The Less You Seek, The More You’ll Find | The Happiness Paradox
The less we try to think about a blue elephant, the more likely this creature persists in residing in our thoughts. Imagine the blue elephant represents our unhappiness – our dissatisfaction with life – hence the color blue. Obviously, no one likes feeling blue, and when we experience it, we’re likely to try getting rid of it. But the more we try to push it away, the bigger the blue elephant seems to become.
Often, the more we try to fight negative mental states like anxiety and sadness directly, we experience that they get worse. We experience not only the unwanted mental state itself but also the fact that we fail to get rid of it. That’s why trying to suppress mild anxiety can turn into a panic attack and why forcing ourselves not to be sad often works counterintuitively. The same goes for negative thinking. The coming and going of thoughts are beyond our control. We cannot unthink a thought.
Like with the elephant, the more we try to get rid of a thought, the more it persists. Because by thinking about it, we invite the thought to stay. Reversely, the mental state of happiness also seems of paradoxical nature. The more we wish to be happy, the less likely we succeed. But if we stop desiring happiness and stop pursuing it directly, we’re more likely to experience it.
Happiness seems to be like a butterfly: the more you try to catch it, the more it escapes your grasp. But if you stop searching, it might just appear sitting on your shoulder when you don’t expect it. But how does this work exactly? Why is happiness so elusive? And is there any scientific explanation for why craving and searching for happiness reduce our chances of finding it? This video explores the happiness paradox.
Happiness is elusive. We cannot obtain it directly. If we could, the vast majority of people, if not everyone, would be happy all the time, as they know precisely how to get it. In the 19th century, American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in one of his personal notebooks, and I quote: “Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained.” End quote.
Whatever we pursue, there’s no guarantee that happiness will result from it. We may have expectations of happiness being a consequence of certain actions. But in many cases, these expectations do not align with reality. For example, we could have the expectation and desire that meeting with a friend will generate a sense of satisfaction. But there’s a chance that this meeting will not provide us with the happiness we seek, leading to disappointment; moreover, the failure to meet our expectations might even make things worse.
Chances are that we continue our pursuit of happiness in other ways to find it; in some cases, it indeed occurs, while in other cases, it doesn’t. It seems that we can more or less create the conditions in which happiness is more likely to arise. But, ultimately, it remains elusive. The so-called paradox of hedonism, first coined by the utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick, explains that the conscious pursuit of pleasure interferes with the actual experience of it.
The more we look for it, the less room we leave for the actual possibility of experiencing it. Moreover, if happiness becomes our sole pursuit, then we may close our eyes to other goals. Philosopher and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl stated that it’s impossible to pursue happiness directly: it must ‘ensue.’ This means that with whatever we do, happiness shouldn’t be the goal but rather an unintended side effect of our actions.
Frankl argued that happiness could be a byproduct of “one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.” Frankl himself disposed of the goal of happiness when he was imprisoned in several concentration camps during the Second World War and found meaning instead. A purpose greater than himself, for example, his wife, that could still be out the...