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Human Behavior Life Lessons

Happy All the Time?

One of my wife’s favorite books from growing up was Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin. It stands proudly on our bookshelf like a little totem to childhood optimism—a promise that somewhere out there, happiness could be a permanent state if you just figured out how to arrange your life correctly.

For a very long time, I believed that too. I even had a section on my website called “Happiness and Inspiration.” I thought that if I read enough, optimized enough, meditated enough—whatever the adult equivalent of eating my vegetables was—I could eventually arrive at happiness.

But this year, I realized I was chasing the wrong goal.

Happiness, it turns out, is a tricky concept. Even psychologists get tangled up in it. When I got married, I remember reading about studies claiming that parents were less happy than non-parents. This was scary. Less happy? That couldn’t be right. Having a kid was supposed to make me happier. So why did the research say the opposite?1

It turns out there are two kinds of happiness. The first, which the ancient Greeks called hedonic pleasure, is moment-to-moment pleasure—how you feel right now. The second, eudaimonia, is deeper fulfillment—the sense that your life has meaning and purpose.

Psychologists at the time were mostly measuring happiness by asking people how happy they felt at that exact moment—pinging them randomly throughout the day and asking, “How do you feel right now?” Those results made it look like parents were miserable: tired, stressed, juggling chaos. This is hedonic happiness, and it only told half the story.

It’s that larger happiness, eudaimonia, that children give in abundance: the inside jokes, the Bar Mitzvahs, the pride of seeing your kids work hard to accomplish things. That’s the self that says, “It was all worth it.”

The more I thought about it, I realized I’d been targeting hedonic happiness, asking “How can I be happy all the time?” But happiness isn’t something you can aim at directly. The more you chase it, the further it runs.

That’s what the book The Happiness Trap2 by Russ Harris is all about. Harris writes that our cultural obsession with “feeling good” actually makes us miserable. We treat happiness like a destination—something we can reach if we just fix all the bad feelings, declutter our lives, and meditate enough. But life doesn’t work that way. Pain, stress, and disappointment aren’t glitches in the system; they’re part of being alive.

Our brains aren’t built to be happy all the time. Each surge of pleasure—what we experience as a dopamine spike—is followed by a balancing dip. Neuroscientists call it hedonic adaptation. When we chase the highs too often, the baseline shifts downward, and it takes more stimulation just to feel normal. We can actually get addicted to happiness. The system is designed for balance, not bliss.

So if we can’t chase happiness, what can we do?

We can be more psychologically flexible—stay present, open up to whatever shows up inside us, and still act in line with our values. Instead of labeling ourselves and what we should be and do, we can take a deep breath and really experience life as it is. We can understand our values and what means most to us, and do more of that. In short, we can live a good life. That’s what true happiness and eudaimonia are really about.

Happiness, in the truest sense, is a byproduct—something that arises when we stop fighting our inner experience and start engaging with life as it is. The goal isn’t to be “happy all the time,” but to be alive all the time—awake, connected, and responsive to what’s in front of us.

When I look at that old copy of Happy All the Time on our bookshelf now, I don’t see it as naïve anymore—or even wrong. I see it as a different kind of goal. A goal that takes hard work but is infinitely more rewarding.

Footnotes

  1. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize–winning behavioral psychologist, explained this paradox in his TED Talk, The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory. He used the more psychological terms of experiencing self and remembering self, but it boils down to the same thing. ↩︎
  2. The Happiness Trap is one of the best popular explanations of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) developed by Steven C. Hayes. ↩︎

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