THE BIG HAPPINESS LIE
One absolutely mind-bending thing is that, so often, the way that we think about happiness is actually what's keeping us from being happy.
Most of us live our lives according to incorrect, outdated or even harmful ideas about happiness. Some of them come with a body (like that your brain is designed to keep you focused on what’s going wrong.) Some of them come from our culture (like that following your passion is the key to happiness at work.) And some of them come from well-meaning friends and family or school, who think that they are teaching us something helpful about happiness, but often end up leading us in the wrong direction.
To live a life aligned with our goals - where we are both happy and positively contributing to others - it’s essential that we learn, first, how to be aware of those myths, and second, how to replace them with the truth.
There’s one really big lie that I so often see getting in the way of people’s pursuit of a good life.
I call it The Getting Lie: the story we tell ourselves about how our happiness is dependent upon what we get.
Today, I want you to reclaim your freedom from this lie by learning the truth that, in fact, pinning your hopes for happiness upon what you get is not a good strategy, and instead, that happiness reliably ensues from the intentional choices we make about how to be, how we see, and how we connect.
The Getting Lie: “Getting this thing I want will make me happy.”
This lie is basically the foundation of modern capitalist Western culture, and the reason that so many of us are unhappy and unfulfilled.
It goes a little something like this:
If I get this thing, I will be happy… If I get this promotion, I will be happy… If I lose those pounds, I will be happy… If I find the right partner, I will be happy… and on and on it goes.
There are variations on the Getting Lie too, ones that you might see manifest in your own life in some way, including:
Getting to the next life milestone will make me happy
Getting that big award will make me happy
Getting what I want from other people (or getting other people to do what I want) will make me happy
Have you noticed in your own life there is never an end in sight to what you want to get, and there is never a lack of belief that this time, it will work? And then also that once you’ve achieved something, you are ecstatic for a little while, but then the feeling fades, and you set your sights on yet another thing to pursue?
Even in the very unlikely scenario that we do get every single thing that we want, even if our life is a never-ending series of positive achievements and results, this will never make us lastingly happy. We have a glitch in our brain that scientists call ‘hedonic adaptation’. We naturally acclimate to experiences, stimuli, pleasures, and achievements the longer we are exposed to them.
Hedonic adaptation is sometimes a blessing. Psychologists have studied people who become paralyzed and find that while their happiness does dip at the beginning, after some time, their happiness actually returns to the level that it was prior to their accident. It helps to protect us and ensure we are resilient to life’s challenges. But the same finding also holds for people who won the lottery: their happiness spikes, and then again returns to their original baseline. We get used to the good, too.
Just remember the last time you bought something and how shiny and fresh it felt for a few days or weeks, until one day, it was just that same old thing you’ve gotten used to. Getting stuff leads to happiness for minutes or hours and very rarely days, but doesn’t deliver in months or years.
This is why pursuing fame and riches backfires and often leaves people far unhappier than they were when they started; multiple studies have found that pursuit of extrinsic and materialistic values is detrimental to well-being. Most people have never learned that this is a lie, and thus continue forward seeking to get more and more, tragically not seeing that the time has come for a different approach.
That new approach comes from being, seeing, and giving.
The truth, part one: “Happiness comes from being.”
Happiness can come from cultivating compassion and wisdom within you. By choosing to discipline your mind to cultivate love and to learn and grow, you will begin to flourish in a way that will utterly transform your life.
How to do it: simply try to love everyone you meet, including yourself; and try to always learn from whatever you are experiencing in life. (Read more about love and wisdom here.)
The truth, part two: “Happiness comes from seeing.”
Studies have shown that the people who rate themselves as happy experience the same number of positive and negative events in their life as people who rate themselves unhappy - it is the way that they interpret and see life that matters most.
How to do it: choose to see and appreciate the experiences of your life, particularly the ones that you might normally breeze past, you will hold off hedonic adaptation and further encourage happiness, for this practice will help you to notice even more things to be happy and grateful for. (More advice here!)
The truth, part three: “Happiness comes from giving.”
Doing a kindness for someone else provides the most reliable momentary increase in well-being for the giver of any intervention studied. Volunteering has been shown to positively impact health, including impacting obesity, blood glucose, blood pressure, and overall longevity. Volunteering benefits are universal across all cultures and age groups studied. Other studies have found that we are happiest when we spend money on other people and that we have more positive emotions when we are doing kindness for others.
The very best way to be happy is to be altruistic.
And remember that your altruism, your compassion, and your kindness extends to all beings, which includes you. Your happiness is just as important and cherished as anyone else’s.
Giving is the greatest win-win that exists in the world.
How to do it: build giving into your life, your job, your daily activities, your relationships, and your values. (Some advice about how to do that in your career here!)
The truth, all put together: Cultivating, seeing, and giving will bring me happiness and change my world for the better.
This is the model I use in my own life: the three-pronged approach that is backed by science and at the heart of our New Happy philosophy.
How are you living this truth today? What resonates most with you? What do you still have questions about? Let us know (via email, Twitter, or Instagram) so we can connect and learn from one another.
Here’s to happiness for all beings, everywhere.
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