The Pursuit of Happy And Other Geese
Have a former student who asked these questions (among others) —
How should one pursue happiness? Is it even worth pursuing?
I’m at a place in my life that I think less and less about being happy. Or at least the focus on my life is less and less on my state of happiness. Is it depression or maturity? A little of both? Not sure.
In my youth I pursued happy and got misery. Now I am pursuing meaning and impact and communion with God…and generally I’m happier now than I’ve ever been. Irony, huh? The years of believing that if I got this one thing or one experience, I’d be happy have taken their toll. I’d get it and then I’d be miserable looking for the next one thing. How many one things were there? I lost count. But they were all done in the pursuit of being happy.
By not pursuing happiness, I’m happy … more often than not. But it’s larger than just NOT pursuing happy. It’s pursuing God (for me), His ear, His heart…meaning, impact, communion. And maybe it’s not really happy but rather joy. Whatever “this” is, it is the residual feeling of pursuing meaning, impact, communion with God.
I’m tempted to write that the pursuit of happy is the most selfish thing a person can do. Not that I want all of us being Eeyores, but I’m not sure happiness can be achieved with itself being the end goal.
My generation and the ones behind me have an unhealthy obsession with being happy. Someone told us that we’re entitled to being happy and we believed them. Where did we get this? Where did the idea that my life was supposed to be easy and happy? And who is continuing to feed that lie?
3 Responses to “The Pursuit of Happy And Other Geese”
You would not believe all the books we have at the Library on the subject of happiness. The funniest is ” How To be Happy Dammit: the cynic’s guide to finding happiness”. Way more than we have on the subject of growing a life based on fellowship and interaction with God.
I think we can blame it on The Partridge Family and their theme song “C’mon Get Happy”
I read a great book on this subject by JP Moreland (professor at Talbot) called ‘The Lost Virtue of Happiness’. He argues that from history through the 1960s we literally operated on a different definition of ‘happiness’. Since the 60s revolution, ‘happiness’ to us has become linked to ‘pleasureable experiences’, totally dependent on circumstances, where it used to mean, and should biblically mean, ‘Life well-lived’ in a less fleeting and narcissistic way.