A long time ago I etched it into my mind that happiness is not a goal in itself but a part of who we are. Happiness is one more emotion we feel, and so it is not something we can obtain but a place in the mind where we come to live.
The problem is that most people go looking for happiness, probably with the wrong idea of what it is. Sometimes as something material, and other times as a kind of “nirvana” where, if we do A, B and C, happiness will come to us. Then we will sit down and ask ourselves: “Am I happy now?“
But happiness is like anger or rage. Someone who is very angry does not stop to ask whether they are angry. They simply live in their anger at that moment, even if they are not aware of the rage they are feeling. Then moments of pleasure come along, or the reasons for the anger are resolved, and the anger goes away.
A very self-confident person does not ask every day whether they are self-confident. They simply are.
So happiness is not a goal to be reached but a state of mind that arises when a certain set of circumstances and experiences come together in life.
That is why today’s marketing seizes the opportunity to sell products that will make you happier. Buy this and you will be happy. Take this course so you can succeed, and then you will be happy. At other times happiness is sold as a synonym for pleasure. And the two really have nothing to do with each other.
That is also why advertisers know that happy people are not their target customers. Advertisers launch campaigns aimed at unhappy people, the ones who think buying things will make them happier. In other words, padded bras are bought by women who are not happy with their natural breasts. Someone who does not like their nose gets a nose job. A person who cannot afford a luxury car often buys one anyway when they need that car to feel more admired, more respected or simply to appear to be more than they are.
Most people who are looking for happiness are not really looking for happiness but for pleasure. So they will find pleasure, but they will not be happy. You can buy a new car, you can lose weight, you can have more sex or go to the cinema to see a film you were dying to see. You can fill your life with hundreds of pleasurable moments and still not be happy overall.
Although pleasure certainly seems to be linked to happiness, it really is not the same thing.
For example, a drug addict is constantly seeking pleasure in every “fix”. It gives him pleasure, but the addict knows what it is, and he is not happy, even if he thinks he is with every fix.
Pleasure is a married man sleeping with a stunning woman. A real fantasy for that man, but when his wife finds out and divorces him, he is devastated as he realises he has thrown his marriage away for a single moment of pleasure that let the happiness he lived in slip away.
Various studies have shown over the years that people who “chain” their happiness simply to material and superficial pleasures end up more anxious, more emotionally unstable and less happy in the long run.
Experiencing pleasure is necessary, but it is not enough if we want to achieve happiness.
What happens when we compare our happiness with other people’s?
We do not all need the same things to be happy, and we do not all share the same definition of success. We know that a lack of money can make us completely unhappy, but an excess of money will never make you happier if you did not already live in happiness before you had a lot of it.
Happiness is now sold as a race to success in which a person has to be self-employed, start a company and have 2 million in the bank, buy a good car and a luxurious house. The thing is, getting all that will not guarantee you happiness. In many cases it guarantees a kind of living death, especially when the success came quickly. If that was your standard of success and happiness, you will probably find that you still have not found happiness, because you confused numbers and material things with being happy.
And of course, that person’s happiness would collapse if their financial empire ever collapsed, whereas great entrepreneurs have discovered true happiness during their biggest professional failures, completely changing their view of the world and of life, and rebuilding their empire with an entirely different mindset.
An old businessman used to say that a person finds true happiness when they realise that everything material they own could disappear overnight. At that moment you think: “What would I have left if that happened?” The answer is that you would be left only with the real happiness found in the people who do not leave because of a bad business decision (your wife, your children, your parents, your friends…).
Happiness is good humour.
It does not matter what you achieve in life if you lack a sense of humour. A bitter person with 100 million is a bitter person. Full stop. A person with a good sense of humour is usually a happy person. And that person will be happy with 500 euros and with 100 million. Obviously, as their financial problems disappear, their worries will shrink, and so they will be even happier. But that person already lives in the raw material of happiness.
Happiness is living the life you want to live.
The life you want to live is not always the life other people think you should live. If your dream is to be a civil servant and fit your lifestyle to your salary while you enjoy time with your loved ones, go ahead. Your dream does not have to be my dream, because your capacity to cope with failure may not be the same as mine.
Maybe starting your own company would bring you more problems than happiness. Perhaps your talent lies in helping an entrepreneur build their company. And there is nothing wrong with that, because no successful entrepreneur has ever built a company alone. They have needed people who were willing to work for others and lead a life free of all the headaches an entrepreneur deals with every day.
So what is happiness?
Happiness also involves things like the love and affection other people feel for us. A person who feels lonely is rarely a happy person. Once you feel loved and feel that you love, all that is left is the professional side.
In your professional life, do not limit your happiness to a goal or target. Ask yourself what you want to be and how far you want to go. Draw up a plan and start taking steps towards that goal. Fighting for your goal should be happiness in itself, and whether or not you achieve it should not make you unhappy, but give you the drive to keep fighting for that goal or another one.
But if you make the mistake of tying your happiness to achieving a goal, you are programming your own unhappiness: you will be unhappy while you fight for that goal, and you will discover you are still unhappy once you cross the finish line. Enjoy the whole process. If you cannot enjoy it, you have chosen the wrong “process” or the wrong path.
So, to answer the question in the title, “Why should we stop looking for happiness?“, the answer is: “because happiness is not something you have to look for, nor something you can find. It is something you either have or do not have, and having it does not depend on external factors.”
Often, unhappy people can become happy by changing their beliefs about life and shifting their focus to what they have rather than what they lack.
Further reading
- 14 ways to be happier (backed by science)
- 16 things you should know about life, success and happiness
Featured image: Nikolay Argunov, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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