To Be Happy in 2021, Do This

December 31, 2020

To Be Happier in 2021, Do This

by Stephanie Harrison

Over the course of your life, you have been told — over and over again — that the path to happiness is to focus on fulfilling your own needs first and foremost. Whether it comes from well-meaning family members or cynical advertisers, we have come to believe that self-focus leads to fulfillment.

We take these messages very seriously, because happiness is something that matters so much to each of us. Aristotle argued that happiness was the over-arching goal of human life, and if someone professes to know the secret to it, you better believe we’ll sit up and listen a bit more carefully.

Unfortunately, what we have been told is, quite simply, completely incorrect. Selfishness will never lead to lasting happiness. The pursuit of your own needs never ceases and never fulfills, with a new problem to solve that pops up each time. The accumulation of money, power, fame, and prestige will never fulfill you; it simply creates an escalating need for more, more, more of that, a gaping hunger that never stops demanding more.

In 2021, I urge you to try something different: try focusing instead on what you can do for others, rather than what you can do for yourself. It is the ultimate win-win: when you help other people, you increase your personal happiness significantly, which in turn makes you want to help people more. The people or situations that you’re helping benefit, in turn, from your gifts and your strengths, making them better off and leaving the world greater because you were here. And isn’t that what we all want: to leave the world a bit brighter because we lived, to know that we mattered?