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Monday, May 16, 2011

The Trouble with Happiness

A good read. Truth for sure. Happiness is a by-product. Chasing it is like a dog chasing his tail, except I think the dog has more fun doing that.

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The Trouble with Happiness

http://whiskeyandgunpowder.com/the-trouble-with-happiness/

Our nation has a happiness fetish. Each year, publishers print thousands of books on the subject. Talk show hosts offer advice from psychologists and therapists. Magazine covers promise “The Short-Cut to Total Joy” or “The Seven Secrets of Wedded Bliss.”

You might reasonably wonder why the market is so large. A Pew Research Center poll reports that almost 85 percent of Americans say they are happy or very happy.

Yet millions want to be happier still. And they feel they could be, if only they pursued it a little more ardently.

Except… that won’t work. Happiness is a by-product. It is achieved indirectly, by producing something beautiful or useful or by making someone else happy. The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

Take a look around. Much of the economic misery we see today is due to the unbridled pursuit of bigger houses, fancier cars, and more exorbitant trips. The lure of consumer culture and an obsession with more is precisely what keeps so many from contentment.

The Stoics argued that happiness results not from pursuing affluence and status but rather virtue and wisdom. Pythagoras, the sixth-century B.C. philosopher and mathematician, asked that his followers take time, before going to sleep each night, to pose three questions: What have I done? Where have I failed myself? What responsibility have I not fulfilled?

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