What is happiness?

Who knows!

This word gets thrown around often in our society as some kind of goal that must be achieved in order to be successful, yet many of us mean different things, or don’t even know what we mean at all, when we use this word.

“Happiness” is elusive, undefined, and a BIG distracting problem when it comes to defining what we want in our life — because no matter how we choose to define it, it’s impossible to achieve “happiness” 100% of the time (or even 80% of the time) in our lives, long-term.

Let me explain.

If you’re like most people I talk to (including a not-so-distant version of my past self), it’s likely you have a subconscious, or perhaps even conscious, goal of “happiness” in your life. It’s also likely that this goal of “happiness” is elusive, ill-defined, and impossible to achieve.

I’ll never forget the day one of my coaches said to me: “This goal you seem to have, of arriving at being 100% confident, content, satisfied, and fulfilled all of the time, is never going to happen. We’re always going to experience all of the emotions, no matter what our circumstances in life, and no matter how much self-work we do.”

It seemed so obvious, yet I hadn’t thought of it this way before!

I felt a wave of relief wash over me.

I didn’t have to strive for perfection in my external or internal life, because that was never going to happen. What’s more, I didn’t need to WAIT for perfection to start fully living and being present in my life.

“Happiness” was never going to come, at least not more than in fleeting moments, and that was ok. No human experiences 100% happiness all of the time, so why was I (and later, I realized, so many of my clients), striving for this impossible ideal?

It’s actually madness. But it’s how our brains seem to be wired until we become aware of it.

So, what does happiness mean to you?

Contentment? Satisfaction? Confidence? Positivity? Energy? Elation? Joy? Inner peace? Lightheartedness?

It likely means some combination of these things to you, and/or something else not listed here that falls in the realm of what we consider to be a “positive” emotion.

Because of its obvious association with what we consider to be positive emotions, it doesn’t really matter how we choose to define happiness. (Although it IS a helpful exercise to start with if happiness has been a goal for you in your life up until now).

However, as I’ve shared, feeling whatever we define to be “happiness” 100% of the time, no matter what we define it as, is not an achievable goal.

One of my favorite coaches, Brooke Castillo, talks about how life is and always will be 50/50. Meaning, we will always experience 50% negative emotions and 50% positive emotions — however we choose to define “negative” or “positive” emotions for ourselves.

The negative emotions we experience, and the cause of them, might change and be less painful as we grow and progress, but they will always be there.

I recently had a very smart friend refer to this as our “problem quota”.

Whether we are in debt, we have Parkinson’s, or everything in our life is seemingly in order but we’re out of toothpicks, we’ll always have problems and the stress, self-doubt, restlessness, dissatisfaction, and “unhapiness” that accompanies those problems.

The best we can do is aim for problems like running out of toothpicks, rather than running out of food and money, and to manage our negative emotions in as healthy a way as possible when they do inevitably show up.

A big part of this is remembering that problems, and the negative emotions that tend to follow (and that we may associate with the equally elusive word “unhappiness”), will ALWAYS occur.

Negative emotions are an inevitable part of EVERYONE’S life.

• What if we embraced the negative emotions we experience in our life, rather than resisting and thinking we shouldn’t be having them?
• What if we lived and experienced our “unhappy” emotions fully because they ARE our life, and always will be?
• What if we experienced negative emotions as more than a mere stepping stone to a “postive-emotion-only-dream-life”, and accepted that they will always be a part of us?

Emotions, like self-doubt, dissatisfaction, and discontent, are never going away for good and we’ll never arrive at perfection — even if our external life is seemingly perfect and everything we want it to be!

I’m speaking from experience here, my friends — nomad life and working less than 20 hours per week, while grossing $100K+ per year, with a glorious team at my side? It was my dream for years and now I’m living it.

And guess what? I still have problems.

They’re the problems I prefer to other life circumstances, and the problems that I’m blessed to have compared to other ones, but they’re still there. And I gotta deal, just like everyone else.

So let’s be with the uncomfortable feels that are present in our life right now, and set ourselves up to be present with them in the future as well — even when our life and career have become completely ideal. Because we’re going to need that skill in order to feel good about our lives, even when we’re living our dream life.

Alright. Now we know to…

Stop trying to be happy!

So, what do we focus on instead?

Let’s start with defining what we want and be SPECIFIC about what that is, rather than using a non-specific word like “happiness”:

• Ideal income
• Ideal number of hours working per week
• Ideal amount and structure vacation time
• Employed or self-employed (or combo)
• Ideal work environment
• Source of inspiraton/purpose
• Ideal feeling at work / towards work (E.g., engaged, inspired, belonging, in flow, energized, purposeful, excited)
  (Note: this is how you want to feel, generally, about your work 50%+ of the time, as we acknowledge perfection does not exist.)
• Ideal relationships
• Ideal health
• What else???

Then, let’s be prepared for the problems that will come when we have all of the things we want, by being present with our current problems.

Let’s LIVE in the continual process that is our life and let go of the idea of arriving at a perfect life at some point in the future.

Acceptance of misery is the closest we will ever come to “happiness”, however we choose to define it.
(I think the Buddha said something like this, right? He had it going on!)

Are you feeling what I’ve shared here?

LMK in the comments!

Xo

Rebecca

(PS – If you’re interested in diving deeper into these kinds of philosophies from a scientific and historical/evolutionary perspective, check out the book called “Buddhism is True” by Robert Wright. No woo, crystals, dogma, or ceremonies involved, as the title might suggest.)