Pursuing Happiness
Whatever you pursue, don’t do it alone
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“One is never as unhappy as one thinks, nor as happy as one hopes.” — La Rouchfoucauld, 1664
March 20 is the United Nations’ International Day of Happiness and this year’s theme is “Happier Together.”
Along with life and liberty, the pursuit of happiness is a self-evident truth, according to Thomas Jefferson.
But make sure you read the fine print: it’s not happiness that’s guaranteed; just the pursuit of it. And therein lies the difficulty.
The attainment of happiness is always the challenge, isn’t it? And we don’t make it any easier on ourselves when we predicate our expectation of happiness by how we measure it.
When we say to ourselves “I’ll be happy when…” we’re making it dependent on some external achievement. This was the theme of an episode of Timeless Leadership:
Episode 50: If Only
Thinking about the conversation with Laura Gassner Otting in Episode 49, I was struck by our human desire to put a definition on success, and oftentimes, never being satisfied. Kind of like how we constantly chase happiness, promising ourselves that “if only” we achieve a certain milestone, we’ll be happy.
“Human happiness never remains long in the same place.” — Herodotus, c. 430 BC
People are always looking for th…
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