The Pursuit of Happiness
A quasi-scientific approach
Introduction
The pursuit of happiness has been a common goal of the human society over thousands of years. It is even enshrined in our Declaration of Independence — most Americans will recognize “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’’ as one of our core human rights.
Now, there are a few among us who are happy most of the time either by nature or they are satisfied with their lot in life or for some other reason. This article is not for you. You are already blessed! You can stop right now and spend your time doing whatever you were doing before you clicked on this thread.
If you are still reading, then let’s explore some of the reasons that obstruct our pursuit of happiness. We use a simple construct that assumes that for many situations, we feel happy when an outcome meets our expectations. In this construct, we start with a desire or a goal — this could be a desire for anything (say a promotion or getting a thousand views of this article or something else). The desire leads to a process by which we try to accomplish this goal — the process is obviously related to the goal. The construct can be summarized in Figure 1.
At the end of the process there is an outcome which could be a simple binary outcome — either we accomplished the goal or we did not accomplish the goal. Or it could be a more complex outcome such as we partially met the goal or we met the goal but not in the time frame we (implicitly) had in mind. Note that there are a couple of key factors that also influence the process — the desires of other people and random events in the world — we will discuss these further.
Mathematically, the construct can be expressed as:
Outcome = f(My Effort, Other People’s Desires, Random Events)
We are not going to estimate a statistical model here for the construct (I can feel your disappointment!!), but just use the construct as a way to organize our thinking.
Expected vs. Actual Outcome
Based on our construct, when our expectations for the outcome do not match the actual outcome, we are not happy. There are several reasons for this. Some of these are in our control and some not in our control.
The main element within our control is the effort that we put into the process to accomplish our goals. We may put in the right amount of effort or not. If we don’t put in the effort, then obviously fuhgeddaboudit. Often we put in the effort but not the right type of effort. It is easy to see this by means of an example. Say our goal is to get a promotion to a manager and we think that working hard at our current job is the way to get the promotion. We can work as hard as we can on our current job but if the future job requires other skills (such as an ability to manage a project or a team) and we don’t work hard on those aspects, then the likelihood of accomplishing the goal goes down. So we put in the effort but it was the wrong effort.
The areas that are not in our control are other people’s desires and random events. However much we don’t want to accept it, the fact is that most processes that take some time have other people involved in it. These other people have their own desires, their own processes and their own time frames. These may or may not be consistent with our goals, processes and/or time frames. These other folks are independent actors and we often make the mistake of assuming that they will always act to further our goals.
Finally, we cannot under-estimate the role of random events. We may want to get promoted in our job but if the employer decides to discontinue the line of business where we work and lay-off everyone in our department, then the goal is not getting accomplished (at least at our soon to be ex-employer). There can be other random events — the Corona virus pandemic to take a recent example — that could have an unusually large influence on our goals.
The overall result is that there is an randomness associated with the potential outcome of any process. By not recognizing this inherent uncertainty of the outcome, we set ourselves for a potentially “unhappy’’ situation. We can, however, prepare ourselves better by realizing that we need to make the right kind of effort, understand other people’s role in the process and their own goals, and accepting that there are things that we simply cannot control.
We can even begin the process of not tying our happiness to an outcome of an uncertain future event. This process can be short for some and take years for others. Or, we are able to do this for some situations but not for others. In any case, we can begin to understand the reasons for not being happy in some situations.
Closure
This article, hopefully, has provided a reasonable explanation for some of the common disappointments that we encounter during our lives. It is not meant to be a deep, philosophical piece with a solution to achieve happiness but simply an aid to our pursuit of happiness.
