Does the pursuit of happiness lead to contentment?

"If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.” (Wharton, 1908, p. 40)

Photo by Edu Lauton on Unsplash

In 2012, journalist and author Oliver Burkeman wrote a book titled “The Antidote”, where he wrote about the popular emergent trend fixated on feeling happy or looking at the bright side of things all the time, “positive thinking.” Since then, this worldly trend of increasingly being fixated on the pursuit of “happiness” has just continued to grow - compulsively fixated on the lookout, scanning for the next thing that will make me happy.

But, might this be counterproductive, as we might end up in a chase looking for the next thing that will give us the next high never truly feeling content and satisfied. I learnt this the hard way and in relation to the meaning of life I had written,

“That there are times where we find ourselves caught in a hard-bound search for the “meaning of life”. What is the meaning of life? It’s a question with an unfathomable answer. So hard is the question to answer that it leads one into an exhausting, endless search while life passes by. Stop searching, start living, and meaning will start creeping into life.” (Micallef, 2024, para. 45)

Might this also apply to happiness? So, the provocative notion that comes into my mind is that true contentment may lie in abandoning that very chase, the pursuit of happiness. I will be exploring this very notion in this article — how the pursuit of happiness might make us miserable.

This is epitomised in a short story written by Edith Wharton, originally published in 1908, where one of the characters in her story states the following,

“Possibilities of what? Of being multifariously miserable? There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.” (Wharton, 1908, p. 40)

Leo Tolstoy, a prominent Russian novelist born in the 1800s, also points this out. In what might be one of his most famous novels, “Anna Karenina,” a novel on marriage, relationships, families and family life that talks about the human condition, living a better, fulfilling life and attaining happiness, Tolstoy writes how,

“Vronsky, meanwhile, despite the full realisation of what he had for so long desired, was not entirely happy. He soon felt that the realisation of his desire had afforded him only a grain of sand from the mountain of happiness he had anticipated. This realisation had shown him the eternal error men make in imagining happiness as the realisation of their desire.” (Tolstoy, 2014, p. 426)

This is a direct challenge to what we might call conventional “logical wisdom” (note the inverted commas) about happiness and well-being. So, let us take a moment to reflect on the above statements with an open mind, as they might be an invitation to reconsider an alternative approach to finding happiness and fulfilment in life.

However, let’s start by making it clear that at a glance, these statements may seem counterintuitive or even pessimistic, especially the one by Edith Wharton (1908) where she writes,

“If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time” (ibid. p. 40).

Why? Because it is natural to seek to be happy. It is something that is deeply ingrained in the way we approach living life, “we all try to avoid pain and seek pleasure,” and it is also rooted in our cultures. An example would be how it is even embedded in founding documents like the United States Declaration of Independence 1776, which actually opens with the statement,

“….to recommend to the respective assemblies and conventions of the United Colonies, where no government sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs had been established, to adopt such a government as should, in the opinion of the representatives of the people, best conduce to the happiness and safety of their constituents in particular.” (US Congress, 2008, p. XLV)

All this is not to be dismissed as if we reflect on it on closer examination; it might give a profound insight into the nature of the human psyche and the possible self-defeating nature of the quest for constantly feeling positive, happy emotions.

This is not to say that experiencing happiness and positive emotions does not result in beneficial outcomes. That is an established fact and considered to be a cornerstone of psychological health (Fredrickson, 1998). What we are eluding here is that being in a constant pursuit of maximising happiness or feeling positive emotions might result in the opposite.

As Gruber et al. (2011) pointed out, there are a multitude of studies that point out the importance of maximising happiness, yet,

“At the same time, psychological research has, to date, neglected another important possibility regarding happiness—that it may, under certain conditions, be maladaptive.” (ibid. p. 222)

And there is research that points to this. For example, in their review article, Gruber et al. (2011) pointed out that a number of studies on happiness indicate that benefits from happiness do not follow a linear outcome. This means that a high level of happiness does not always necessarily lead to higher levels of beneficial outcomes. That is, the more you try to increase it, the less beneficial the returns are, with indications that beyond a certain level, it can also have unintended consequences.

Why pursuing happiness might be counterproductive

This might happen because when we strive for a positive outcome, we implicitly set an expectation of how good this will make me feel. However, this might result in a paradoxical effect when the positive situation does not feel as good as the expectation I set, leading to disappointment that I don’t feel as happy as I expected. Gruber et al. (2011) argued how this,

“Leads to the prediction that the more people strive for happiness, the more likely it is that they will become disappointed about how they feel, paradoxically decreasing their happiness the more they want it.” (p. 226)

What does this mean here? That being in the constant pursuit of happiness can lead to frequent disappointment even if the outcome of a situation is positive because the outcome does not meet expectations.

This is precisely what Mauss et al. (2011) found in a study on the potential paradoxical effects of valuing happiness in a series of two experiments constructed to test how valuing happiness effects well-being. In study one, their results directly noted this paradoxical effect, how chasing after happiness does not make you happy, where participants who strongly valued happiness under conditions of minor daily stress tended to experience:

- Lower levels of pleasure and enjoyment.

- Lower overall well-being and life satisfaction and,

- A propensity to experience more symptoms of depression.

The finding that putting a high value on pursuing, attaining or feeling happy can be a risk factor for experiencing more symptoms of depression has been replicated in another study (Ford et al., 2014).

In other words, as we argued above, actively trying to be happy can potentially make you less happy, particularly when dealing with small stressors in life. However, the researchers noted that this effect did not appear in participants facing major stress.

These findings carried on into study two, where Mauss et al. (2011) performed an experimental manipulation that induced happiness or sadness after participants were primed to value happiness by reading an article that talked about the importance of valuing happiness. Results were compared to those of a control group who underwent the same procedure; the only difference was that they read the same article adapted in a way that it did not prime valuing happiness by replacing the word happiness with “making accurate judgments.”

What Mauss and colleagues observed [that compared to the control group] participants who were primed to value happiness reported feeling fewer positive feelings after watching a “happy video” compared to those who watched a “sad video” with participants in the happy condition expressing disappointment in how they felt after watching the “happy film.”

Mauss et al. (2011) argued that the results from the study indicated how,

“Valuing happiness can lead to less happiness, precisely in a situation that should give rise to it, namely a happy emotion induction.” (p. 812)

This finding was supported by both direct and indirect measures of emotional response. So, these findings suggest what we mentioned previously - that pursuing or placing a high value on achieving happiness creates unrealistic expectations, leading to disappointment when those expectations are not met.

In fact, this is exactly what Mauss et al. (2011) found: the relationship between valuing happiness and experiencing less happiness was explained by people feeling disappointed about their expected emotional state. As Gruber et al. (2011) had proposed,

“That the more people strive for happiness, the more likely it is that they will become disappointed about how they feel, paradoxically decreasing their happiness the more they want it.” (p. 226)

So, looking at all of this, it might be that in the search for happiness, we might need to flip things on their head.

This is also what Oliver Burkeman (2012) suggested in his book. What if we start our search for happiness by flipping things around. Rather than chasing after happiness to attempt to eliminate what makes us unhappy or feelings of unhappiness. What if we start by acknowledging that these are a fact of life and start by approaching them. He writes how, after several years of reporting on psychology, he started to realise,

“That the effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness – that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.” (ch. 1, para. 16)

As Edith Wharton (1908) also eluded,

“Possibilities of what? Of being multifariously miserable? There are lots of ways of being miserable” (p. 40).

Discontentment is a fact of life

Indeed, suffering seems to be a fact of life. It comes in endless varieties and forms - from physical to emotional pain and distress, to existential despair, to the daily mundane frustrations we encounter in daily life. It seems as if we cannot avoid it as the Buddha famously observed, “Life is suffering” or more accurately “, dukkha”, an inherent dissatisfactory quality to life considered to be one of the three marks of existence in Buddhist philosophy and contemplative teachings (Gethin, 1998; Harvey, 2013).

This, the recognition of the factual universality of “suffering” of experiencing difficulties and discomforts in life and how this is inevitable, is at the foundation of many philosophical and spiritual traditions (Hadot, 2016).

So, is there a solution?