You, we are told throughout life to chase happiness in one way or another. This is essentially the running narrative of society. The pursuit of happiness is deemed perhaps one of the best things you could pursue, one of the best truths that might be out there, according to a lot of people. And this makes sense. Why would you not want to pursue happiness? It makes sense to pursue things and places and people that are going to increase the happiness in your life.
If you want to get together with an individual, that individual hopefully increases your happiness. If you're going to take a job, that job should increase your happiness. It seems almost obvious and undebatable that the pursuit of happiness would be a good thing, that this would be a good way to orient one's energy in their life towards things that maybe have a higher likelihood, hopefully, of making you happy.
The pursuit of happiness is a goal that might make you choose to put yourself in certain situations with a byproduct. Is more happiness. And happiness, on its face, of course, is a good thing. We like to feel happy. I think it is good to feel happy. It's probably even healthy to feel happy. So why would you not want to pursue that ultimate state of mind? One might say, if happiness is the ultimate state of mind, why would you not want to pursue that at all costs, we should be happy.
But I think there's something wrong with the pursuit of happiness. And I'll be clear. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with happiness itself. Of course, that's not the case. Happiness, it's good to be happy. I think most of us should want to be happy. And I think we would all agree that when we are happy, that is a good thing going on. But the pursuit of happiness is not the same as happiness itself.
The pursuit of happiness is what I'm going to challenge in this episode and actually argue that it's not such a great thing. And on its face, that might sound almost ridiculous to some listeners. How could the pursuit of happiness be a bad thing? Well, I want to argue that happiness actually has more in common with misery than it does with contentment. So I want to be clear here. So contentment, I don't think of as being the same as happiness. When we're content, we're still.
We're accepting of the world around us. We can see, we can observe that the world has some good things, that the world has some bad things, but we accept it, not accept it in the sense that we are complacent and that we have inaction. Of course, it's good to take action on things that you believe in. It's good to want to change the world for better. But there's also this realistic acceptance that within our lifetime, there's only a very minimal that any of us can do.
And the state of mind of contentment is to just be very accepting of the way things are. Even though you do take action to try to make things better, you know that some of those actions will work, and many, probably most of those actions will not work. And in the grand scheme of things, that's okay. It's okay because that's life. And there's this acceptance of the epistemic uncertainty, or just the inability to evoke too much change in the world around us. We know that's the case.
So contentment is a stillness. It's an inner peace. It's a tranquility. It's an acceptance that most efforts will not go the way we think they will. Which is not to say you shouldn't take the action. You most definitely should. That is the best way to learn and to understand the world around you. We should always be building solutions. I always argue for this. Try to create, try to build, try to bring about change.
But you can do that in a state of contentment, where you accept that the world is never going to look the way you want it to look. Not even close. That there are good things and there are bad things in this world. And there's no reason to believe that's not always going to be the case. Even though we can try to bring about change in a positive direction. That's contentment. But happiness is more about passion. It's more of an emotionally charged thing.
It's like a pendulum where maybe in the middle of that pendulum, or though the lowest point is kind of your everyday, average kind of baseline behavior. And happiness is kind of an extreme where it swings, let's say, to the right. And that's a good feeling. It's wonderful to feel happy, but it's a passionate, emotionally charged thing, which means it has a lot in common with misery. Now, in some sense, obviously, happiness is the exact opposite of misery. But misery is also passionate.
Misery is also emotionally charged. It's another extreme of that pendulum. You can imagine the pendulum swinging to the far left. And so extremes actually have a lot in common with each other, even though in some sense, they're at the opposite ends of a spectrum. And I think it's often more useful to, instead of thinking of things as being on a spectrum, as being very similar to each other when they are the extreme and you can imagine there are other analogies here.
Political opinions that are extreme actually have a lot of similarities to each other. Right, extreme right wing people have a lot in common with extreme left wing people. Even though the ideologies are very dissimilar, they have a lot in common with each other because they tend to maybe be quite irrational. They maybe have a lot of confirmation bias, and on and on. Right. They have a lot of similarities in the way that they speak, even though they're speaking about very different things.
So, analogous to that, happiness is an emotionally charged, extreme feeling, just as misery is. And because of that, happiness actually has a lot more in common with misery, I would argue, than something like contentment, which is more about being still, it's not about being happy or sad. It's just about being and accepting of the world that we're in.
And we make changes in those world, at least we try, we make attempts, and we want to orient our lives and the world around us in a positive direction. But it's not about having a bunch of passion. It's about just taking those actions on a daily basis and observing what happens and accepting that there's only so much change we can bring. It's a very peaceful, accepting, not inactive, but just accepting state of mind.
So I said at the beginning that we are told in one way or another in today's society to chase happiness, that this is a good thing. The pursuit of happiness is perhaps one of the most lofty goals we could have, that whatever we do in life, that we should be pursuing happiness. And it makes sense on its face, why would we not want to be happy? But happiness actually has a lot more in common, I would argue, with misery than it does with contentment. It's more of an extreme emotional state.
Now, again, I want to be clear. Happiness itself is not bad. Happiness is a good thing when we are happy. That's great. I don't think anybody would say happiness itself is inherently bad, but the pursuit of happiness actually has some problems with it. In fact, I think the pursuit of happiness can place you into a situation in many situations on an ongoing basis that makes you miserable quite often. And that's because happiness has this commonality with misery.
And I'll explain the mechanism of how this works in a bit. Before I do, I want to be clear that we are not in control of happiness. And so because of that, it doesn't make sense to make it a goal. How can something be a goal if you can't control it? Now I understand that you can kind of as a baseline, generally orient yourself towards better outcomes than poorer outcomes generally. But in some sense, this is not even an interesting conversation, that part of it.
Because for example, if you see someone smoking all the time or they make a bunch of bad decisions in life, well, obviously they're not orienting their life around happiness. And even the person doing it, I think knows that. So in some sense you could say, well yeah, there's decisions you can make in life that might make you happier. Well, yeah, as a baseline, you should obviously do a level of exercise. You should obviously eat healthier food than unhealthy food. You obviously should not smoke.
There are some baseline things you can do that will definitely make your life happier, but that's not really making happiness the goal. That's not the pursuit of happiness. That's just in some sense not being an idiot, right? For lack of a better term. I mean, I think we all know if we use common sense that there are ways to put ourselves into opportunities way, and there are ways to put ourselves into kind of misery's way, right?
So in some sense, don't be an idiot and don't smoke, don't always eat unhealthy, don't never exercise. Those are dumb things to do or not do, and that's not going to make you happy. I think we all get that. Okay? But if we're using a level of common sense for baseline human behavior, then beyond that, the question is what is the pursuit? And I'm going to argue that the pursuit of happiness is actually quite problematic because we're not in control of happiness.
So it doesn't make sense to make it a goal. We don't know when happiness is going to arrive. It happens at different times. It has unannounced arrival times or stochastic or random arrival times. And anything that is entering our life randomly does not make sense to make it a goal. It can be appreciated, it can be enjoyed, it can be kind of pounced on if it's like an opportunity that's arising, but we're not in control of when this feeling arrives.
Because the nontrivial aspect of life, the complexity of life, is such that we're doing many different things, we're interacting with many different people. And when a particular coalescence of something comes together and precipitates out is just not something we get to control. We can take advantage of it when it does happen, but it's not for us to control.
And if you're not in control of something, things that cannot be controlled, it makes more sense to understand those in terms of contentment than it does happiness, right? So much of life is uncontrollable, and so it makes more sense to step back and accept that sometimes we are happy and sometimes we are not. As opposed to making it an explicit goal. As though there are deterministic levers that we can pull to try to get ourselves more happy.
More often, I think we need to see contentment as being better than happiness. That contentment is the thing we're actually after. You think about people saying, well, don't get your hopes up. And we normally think of that as being kind of a depressing thing. If someone says, well, don't get your hopes up. And you might say, well, don't say that. That's a bad thing. Right? You shouldn't say, don't get your hopes up. It's good to have hope. You need to have hope.
But I don't think it's all a bad thing to not get your hopes up. I think that not being excited is not a bad or depressing thing. I don't think that's the opposite of happiness. I think it's actually quite peaceful. To not get your hopes up does not mean you're miserable. To not get your hopes up does not mean you're depressed. It just means you're not trying to specifically engineer your life towards being happy all the time. And I don't think that's a bad thing.
So let's pick apart the mechanism of why I think this is and why I think it's true that it's better to be content than to be happy. When we base our pursuits on happiness, what we're doing is we're setting up a kind of contrast between our expectations and reality. We are artificially engineering this kind of juxtaposition on an ongoing basis between what we expect to happen and reality. The reality is that we don't know when we're going to be happy.
It's some intricate, complex confluence of different factors that we're just not in control of. Happiness is great, it is wonderful, but it is not something that you have control over. And if you actively, on a regular basis, pursue something that has this unannounced arrival time, then what you're doing is you're purposely engineering a contrast between what you expect in life and what life actually is. And it kind of leads to a constant crash effect that is itself quite depressing.
Which means that the pursuit of happiness has a real downside to it. Now, again, I want to be clear. We're told to pursue happiness. But if you think about it, happiness has a lot more in common with misery than contentment. Because happiness is an emotionally charged thing. It's very passionate, and we're not in control of it. And if it's something that you're not in control of, it means you don't know when it's going to come.
But if you act like you have control over it, then what's going to happen is you're going to continually and purposely engineer in your life these moments of contrast between what you expect to happen and reality. And this leads to, I think, something that's quite depressing or even miserable. It's soul sapping to constantly be let down. And I know in one sense, this sounds a bit funny because, well, you shouldn't tell people not to get your hopes up. And I'm not saying never get your hopes up.
I think hope has its place. I think hope is bad. But to act as though you're going to constantly hope for things to turn out sets you up for kind of a soul sapping experience throughout life. And I argue that it's better to be content than to pursue happiness actively. Because you're chasing a ghost in some sense. You're pursuing something that you don't have control over.
And because of that, statistically, you're setting yourself up to constantly run into this contrast between your expectations and the way reality actually plays out. And I think this is true. Anytime you try to act as though you have more control than you do in a situation, anything that has this stochastic arrival time, this random arrival time in your life, or in any system for that matter, means you are, by definition, not in control of it doesn't mean it can't be taken advantage of.
It does not mean that it cannot be enjoyed. But it does mean you don't have control over it when you act like you do have control over it. You are now purposely engineering a contrast between the stochastic arrival time of something that you have no idea when it's going to happen and your expectation that it is. Which means you are purposely in your life engineering a kind of depression. And I think this is what a lot of people do.
You are purposely engineering moments of discontent, of unhappiness, because you are acting as though you can control the pendulum. It's almost like you're trying to push the pendulum to the extreme. And then when life doesn't have the confluence of factors, at that moment when things don't go the way you thought they were, they did. They look different, then it ends up being a bit depressing. It ends up having more in common with misery than it does with happiness.
And I think this is what's problematic about the pursuit of happiness. And so I think we have to see contentment as the goal, because this is something we can actually work on in life. We can develop mental discipline around how to be content, about how to have an inner peace, about how to view the world in a way that you don't have a lot of control over it. And this is not a depressing thing. It's just not exciting all the time. It's just not elation.
Not because those are bad, which they're not, but because you don't have control over those. There is something good about resisting undue excitement. There is something good about that. There is something really peaceful and good and content about not chasing or pursuing happiness, but instead accepting much of what life throws at us. And when good things do happen, to pounce on it at that moment, as opposed to trying to explicitly engineer it.
Happiness is good, but there's nothing we can really do about that but enjoy it when it comes. It's contentment that can be worked on. And when you really understand this, when you develop the mental skills in achieving contentment, I would argue that you realize contentment feels even better than happiness. And that probably sounds a bit funny to a lot of people. But again, happiness is an emotionally charged thing. It's not a bad thing at all.
It's great, it feels wonderful, but it's very fleeting. It's very passionate, it's very charged. Contentment is like a peace. It's an acceptance. And I would argue that's really what we are after in life, is that feeling of contentment.
So not only does pursuing happiness present a lot of problems because of the contrast we set up between our expectations and the way the real world works, but I think that happiness itself, even though it feels really good, is not as good as achieving contentment. Okay, so I said at the beginning, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, society tells us to pursue happiness. And on its face, of course, that makes a lot of sense. Happiness feels great. We want to be happy.
We should want to be happy. But there's something problematic about the pursuit of happiness. Happiness has a lot more in common with misery than it does contentment. Happiness is emotionally charged. It's passionate, it's fleeting. And we're not in control of happiness, just like we're not really in control of misery, right? Beyond a kind of baseline common sense behavior, in life, both misery and happiness, because they're extremes, are not things that we're really in control of.
And if you're not in control of, it doesn't make sense to make it a goal. I argue that the big challenge here is we need to see contentment as being better than happiness. Contentment is actually the thing that we're after. It's okay not to get your hopes up on a regular basis. That's not a bad thing. And I'm not saying never get your hopes up. But I don't think your baseline behavior should be constantly getting your hopes up.
Because there will be an ongoing contrast between those hopes and reality. That's just the way the world is. Not getting excited all the time is not depressing. It's peaceful. It's arguably better than happiness. When we base our pursuits on happiness, we set up that juxtaposition, that contrast between our expectations and reality, that leads to an ongoing kind of downside, almost depression, I think in a lot of people, because it's soul sapping to constantly be let down.
To pursue happiness is to engineer its opposite. Since anything with a random or sarcastic arrival time cannot be controlled. And that means that you will statistically be engineering many moments of discontent and unhappiness in your life. We need to see contentment as the goal. This is something we can actually work on. Learn to view the world beautifully and objectively, but not in a sense that you're constantly pursuing every hope that enters your mind.
That you're going after a feeling you have no control over. Learn to appreciate a lack of excitement and a lack of elation. There is something good about resisting undue excitement. Happiness is good, but it's not something that we can work on directly. It's only something we can enjoy when it comes. But contentment is something you can develop a mental discipline around. And I argue that when you really get this, contentment feels even better than happiness. That's it for this episode.
Thanks so much for listening. Until next time, take care. You.