17 March 2025
Recently, I came across a paper that reported the findings of several studies that concluded that people who obsess over their own level of happiness end up more depressed, more negative, and less satisfied with their lives than people who are more or less unconcerned by how happy they are. On the other hand, aspiring to happiness or viewing the pursuit of happiness as an important goal had no detrimental effect on well-being.
The origins of this paper lie in an intriguing discrepancy in the body of research literature on human happiness. On the one hand, some studies have found “that sometimes the more people value happiness, the less happy they are”, and that “valuing happiness may not translate into more happiness and can even backfire”. On the other hand, there is a considerable amount of research which finds that indeed, “individuals can actively and successfully pursue and obtain happiness.” But surely people pursue happiness because they value it, so why would pursuing happiness lead to more happiness, while valuing happiness leads to less?
Perhaps, the authors hypothesised, previous research had conflated two distinct concepts under the banner of ‘valuing happiness’: holding happiness as an important goal, vs being concerned about one’s own happiness in the here-and-now. They reasoned that if you aspire to happiness, you will set goals to feel happy more often, and to feel that happiness more intensely. But if you are concerned about your happiness, you will judge your level of happiness – that is, compare how happy you feel to how happy you believe you should feel or how happy you expected to feel during a positive event. This judgment can evoke negative meta-emotions (i.e. emotions about your emotions), such as disappointment, which undermine your ability to just feel happy.
Put simply, if you believe that you should feel extremely happy about a particular positive event, but in fact you feel only moderately happy, you’ll judge the event as being disappointing rather than enjoyable. Over time, this self-sabotage of your own experience of happiness would be expected to lead to declining well-being and even depression.
To test these hypotheses, the researchers conducted a series of studies comprising online surveys and daily diaries, on five different groups of Americans and Canadians, totalling over 1800 adults and undergraduate students.
After analysing participants’ responses, the researchers concluded that indeed, aspiring to happiness and concern about happiness are two distinct concepts, and it is possible for individuals to be discordant in them – that is, to greatly aspire to happiness while being relatively unconcerned about how happy they are, and vice versa.
Somewhat disappointingly for the pursuit-of-happiness camp, they found that those who had goals to be happy weren’t any better off than those who didn’t. But those who were concerned about their happiness were far worse off, and their negative meta-emotions played a significant role:
“Aspiring to happiness was not reliably associated with any measures of well-being. Conversely, concern about happiness was robustly associated with lower well-being cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Specifically, concern about happiness was associated with lower satisfaction with life and psychological well-being and greater depressive symptoms cross-sectionally and 6 months later… Being concerned about one’s happiness relates to lower well-being, and this is in part due to negative meta-emotional experiences during positive events in daily life.”
Unpacking the Pursuit of Happiness: Being Concerned About Happiness but Not Aspiring to Happiness Is Linked With Negative Meta-Emotions and Worse Well-Being
The finding that concern about happiness undermined well-being reinforced the conclusions that I drew in my previous article Stop talking about your ‘mental health’: It’s making you – and everyone else – crazy: The most effective way to destroy your so-called mental health is to obsess about it. The more intently you focus on how you feel in any given moment, the worse you’ll feel. Instead, if you feel lousy, your best bet is to figure out why, and to develop (with skilled help, if necessary) a comprehensive plan to address the cause/s of your low mood, potentially incorporating diet, exercise, sleep optimisation and troubleshooting of your current life situation.
However, the finding that aspiring to happiness was not associated with experiencing greater happiness intrigued me. My own thinking about happiness has undergone significant changes over time, and I hope you’ll indulge me as I put those thoughts into writing.
‘Pursuing happiness’ down a blind alley
Growing up in Australia, one of the many aspects of American culture that I found rather risible, was the sacrilising in the Declaration of Independence of ‘the pursuit of happiness’ as an unalienable right. How exactly, I wondered, was one meant to pursue happiness? Like a cheetah chasing down its prey, perhaps, pinning it to the ground and devouring it, only to be driven by unquenchable need to another pursuit, and then another, and another? What was this happiness of which the founders of the nation spoke, if it had to be chased after? And in what way was it a ‘right’ that governments existed to secure? The notion of a government solicitously watching over an entire nation of people constantly in hot pursuit of happiness conjured up preposterous mental images. Especially when the people in question were so fat and unhealthy that pursuing anything faster-moving than a Roomba would be likely to bring on a cardiac arrest. Furthermore, wasn’t it this ‘pursuit of happiness’ that had made Americans so fat and unhealthy anyway, not to mention, that had spawned the culture of crass commercialism that had swamped their country in a tide of plastic crap and eminently disposable pop culture, which then rolled across the Pacific Ocean to engulf my own country?
And then there was the societal impact of this ‘pursuit of happiness’. In the course of my lifetime, I have witnessed the reorientation of societal institutions around prioritising happiness – or at least, a particular version of happiness – in a way that I believe is hugely destructive, and in fact, completely counterproductive. The obsessive fixation on ‘being happy’, which emerged from American therapy/shelf-help book culture, has spawned at least three generations, and probably four, of the unhappiest people in human history. We in the West live safer and more comfortable lives and lose fewer of our loved ones to violence than any of our forebears, yet somehow everyone is ‘traumatised’. The terror of losing a husband or child to infectious disease, or a wife or mother to death in childbirth – a spectre that haunted every family, even the wealthiest and most high-born just a few generations ago – has been almost entirely quelled, and yet we complain of being more depressed and anxious than our ancestors, who were summoned to the graveyard as often as to the wedding feast. What the hell is wrong with us?
‘We just want our kids to be happy!’
I was raised by pre-war generation parents who were not particularly concerned about how happy my siblings and I were, at any given moment. I’m not saying they were harsh or neglectful, and they certainly were not unloving. They just didn’t predicate every decision that affected our lives, on whether it would ‘make us happy’. They arranged holidays and chose schools for us without consulting us about where we would like to go, and provided clothes that they wanted us to wear, regardless of our feckless fashion preferences. Not once did my mother ever ask us what we would like for dinner; we were called to the table (in fact, we were required to set it, and clean up afterwards), and if we didn’t like the meat and three veg that was served up, tough luck – eat it, or go hungry, kiddo.
I don’t know that anyone ever asked my parents what was their fondest wish for their children, but I can absolutely guarantee you that they wouldn’t have said, ‘We just want them to be happy.’ They wanted my brother, my sister and myself to get a good education so we could earn an honest living, find decent partners (whom they expected we would marry), buy a house, and have kids of our own. They did their best to guide us into career paths that they thought would be a good match for our abilities and interests, but the idea that we should select jobs that ‘made us happy’ was utterly foreign to them.
My parents had children quite late in life, so my friends’ parents were all Baby Boomers. One high school friend’s grandmother was the same age as my mother! I was envious of many of my friends; their olds were so cool compared to mine – more like friends to their children, than parents. Their mums bought them the latest fashions, took them to McDonald’s, and had their car radios tuned to their offsprings’ favourite stations. (My dad listened to daggy 2CH, which was a source of intense mortification for me whenever he drove me anywhere with a friend.) At the time, I was certain that I would have been much happier if my parents were more emotionally attuned to me. Didn’t they know how much my feelings mattered??????
However, when my own children entered school, I was struck by the single-minded devotion of mothers my own age – who were Gen Xers like me, but all with Boomer parents – to their children’s happiness. Or, more accurately, to their children’s expression of positive affect in the moment. These adults had no hesitation in expressing that their greatest desire for their children was that they would do ‘whatever made them happy’. I vividly remember a conversation with the mother of one of my daughter’s classmates. We were comparing notes on our children’s personalities, and she commented that her daughter was so strong-willed that she would always be the leader, rather than the led. I replied that that should at least immunise her against being drawn into risky drug and alcohol use. “Oh no,” the mother replied, giggling. “She will be trying everything that’s out there, and influencing others to try it too!” I was horrified; she thought it was hilarious.
The transition in how parents conceived of their central mission, from the ‘raising responsible adults’ sentiment of my parents’ generation to the ‘we just want them to be happy’ mantra of the Boomers and subsequent generations, stirred a deep discomfort in me, which took me a while to fully articulate. Here’s what I eventually concluded: While I certainly hoped that my children’s positive experiences outweighed their negative ones, I had absolutely no expectation, or even desire, for them to be ‘happy’ all the time. I knew that many of the decisions I made as a parent would not ‘make my children happy’ in the moment, but my sense of my principal task as their mother was to instil and cultivate in them the values, habits and character traits that would, in the long run, lead to productive and fulfilling lives… and I also knew that plenty of the things I needed to do in order to accomplish this task would sure as hell not ‘make them happy’.
I wasn’t happy when my mother assigned chores and my father gave me a fixed amount of pocket money rather than acting as my personal ATM, but I learned invaluable life skills – like how to budget, clean a bathroom and cook a meal – and I was determined that my children would learn these life skills too.
Now, I was very far from a model mother. I committed parenting fails left, right and centre, and there are plenty of episodes that I would handle very differently if I could have a do-over. But there’s one thing I don’t regret, and that’s prioritising my children’s development into responsible, considerate and productive adults, over ‘making them happy’. (I’m pleased to say that both my kids are excellent cooks, good at managing money and tolerable cleaners. And they’re both good people, who care about others and are motivated to make a contribution to the world.)
What does ‘the pursuit of happiness’ actually mean?
As I dug into what Thomas Jefferson and the other founding fathers actually meant by ‘the pursuit of happiness’, it turned out that my previous understanding of this phrase was embarrassingly puerile. In an incisive essay on the topic, economist Barry Brownstein wrote:
“Most people think of happiness as feeling good, but that is not what Jefferson meant. Pleasure and happiness are not the same. Our happiness does not depend upon everything going right in our life or getting what we want.
In her law review article, ‘The Origins of the Pursuit of Happiness,’ Carli Conklin observed the widespread societal misunderstanding about the nature of happiness. Jefferson didn’t mean, ‘The unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness’ provides an ‘unmitigated right to pursue that which would make one feel good.'”
What Thomas Jefferson Meant by ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’
Jefferson’s conscious decision to include ‘the pursuit of happiness’ in his brief catalogue of unalienable rights, was influenced by the English legal scholar William Blackstone. In his Commentaries on the Laws of England, Blackstone
“argues that the law of nature, and of nature’s God, contain the fundamental principles by which the entire natural world—including animals and humans—is to be governed. Next, he argues that the pursuit of happiness is the primary method by which men can know and then apply the law of nature as it pertains to humans: men can readily ‘discover . . . what the law of nature directs in every circumstance of life; by considering, what method will tend the most effectually to our own substantial happiness.’ Happiness in this sense is synonymous with the Greek concept of eudaimonia; it evokes a sense of well being or a state of flourishing that is the result of living a fit or virtuous life. Rather than being ‘fleeting or temporal,’ such happiness is ‘real’ and ‘substantial.’ It is real in that it is ‘not fictitious; not imaginary; [but] true; genuine.’ It is substantial in that it pertains to the substance or essence of what it means to be fully human. Thus, for Blackstone, to pursue happiness was to pursue a fit or rightly ordered life; one that was in harmony with the law of nature as it pertains to man.”
The Origins of the Pursuit of Happiness
Brownstein provides a vivid anecdote confirming that Jefferson’s understanding of happiness conformed with Blackstone’s:
“In a letter to his eldest daughter Martha (Patsy), Jefferson advised living a virtuous life is the key to happiness. ‘Ennui,’ Jefferson wrote, is ‘the most dangerous poison of life.’ According to Jefferson, the antidote is ‘developing daily those principles of virtue and goodness which will make you valuable to others and happy in yourselves.’ Jefferson left no room for doubt about the means to happiness: ‘Health, learning, and virtue will ensure your happiness; they will give you a quiet conscience, private esteem, and public honor.'”
What Thomas Jefferson Meant by ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’
Is this understanding of happiness congruent with what post-war generation parents mean when they say, ‘We just want our kids to be happy’? I don’t think so. Or if it is, their parenting methods – indulging their offsprings’ every whim, hiring a cleaner rather than assigning household chores to their children, cooking separate meals to accommodate each one’s ever-changing preferences, and distracting them with electronic gadgets rather than expecting civilised behaviour at family occasions – are poorly suited to the task of cultivating the ability to experience happiness as a direct and inevitable consequence of a life well lived.
Turning back to the study that I discussed in the beginning of this post, I’ll take a wild guess at why the participants who aspired to happiness or held it as an important value, were apparently no happier than those who didn’t (in contrast to other research that has found that actively pursuing happiness can indeed promote happiness). Perhaps it’s because their conceptions of happiness were closer to the ‘feeling good’ end of the spectrum than the Jeffersonian ‘living a good life’ end.
The researchers were, in fact, keenly aware of these distinctions:
“It would be interesting to consider the role that one’s definition of happiness plays in the current work (Jayawickreme et al., 2012). Previous research found that valuing happiness was linked with greater well-being for participants from Russia and East Asia, and this link was explained by holding more social (vs. more individualistic) definitions of happiness (Ford, Dmitrieva, et al., 2015). Future research might consider how different types of happiness definitions (e.g., hedonic vs. eudaimonic definitions) influence the link between valuing happiness and well-being (Biswas-Diener et al., 2009; Kashdan et al., 2008).”
Unpacking the Pursuit of Happiness: Being Concerned About Happiness but Not Aspiring to Happiness Is Linked With Negative Meta-Emotions and Worse Well-Being
It’s darkly funny that our current societal approach to ‘mental health’ is so completely ass-backwards, we probably do actually need further research to prove to ourselves that if you want to be happy, pursuing hedonic enjoyment is an inferior strategy than cultivating “health, learning, and virtue”. Our forebears would be shaking their heads in amazement at our rank stupidity. They would have implicitly grasped Brownstein’s pithy summary of the Jeffersonian understanding of ‘the pursuit of happiness’:
“Happiness is an inside job, and those who understand the nature of happiness cultivate timeless virtues that lead to a life of meaning and purpose.”
Barry Brownstein
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