The Age-Old Trick That Keeps Happiness Out of Our Reach
3 Reasons We Get Happiness Wrong
I had terrible aim at “trying” to be happy.
For a long-time, I equated the word happiness with the superficial idea of a life endlessly filled with pleasure, sitting on the beach on a tropical island in which money, sex, and adoration were like air.
Yes, I was a bit of a delusional hedonist.
I spent years chasing money, fancy job titles, affection from women, and admiration from my friends and colleagues.
Yet, my life still felt empty at times. I would find myself on occasion looking up at the sky, thinking that there has to be something more than this.
I sensed that within me existed an inner resource for deeper peace and well-being that was beyond compare to anything ephemeral.
This is the type of happiness we all yearn for, whether consciously or unconsciously — everyone from your grumpy co-worker to the wealthiest and most successful person you know to even the most tyrannical dictators.
Yet it always seems to evade us.
3 Reasons We Get Happiness Wrong
1. “The pursuit of happiness.”
We learn from a very young age whether from our caretakers or our education system that life is about doing as much as we can so we can accumulate tons of accolades and lots of material things so we can one day “arrive.”
Hell, even the US constitution defines happiness as something that’s attainable by explicitly mentioning that every person is guaranteed the right to the pursuit of it.
The keyword here is pursuit.
This implies that our natural state is the opposite: that perhaps we were born unhappy and must work really fuckin’ hard just to get a crack at having a life of happiness.
And while we’re chasing this “lofty dream”, our brains are bombarded with messages and images from the media and advertising industries telling us if we get that degree, purchase that house, have sex with that person, or follow this diet, we will then reach status “good” life.
2. The money-grab of happiness
Conceptually we all have this memorized by now: placing our happiness on anything external will never lead to the happiness we truly seek.
- Earning more money, finding that “just right” significant other, living in a bigger house, or traveling to the ends of the earth will never do the trick.
- Make all the changes you want to your outside world. Rearrange it in and out and upside down but in the end, it will mean very little because you’ll always be chasing that next fix which you believe will be the magic elixir to experiencing a more meaningful, deeper, and happier type of existence.
It’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic to make it look nice while the orchestra plays beautiful relaxing music. Either way, the ship is going down.
This is what I like to call the “money-grab” for happiness which creates what psychologists refer to as background stress:
The compounding, ongoing ambient stress and hassles of daily life that we learn to just live with and let run our lives. But only makes us unhappy.
3. The confusing pleasure of happiness
The pursuit of happiness and the “money-grab” of happiness reveals how badly we confuse happiness with pleasure.
Pleasure is a form of temporary happiness — one that is dependent on circumstances, situations, other people, or outcomes. Such as that bigger salary, the bigger house, or having amazing sex.
While experiencing pleasures like these can be amazing and is one of the great parts of being human, the happiness we yearn for is what Eckart Tolle describes as the simple joy of being. It’s that quiet presence of belonging within our body, mind, and with the rest of life that makes all the things we place on a pedestal seem meaningless. It’s the original happiness we were born with; that brand of joy we freely experienced as children but then one day we entered the culturescape and poof that natural power of joy went dormant.
Background Happiness
The good news is that we can reclaim that power. We can cultivate this joy that resides within us.
To start let’s invert the problem.
- Ultimately our issue is the never-ending, all-encompassing personal havoc known as background stress caused by our grave misconceptions of happiness.
- Inverted, we would arrive at background happiness.
Background happiness is the subtle all-pervading feeling of deep well-being — an awareness that regardless of whatever is going on around you and in your life: you are well.
It’s like a soft, gentle, soundtrack that plays in the background of your life that allows you to feel relaxed yet alert with good feelings in your body, love in your heart, and positive thoughts in your mind.
Background happiness is omnipresent.
It’s the one and the only reason we ever need to feel good. It’s the antidote to our ingrained conditioning that tells us we always need to find reasons to be happy.
When you have that soundtrack of background happiness rolling, the pleasure you seek from the things in the outside world becomes secondary to the inner joy you experience within.
Yes, you will still desire things and have goals but their success or failure becomes irrelevant to this state of deep well-being.
Any accolade you receive, relationship with another person, or amount of money in your bank account will pale in comparison to the joy and peace you have within yourself.
Background happiness is the ultimate form of self-care and its aura emanates from inside you; you just need to catch it.
Like every great spiritual text has been saying since the beginning of time:
“What you seek is within you; the kingdom of heaven is within you.”
Can you hear it?
Can you feel it?
