But what exactly is happiness? What is it that we are aiming for? And why does happiness seem to be missing from your life?

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What is happiness?

Happiness is an emotion. It’s a state of being, but like any emotion, it’s not constant. It’s temporary and fleeting, ebbing and flowing with every moment we experience throughout the day. Think of it as a by-product of pursuing particular activities or as a signal of satisfaction and contentment with specific ongoing life experiences (Delle Fave et al., 2016).

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The happiness paradox

Once we start chasing happiness, we often find ourselves in a happiness paradox, which means that if we set out to become happy, we are more likely to find ourselves depressed and further away from actually becoming happy (Krauss Whitbourne, 2023). Because when we try to pursue happiness, we often focus on what we don't have, which also implies that we are currently not happy and that happiness is something that is somewhere far off in the future. So, we start wanting to eliminate anything that gets in the way of our happiness - everything negative - until we find ourselves in this endless loop of never-ending life and self-optimization. And that is what, in the end, causes anxiety, frustration, and unhappiness.

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When happiness becomes a permanent goal, we set ourselves up for inevitable disappointment. It places enormous pressure on us to constantly feel good, making any deviation from this state seem like a failure. The truth is that obstacles and hardships are part of our mundane experience, and there’s no one on this planet who hasn’t experienced them. What's more, experiencing negative emotions helps us to maintain a stable baseline of happiness in our lives; without them, we wouldn't be able to appreciate the good times in life, and denying them can eventually lead to emotional dysregulation, meaning we experience negative emotions more deeply and for longer periods (Ford et al., 2018).

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Allowing ourselves to experience all of our emotions, even those outside of happiness, is what actually brings us one step closer to understanding ourselves and becoming resilient to the storms that life throws at us. Eventually, we will also realize that emotions are just emotions; we can choose how much value we place on them and how much we allow them to take control of us. But this is only possible when we embrace our wide emotional catalog and become comfortable feeling all of our emotions.

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Achieving goals doesn’t guarantee happiness

Moreover, we tend to tie milestones to our understanding of happiness, such as our career, relationships, and wealth. Yet, so often we find ourselves empty or indifferent once we have reached them, because what we tend to forget is that humans can easily adapt to new circumstances, meaning we become used to our new life circumstances, and the short high we felt won’t satisfy us long enough to stop chasing after a new dream - hoping the next achieved goal will  finally make us happier. And in turn, we become restless with a desire to be and become more.

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So stop focusing on the end result. It's the process of getting there that brings us happiness. All the small steps, the recovery from setbacks, and the successes along the way are the things that fulfill us and bring us closer to ourselves. The end result doesn't define our happiness; the journey does.

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Experiencing happiness is a deeply personal and subjective experience. Yet, in today's world, it's easy to get lost in the belief that being a certain way, doing certain things, and owning certain things will make us happy, but the truth is that the things that make other people happy may not necessarily define your happiness. You might experience happiness at a certain moment, but the person next to you might not feel the same, or you might watch someone and wonder why they are feeling so happy about it. So, it's our individual task to figure out what it is that makes us happy. It's also important to remember that what brings happiness to us can change as we grow and evolve. The things that made us happy as children, teenagers, or young adults may no longer bring the same joy because they no longer collide with our current lives and needs. And the same may be true for the things we thought might make us happy a year ago, six months ago, or a few months ago, because what makes us happy also changes with life moving forward.

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Ultimately, the one thing you should take away from this is that you shouldn’t make happiness a constant chase, because you’re chasing something that is not meant to be everlasting. Instead, consider it a fleeting yet beautiful part of being alive. Embrace it when it comes as part of being on a journey to personal growth and resilience, but don’t make it the sole purpose of your existence.

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Sources:

Delle Fave, A., Brdar, I., Wissing, M. P., Araujo, U., Castro Solano, A., Freire, T., Hernández-Pozo, M. D. R., Jose, P., Martos, T., Nafstad, H. E., Nakamura, J., Singh, K., & Soosai-Nathan, L. (2016). Lay Definitions of Happiness across Nations: The Primacy of Inner Harmony and Relational Connectedness. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 30. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00030

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Ford, B. Q., Lam, P., John, O. P., & Mauss, I. B. (2018). The Psychological Health Benefits of Accepting Negative Emotions and Thoughts: Laboratory, Diary, and Longitudinal Evidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115(6), 1075–1092. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000157

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Krauss Whitbourne, S. (2023, October 12). What the Happiness Paradox Means for Your Daily Joy | Psychology Today. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-at-any-age/202309/what-the-happiness-paradox-means-for-your-daily-joy

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