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 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 perfect romantic partner, material comforts, bigger house, etc. 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 importance on good feelings, forgetting that life is made of a full spectrum of emotions and experiences — positive and negative ones. We place too much value on 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. Happiness comes and goes like any other human emotion, 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 showing 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.
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” at the moment, but they present opportunities for renewal, growth, and meaningful change. Instead of focusing on a few momentaneous pleasures, we should focus on living a fulfilled life, embracing its beauty and terror.
Seeking happiness is a trap. We can never find it, as we cannot eliminate the feelings of anxiety, uncertainty, fear, and sadness 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.
“Go to the Limits of Your Longing”
by Rainer Maria Rilke
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.Give me your hand.
The eighteenth century understanding of happiness was the attainment of a worthy life. It's something to strive for but never get. That's the beauty of the Declaration of Independence's pursuit of happiness. In God's gift of free will, he gave us the ambition to strive for a more perfect life; to aspire to the good. To find meaning in it.