The Pursuit of Happiness

Ernest Hemingway once told the world, “happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” It sure seems true, given that happiness, or our idea of what it consists, eludes us despite everything we do to attain it—and we sure do everything we can. There isn’t anything that people do which are not ultimately in the name of seeking happiness. We are born crying for it, and thus spend everything chasing it. However, the biggest obstacle to our happiness is not particularly that it is elusive, but more because we’ve got the concept of happiness all wrong. It has been often said that happiness is not an endpoint, but a process, which is partly true, although it does little to change what they think happiness is: a pure, extreme joy, almost akin to an antimatter explosion. Despite our inability to attain it, we have never stopped trying to inch a little closer.

The world is obsessed with happiness, in a way or another. Most people would believe the world’s biggest obsession to be with money and material success, but that is really a misguided endless chase to happiness. We think money brings us happiness, because money buys us everything. It buys us the things that fulfill our basic needs like food and lodging, but it also buys us status symbols that create some semblance of belonging and esteem. Looking at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, this means we’re pretty close to the dream!

Unfortunately, as many people can identify with, the obtaining of status symbols never stop, and people find themselves as far away from happiness as they were before. That does just does more harm than good to everyone, having spent all that effort and time making sacrifices and earning money to gain those objects only to still not achieve the super-ordinate goal. In order to make themselves feel better, people just buy more stuff (look at the throngs of people at our local IT fairs!) and revel in that momentary escape from the inability to achieve happiness. Thus, we could say that escape, rather than money, is what the world is obsessed with. As much as escapes are our obsessions, our obsessions are also our escape.

Escape becomes the only way to achieve a semblance of happiness, because reality is trying. Reality is plenty of trying and not succeeding at all things that contribute to the one true goal of happiness. As such, the absence of awareness of that emptiness omnipresent in reality is the only way to make living seem more bearable. We escape in so many ways: in work, religious TiVo-ing, marathon running, grocery shopping, chasing celebrity news, criticizing the government, endlessly scrolling through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. People need escape like they need air, to the point of not standing being alone.

Even when going out to run errands do they need someone to tag along and distract them from their own thoughts. In the event that they ever need to eat a meal alone, they would take to their devices and watch a video so that it’s almost like someone else is there. Escape is almost like an expulsion of thought from the mind, changing our focus from conceptual things to tangible ones, which brings us back to Hemingway’s quote. If we stop thinking about the happiness we cannot attain, we will stop feeling the void of not having it. Even then, escaping from reality becomes an obsession, what we long for. It becomes a constant chase.

Coming back to the saying about happiness being a process, happiness is the proverbial carrot dangling in front of us. It is not even the carrot, but merely chasing the carrot that constitutes happiness—not that the chase makes us happy, but that the chase simply is happiness. As hard as we try, we never really obtain our notion of happiness. That sort of pure, clean happiness exists only in fleeting moments that lose all significance in the face of pain. Even if we think we’ve found happiness, it takes so much effort to hold on to it and stay happy—as Elizabeth Gilbert wrote, “you must take a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.” That just makes people feel jaded all over again. Happiness doesn’t really exist as we know it. Happiness acts just as motivation for us to live our lives and get things done, rather than a state of being for us to achieve.

To provide a different perspective, think about how depression is a result not of losing what made the person happy, but more so of losing the hope that they could be happy. Apparently, the hope of achieving the goal is much more important than actually reaching it. That sounds awfully cynical, but it doesn’t have to mean that our lives have now been rendered utterly meaningless. We can still make the best of this life and do meaningful things. We should not lose hope either, for a semblance of our concept of happiness does exist—just with none of the grandeur we imagine.

Yet another saying we have commonly heard is that it is the small things that truly matter. That is exactly where happiness lies: in the things we do to escape reality. It exists in a good cup of coffee, a good movie, or a good workout at the gym. The only barrier to happiness we have, is merely our expectations of happiness. Stop looking for an eternal happiness and start living it in the littlest joys. Do all the same things you used to do, but change the way you think about them. Don’t see them as vessels to happiness—like Albert Camus said, “you will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of.” Just enjoy the vessels for what they are. Take the happiness in front of you when you are with your loved ones and revel in it, not before it or after it or how it compares to other people.

You don’t even need to do crazy, novel things. As boring as having a meal together sounds, it can make your day just spending that time with a person important to you. Enjoy the happiness of striking things off your to-do list or doing things for the people you love so that they’ll have an easier time. When you truly enjoy the happiness in small things, it becomes so much easier to be happy and overcome difficult times.

It may seem ironic to have a pretty grim outlook on something like happiness, but lowering expectations can only mean a lesser chance of disappointment. If we challenge what we have been told and change the way we think of happiness to something smaller and therefore more within our grasp, happiness will naturally descend upon us. Happiness may be an obsession, an escape, and an endless chase, but those do not have to take on negative connotations. Look out for happiness in the tiny manifestations of our obsession for escape, and we will find ourselves well on the way to the happy life we always wanted.