Why the Search for Happiness Makes You Miserable
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If you asked me to tell you the one thing that has tripped me up the most in my 25+ years on the spiritual slash self-improvement path, it’s this: the focus placed on being happy, positive, and amazeballs.
The focus placed on it creates a search for it which, ironically, causes us to miss it all together.
Took me a while to really get this one, but ultimately I realized this obsession we have with achieving some sort of idyllic, happy, so-called fabulous life is the very thing that keeps us from experiencing more of it. In other words, the problems we think we have aren’t the real problem. The real problem is the belief that there’s a problem with having problems (and certain un-preferred emotions), as if there’s something deeply wrong with us if we aren’t pooping rainbows every day. This one little belief creates a massive treadmill effect that keeps us trapped in a futile search to nowhere, placing “happiness” out there in the future somewhere—never here, now. And so it continues to elude us.
Why do we fall for it? Why do we continue to sit in lotus position, day after day, among endless other things, hoping, praying, that somehow, some way, some day, we will get “there”? (And where is it, exactly, that we are trying to get? And who is trying to get there?)
We fall for it because we are deeply conditioned to fall for it. We are literally hard-wired to listen to, and believe, what the mind tells us. Mind is relentless in chattering on about all sorts of things we could, should, or need to possess or be doing in order to be happier, more successful, more confident, more enlightened, more balanced, skinner, kinder, whatever. As Eckhart Tolle put it: the mind is like a dog always looking for something to pee on. 🐕 🤯
The truth is that life is a dancing contrast of highs and lows, triumphs and failures, laughter and tears, magic and minutiae. There’s a reason these things come in pairs. I don’t care what kind of create-by-thought genius you think you are or how many times an hour you tap your wrist and chant mantras 🧘, sometimes you are going to feel messed up. You aren’t going to be happy and positive all day every day, no matter how hard you try. And you aren’t going to be a fearless badass all the time either. It’s called being human. Far from being a problem, I realized, wow, this is great news! At last, we can all stop trying so hard to be someone different, have prettier emotions, get someone else’s approval, and/or escape from the inevitable problems that come with life because we know there’s nobody else to be and having problems is no longer a problem.
When you just STOP, a crazy thing happens. By deeply accepting and being with whatever your current reality happens to be, awesome or not, wanted or not, you realize the peace and fulfillment you were searching for was always right here. It is always right here, right now—no matter what else comes and goes—because it’s literally your very essence. ✌🏻
Yours in the mo,
KB
