“This is the true joy of life. The being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. The being a force of nature instead of a feverish and selfish clod of ailments and grieving senses complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and that as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.
Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got to hold up for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
– George Bernard Shaw
Setting goals, and working toward achieving them, has been found by psychologists to be one of the key components of happiness. That is, happiness is to be found in productive, goal-directed activity, or striving toward excellence based on one’s unique talents and potential.
However, setting goals does not mean that your happiness is contingent on reaching those goals. Instead, happiness is a result of having found a way to express who you are and of applying your strengths through the pursuit of the goals you have set for yourself. What you do is worth doing for its own sake, not simply as a means to reach a desired end.
Eudaimonia v. The Hedonic View of Happiness
Most people in today’s society believe that happiness consists in having as many pleasures as possible, which is the hedonic view of happiness. In many cases this has led to a life of overeating and over-consumption, as well as a basic mentality of “the more the better”.
Although pleasure is a component of happiness, psychologists have identified a more important component of authentic happiness: pursuing a meaningful life, or using your signature strengths in the service of something that you believe is larger than yourself.
Dr. Martin Seligman, founder of “Positive Psychlogy”—a new branch of psychology that studies how we can create happier lives instead of the traditional emphasis of seeking to alleviate depression, anxiety, and other negative emotions—argues that in order to create lasting happiness we should figure out our strengths and find ways to direct them toward achieving meaningful goals.
In one experiment, Veronika Huta, Ph.D., from McGill University, followed people in their daily lives and beeped them at random. At the signal each person would write down where they were, what they were doing, what they were thinking about, and who they were with, as well as rate their state of consciousness at the moment on various numerical scales: how happy they felt, how much they were concentrating, how motivated they felt, their level of self-esteem, and so on.
She devised a scale reflecting hedonic motives–such as pursuing pleasure, enjoyment, and comfort–and a scale reflecting eudaimonic motives–that is, pursuing personal growth, development of their potential, achieving personal excellence, and contributing to the lives of others. Eudaimonic pursuits were significantly correlated with life satisfaction, whereas hedonic pursuits were not.
Happiness is Not Determined by External Factors
Richard J. Davidson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison indicates that, barring extreme cases such as people living in poverty who are not having their basic needs met, a change in external conditions–such as buying a new car, moving to a bigger house, and so on–will not produce sustained increases in happiness. Instead, the positive emotions that accompany thoughts of having purpose in our lives is one of the most enduring components of well-being.
In 1985 Ed Diener, Jeff Horwitz and Robert A. Emmons wrote an article called “Happiness of the Very Wealthy” in which they presented the results of an experiment in which the subjective well-being of very wealthy people was compared with that of a control group who lived in the same geographical area.
One hundred people from Forbes list of wealthiest Americans were queried, as well as one hundred control people selected from telephone directories. They found that Americans with a net worth of over $125 million were only trivially happier than those in the randomly selected controls, and that 37 percent of the people on Forbes’ list of wealthiest Americans were less happy than the average American.
In addition, “Hedonic adaptation” means that outcomes which we feel will have a great positive impact on our lives create only a temporary raise of our happiness level. A new purchase of an eagerly-awaited good, a new job, a new relationship,and so on, all may produce a great deal of pleasure initially, but they become less important as time goes on, even to the extent of retreating into the background humdrum of our lives.
This is an additional clue that achieving a goal in and of itself is not what creates happiness: after our initial elation once we reach the goal, the happiness will begin to subside. We have to find the journey itself worthwhile, not the achievement of the external indication that we have reached our objective.
Because we believe that happiness is created by external factors such as getting the promotion, but we experience hedonic adaptation once we achieve our intended target, we tend to conclude that the problem lies in the fact that the goal we set for ourselves wasn’t lofty enough. We therefore set an even higher goal and make our happiness dependent on reaching this next step. That is, we’re continuously stretching the target at which we will be happy and end up chasing the proverbial carrot which we can never catch.
Set Goals, But Don’t Postpone Joy
Steve Pavlina explains in his article “The Power of Now” that while he was developing computer games one of his goals was to become very wealthy, which he concluded would give him a lot of freedom. However, he noticed that while he was running his business he didn’t have much of the things he was striving for, that is, he didn’t have much wealth or freedom. He went on in this way for some time and his goals always seemed to be just out of reach.
After reading Eckhart Tolle’s book “The Power of Now”
Although he continues to set goals and plan for the future, it’s not because he believes that achieving those goals will increase his happiness, but because through the process of moving toward his goals he is better able to express his happiness. Here’s an illustrative quote from his article:
“Consider the goal of building web traffic. With my games business, I wanted to build web traffic because of what I thought it would bring me: more leads, more sales, more money, more success, etc. With this personal development business, I also want to keep building web traffic. But now it’s mainly because I’m so passionate about the work I’m doing that I want to share it with as many people as possible. Again, the flow has been reversed. I don’t look to this business to make me happy. I look to this business to express my happiness outward and to share it with others.”
Ari Koinuma, owner of the blog “Our Best Version”, has a great series on “How to Set Process-Oriented Goals” in which he explains that setting goals should be a tool to focus your efforts toward a chosen direction. The focus is on enjoying the journey, not in racing toward the finish line; he explains that you win “simply by being on the road”.
Conclusion
Pleasure is a component of happiness, but moving toward the achievement of meaningful goals has a much greater impact on authentic happiness than hedonic pursuits. At the same time, our happiness should not depend on the achievement of our goals, instead, happiness is the result of being able to express our strengths, talents, and abilities while traveling along the path to reaching our objectives.
“Grow happiness under your feet.” — James Openheim
(“How to Be Happy”; courtesy of vanessawoz)
Related Posts:
- “Happiness Extravaganza: Tips, Tidbits, and Tools”
- “How to be Happy”
- “Six Scientific Ways to Create True Happiness”
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