Pursuing happiness is one the things that we set out to do, now more than ever it seems. Yet, here we remain, as unhappy as ever. We chase things, likes, excitement, money, status and mistake that as happiness. After the moment of joy is gone however, we get back to square one.

The next round of meaningless pursuits.

Why are we still unhappy?

You chase moments of excitement, not meaning

This explains the excessive shopping, partying, endless scrolls on Instagram, watching video after video on youtube. You are seeking something that makes you feel alive, even if just for that moment. People who are into extreme sports have that moment of exhilaration when they go bungee jumping, go cliff diving, parachuting. That moment when all of your senses are alive, you feel invincible, sometimes scared as hell but alive in every cell in your body.

In our daily lives we seek to fill our mundane existence with pockets of exhilaration like this. This is why Tinder is so exciting for some. The idea of meeting a random person and seeing whether you click, hooking up, or not. The uncertainty of it makes it exciting. It makes us feel the butterflies in our stomachs like we do on first dates, during the first kiss. This is also why we want to travel off the beaten path. Remote islands, random enclave, mysterious alleyways, the mystique of not knowing exactly what is there pulls us in.

Yet, to live for moments like this alone is simply not enough to sustain real meaning in your life.

After some time, the nomad finds a place he calls home. He settles down with a person who gets him. Mysterious locations and surprising hook ups no longer satisfy because at some point, those things stop providing the fulfilment required.

Exhilaration all the time is not sustainable and with too much occurrence it becomes the same old life. The exciting becomes the mundane if taken in too large a dose. Likewise, if you only seek the mundane without anything new and exciting, how can you appreciate the routine stuff?

In Brene Brown’s talk on courage and vulnerability on Netflix, she talked about people who have lost their spouse. It is never the exciting holidays or the adventures they miss. It is always the small daily stuff like curling up to watch TV together or simply spending time together. A meaningful life is created in moments like this, not in an alcohol fuelled weekend.

Start building meaningful moments, with people who bring meaning to your life.

You live in envy and constant comparison

We get envious and jealous of people, of course we do. After all, envy is one of the deadly sins so it must be prevalent right? In today’s world it is even easier to envy others and their lifestyle because our lives are broadcasted 24/7. And only the good parts of our lives are curated and then published for the world to ogle and like. This version of people’s lives makes us think that we all live a fairy tale life. As if life is about café brunches, smoothie bowls, yoga at sunrise, cranking out a F45 workout.

But it isn’t is it?

We have lives that are full of frustrations like when we wake up late in the morning, get stuck in traffic, feeling perpetually hungry because Instagram figure does not create itself you know what I mean. We don’t broadcast the loneliness we feel because our relationships aren’t great, or that our friends have moved on with their lives and out of ours. We don’t share the disappointment we feel when we get passed over for yet another promotion and we don’t tell others about the anxiety we feel about barely making rent and affording essentials.

Yet, online we see lives of others as perfect. Picture perfect. Caption-worthy. Instagram-worthy. We envy those lives. In comparison, we see our real life as pathetic, and in turn see ourselves as a loser or an imposter pretending to have a decent life.

Even when we meet others in real life, friends, colleagues, family, relatives, we ask how they are doing but internally we compare ourselves with them. Are they doing better than me? How did they afford their big house whilst I live in an apartment the size of a shoe box? Why am I still not making more money than them?

All of this are just material comparisons. How about comparing happiness or well-being? Are they more satisfied in life than you? Or are you happier than them? We do not compare things we cannot see but we also mistake the things we see and own as markers of success and happiness.

Stop comparing yourself to others. We all have multiple layers to us, things we show others and things we keep hidden. Mostly the things we keep hidden are the sadness, the loneliness, the anger, the disappointment, our desires, our needs. These are the things that matter, the real us.

Focus on the real you.

You don’t really know who you are and what you want

When we do the constant chase of exciting moments and the endless comparison of our lives with others and subsequently feed the envy monster, we are really running away from the one truth: who we are. Even though many people seek to find out who they are, they are only really seeking the good side of them. Many want to blank out the less desirable side of themselves or at least what they perceive as less desirable.

We fear finding out who we are because it uncovers the side of us we are ashamed of, the side we wish to hide, even from ourselves. We all have insecurities, shame, secret desires, regrets, behaviours we aren’t proud of, personality traits that we aren’t too keen on. When we start to dig beneath the shiny veneer of goals and to-dos, we start to see the tarnished silver underneath.

The tarnish though is only as a result of us hiding away from ourselves, not because it is bad. This is not about broadcasting your shame and secrets to the world, neither is it about denying how you feel about them. Instead, it is about self-acceptance. When you accept that you in your authentic version is not going to be perfect, nor will this version be liked by everyone, you will start to free yourself from the obligation of being someone you are not.

The other thing we fear about knowing who we are and finding out what we want is that we start to doubt whether we are worthy of the things we want. We also start to doubt whether we have the capabilities to get what we want. When you clarify what it is you want, you might actually have to start putting in effort.

If you remain clueless, you can stay oblivious and in denial. You can tell yourself that this dreaming thing is for others, I am too good for it or not good enough for it. Either way, it’s a cop out. The idea of going after what you want is not simply about the end result, but also about the journey. You can never be certain about the outcome, no matter how hard you try. But you can be in charge of the journey, what you learn from it and how you will change as a person.

If we did think about what we want, many of us tend to focus on the superficial layer, amount of money we want to make, the car we want to drive, the house we want to buy and the holidays we want to take. What we need to do is look deeper, beyond the shiny things. Look within you, who are you really? What would make life meaningful for you? What would make you feel like you have lived for a good purpose? What would justify your existence? Again, this is for no one else but you to decide.

You have to decide your own value to the world, in the world.

At the end of the day

Happiness is not to be confused with long term fulfilment. It is after all, a fleeting moment of emotion. It is an emotion attached to an event, a moment in time. What we should be looking for is long term meaning and thus fulfilment.

How can we do that?

We can do that by creating and appreciating more meaningful moments in our lives, rather than seek to escape it constantly. Next, we can do this by not comparing ourselves with others and instead focus on accepting and nurturing the real us. Lastly, we create a more meaningful life by doing the hard task of finding out who we really are and subsequently what we want in alignment with our true self.

Remember, being in a state of unhappiness can be changed, it need not be forever. If you are unhappy, it is not because you are broken. It is simply because you have been walking down the wrong path, all you need to do is change the direction and the destination.