Where Did I Get The Idea That This Would Make Me Happy

In our last article, we looked at a question many people eventually find themselves asking:

I have everything I want. Why am I still not happy?

Maybe not everything. Few people get everything they want. But perhaps you did what you were supposed to do.

You got an education. Built a career. Made enough money to live comfortably. Found someone to share your life with. Bought a home. Raised a family. Became financially secure. Accomplished some of the goals you set for yourself.

Maybe your list looks different.

But if your life has gone reasonably well and you are still wondering why you are not happy, something deserves another look.

Not necessarily the things you achieved.

The expectations that were attached to them.

Somewhere along the way, you came to believe that getting enough of the things you wanted would eventually produce something else: happiness, satisfaction, contentment, or perhaps what you were really looking for all along—peace of mind.

So where did that idea come from?

Everyone Needs a Way to Navigate Life

None of us enters the world knowing how to live.

We have to learn what matters, how to judge right from wrong, good from bad, what is worth pursuing, what should be avoided, what success looks like, and what kind of life is worth building.

In other words, we need some kind of navigation system.

You probably didn’t sit down at eighteen years old and design yours. You inherited much of it. Your parents contributed to it. So did teachers, friends, religion, television, movies, music, advertising, employers, experts, books, social media, and the culture you grew up in.

Then experience added something important.

You discovered that some of what you had been taught worked.

Education really could create opportunities.

Hard work really could produce results.

Planning could improve your chances of success.

Money could provide security and choices.

Relationships could enrich your life.

Setting goals and reaching them could be deeply satisfying.

So there was good reason to trust the navigation system.

Much of it had proven itself.

But human beings have been trying to navigate life for a very long time.

And when we look backward, we find something interesting.

People Have Asked This Question Before Us

Civilizations separated by geography, language, religion, and culture did not agree about everything. In fact, they sometimes understood life in radically different ways.

But they repeatedly wrestled with a similar problem:

What allows a human being to live with happiness, contentment, or peace?

The ancient Greeks emphasized things such as wisdom, virtue, moderation, and learning to govern our appetites and desires.

Chinese traditions emphasized character, proper relationships, harmony, restraint, duty, and learning how to live well with others.

Buddhist teaching approached life from a very different religious perspective but recognized that craving—continually needing something else in order to be satisfied—could become an obstacle to peace.

Ancient Egyptian wisdom warned against greed, pride, uncontrolled desire, and anger while emphasizing restraint, right conduct, and order.

The Stoics taught that placing our happiness in possessions, reputation, circumstances, or other things outside our control leaves our peace dependent upon things that can change.

Hebrew wisdom repeatedly warned about the same human problem. Ecclesiastes observed that the person who loves money is never satisfied with money. Proverbs repeatedly connects wisdom, restraint, humility, and right living with a life that is well ordered.

These traditions did not give the same explanation for why these things were true.

Therefore, we should not pretend that ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Chinese thinkers, Buddhists, Stoics, and the writers of the Bible all believed the same things. They clearly did not.

But people looking at human life from very different places repeatedly noticed something similar:

Getting more of what we desire does not necessarily produce peace, happiness, or contentment.

That is worth considering.

Now Look at What We Learned to Value

Think again about the things many of us were encouraged to pursue:

Get a good education.

Build a career.

Make enough money.

Find the right person.

Buy a home.

Raise a family.

Become financially secure.

Do something meaningful.

Find yourself.

Be yourself.

Follow your heart.

Create the life you want.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with those things.

Education is valuable. Work matters. Money solves real problems. Financial security is better than constantly wondering how the bills will be paid. Relationships matter. Families matter. Goals can give direction. Accomplishment can be satisfying.

Many of these values have helped people build lives that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. So perhaps the navigation system didn’t fail.

Maybe it took you exactly where it said it would.

You got the education.

You built the career.

You made the money.

You found the relationship.

You bought the house.

You raised the family.

You accomplished the goal.

You arrived.

And then something unexpected happened.

What you thought would be waiting for you when you got there wasn’t there.

Maybe We Expected the Wrong Thing From the Right Things

Perhaps education was never supposed to give you peace. It was supposed to educate you.

Perhaps a career was never supposed to make you content. It provided meaningful work, accomplishment, income, or opportunity.

Money can provide security, comfort, choices, and experiences. Those are real benefits.

But perhaps money was never designed to settle the mind.

A relationship can provide love, companionship, intimacy, and belonging.

But another person may not be capable of making you permanently okay with yourself and your life.

Achievement can give you the satisfaction of accomplishing something difficult.

But after the celebration ends, another goal usually appears.

These things may not have failed us at all.

We may have expected them to provide something they were never capable of providing.

That raises a different question.

Where did we get that expectation?

We Inherited More Than a List of Goals

Nobody may have ever told you directly:

If you accomplish all of these things, you will finally have peace of mind.

Maybe nobody needed to. The message was built into much of what surrounded us.

Work toward a better life.

Get ahead.

Become successful.

Find the right person.

Improve yourself.

Follow your dreams.

Create the life you want.

And there is plenty of truth in those ideas.

But somewhere along the way, “these things can make my life better” can quietly become “these things will make me whole.”

Those are not the same claim.

One can be tested rather easily.

Did the education create opportunities?

Did the job provide income?

Did saving produce financial security?

Did the home give your family somewhere to live?

Did achieving the goal give you a sense of accomplishment?

If so, those things worked.

But now we are testing the second claim.

Did having them make you content?

Did they quiet the continual need for something else to change?

Did they produce peace of mind?

If they did, you probably would not be asking the question that brought you here.

Perhaps We Should Look at Our Navigation System

This does not mean we should throw away everything our culture taught us.

It means we should examine it.

For thousands of years, people from very different civilizations repeatedly connected peace and contentment with things such as wisdom, character, moderation, restraint, right relationships, and learning how to govern desire.

Much of what we have learned to pursue involves achievement, acquisition, security, experience, personal fulfillment, and arranging life in ways we prefer.

There are good things on both lists. But they are not necessarily designed to produce the same results.

One list is largely concerned with what happens around us and what we accomplish.

The other asks more about what happens within us and what kind of person we become.

Perhaps that difference deserves more attention than we have given it. Especially if you have already tested one of them.

But how did we get here?

The West Did Not Always Think This Way

The navigation system most of us inherited did not appear all at once.

For much of Western history, people understood life within a larger framework. Greek philosophy emphasized virtue and character. Judeo-Christian thought placed God at the center and understood human life in relationship to Him. Family, community, duty, faith, and tradition helped define how a person understood his or her place in the world.

That world was far from perfect.

Over time, the West gained something enormously valuable: greater individual freedom.

People gained more freedom to think, choose, own property, pursue education, select occupations, improve their circumstances, challenge established authorities, and determine the direction of their own lives.

Industrialization and economic growth brought another enormous change. Things once available only to the wealthy gradually became available to ordinary people. Education expanded. Careers became more varied. Living standards improved. Travel became possible for more people. Homes became more comfortable. Technology made life easier in ways previous generations could hardly have imagined.

Those were real improvements.

And they changed what was possible.

A person no longer had to accept life exactly as it had been handed to them.

You could build a better life.

That idea worked.

Millions of people did exactly that.

But over time another idea became attached to it.

If I can build a better life, I can build a life that will make me happy.

Those are not quite the same thing.

The Successful and Fulfilled Life

By the twentieth century, prosperity, advertising, entertainment, psychology, self-help, and eventually social media helped shape what we might call the successful and fulfilled life.

Its values are familiar because most of us grew up with them.

Get educated.

Become successful.

Be financially secure.

Find the right relationship.

Own the things that make life comfortable.

Have experiences.

Improve yourself.

Discover your potential.

Find yourself.

Be yourself.

Follow your passion.

Create the life you want.

Again, there is nothing necessarily wrong with these things.

The important part is the promise we began attaching to them.

If I can get enough of these things right, I will finally be okay.

Maybe nobody ever said that to you.

Maybe nobody had to.

It was already part of the culture you inherited.

Your parents probably inherited parts of it too. So did their parents. Each generation added something as freedom, prosperity, technology, opportunity, psychology, entertainment, and consumer culture changed what people believed a satisfying life could look like.

Eventually, what began as the opportunity to improve our circumstances became the expectation that arranging those circumstances correctly would produce happiness, contentment, and peace.

And there is the problem.

Our modern navigation system has become very good at helping us obtain many of the things it taught us to pursue.

Education.

Opportunity.

Prosperity.

Freedom.

Choice.

Comfort.

Achievement.

Experiences.

A better standard of living.

Those things can genuinely make life better.

But making life better and producing happiness, contentment, and peace of mind are not necessarily the same thing.

And that brings us back to the question that started all of this:

Why am I still not happy?

Maybe Humanity Learned Something We Forgot

Now the comparison becomes interesting.

People separated by centuries, continents, languages, religions, and cultures repeatedly came back to things such as wisdom, character, moderation, restraint, right relationships, and learning how to govern desire when they thought about happiness, contentment, and peace.

Our modern Western system has become very good at helping us change our circumstances.

The older systems placed considerably more attention on developing the person living within those circumstances.

That does not prove they were right.

It does not prove everything modern culture values is wrong.

And it certainly does not mean we should return to the ancient world.

But it does give us something to consider.

If changing our circumstances were enough to produce happiness, contentment, and peace, then people who successfully created the lives they wanted should have found them.

Some have.

Others haven’t.

And if you are asking the question that brought you here, apparently you haven’t either.

Perhaps the problem isn’t that you failed.

Perhaps you succeeded at obtaining things that were never capable of producing everything you expected from them.

That means the answer may not be another destination.

It may be time to reconsider what actually produces what you have been looking for.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

We have something now that we didn’t have when we started.

Something to compare.

Our modern culture taught us that education, opportunity, prosperity, freedom, choice, relationships, achievement, and personal fulfillment could help us build a better life.

Much of that proved true.

Earlier civilizations looked at the problem differently. Despite their enormous differences, many repeatedly connected happiness, contentment, and peace with things such as wisdom, character, moderation, restraint, right relationships, and learning how to govern desire.

They may have disagreed about why.

But they noticed something.

And now your own experience gives you a reason to take another look at what they noticed.

The question is no longer simply:

What else do I need to get?

Perhaps a better question is:

What do I need to learn about living differently?

But even that creates another problem.

The Greeks had answers.

The Chinese had answers.

The Egyptians had answers.

Buddhists had answers.

The Stoics had answers.

Hebrew and Christian traditions have answers.

Modern Western culture has answers.

Which ones actually work?

We don’t need to choose one simply because it is old.

We don’t need to choose another because it is modern.

And we don’t need to accept something merely because somebody sincerely believes it.

We have something we can begin evaluating:

What actually produces happiness, contentment, and peace—and what does not?

That is where we will go next.

Recognizing where our beliefs came from is only part of the answer. If getting what we want doesn’t necessarily produce happiness, the next question is worth considering: Where Does Contentment Actually Come From?