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It sounds like the least controversial goal one could have. Be happy. Pursue it, prepare for it, build a life around it – what could possibly go wrong with wanting the one thing everyone agrees you should want?
As it turns out, it’s a lot. And the people who are likely to find this the hardest are the ones who try the hardest.
For more than a decade, researchers have been experiencing the same strange result: the more a person values and pursues happiness, the less they tend to have.
Not because the pursuit of happiness is bad, but because the pursuit itself, directed directly at the goal, quietly gets in the way.
Psychologists call it the paradox of happiness, and once you see how it works, much of today’s grief begins to make sense.
The lesson that started the trouble
A clear display is almost uncomfortably easy. In basic research, people who strongly advocated the goal of happiness appeared, on average, to beUnderneathyou are happy, and prone to disappointment, than people who hold you at ease.
Some previous research suggested that people keep a diary of the good things that happened to them each day. The result was exactly the opposite of intuition: participants who wanted to be happier judged their daily activities more harshly, not less.
A pleasant afternoon was not pleasant enough. A good night fell short of what it should have delivered. The high standard that came with caring so much about happiness turned ordinary good times into little failures to be happyenough.
That’s a puzzle engine in a nutshell. When happiness becomes a self-determined goal, you put a judge behind every happy moment. And the judge is not satisfied at all.
Why you intend it destroys it
There are a number of different ways in which direct pursuits are self-destructive, and they overlap.
First is the problem of standards. Valuing happiness too often tends to overestimate it, which means reality always pales in comparison. And disappointment itself is an unpleasant feeling, which is the exact opposite of the goal. The more you insist on feeling beautiful, the more you will realize that you are not, and the worse it is to realize.
The second is subtle and you don’t know it: caution.
To pursue happiness, you have to constantly check if you already have it, and that check takes you out of the experience you’re trying to enjoy. Part of you lives this moment; the other half stands aside with a clipboard, askingam i happy right now? does this work?
Some of the most common ways people push away good feelings are silently distracting them in this way. You can’t be in the moment when you’re busy researching, and most of the happiness lies within.
Third time. The pursuit is especially painful when you “should” feel the most joy – a celebration, a wedding, a long-awaited vacation – because those are the moments that carry the most expectations.
The gap between how good this should feel and how good it feels is yawning big when the pleasure stakes are high. That’s why so many weather events come with loose, confusing thunder.
Happiness behaves like sleep
The most useful way to understand all of this is that happiness is a rare category of things that recedes when you approach them directly.
Sleepiness is obvious cousin. Lie in bed and work hard to sleep and work hard to keep you awake; the effort does not match the result. The same goes for trying to relax on command, trying to be spontaneous, trying to force laughter.
All of these are conditions that come as products of one another, not as a result of a direct attack. Direct yourself and produce only a strong, self-conscious effort to aim – the exact opposite of the loose, absorbing state you want.
Happiness is in that family. It comes when you are busy with something that draws you: a piece of work, a person, a problem to be solved, a project that takes you out of yourself. The second you stop and ask if the attraction is making you happy, you’re already out of it, and the pleasure you were producing is diminishing in your hands.
An honest warning about who and where
It would be an understatement to say the pursuit of happiness backfires on everyone, everywhere. The research is more interesting than that, and worth being honest about.
Most of the conflicting findings come from Western, private settings, where the “pursuit of happiness” often means a private, self-centered project –minegood wind,mineand to do well, he is employed alone.
In many group cultures, where happiness is understood as something social, tied to relationships and shared moments, the pursuit of the same looks different and less rewarding in the same way.
The problem, in other words, may be the pursuit of less happiness than loneliness, self-examinationformthe pursuit takes on a culture that treats happiness as a personal activity. The result is real and well reproducible, but it is not a universal law of human nature. It is a conditional pattern.
An indirect method that really works
So if you can’t catch the joy by running into it, what do you do – give up and hope it floats away? Not really. The research points to the real strategy, and the trick is to steer it a little in the direction of the target.
One method with real evidence behind it is what researchers call prioritization: instead of chasing a sense of happiness in the abstract, you intentionally build your days around activities that tend to produce them for you. A weekly walk with a friend, an hour in the morning with a good book, a dinner that you actually cook.
You are not aware of your happiness levels. You arrange the conditions and let the feeling do it for itself, like the result of a well-chosen afternoon rather than the object of a frantic search.
Difference is everything. Appreciating the excitement keeps your attention on the scoreboard. Good prioritization keeps you in the game. Man produces man forever asking if he is happy yet; the other produces a person who is more involved in something good than he can think of to ask – which, not automatically, is what happiness really looks like inside.
So the surest way to miss out on true happiness is to stare at it, insisting that it arrive at a certain time and definition. And the surest way to find it is softer and rounder than the self-help slogans suggest: stop taking your own emotional temperature, point yourself to a life full of things to do, and let happiness do what it has always done best – express itself quietly, unannounced, while you pay attention to something else.
It wasn’t meant to be something you chase. It’s something that catches you when you quit.