Whenever I hear or read people’s obsession with happiness, that their life’s purpose is to be happy, I’d almost instantly go ‘ugh’.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate happiness. Some twenty years ago, I prioritised happiness over everything, only to get into unhealthy addictions, simultaneous anxiety and depression, unexplained illness and chronic pain, which all dissipate after I finally prioritise the journey to discover my true potential.
Coupled with several self-help books including Mastery by Robert Greene and Everything is F*cked by Mark Manson, I now strongly believe that life’s purpose is not to be happy.
Happiness is important, but it’s not the endgame. The endgame should always be to realise our full potential, where happiness serves as a gauge of how close we are to realising our full potential.
I wrote about life’s purpose a while ago, but after rereading it (click here to read that article), I think I rambled a little more than necessary. Hopefully, by writing it with fewer words this time, I can make it more understandable in a relatively shorter time.
Obsession with Happiness
The majority of people are obsessed with happiness as a life’s purpose. This obsession is one of the most common reasons people fall into becoming greedy and/or becoming apathetic toward others. Both result in prioritising short-term solutions, ignoring the long-term consequences. It’s a recipe for disaster in the long run, not only disastrous to themselves but also to their surrounding.
Many people still believe that more money means more happiness. Many work their ass off for more money, often ignoring their mental and physical health, only to spend the money they have earned to recuperate their health later on.
Some go the opposite way. They stop working, live in a forest, away from human civilisation, treating money as the enemy, assuming that without money they’d achieve true happiness. While it is possible to achieve happiness that way, they are likely to still feel ‘empty’ unless what they’re doing is aligned with their true potential.
Some don’t live in a forest but work just to pay the bills. They work in a mediocre, often meaningless job. Many hate their job and seem to over glorify weekend breaks and vacations and then get excessively sad when the weekend or the vacation is over.
Some are unemployed and live on welfare. These people spend their days bragging about their slow life, thinking they’re living a happy life with their misleading ‘living in the moment’ motto, while deep inside they know they can do more. They’re often sardonic towards people who show enthusiasm for work/hobby aspirations.
While some of them can appear happy, some often patch their miserable way of thinking and being by taking drugs or other forms of unhealthy addictions, including shopping, eating junk food, or playing video games excessively.
Meanwhile, many people simply assign the happiness responsibility to their surroundings: their friends, spouse and their kids. Once any of these people don’t behave the way they have expected, they get devastated and plunge into anxiety or depression quickly and simultaneously. Or if they’re in the position of power, they become control freaks, micromanaging people, suffocating everyone they try to control.
Some travel a lot, believing that going on more adventures means more happiness. But no matter how many adventures they may have, the happiness they experience will only feel temporary and is likely to crash as soon as the trip finishes, unless the travelling is aligned with their true potential.
Why Happiness Should Not Be the Life’s Purpose
Quoting Mark Manson’s book, “Everything is F*cked”, this is why happiness shouldn’t be the life’s purpose:
“The pursuit of happiness plunges us head-first toward nihilism and frivolity. It leads us toward childishness, an incessant and intolerant desire for something more, a hole that can never be filled, a thirst that can never be quenched. It is at the root of corruption and addiction, of self-pity and self-destruction.”
Mark Manson, Everything is F*cked, page 191
On the other hand, those who think happiness has a lot to do with lower expectations will force themselves to accept the unacceptable. This range from being complacent with their meaningless, dead-end career, to accepting the behaviour of their manipulative boss, abusive spouse, toxic friends, and everything that is obstructive to their true potential. Over time, the resentment that they consciously or unconsciously build underneath will eventually surface as physical discomforts like pain and illness.
Life’s Purpose
Ideally, realising your true potential should be your life’s purpose. What is life’s purpose? As mentioned in the article I wrote a while ago (click here to read the article), life’s purpose is:
to align our life with our life’s task, which is to discover our uniqueness and bring it to flower to its full potential.
Life’s purpose is unique to individuals and can change over time. Therefore you can’t just ask your parents, teachers, priests, spouse, or friends to tell you what to do with your life. It is your responsibility to discover it yourself. Sure, people can help by giving you feedback like pointing out your good (and bad) qualities. However, at the end of the day, you have to decide what’s best for you and what you’re truly passionate about.
Robert Greene, in his book Mastery, warned us about the false paths when discovering our life’s purpose.
“A false path in life is generally something we are attracted to for the wrong reasons—money, fame, attention, and so on. If it is attention we need, we often experience a kind of emptiness inside that we are hoping to fill with the false love of public approval…. Scoff at the need for attention and approval—they will lead you astray.”
Robert Greene, Mastery, page 54
To help you discover your life’s purpose, you can ask a therapist to help you or read self-help books and articles. I highly recommend Robert Greene’s book, Mastery. If you haven’t got much time yet to read thick books like Robert Greene’s Mastery (you should, it’s the most important thing in life!), here is my article on how to discover your life’s purpose: 7 questions to ask about yourself. Click here to read that article.
How to Use Happiness to Discover Your Life’s Purpose
Start observing your own behaviour towards everything you do and write it down whenever you can, ideally at the end of the day.
When you write, write it as if you’re writing to a best friend, the kind of friend with whom you genuinely connect without the need to put any walls.
Write down positive things/activities that make you forget to eat and sleep. No, coffee doesn’t count.
Well, OK maybe you like coffee so much so perhaps you may want to explore its history and other ways to use coffee. And maybe next year you’ll have your own coffee shop. With a coffee museum in it. Who knows. The sky’s the limit.
Some other example would be computer programming. If you’re really passionate about it, you’ll forget to eat. You feel so happy working with codes.
But if you keep looking at the time and so looking forward to having your lunch break, and it happens every single day, then perhaps computer programming is not your passion and no matter how big the salary is, it’s not for you.
If you keep working on the job you hate, one day you may reach a point where you find yourself crying in the toilet alone because you hate your job so much. Or worse, get into an unhealthy addiction just to patch your hatred toward your job. You don’t have to go through that.
Use your happiness as a gauge of how close you are to realising your full potential. Find something you’re really passionate about. If you still need the job you hate because it pays the bills, then keep working on that job until you’re strong enough to start something you’re passionate about.
All in All
While I often frown when people proudly brag about wanting happiness as their ultimate life’s purpose, I must remind myself that everyone has a different trajectory.
Maybe happiness, no matter how temporary it feels or how stupid it sounds, is what they urgently need at that stage of their life, regardless of their mistaken assumption that happiness is all they need. People coming out of a tragedy or trauma, for example, often heavily focus on short-term gratification as they just want to get out of the pain.
In the end, we (yes including me) must remember that everyone is where they should be: learning about life at their own pace.
I hope you all discover your life’s purpose soon instead of staying on the wrong path and running around like a headless chicken: where you’re surrounded by friends and families, have so many adventures and activities but feel empty underneath as none of them is aligned with your life’s purpose.
And I hope you can avoid getting stuck in an unhealthy addiction as a result of feeling empty for not aligning with your life’s purpose.
