Happiness is suddenly all the rage. Workshops, online courses, scientific research. Books on the subject climb the bestseller lists. Even the volume you presently hold can be (mis)construed as a backhanded stab at happiness. The successful pursuer, it is implied, will be happy twenty-four hours a day.
What has this got to do with misery? It turns out that the relentless pursuit of happiness is actually a fairly good way of producing its opposite. There are three primary reasons for this: Utility, expectancy, and interpretation. Let’s consider these in order.
First, utility. Imagine an airplane cockpit. There are multiple dials and indicators: the altimeter, compass, fuel gauge, airspeed indicator, and so on. Each has a purpose. Now imagine a pilot who offers to take you for a spin. You look at the controls and see that most of them have been taped over. “I don’t really like the compass, it makes me feel restricted,” he explains. “Or the fuel gauge, it just makes me anxious. I only like the airspeed indicator. I like to go fast.”
Do you fly with him?
You would probably be tempted to point out that all of the gauges have important information to provide, whether the news is good or not.
Like the controls of a plane, the emotions operate as a kind of behavioral guidance system, letting us know about the environment, dangers ahead, and the impacts of our actions:
Most of us need all the advice we can get. A guidance system that can only say, “Go left, go left, go left” is limited in its usefulness. We will ignore threats, miss cues, never defend ourselves, and behave badly—smiling in the short term but bringing disaster down on our heads. In the same way that eliminating most cockpit gauges leads to unhappy flights, then, ignoring negative emotions will tend to magnify our misery.
What about expectancy? Let’s do another thought experiment. Imagine that a friend sees a discarded lottery ticket on your table and says, “I follow this lottery—I think you’ve won $10.” You go to the local shop, and the attendant informs you that you have actually won $10,000. How do you feel?
Try it again. Your friend sees the lottery ticket and says, “I think you’ve won $10 million.” The shopkeeper confirms the win, but it is actually $10,000. How do you feel?
If you are like most people, your reactions in the two situations are quite different: pleasure in the first and disappointment in the second. But the actual situation—winning $10,000—is the same. The difference is accounted for by your expectations as you run to the shop. The higher you set your expectations, the more disappointment you feel.
So it is with the quest for happiness. If you believe that you can be unfailingly, unremittingly happy all of the time, reality will smack you in the face with the fact that you are simply not wired for constant good cheer. The disappointment will, instead, propel your mood in the opposite direction. As Edward de Bono once said, “Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.” For maximum misery, then, set your expectations high.
The third misery-inducing aspect of the quest for happiness involves interpretation. Cognitive therapists argue that most of our emotions arise from our appraisals of events, not from the events themselves. The frown on our partner’s face is not so alarming; it is what we think the frown means that bothers us.
Traditional cognitive therapy emphasizes our evaluations of external events (such as receiving an ominous envelope from the tax department or noticing that our youngest child is late coming home from her first date). But we also appraise our own reactions, emotions, and behavior. If we see uncomfortable emotions as normal parts of life, as indeed they are, we will experience sadness or anxiety and accept them and the guidance they may give us.
If we strive for constant happiness, however, we will inevitably change the interpretations that we make when another selection emerges from the emotional vending machine. We have failed. This is not a normal part of life; it is a sign of our own faultiness. Many of our most intense miseries arise from the exaggerated meanings we assign to our own internal experiences:
In order to increase misery, then, view happiness as the only normal state, and your uncomfortable emotions as reflections upon you. Make them deeply meaningful. They prove that you are, as you have long suspected, flawed and inferior.
Does all of this mean that the whole happiness industry is really just a sham? Not entirely. Those wishing to become at least somewhat happier can do so, paradoxically, by giving up their laser-focus on the quest. Happiness is incidental—a result of doing something else, pursuing some other goal, or being involved in some other activity. Pursuing happiness is like chasing squirrels: you will never overtake your quarry. To get close to a squirrel, you must arrange yourself so the squirrel will come to you. To increase happiness, you must arrange your mind or your life so happiness appears as a natural consequence.
One strategy for bringing about life dissatisfaction, then, is to ignore the role of meaning in your life. Another is to elevate the pursuit of happiness to the throne and make it your sole aim. Happiness is the outcome, not the path; it is the result of producing meaning in one’s life, not the meaning itself.