I had scheduled myself to write a post about how chasing happiness makes it impossible to find it for this week. After all, what would be more appropriate when I am also reading Will to Meaning by Victor Frankl0? But as a twist of fate this week was probably the worst timing for writing it, as I have been having a rough time lately. The first draft of this ended up being the most dishonest, vacuous and pretentious piece I have ever written.
The piece was trying to convince me more than anything, that I was doing the right thing, right now. The honest truth is, I don't actually know. I was trying to answer questions of how to find the meaning that brings us happiness, when I neither have answered the question for myself, nor truly believe it can be answered. Philosophers have been trying to answer the question for millennia and still there is no universal answer. How could I hope to solve it all in one single blog post?
While there are wrong ways to try and become happy, there may not be one right way.
From a purely scientific perspective happiness is just an emotion. And an emotion is a series of chemicals being released in the brain that make us feel a certain way. What this means is that happiness is fleeting, not a state of being. We can't just be happy all the time. I think Inside Out has done a better job than any other post, book or class in explaining this.
Because of all this I think the pursuit of happiness is folly. Not only is it a singular burst of happiness we are seeking as a constant, but in saying that we pursue happiness we give ourselves absolutely no hints as to what it is that we actually want. It's about as useful as answering "I don't want pizza" when someone asks you what you want for dinner. It sounds like an answer, but it doesn't really get you much closer to figuring out dinner.
Frankl makes a very useful distinction between the reason to be happy and the cause of happiness. "Reason is always something psychological or noological. Cause, however, is always something biological or physiological." In other words, cause is something we do. And reason is something that affects us. In life, we only have control over our own behaviour1 and actions. If we focus on the cause we can control both the stimulus and the response. So, naturally, if we make happiness the focus of our attention, i.e. something that informs our actions, we will inevitably end up chasing the actions that cause that happiness in the short term. And you know what is then the logical conclusion? Drugs and alcohol, because they guarantee the serotonin boost that generates happiness. But when that stimulus ends, so does our happiness, and we sink even deeper into the negative feelings they let us avoid. I find it hard to consider that true happiness, but I have seen people go down that path.
There's an adage attributed to the British economist Charles Goodhart that says "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" as Goodhart's Law. While this adage is often used in the context of economy and management, it applies in life too. When we make happiness the goal, it stops being a useful measure of how good our life is. Because if happiness is the goal, what's to stop us from taking unhealthy shortcuts? After all, that is the goal, right?
Goodhart's law, as described in multiple analyses that even predate the economist, has the following consequences: we as humans are particularly goal-driven; and are generally quite lazy and can, on occasion, be quite smart. This leads to us finding new and novel ways to achieve our goal as quickly as possible. After all, why bother with the things in the middle if they don't help us reach our goal?
What the economics principle says, combined with the fact that we have no way to know what will be a reason for our happiness, is the idea many philosophers and psychologists have said before. "Happiness as a goal leads to unhappiness". Because not only are we setting ourselves an unreachable goal, but in doing so we lose the value happiness gives us -- positive reinforcement. Thus, happiness should be the metric, not the goal.
If our actions bring us happiness, we get further signal that we are doing the right thing insofar as a right thing exists. For example, I didn't move to Korea to be happy, but I know I made the right decision because I am happy here. Am I happy all the time? No. That would be weird. But, on the whole, I am happier than I have ever been in London. And that is what matters.
It is very easy to come up with ways of how not to be happy. In fact there's an entire book dedicated to it. But that brings us no closer to knowing how to be happy.
There are so many people who are selling us the key to our happiness. And the ones who can be the most adamant about the "only way" to be happy can be our parents. And, spoiler alert, it doesn't work. How do I know? Well, I did everything I was supposed to, and still wasn't happy. I went to an amazing university, in a competitive, good-ROI degree, got a job at multiple big, well-renowned companies, did that job well, and still... well... nothing... I did that hoping I will be happy, because others told me it would. I, myself, never had the time to stop and think what would make me happy. It was just the intellectual version of "I will be happy when I buy that expensive car", only to wonder why I am not happy when I do finally buy the car.
Sadly, no-one else can tell you how to be happy, otherwise we could all be happy. What makes someone happy, may not make another person happy.
The most important thing I did for myself in the last year, is to not base my happiness on whether what I do right now is going to succeed or fail. Success is not entirely in my control2. And I can still enjoy the process, even if it does in fact fail in the end. I grew up being told that everything I do must be meaningful and successful, but when we fail to find meaning or success3 does that make things not worth doing?
We can more easily dismiss something as meaningless than we can find meaning in that same thing. I go to the gym to lift heavy things and put them back down. What is the meaning in that? Yet it's the thing that makes me feel good most reliably, every single time I go4. I love theatre dearly, passionately, and fully. It doesn't mean that I will put any effort into becoming an actor. I don't need to be successful at theatre. I am allowed to just like it, without getting involved in the theatre scene. Even when people ask me to justify that, I don't owe them any explanation, because it really doesn't need to have a meaning. It just is.
Sometimes, when I struggle, I try hard to remember what made me happy as a child. Because as children we are actually much better at just being happy. It's all the unhappy adults telling us that we're "doing it wrong" that eventually gets to us. Sometimes happiness just is. Not something we pursue, nor something we can predict.
I, for one, tried to find meaning, and failed. In pressuring myself to find meaning in the things I did, I only made myself more miserable. So, nowadays, I just try to focus on what I can do, and as much as I can, allow happiness to find me. Because I know happiness is fleeting, but if I need to give it meaning, then I am making it a lot harder to feel happy from the meaningless tiny little things that could otherwise make me happy. I can never predict when someone's smile will make me happy, but they sometimes do. And I could try and find some meaning as to why that particular smile made me happy, intellectualising my happiness away, or just let it and enjoy it when it does.
0 Which was recommended to me as a replacement to reading Man's Search for Meaning. I had to stop reading that book as it was giving me nightmares.
1 Here stoics overlap with existentialists a bit, but I much prefer the stoic take on the issue
2 My touch of stoicism
3 Usually in the eyes of others
4 To the point where I hate my rest days, even though I know they are important.