From the US founding fathers to utilitarianism, hedonism, and today's self-help, philosophers and thinkers have strived to articulate why we should place happiness and well-being above other things and how we can achieve them. Professor Lorraine Besser, on the contrary, argues that we should stop seeking happiness. Whether we are happy or not is largely out of our control. Instead, we should try to achieve different interesting and valuable experiences that we can control, and just enjoy happiness when it comes.

Happiness. The very word strikes a chord. We wish we could have it. We think about what’s holding us back from it and the “if-only” tracks start to fly: if only I had more money, a different job, fewer responsibilities, a house with more room or a bigger yard, the perfect partner or the perfect children. We read all the news articles about happiness. We try to make more friends. We try to meditate. We try to be optimistic. We think about moving to Sweden.

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Giving up the pursuit of happiness feels like a cop-out, as if we are wasting the gift of life. But what if I were to tell you that giving up on happiness is the first step to a better life?

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Whether we go for everyday changes or big ones, more often than not, we find ourselves in the same place. That glorious state of happiness we are trying so hard to get is still out of reach. Should we try harder, and double down on our efforts to be happy? It is hard to imagine that we should not. To give up on a life of happiness, to stop striving to get to a better place, to accept the level of happiness we’re currently at, all seem poor choices. Giving up the pursuit of happiness feels like a cop-out, as if we are wasting the gift of life. But what if I were to tell you that giving up on happiness is the first step to a better life?

It's true. The best thing we can do for ourselves is to stop pursuing happiness. The time and effort we spend pursuing happiness takes us farther away from that which we’re really after: a good life, full of valuable experiences.

Lots of things happen when we try to be happy. But none of them delivers what we are after: a happier life. Why not? 

From a psychological point of view, the answer is that happiness just isn’t the kind of thing that we can harness, that we have agency over. Happiness is a mental state distinguished by feelings of pleasure. By nature, happiness is an elusive goal, both hard to pursue and hard to sustain. 

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It’s hard to pursue for a few reasons. First, unlike many of our goals, there is no recipe for becoming happier. If we want to become more physically fit, there’s a reliable recipe that will get us there. Eat healthy foods, do some cardio, lift some weights. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. It is not an easy recipe, but it is a reliable one. Make it through the steps, and you will enhance your physical fitness.