How Not to Pursue Happiness

Happiness HackMind Hack
Written By Aidan Park
 
 

Your happiness not only makes your life experience a hell of a lot more fun but it also makes you a hell of a lot more fun to be around. Your happiness will result in better job opportunities, more friends, more money and even better health. However, most of us have been conditioned to believe that the biggest contributor of our happiness is our circumstances.

One of my favorite art forms to draw life lessons from is reality television. There is one show in particular that epitomizes this conditioning. Toddlers & Tiaras is a show about little girls whose parents enter them in beauty pageants. It’s pretty normal to watch an episode of this show and find the parents of the contestants saying something like this, “Stop crying. Be a good little girl and win. Mommy promises to take you to McDonalds for a Happy Meal. Won’t that be fun? Now, smile for those judges!”

This kind of behavior is so prevalent that I don't even need to point you to a particular episode. Even if you were never entered into a beauty pageant before you started retaining memories, you'd probably watch a scene like this and cringe. How many times were you forced to wear uncomfortable clothes for the benefit of providing some weird sense of pride for your parents? How many times were you urged to hug a creepy family member or stranger in order to avoid seeming rude? How many times were you bribed into doing something you didn't want to with some sort of treat? Although Toddlers & Tiaras provides a plethora of extreme examples of this kind of pressure and manipulation, most of us have experienced it to some degree.  

Obviously most parents don’t do these things out of malice. This pressure also comes from authority figures that we don't have the power to defy without punishment. We carry the same conditioning into adulthood. We pressure ourselves into staying with jobs we hate or relationships that are unhealthy. We spend ridiculous amounts of money on clothes, shoes, haircuts, make-up; anything that makes us appear to be as happy as we're told we're supposed to be. We soothe the discomfort with external rewards; treats, food, alcohol, etc.

I have personal experiences around this that I detail in my book, The Art of Being YAY. In the book, I talk about how I lost my partner of five years. The loss was obviously devastating. To get through the grieving process, I tried to make myself happier by changing my circumstances. I tried powering through and working too much. I tried dating. I even tried being "good". Essentially, all of these attempts to feel better led me down the path to bad relationships, panic attacks, too many drugs and overall terrible feelings. (I'm waiting for Lifetime TV to option the rights to my story, haha but, seriously).

We tend to think that our happiness lies within our fortunes and misfortunes. It turns out that we have an average happiness level that we operate under. Our happiness levels can fluctuate when good and/or bad things happen to us. Then those levels return to our personal averages. There is a study on this linked below. To summarize for the sake of this post, if you won the lottery, your happiness level would shoot up. Then once your new lifestyle became normalized, your happiness level would return to what it was before. Similarly, if you became paraplegic, your happiness level would lower until you became accustomed to your new circumstances but would return to your natural average.

Of course, our circumstances affect our happiness levels. Our fortunes and misfortunes affect our psyches. However, the answer to making permanent change to your happiness level doesn't lie in your career, how hot your girlfriend is or how perky your tatas are. Also, relying on external "prizes" to feed your internal happiness level is dangerous. First, the benefits to your happiness levels are temporary -- you'll always need more. And second, we can lose jobs, physical objects and even people.

The only thing you are guaranteed in life is the body you live inside. Yet, sometimes you don't even get to control that. So, what's left? The answer is you. The uniqueness that you bring into the world that nobody else has. Call it your mind, your spirit, your psyche, whatever. As much as you may love your family, the only person in your life who is with you 24 hours a day, is you. Being around a person who hates themselves all day, every day, is exhausting. 

To raise your average level of happiness, be forgiving of your faults and the faults of others. Find one thing to like about every person you meet, even if you can't like anything else about them. Your career shouldn't be the largest factor in your happiness level but since it's what you most likely spend the most of your time and energy on, find a job that fulfills you rather than just pays the bills. 

People aren't prizes, but people you connect with on emotional and intellectual levels enhance your life. We are often surrounded by people we feel obligated to due to their social status or what they can do for our careers. You aren't your job. You don't have to be working all the time. Allow yourself the luxury of enjoying your social life. 

The more you focus on your internal happiness, the less reliance you'll place on external accomplishments. Raising your happiness level is a long-term goal. Understand that it may take a while to accomplish all of these things. In the meantime, monitor your internal dialogue and make sure that you are saying kind things to yourself. Empathy starts at home. 

 


 

 

Aidan Park
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