Happiness is just a thermometer - Don’t waste your time chasing it

Pursuit of happiness can make us less happy. It is time to rethink how to approach happiness.

So you want to be happy? Don’t.

I am not saying you shouldn’t be happy. What I am saying is that you shouldn’t aim to be happy. There is nothing wrong with being happy when the occasion arises. I have been known to be happy myself. However, happiness is a poor goal for life.

There are certainly many benefits to being happy. Positive emotions broaden our thinking and make our imagination fly. Sharing a laugh or smiling together helps us to connect with other people. Being happy might be good for our health, too. Also – and this almost goes without saying – it feels good to be happy.

But while being happy can be a good thing, pursuing happiness might actually be bad for us. ‘Good vibes only’ might sound like an innocent slogan, but it is just another way of telling you how you should feel. It pressures you to bury the negative and hide your sadness from others. Such tyranny of toxic positivity, that allows no negative feelings, is harmful. As professor Adam Grant summarized the state of the science: ‘There’s reason to believe that the quest for happiness might be a recipe for misery.’ This is due to four key reasons:

1. You are seeking happiness in the wrong places.

We are not good at predicting what makes us happy. We are also easily seduced by images of various material possessions as the pathways to happiness. Conscious efforts to become happier often backfire as we end up running after things that ultimately will not make us any happier.

2. The attempt to maximize happiness diminishes it

Research shows that people who put a high value on happiness are, on average, less happy than people less concerned with being happy. Victims of our modern obsession with happiness are so eager to optimize their joy that they are unable to settle down and be satisfied with anything.

3. Exclusive focus on your own happiness makes you selfish and lonely

Self-interest backfires. Obsessing over one’s own happiness makes us feel more lonely, while being happy can make us more selfish. Blinded by an exclusive focus on ourselves and our own happiness, we lose touch with other people. Positivity is at its most toxic when we cut out friends who are going through a rough period because they have ‘bad vibes’. Sacrificing friendships on the altar of happiness might be the most horrible consequence of our modern obsession with constantly being happy.

4. The tyranny of toxic positivity makes inevitable moments of unhappiness intolerable

Research shows that many of us feel societal pressures to not be sad – and those who feel such pressures tend to feel more sadness. These pressures are especially strong in Western countries, and contribute to people feeling more depressed, having more negative self-evaluations and ruminating more after a failure. If you have been indoctrinated into believing that everyone should be happy, life’s inevitable moments of unhappiness become even harder to bear: not only do you feel sad, you also failed at the grand task of being happy. You are sad and a failure. This is why our modern obsession with happiness is so dangerous. It makes life’s inevitable moments of sadness more intolerable. It makes us less capable of dealing with setbacks, frustrations and tragedies – which all have their place in human life.

So, don’t be fooled by the false prophets in advertising industry that spend billions each year to convince you that you are not happy enough right now. Don’t sacrifice the good things in life in the vain hope of becoming happier. In the end, happiness is just a feeling – and you shouldn’t lose sleep over a feeling.

Image by Mabel Amber from Pixabay

I have come to think that the best way to think about happiness is as a sort of thermometer. Finnish winters are cold and dark, with temperatures below freezing for a few months in a row. Thus, keeping houses warm has been vital for survival. A thermometer is a useful tool for that: when it is too low, you know something is wrong. Perhaps someone left the door open, a window is leaking, or the fire has died out. The thermometer warns you that something needs fixing, initiating you to start the search for a way to get the temperature back up.

But what you don’t do when the thermometer is low is fix the thermometer itself. It’s the same with happiness.

Human emotions exist for a reason – they are our body’s way of signalling whether things are good or whether something needs attention. Starvation signals that now might be the time to focus on finding food. Sadness highlights that we are losing something dear to us. Excitement tells that whatever we are doing might be worth doing more of in the future. Emotions give us crucially important information that we should pay attention to. When this signal system is broken, various problems ensue. For example, extremely cheerful people tend to engage in riskier behaviour and be more careless about their health and safety. If you want to climb Mount Everest, too much optimism will likely get you killed. That was the fate of Maurice Wilson, who, in 1934, set out to climb the mountain, sure that his faith would lead him to succeed, and thus not bothering to learn the necessary mountaineering skills. His body was found the following year, far from the top. Feeling happy or optimistic in situations that might call for stress, anxiety or fear is not something to strive for, but a malfunction of our emotional system.

Happiness is a useful tool – when it is low, that signals that there might be something in your life that needs fixing. Something is dragging you down, and the low happiness alerts you to identify the culprit. It is thus a good idea to pay some attention to happiness, as it can give you valuable information about the things that make your life better and the things that make your life worse.

So, use happiness as a tool – as an inbuilt system in your brain that gives you emotional signals about things to avoid and things to seek out. But don’t focus on the tool when it is the environment that needs to be changed. When the temperature drops, you don’t manifest warmth or suppress the cold. You put on a coat. Happiness is a tool, not a goal.

To celebrate the publication of my new book, Stop Chasing Happiness – A Pessimist’s Guide to a Good Life (Allen & Unwin), I created a series of posts covering themes from that book. This post is adapted from the chapter on happiness in the book. For the full story of how to approach life, get your copy here.