The Impossible Dream of the Pursuit of Happiness

I read a good book today, and by read, I mean I read it on Blinkist. However, it's made me want to buy the book and read it in it's entirety. The book is called The Upside of Your Dark Side.

There is a constant focus on pursuing happiness in today's society, along with being mindful about everything. Any other emotion is something to be avoided. A quick search on Kindle eBooks reveals over 18,000 results for books containing the word 'happiness' in their title.

It doesn't help that our news media is constantly reporting about fear, while people give only a positive version of their life on Facebook. No wonder we don't know how to handle our emotions.

It's OK to not be happy all the time.

We shouldn't be pursuing happiness, but pursuing purpose. As that is what leads to happiness, just as it often leads to wealth. Chasing money often leads to neither being happy nor wealthy.

You can do whatever you want with your life, but one day you'll know what love truly is. It's the sour and the sweet. And I know sour, which allows me to appreciate the sweet. 

- Vanilla Sky

This book introduces many studies, which the Blinkist only briefly refers to, but I'll summaries some of the key ones here.

Focusing on happiness can result in us removing the parts of our lives that make us happy. For instance, not helping a troubled friend to prevent their problems from negatively affecting you. Relationships are something that make us happy. By avoiding any negativity in them, we can lose deep & meaningful ones. We are just then left with the superficial relationships.

Pursing happiness can leave us unhappy in the short term. This is something mindfulness tries to address. By being overly mindful we can put ourselves into a position of "analysis paralysis" where we struggle to make snap decisions. Instead, we should be using our instinct.  The book mentions that those with psychopathic tendencies are better in high stress situations - such as the aftermath of a terrorist attack or other disasters. They are less overwhelmed by the emotions of the situation compared to others.

Those that are happy tend to focus on the bigger picture, rather than tiny details. This can be good, but it has a negative.  A study involved "happy" and "unhappy" people being asked to create arguments from a range of issues from the allocation of tax dollars to the existence of soul mates. "Unhappy" people were 25% more convincing.

Happy people are easily more deceived and likely to recall false facts. They're less persuasive, but more gullible.

Anxiety serves a much needed purpose too. Without it we'd have no love of thrills like roller coasters and scary movies.

It's fine to want to be happier and more content in life. But if it's the goal and your whole purpose and focus, then you'll likely fail. Many of our most creative ideas come from dark places.

It's fine to try "life hacks" to help improve your life, but make sure you're chasing a purpose, not just happiness. Being happy is fine, but don't trick yourself into believing that by doing X Y and Z you will become happy.  The whole emotional spectrum is something to be enjoyed, not suppressed. 

This is not an attack on being happy or mindfulness. Like most trends, they can be a pop-psychological fix to an issue and result in more problems being created.

Once I've read the book, I will write more about this quite interesting topic.