Happiness Is Not the Goal, and Unhappiness Is Not the Enemy
Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. To get happier is to get more of these elements, in a balanced way—not all of one and none of another. But if you were reading closely, you noticed one funny thing about all three: they all have some unhappiness within them. Enjoyment takes work and forgoing pleasures; satisfaction requires sacrifice and doesn’t last; purpose almost always entails suffering. Getting happier, in other words, requires that we accept unhappiness in our lives as well, and understanding it isn’t an obstacle to our happiness.
Without unhappiness, you wouldn’t survive, learn, or come up with good ideas. Even if you could get rid of your unhappiness, it would be a huge mistake. The secret to the best life is to accept your unhappiness (so you can learn and grow) and manage the feelings that result.
The desire for greater joy and less sadness is natural and normal. However, making the quest for positive feelings—and the fight to banish negative ones—the highest or only goal is a costly and counterproductive life strategy. Unmitigated happiness is impossible to achieve (in this mortal coil, at least), and chasing it can be dangerous and deleterious to our success. More important, doing so sacrifices many of the elements of a good life.
Perhaps you are wondering if we are suggesting that you look for suffering. There’s no need; suffering will find you—and everyone else. The point is that each of us can strive for a rich life in which we not only enjoy delicious honey but can also appreciate the bees responsible for it. This is more than a shift in mindset. It is a new way of life, full of opportunities you have never seen before. By embracing your life without fear, you can manage your emotions. And once you do that, you will be free to build on the pillars that will set you on the path to getting happier for the rest of your life.
Choose a Better Emotion
Most people use caffeine because they aren’t content with the way they feel naturally, and want better outcomes in mood and work. It does so through substitution of one molecule for another. Caffeine is a good metaphor for the next principle of emotional self-management: You often don’t have to accept the emotion you feel first. Rather, you can substitute a better one that you want.
Be grateful. The single best way to grasp the reality of good things in life and turn down the noise that makes real threats hard to distinguish from petty ones is to occupy some of the negative emotion receptors with a different, positive feeling. The most effective of these positive feelings is gratitude. Many people see gratitude as something that happens to them because of their circumstances, which can make it feel out of reach in bad times. That’s the wrong way to approach it. Gratitude isn’t a feeling that materializes in response to your circumstances. It is a life practice. And even if you feel that you have little to be grateful for right now, you can—and should—engage in it.
Find a reason to laugh. Consuming humor—enjoying jokes—brings joy and relieves suffering. Your brain won’t buy it if you try to convince it that you are cheerful when you are sad. But finding humor is just different enough from suffering’s opposite that it slides right into the negativity receptor. Don’t worry about being funny. Some people can’t tell jokes to save their lives. Either they can never remember the punch line, or they start laughing so hard themselves that no one has any idea what the punch line is. That’s fine; for happiness, it’s better to consume humor than to supply it. It’s also a lot easier
Choose hope. There’s a word for believing you can make things better without distorting reality: not optimism, but hope. People tend to use hope and optimism as synonyms, but that isn’t accurate. Hope focuses more directly on the personal attainment of specific goals, whereas optimism focuses more broadly on the expected quality of future outcomes in general. In other words, optimism is the belief that things will turn out all right; hope makes no such assumption but is a conviction that one can act to make things better in some way. Hope and optimism can go together, but they don’t have to. You can be a hopeless optimist who feels personally helpless but assumes that everything will turn out all right. Or you can be a hopeful pessimist who makes negative predictions about the future but has confidence that you can improve things in your life and others’.
Turn empathy into compassion. You can no doubt think of cases in your own life when feeling too empathetic prevented you or someone else from giving the “tough love” someone may have needed. Instead of helping the loved one you think is making poor life choices, you were simply empathetic, it might relieve his suffering briefly, but it wouldn’t help him to get on the right track. Making empathy a full-fledged virtue and a protective emotional caffeine requires adding a few complementary behaviors that convert it into compassion. One comprehensive study of compassion defines it as recognizing suffering, understanding it, and feeling empathy for the sufferer—but also tolerating the uncomfortable feelings they and the suffering person are experiencing and, crucially, acting to alleviate the suffering.
To become a more compassionate (and thus happier) person, start by working on your toughness. To be tougher in the face of another’s pain doesn’t mean feeling it less. Rather, you should learn to feel the pain without being impaired to act. If you ever meet a Marine who has gone through boot camp, they will tell you they faced rigors beyond anything they had ever experienced before in life.
Compassionate people are like Marines after training: just as likely to feel pain as anyone else, but able to bear it and function. Empathetic doctors relieve pain with their empathy; compassionate doctors can also calmly operate on the patient. Empathetic parents suffer with their adult kids when they are struggling at college; compassionate parents can resist the urge to call the dean or drive over to the university and treat their young adults like children.
Focus Less on Yourself
You are actually two people. You may have noticed that you look most normal to yourself when you look in a mirror. A photo always looks less natural, almost as if it were another person. And in fact, philosophers say that you are, in a very real way, two different people—one who sees, and one who is seen. Understanding this can help us a great deal in focusing less inwardly and more on the outside world.
When you are the observer, it’s called being the “I-self” (the seer of things around you). When you are observed, or looking and thinking about yourself, that’s called the “me-self” (the one seen). Neither one is a permanent state of mind. The trick for well-being is balancing your I-self and your me-self. And that means increasing the former and decreasing the latter, because most people spend too much time being observed and not enough time observing. We think constantly about ourselves and how others see us; we look in every mirror; we check our mentions on social media; we obsess over our identities.
In some traditions, the I-self is not just a ticket to happiness but a connection to the divine. Hindus seek to reveal their atman, which is characterized by an innate state of awareness in which one witnesses the world but does not get embroiled in it. Atman is considered a direct link to Brahman, the ultimate divine reality. Jesus’s teaching that “anyone who wishes to follow me must deny himself” is usually interpreted as focusing on God and other people, but doing so also requires a greater emphasis on the I-self.
You will never eradicate your me-self, of course, but you can certainly increase your happiness by adopting conscious practices that lower the amount of time you spend in an objectified state. Three conscious habits can help.
First, avoid your own reflection. Mirrors are inherently attractive, as are all mirrorlike phenomena, such as social media mentions. We are magnetically drawn to them. But mirrors are not your friend. They encourage even the healthiest people to objectify themselves. Virtual mirrors are even easier to get rid of than literal ones. Turn off your social media notifications. Adopt an absolute ban on googling yourself. Turn off self-view on Zoom. Don’t take any selfies
Second, stop judging things around you so much. Judging might seem like pure observation, but it really isn’t. It is turning an observation of the outside world inward and making it about you. For example, if you say, “This weather is awful,” this is more about your feelings than it is about the weather. Further, you have just assigned a negative mood to something outside your control.
Third, spend more time marveling at the world around you. In his research, the University of California, Berkeley, psychologist Dacher Keltner focuses on the experience of awe, which he defines as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.” Among its many benefits, Keltner has found, awe diminishes the sense of self.
Stop Caring What They Think
Caring about and paying attention to others is very different from worrying about what others think about you. The first is helpful and good; the second is often egocentric and destructive. In fact, to manage emotions, almost all of us need to work to care less what others think about us.
It’s Mother Nature making our lives difficult. We are wired to care about what others think of us, and we obsess over it. As the Roman Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius observed almost two thousand years ago, “We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own,” whether they are friends, strangers, or enemies.
For virtually all of human history, humans’ survival depended on membership in close-knit clans and tribes. Before the modern structures of civilization, such as police and supermarkets, being cast out from your group meant certain death from cold, starvation, or predators. This can easily explain why your sense of well-being includes others’ approval.
Unfortunately, the instinct to want the approval of others is woefully maladapted to modern life. Where once you would have justifiably felt the terror of being expelled into the forest alone, today you might suffer acute anxiety that strangers online will “cancel” you for an ill-considered remark, or passersby will snap a photo of a poor fashion choice and mock it on Instagram for all to see.
The goal here is to focus on others but not on their opinion of you. One way to do this is to remind yourself that no one cares. The ironic thing about feeling bad about yourself because of what people might think of you is that others have many fewer opinions about you—positive or negative—than you might imagine
Second, rebel against your shame. Because fear of shame is frequently what lurks behind an excessive interest in others’ opinions, you should confront your shame directly. Sometimes a bit of shame is healthy and warranted, such as when we say something hurtful to another person out of spite or impatience. Often it is frankly ridiculous, such as being ashamed for, say, accidentally leaving your fly unzipped, or having a bad hair day.
Ask yourself: What am I hiding that I’m a little embarrassed about? Resolve not to hide it anymore, and thus dominate the useless shame holding you back. You won’t be perfect and you will have good and bad days, because these things are hard. But it absolutely can be done, and you can do it. And as you make progress, you will get happier, as will those around you. Even better, emotional self-management sets you free from the distractions we all use to numb our discomfort and equips you to focus on what truly matters.