I Was Wrong About Happiness All My Life

In fact, most of us are. When, where, and why did we go so fundamentally wrong?

Happiness, the ever-elusive thing that every one of us is constantly pursuing and something that millions of self-help “gurus” constantly spout advice on.

It wasn’t long ago that I discovered that almost everything I knew about happiness was wrong. In fact, most of us are wrong.

When I was bullied in middle school, my self-esteem hit rock bottom and I fell into depression. It wasn’t long before I recovered but the bullying left something deep within me.

A need for constant validation. If someone told me I looked good, I did. If someone told me I was right, I was.

“Seeking validation was the name of the game, the numbers mattered more than anything else and it was the numbers I chased.”

I also needed more — more friends, more clothes, more achievements, more followers on Instagram, more likes, even more relationships, and overall more validation.

I just had to look and make others think I was confident, happy, cheerful, and “cool”. What others thought of me mattered more than what I thought of myself. It was my sort of “making up” for being bullied.

Seeking validation was the name of the game, the numbers mattered more than anything else and it was the numbers I chased.

“Caught up in the numbers when it came to anything, the thing itself had ceased to matter.”

I had a lot of “friends”, friends that liked to constantly put each other down, make each other miserable, and exhale toxicity and negativity into the air.

Instagram clout mattered so much that I would spend hours scrolling and refreshing my stats every few seconds after posting something. I even used apps to gain fake followers and fake likes.

Funnily “more” never made me happier. The more I had, the more I wanted and caught up in the number when it came to anything, the thing itself had ceased to matter.

More Isn’t Always Better

If I only chased higher numbers, I could never have enough as there are infinitely many numbers and as a result no highest number.

Neither did the numbers actually matter nor did what others think of me. What actually mattered was what I thought about myself. How had I not realized this earlier?

“When you depend on people to build you up, they will also have the power to break you down. You don’t need their validation to know your worth.”

What mattered wasn’t the number of friends, relationships, achievements, or the number of things but it was the friends, the achievements, the relationships, and the things.

“We get so caught up in adding things that we forget just how important it is to subtract.”

I don’t have a lot of friends now, but the ones I do are invaluable. They instill positivity, uplift me, and make me feel great overall. Every goal I set is meaningful, not just something to increment a number.

We also get so caught up in adding things that we forget just how important it is to subtract — negative people, toxic relationships, worries, hate, stress, and the like.

The Hedonistic Treadmill

When I was bullied, I thought I would never be happy in life and when I fell in love for the first time, I thought I had found true happiness. Funny that over time, both have had barely any bearing on my happiness.

“This is where we are primarily wrong — we chase temporary spikes instead of trying to elevate our baseline of happiness.”

Compare the scenarios of winning a million-dollar lottery today versus getting involved in an accident and losing a leg. How different do you think your degree of happiness in both cases be after a year or so?

Zero. Yes, zero difference. Some pleasure and maybe a temporary happiness spike in the former while some suffering and a temporary dip in the latter.

But over time. Your happiness will return to its baseline. This is what’s called the hedonistic treadmill in psychology.

This is where we are primarily wrong — we chase temporary spikes instead of trying to elevate our baseline of happiness. No matter how fast or how much you run on the treadmill, you will end up in the same place.

It Was Never a Feeling

We keep pursuing happiness and want to feel happy all the time but the funny thing is that you can never “feel” happy as happiness isn’t a feeling, never was either.

Happiness is a state. Pleasure is a feeling. This is the fundamental distinction we fail to make.

When you eat your favorite food, achieve something, have an orgasm, watch your favorite movie, or laugh at a joke, you experience pleasure and not happiness.

“Nothing external can make us happy, only our perception of them can.”

You can never feel happy, you can only “be” happy. It’s an internal thing. You can be suffering on the surface and be happy. You can be having the time of your life and be unhappy.

Nothing external can make us happy, only our perception of them can.

So looking for happiness in money, relationships, achievements, success, etc. is futile. All you would be doing is running blindly on the hedonistic treadmill.

“Happiness is a state. Pleasure is a feeling. This is the fundamental distinction we fail to make.”

Will to Meaning

So if happiness is internal, how do we achieve it? I mean that’s a good question to ask, right?

Do we forcefully mold our perception of things to be happy? But we would only be deceiving ourselves that way.

What is it that drives the human spirit and induces a state of happiness?

This is one question that psychology has been trying to answer for decades and the three Viennese schools of psychotherapy have different answers.

Will to Pleasure by Sigmund Freud

Sigmond Freud is probably the most famous or more accurately infamous psychologist of all time. He says that the human psyche is composed of three things — the id, the ego, and the superego.

The id is the animal instinct part, the ego is the realistic and conscious part while the superego is our moral conscience. The ego has the tricky job of maintaining a balance between id and superego.

“In fact, as we saw earlier, pleasure needn’t necessarily equate to happiness.”

Freud says that it’s pleasure that we seek and we go to great lengths to prevent even the slightest discomforts. So it’s the id that reacts first, he says.

Freud was a pioneer and the creative genius that went into these ideas is commendable but his ideas have been largely disputed and “disproven” by researchers. In fact, as we saw earlier, pleasure needn’t necessarily equate to happiness.

Will to Power by Alfred Adler

Alfred says that we are born into the world with a sense of “inferiority” as we are born weak and powerless. As we dislike inferiority, we spend all our lives trying to overcome it or by striving for “power”.

“But perfection is an unreachable ideal and as we saw earlier, constantly striving for more is nothing but running on the hedonistic treadmill.”

So he says we are motivated by a will to gain power, attain goals, better ourselves, and constantly strive to reach perfection.

But perfection is an unreachable ideal and as we saw earlier, constantly striving for more is nothing but running on the hedonistic treadmill.

Will to Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, and a holocaust survivor pioneered the idea that humans are motivated by a will to meaning — we strive to find meaning and with meaning, any circumstance is made endurable.

“He who has a why to live for can endure almost any how” — Nietzsche.

Frankl endured suffering that most of us can’t even imagine. He was locked up, starved, physically tortured, surrounded by death, and at the risk of dying himself.

“I am a firm believer in “will to meaning” but neither can I prove it nor can I disprove the other two as with all things psychological”

Finding meaning and purpose in his suffering got him through. His purpose was reuniting with his loved ones, developing his life work — logotherapy, and helping other prisoners find their own purpose.

I am a firm believer in “will to meaning” but neither can I prove that it is correct nor can I disprove the other two as with all things psychological.

The Takeaway

Happiness is a mystical thing and we can never completely understand it. We can only strive to improve our understanding of it and become less and less wrong about it.

Happiness is a state of mind and chasing external things can only bring your pleasure, not happiness. True happiness comes from your perception of things. As Viktor Frankl says,

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

I believe that meaning is what we are motivated by and without a strong sense of purpose in any goal you set and meaning in any action you take, neither the achievement of the goal nor the action will grant you happiness.

So don’t chase numbers, get off the hedonistic treadmill, find meaning in everything you do, have a strong sense of purpose in life and try to perceive things in a positive way.

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