Beyond the Pursuit of Happiness

If your efforts to bring more happiness into your life are not delivering lasting results, perhaps it is time to focus, instead, on allowing in Joy.

We seem hard-wired to seek out the things and experiences we believe will make us happy. This state of mind is so important that the U.S. Declaration of Independence asserts people have an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness.

Many of us—regardless of the country we live in—see happiness as our birthright, and we are willing to go to great lengths to achieve it. And there is no shortage of advice out there on how to become happier.

We are constantly being told that there are things “out there” that can make us happier. And these things are often available to us, if the price is right. Yet our experiences have likely taught us through the years that the happiness we find “out there” can be fleeting.

The association between happiness and material possessions is a powerful one. And it’s an association that is constantly being reinforced by advertisers and the media. We are told that if we wear the right brand of jeans, wash our hair with the right shampoo or drink the right kind of vodka, we will be one of the cool kids, and we will be happy.

So we buy the clothes, the shampoo, the vodka we think will help do the trick. But ultimately, these items fail to deliver on the implicit promise that endless happiness can be ours. At the same time, this grand chase can drain our bank accounts and leave us feeling empty or disappointed when those external “things” – be they people, places, things or events – fail to deliver sustainable happiness.

A central challenge with the pursuit of happiness is that happiness is largely a mental construct. We receive messages from our external environment on all the things that could make us happy, if only we had them. These messages get reinforced by those little voices in our head that arise from ego, urging us to acquire those things.

Yet experience tells us, there is no satisfying those little voices. When we finally get something we believed would make us happy, we do get a sense of satisfaction from the achievement. But the positive feelings that arise generally aren’t sustainable. We feel good, for a while... and then we move on to pursuing something else that seems lacking in our life.

So our lives become about satisfying those voices that tell us something is lacking, missing, or not enough.

But it is possible to engage in a profound shift that takes us from pursuing happiness to awakening Joy.

This state of Joy is not shaped or influenced by the voices in our head. That’s because Joy – real and lasting Joy – is different from happiness. It isn’t a mental construct, but rather a state of being. It is an energetic state that we can choose, time and again, until it becomes our abiding way of being.

The key point of distinction between happiness and Joy is that happiness is conditional, often on the achievement of some future state or on the resolution of some perceived lack. In contrast, Joy is characterized by a sense of awe with every life experience, without the expectation that things need to change in order for us to be happy.

Joy does not need to be pursued, rather simply chosen and cultivated, layer by layer, until it fully blossoms in our lives. And it can start with the gentle mantra: Today, I choose Joy.