Stop Chasing Happiness

Think of a happy memory. Perhaps it’s feeling your toes sink into soft, white sand or hearing the warm crackle of a campfire and looking up to see the sky studded with stars. Perhaps it’s watching your child take a bow at the end of their first school performance or experiencing their contagious excitement as they ride their first bike.

Whatever it is, it’s a fleeting moment frozen in time that you look back on with fondness.

The best of life is a patchwork of these happy moments, yet today’s self-help literature suggests we should be striving for happiness every day. Why? Because people are willing to buy happiness and advice on how to get there. Happiness sells.

The question is: should we be striving for happiness as much as thought leaders suggest?

Happiness is fleeting

I’ve written before about the concept of the hedonic treadmill first explored by Brickman and Campbell in their 1971 paper “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society”. They found that no matter what life throws at us, our mood comes back to the same “set point” over time.

This suggests that chasing happiness each day is a fool’s errand. If we always return to the same set point, happiness can only ever be confined to those fleeting moments and memories. Strive for more than that and we sign up for a never-ending workout on the hedonic treadmill that only increases in intensity as we strive for higher and more frequent highs. Hardly a recipe for lasting happiness.

There’s also a prevailing fear that if we stop chasing happiness, we will be unhappy, with no way to rescue us from bad moods and grumpy days. But it’s easy to forget that we need those neutral and even negative moments in order to feel the full intensity of the brighter ones.

As published psychiatrist Gregory Scott Brown puts it: “emotions such as happiness and sadness aren’t supposed to last. They come and go.”

Enjoying this? Try my weekly 2-minute read for more fulfilling work and better conversations.

Happiness is limiting

Apart from being a dangerous full-time occupation, there’s another reason happiness-seeking is not a golden ticket: for anyone with an ambitious goal in mind, happiness can be limiting, rather than liberating.

Pursuit of happiness is easily confused with comfort. Marathons are uncomfortable, but deeply satisfying at the end. Work can be challenging, but can also provide a profound sense of accomplishment.

Happiness-seeking compromises our ability to challenge ourselves, to grow and to learn. We exist in service of comfort and enjoyment, rather than risky goals or daring dreams.

A friend spent every holiday in the past year getting up early and missing out on family time to write her book. Happiness-seekers can’t justify this method, yet she was striving for something less fleeting and more meaningful and felt an immense sense of accomplishment as a result.

By examining these moments that eventually lead to a deeper sense of satisfaction, sacrificing opportunities for happiness along the way, a better alternative emerges: fulfilment.

Fulfilment is freeing

When we strive to feel fulfilled, more options are open to us. We can feel our feelings — indulging in a grumpy day under a duvet when we need it. 

We can strive for goals that make us uncomfortable, whether it’s a challenging new role at work or trying something outside our comfort zone that we might not enjoy. And best of all, we can collect happy memories whilst releasing the pressure to chase them down on the daily.

Where happiness hides from risks, fulfilment frees us to dare and to dream. The question is, how to focus on fulfilment? There’s lots we can discuss here, but let’s stick to three ways to define and strive for greater fulfilment:

Fulfilment is…

…Living free of regrets

A study measuring people’s fulfilment levels found that one of the most crucial factors was “living without regret.” Brown suggests tackling any regrets we might have by taking stock of learnings we got from the process. If this regret had never happened, what would you not know now?

In her famous Tedx Talk How Death Can Bring You Back to Life, Jodi Wellman suggests that “remembering that we will die is the secret to a well-lived life.” Her approach to banishing regrets is to remember to make the most of the time we have.

…Being adaptable

Adaptability has become such a buzzword, it’s hard to know where to start when we strive to “be more adaptable”. The University of New South Wales’ Andrew J. Martin clears things up for us, breaking down adaptability into three ways we respond to change: firstly, adjusting our thoughts, secondly, managing our positive and negative emotional responses and thirdly, altering our behaviour.

To find fulfilment, we must challenge ourselves to more readily shift our thinking, emotions and behaviours when curveballs are thrown our way. This is encouraging news. Employers have long-demanded a “growth mindset” from employees, so it’s nice to know that it also benefits us as individuals and will bring us greater fulfilment in the process.

…Believing our “why” 

Without a clear ‘why’ behind the decisions we’re making, we’re tempted to ride the highs. It throws us back into the hamster wheel of the hedonic treadmill: chase happiness, however fleeting, and trust you’re on the right track. If we have conviction in why we’re doing something, it’s easy to take the lows along with the highs, and to see it through, even in tough times.

There’s an easy exercise to kickstart this: the five whys. Ask why you’re doing something, then respond “why” five times to get to the root of your motivation. However superficial your reasoning seems to you on the surface, five whys later and you’ll have hit on something deeper.

Life in pursuit of fulfilment doesn’t promise happiness at every turn, but it does promise a lasting sense of satisfaction and contentment, and has the power to minimise the frustration of falling short of happiness in sad moments. As author Dada Vaswani puts it: “true success, true happiness lies in freedom and fulfilment.”

Enjoyed this article? Try my weekly 2-minute read for more fulfilling work and better conversations.