Happiness
Every time we step into a bookstore, we are often confronted by an ever-growing
column of best-selling self-help books with “happiness” in their titles. This highly
profitable business feeds on man’s desperate search for happiness. That vague
entity, that for some takes the form of perfect grades on a test or perhaps a salary
raise, consumes our lives. Ultimately, happiness has become every man and
woman’s goal in life yet even after all these years whenever we try to describe
happiness, we inevitably fall short of words. Many of us waste our entire lives in the
pursuit of happiness without even knowing what we are actually looking for. What is
happiness and is the pursuit of happiness a futile exercise?
Victor Frankl in his bestselling novel “Man’s search for Meaning” described
happiness as a realization of one’s purpose in life, the meaning of his existence.
Frankl wrote "it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting
something from them; something in the future was expected of them." Unfortunately,
the idea seems to be at odds with our culture, which is more interested in the pursuit
of individual happiness than in the search for meaning when in reality it is the search
for meaning which ultimately leads to discovery of inner happiness. Frankl wrote, "it
is a characteristic of the American culture that, one is commanded and ordered to 'be
happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to
'be happy.” Research supports this idea as it has shown that having purpose and
meaning in life increases overall well-being and life satisfaction. On top of that, the
single-minded pursuit of happiness is ironically leaving people less happy. "It is the
very pursuit of happiness," Frankl knew, "that thwarts happiness."
This idea was proposed since the first philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome:
that it’s our relentless effort to feel happy which makes us miserable and sabotages
our plans. And that it is our constant quest to eliminate or to ignore the negative side
of life- the insecurities, failure and sadness – that causes us to feel so unhappy in
the first place.
Others link our great misunderstanding of what will make us happy to our
unhappiness. Despite the well-established fact that humans are bad at predicting
their futures: we often give our happiness identities like a new car or an expensive
dress while blatantly miscalculating the actual impact of that experience on our
mental state. This misunderstanding finds its roots in our ignorance of what truly
makes us happy. We often mistake the momentary satisfaction of our desires as our
happiness. Our happiness is like a piece of clay and it is our job to sculpt it into
something, we just need to know what. It is perhaps the personalized nature of
happiness that stops us from actually understanding what it is. In that sense,
happiness can never be described, it is each man’s journey.
Our desperate search for happiness derives from two evolutionary impulses: avoiding
pain (which we associate with danger and the risk of death) and seeking gratification
(which helps ensure that our genes get passed on). Paradoxically, it turns out that
pain and discomfort are critical to growth, and that achieving excellence depends on
the capacity to delay gratification. Pain necessarily comes with the territory. We cannot
grow without subjecting ourselves to it.
Moreover, humans often make the blunder of placing their happiness in comparison
with others and social media plays a huge role in this. Through a study at Indiana
university it was found out that we often compare our happiness with others.
The study showed that the people who saw their friend’s photo on social media who
seemed more successful and happier than them were 86% more likely to feel
unhappy. Scientists describe this as the “Happiness Paradox”, a person shown
someone more successful and happier than them compares his happiness with them
and automatically feels depressed. Here’s the confusing bit, the person in the photo
shown happy is not actually happy and often only projects it on social media.
Therefore when the man compared his happiness to the person in the photo, he was
not comparing it to anything and turned unhappy unnecessarily.
Yet this conclusion does not have to be depressing. Instead, it points to an
alternative approach: a new path to happiness that entails taking a different stance
towards those things most of us think oppose the very notion of happiness. This
involves learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity and becoming familiar
with failure. In order to be truly happy, it turns out, we might actually need to be
willing to experience more negative emotions – or, at the very least, to stop running
from them. The key to happiness lies in an earnest acceptance of life’s pain.
