Three Myths and Four Truths About How to Get Happier
The most important thing to realize is that happiness is not a destination but a direction: How you travel through life is what counts.
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I have heard this statement from thousands of people in my career of teaching and researching happiness. I have said it myself many times; you probably have too. As the philosopher and theologian Saint Augustine declared in 426 C.E., feeling no need to offer proof, “There is no one who does not wish to be happy.”
But what do we actually mean when we say we just want to be happy? Usually, that we want to achieve and keep certain feelings—of joy or simple cheerfulness—but that some obstacle prevents this. “I just want to be happy” is almost always followed by naming a source of unhappiness, such as money problems, relationship problems, health problems—or real tragedies. (As I write these words, the Maui wildfires have killed dozens, displaced thousands, and caused suffering that has affected us all.) From small problems to major catastrophes, life seems to conspire to make our wished-for happiness fleeting at best, inaccessible at worst. What a cruel paradox: We are wired to desire happiness yet seemingly doomed to a life of struggle that makes it unattainable.
But what if this paradox was based on a misunderstanding of happiness itself? In fact, much of the most common and popular wisdom about happiness relies on a series of myths. As Oprah Winfrey and I are working together to show in our new book, Build the Life You Want, anyone can make true progress in building a better life for themselves and others if they can get past these myths, even amid a life that contains no small amount of suffering.
Myth 1: Happiness is a feeling.
We all know what happiness feels like: It involves clear emotions such as joy, love, and interest—much as unhappiness involves emotions such as fear, sadness, disgust, and anger. But calling happiness itself—or unhappiness—a “feeling” is a mistake. That is like asserting that your job and your money are the same thing. You need your job to pay you, and how much you earn may be evidence of your professional effectiveness. But to reduce your work to money would be inaccurate and depressing.
In a similar way, your emotional states both derive from and help deliver well-being, but they’re not identical to that well-being. Happiness is more than a series of neurological signals evolved to help keep you alive, safe, and able to reproduce. I prefer to think of it as a combination of three much less ephemeral components: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.
Enjoyment starts with simple pleasure and then adds the company of other people, which calls on our higher consciousness by requiring the executive capacity of our brain to exercise social skills. So a way to think of enjoyment, then, is: pleasure plus the company of others plus memory. Enjoyment raises happiness, as pleasure alone does not. That’s one reason, for example, ads for food and drink usually show people together, sharing a meaningful time in their lives, instead of consuming alone. The advertisers want to associate the product with long-term enjoyment (and thus happiness), not just momentary pleasure.
Satisfaction is the joy you get from accomplishing something you’ve worked for. It’s that feeling you experience when you get an A in school after studying hard; it’s the glow from a well-earned promotion at work. Satisfied is how you feel when you do something difficult, even painful, that meets what you see as your life’s purpose.
Psychologists have defined meaning as a combination of coherence (things happen for a reason), purpose (direction in life), and significance (your life matters). We can make do without enjoyment for a while, and even with little satisfaction. But if we lack meaning—which takes a lot of effort and sacrifice to find—we are utterly lost. Without it, we can’t navigate life’s inevitable challenges and crises. When we do have a sense of meaning, we can face life with hope and inner peace.
Myth 2: Your problems are the problem.
You might have noticed in the preceding definition of happiness something that seems strange, possibly unsettling: All three of happiness’s elements call for some degree of effort, discomfort, or suffering, even for some unhappiness.
Enjoyment demands the investment of time and effort. It means forgoing easy, effortless thrills. It can mean saying no to cravings and temptations. It can require taming the appetite for pleasure and living according to the rules of personal conduct on which you decide—such as staying faithful to your partner. Satisfaction, too, entails some work and hardship. If you don’t suffer for something, at least a little, it’s unlikely to satisfy you much.
The common strategy of trying to eliminate problems from life to get happier is futile and mistaken. We must instead look for the “why” of life to make our problems an opportunity for learning and growth. And unsurprisingly, that last component of meaning involves the most suffering of all. “The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life,” the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in his 1946 book, Man’s Search for Meaning.
Myth 3: Your goal is happiness.
In truth, you can’t be happy. You can, however, be happier.
Searching for happiness is like questing for El Dorado, the fabled South American city of gold. When we look for happiness, we might get glimpses of what it feels like, but it doesn’t last. Some people talk about happiness as if they possess it, but no one does. And all too often, the very people society thinks should be completely happy—the rich, the beautiful, the famous, the powerful—wind up in the news for their bankruptcies, personal scandals, and family troubles.
If the secret to pure happiness existed, we all would have found it by now. If happiness were simply a commodity in that way, it would be big business, sold on the internet, taught in schools, and provided by the government. But it’s not. The one thing every human has ever wanted since Homo sapiens first appeared about 300,000 years ago in Africa has remained elusive. We’ve figured out how to make fire, the wheel, the lunar lander, and TikTok videos, but despite all that human ingenuity, we have mastered neither the art nor the science of getting and keeping the one thing we really want. Some people manage to have more happiness than others, but no one can maintain it consistently.
That’s because happiness is not a destination but a direction. We won’t reach a place of complete happiness in this life. But wherever we are in our journey of life, and however satisfied or dissatisfied we naturally tend to be, we all can be happier with self-knowledge, good habits, and a commitment to improve.
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If the message that happiness requires effort, involves unhappiness, and is largely unattainable strikes you as bad news, it shouldn’t. It should set you free. What it tells you is that your feelings can’t dictate your well-being, that your problems can’t stop you from getting happier, and that you can finally leave off looking for a lost city of gold that doesn’t exist. Here are four ways to apply this information to your life.
Truth 1: Check whether you’re getting your happiness nourishment.
If you go to a nutritionist because you feel that your diet needs improvement, they’re bound to analyze your macronutrient profile—the amount of protein, carbohydrates, and fat you eat—to see where it’s out of balance and make adjustments. Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning are the macronutrients in your happiness diet. So this is a good place to start as you assess your happiness and how it could be higher.
Ask yourself whether you’re settling for mere pleasure or doing the work you need for real enjoyment. Are you making the sacrifices necessary to accomplish satisfying things? Do you have a secure sense of your life’s coherence, purpose, and significance? The answers you come up with for these questions can help you see where you should apply more effort, and where you can make the most progress toward getting happier.
Truth 2: Stop trying to eradicate your unhappiness.
The Woodstock hippie motto was “If it feels good, do it!” This is plenty-bad advice—not least because it suggests settling for pleasure over enjoyment. But just as bad is a more contemporary moral imperative: “If it feels bad, make it stop.” A major reason people fail to get happier is that they spend so much of their time and energy trying to eradicate unhappiness from their life.
You need negative emotions and experiences to achieve enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning in your life. We’re talking about not medical issues, such as anxiety and depression, but the ordinary suffering that befalls everyone at one time or another. You don’t need to seek out this suffering; it will find you. The key is not to fight it—with denial or palliatives—when it does find you but to accept it, learn from it, and grow as a person.
Start each day remembering that every experience you have—positive and negative—is part of being fully alive. If you have been expending a lot of effort trying to avoid normal conflict, shielding yourself from rejection and disappointment and running away from sadness and fear, turn around and say, “Bring it on.” That will take some practice, but in time, you will be amazed at how much this can improve your quality of life.
Truth 3: Remember the progress principle.
One of the great paradoxes of happiness is that what brings joy is not attaining a desired goal but making progress toward it. Some aims—chasing money, power, or fame—are misguided and harmful, but taking steps toward personal growth, skill acquisition, and connection with others is strongly correlated with enhanced well-being.
This principle of progress was well understood at America’s founding. The Declaration of Independence did not guarantee happiness—a utopian promise beyond anyone’s capacity to realize. Rather, our “unalienable right” was the pursuit of happiness. Because happiness is a direction and not a destination, its pursuit makes that utopian promise as near self-fulfilling as we can hope for.
How to pursue happiness, then? Not by valuing happiness highly—that is too vague, and overvaluing happiness as a goal can even lead away from well-being, just as saying, “I want more money” not only won’t make you richer but will make you feel more acutely that you don’t have enough. Instead, the right approach is to make noticeable progress in the habits that add up to making you happier.
Truth 4: Adopt the four happiness habits.
It is easy to imagine that the habits that bring happiness to you are very personal and unique. After all, we are all different in our tastes. But looking at the research, we can identify some broad patterns in the consistent practices of the happiest people. They develop and abide by a faith or philosophy of life; they maintain a strong connection to family; they stay close to friends; and they strive to serve others through their work. Understanding exactly what these things mean and how they are made manifest in your life requires reflection and discernment. However, the broad categories of these habits are common to all.
Perhaps these myths and the better-informed truths all make perfect sense to you. Even so, they can be devilishly hard to remember and practice as you go about your complicated life. So here is one more item, designed to cement the rest into your thinking and daily routines.
Instructors sometimes use a technique known as “plastic-platypus learning” to teach people how to communicate newly gained knowledge by explaining it to an inanimate object—such as a plastic platypus. The research on this technique shows that if you can give a coherent account of recently acquired information, you will absorb and remember it better. A plastic platypus works just fine, but even better is a real person—a lot of research indicates that teaching a subject is one of the most reliable ways to learn it deeply yourself.
You might ask how you can teach someone else to get happier when you still have so far to go yourself. That is precisely when and why you are the most effective teacher. The best happiness instructors are those who have had to work to gain the knowledge they offer, not the lucky ones who fall out of bed most days in a great mood. The lucky few are like the fitness influencers on Instagram who have superior genetics, can eat whatever they want, and have no idea what the challenges are for the rest of us.
Don’t hide your own struggles; use them to help others understand that they’re not alone and that getting happier is possible. Your effort and pain give you credibility; your progress makes you an inspiration. And sharing the experience with others adds to that progress, making it a truly happy win-win.
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