All human beings seek happiness. While we may do it in very different ways, we do search for the things that make us happy. Some of us have found the formula for being content no matter what the tides of life bring to shore, but for most of us, it’s an ever-evolving goal with a less than clear road map to success.

One of the most commons with the search for happiness is the feeling that the next achievement, job, relationship, new house will finally be the last thing we need to be happy. As Alisa Bowman of Spirituality and Health Magazine writes in her post “Cultivate the Habits of Lasting Happiness” this constant yearning for the next life milestone is precisely what prevents us from being happy on a regular basis. If you base your life on achieving milestone after milestone, there will always be another thing that you have not achieved and you will begin to feel like you are running on a treadmill, constantly moving but getting nowhere and never feeling truly satisfied.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t set goals for yourself. One of the best ways to feel satisfied in life is to set realistic goals and then setting out to achieve them. But what should these goals be? Sure, we all want the next big promotion at work and we’d all love to save up for that new car, but will these things actually give us lasting happiness? Probably not.

In the post, Bowman tells us the story of Jason Kurtz, a man who volunteered his time in India to help out at what amounted to a nursing home for Tibetan refugees. The people he helped had been through a long physical and emotional journey, being ripped from their homes and escaping oppression. Because of the trials they underwent, they were satisfied with their current lives. This allowed Kurtz to see what was truly important — their connections to one another.

Your mind will constantly tell you it’s possible to be satisfied by gaining something for yourself, but once you gain it, you realize it didn’t fill the hole you thought it would. The real way to feel true satisfaction is to make connections with other people. Spend time you would have normally spent on yourself helping others or cultivating new relationships and you may just find a sense of contentment, rather than the high and subsequent crash of obtaining the “next thing.”