image courtesy of Pink Sherbet Photography

Happiness is a hot topic right now. From Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project to No Impact Man’s quest to link voluntary simplicity with increased happiness to the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, the world seems full of people with advice on how to be happier.

Now, I’m generally a happy gal, and it makes me happy to think about other people becoming happier. I’m all for it! Especially when the happiness of the citizenry is used to make policy decisions on a big scale, as Enrique Peñalosa did in Bogota in the 90s.

But I wonder, as individuals, when we focus on happiness as a goal, aren’t we somehow missing the point? Put another way, is personal happiness itself best treated as a destination, or as a lovely side effect of living a meaningful life?

Happiness is two kinds of ice cream?

Of course, this has a lot to do with how we use the word happiness. Do we mean the lush, momentary ecstasy of a first taste of chocolate icing? The thrill of anticipation? Fruitful and deep connections with other people? A quiet sureness of who we are and confidence in what we are up to?

All of these are pleasant, no doubt, and each has a place in a happy life. Sometimes, they can even be hard to tell apart—I myself have a tendency to go for the chocolate cake when what I really want is a sense of connection.

Where deep happiness comes from: contribution and creativity

I think most of us can agree that real happiness feels like something more stable and longer-term than the fleeting awesomeness of physical pleasure. It feels deeply right—like an undercurrent of positivity, a sense that we’re on the correct path, or at least a good one. I know that as I write and learn and grow and connect—as I contribute and evolve—I feel more and more of it.

This is an important point, one that is often implied or relegated to the footnotes of happiness conversations. Practical, workable hacks to focus on the positive, achieve balance between generosity and self-respect, and remove friction from day-to-day life are helpful, and from one perspective, they work beautifully.

But from a larger perspective, something is missing. Even if we all learn to deal with people cordially and maintain good boundaries and try a little harder to understand each other, does anything change on a fundamental level? Aren’t we still wrapped up in ourselves to the exclusion of most other things?

For those of us who already have so much good fortune, focusing on how to be happier is the wrong approach

I’m not saying that being happy is wrong—just that making it our focus is a mistake. It puts too much emphasis on us and how we feel: What would I like? What would make me feel good? Which feeds our narcissism and ends up separating us from each other and from the enormous, participatory process that we are part of. How important is my happiness in the big, big, super big picture? Not very.

This is not to say that the happiness inquiry going on right now is a waste of time—the fact that we are learning about what makes human beings feel fulfilled and secure and productive is truly wonderful. I just don’t want to see us all in our own little bubbles continuing to focus on our own happiness with everything we’ve got while sea levels rise and animals go extinct and billions of people languish in poverty.

Can we pop those bubbles and create something new together?

In service to the idea that we can, I’d like to offer a few amendments to Gretchen Rubin’s (really quite lovely) Four Splendid Truths about Happiness.

Splendid Happiness Truth Amendment #1: Happiness is not the most important thing to pursue

Your happiness is not the most important thing in the world to pursue and neither is mine. We have far more important tasks, like learning how to see the problems we face now as catalysts and developing a new worldview that enables us to solve them.

Splendid Happiness Truth Amendment #2: Happiness is created when we come together and push ourselves

Everyone knows that as we give our energy and emotion and effort freely, happiness is created as a by-product and liberated within us. It’s a simple and familiar equation: give and you shall receive.

We might not always feel great in the process of building community and pushing forward together—it is messy and can be painful—but it is splendidly true that if we put our focus on the giving side of the equation, we can and will become radiantly, deeply happy at the same time.