Member-only story
The Paradox of the Pursuit of Happiness
The harder you try to achieve it, the less happy you’ll be.
Whatever happiness means to you — life satisfaction, joy and contentment, meaning and purpose — you’re pursuing it, aren’t you?
Because you want to be happy, don’t you?
Of course, you do. Would you ever say, I’d be worse off if I were happier? If you did, people would look at you sideways and suspect you were confused by the meaning of the word.
But, there’s a paradox to pursuing happiness:
The harder you try to achieve it, the less happy you’ll be.
The dark side of pursuing happiness
We’re often bombarded with the message that to be happy in life we need to set and accomplish goals.
And this is sensible, isn’t it? We all want things, like a university degree, a good job, a pet raccoon. So, we set goals and map out how to achieve them because we all have an intuitive sense that once we achieve those goals, we’ll be happier. And, if we achieve a sufficient number of the right things, we’ll finally have arrived at our proper place in the world — we’ll finally be enough.
