The Myth of Happiness

And the power of meaningfulness

We live in a society obsessed with the pursuit of happiness. Articles such as “10 ways to live a happy life” and “Positive thinking is the key to happiness” are usually the most popular content on the web. We fervently believe that certain achievements, such as marriage, kids, jobs and wealth will make us forever happy and that failures and adversities will only lead us to an unhappy life. We spend our entire lives pursuing the romantic partner, the perfect job, the big house and so on. And when fulfilling these goals doesn’t make us as happy as we expected, we conclude there must be something wrong with ourselves.

Although no one wants to live an unhappy life, we often put too much stress on the importance of having good feelings, forgetting that life is made of a full spectrum of emotions and experiences — positive and negative ones. We place too much value in happiness without fully understanding what it is. We create an ideal in our minds, name it “happiness” and spend our whole lives in the pursuit of it. However, happiness is neither a tangible thing nor a permanent state for one to hold on to. And when our ideal of happiness crashes with reality, we get frustrated and unhappy.

Happiness is merely an emotional state: fleeting, temporary and elusive. Like any other human emotion, happiness comes and goes, according to external and internal stimuli. In a single day, I can experience happiness, sadness, anger, fear and surprise. How I respond to each situation and how I deal with my emotions is what determines my behavior and, hence, my attitude towards life.

We should seek a meaningful life, not a happy one. Jennifer Aaker and her colleagues at Stanford Graduate School of Business published a study in the Journal of Positive Psychology in which they showed the key differences between lives of happiness and meaningfulness. According to Aaker, “happiness was linked to being a taker rather than a giver, whereas meaningfulness went with being a giver rather than a taker”. Happiness is about satisfying desires (getting what you want and need), but it has nothing to do with a sense of meaning. As the study points out, healthy people are happier than sick people, but the lives of sick people do not lack meaning. One can find meaning in life and be unhappy at the same time.

If happiness is about getting what you want, then meaningfulness is about expressing and defining yourself. A life of meaning is more deeply tied to a valued sense of self and one’s purpose in the larger context of life and community. Happiness without meaning is characterized by a relatively shallow and often self-oriented life, in which things go well, needs and desires are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided, the report noted.

By seeking happiness instead of meaningfulness, we deny ourselves opportunities for personal growth. Difficult, sad, life-changing situations and decisions do not necessarily make us “happy” in the moment, but they present opportunities for renewal, growth and meaningful change. Instead of focusing on the need to enjoy a few momentaneous pleasures, we should focus on living a fulfilled life, embracing all full range of emotional experiences.

Seeking happiness is a trap. We can never find it, as we cannot eliminate the feelings of insecurity, anxiousness, uncertainty, and unhappiness from our lives. Instead of avoiding the discomfort of negativity, we need to learn to enjoy it. A meaningful life embraces the full range of emotional experiences, while attaining to a larger sense of purpose and value. A meaningful life guides actions from the past through the present to the future, giving one a sense of direction. It offers ways to value good and bad alike, and gives us justifications for our aspirations.

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