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You can't become happy
The happiness mirage
Most of us live as though happiness is something we can become. The plan is to get all the things, collect all the accolades, and arrange all the pieces until there's a good enough story and good enough reasons to finally be happy. That structure of our psychology goes unacknowledged for most of our lives, and for the most part it's a mirage.
Markets and waiting
Markets run on the same mirage: one more trade, one more rally, one extraordinary return that will finally make everything feel secure. Waiting for that return means obsessing over the future, which can cost a person the life happening now.
Being present
The recipe, paradoxically, leaves out worrying about the future, worrying about the past, and being ambitious in all the usual ways of seeking happiness. It is the capacity to be more and more present, so that moments equalize. Someone stuck in traffic can then locate a depth of well-being that makes the traffic no problem.
Why do big wins fade so quickly?
Psychologists call the fading hedonic adaptation. In a 1978 study, Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman compared 22 major lottery winners with a control group and found the winners did not rate themselves as significantly happier overall. Later work by Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson on affective forecasting found that people consistently overestimate how long and how strongly future events will affect their feelings. They called the pattern the impact bias.
What does a wandering mind do to mood?
In 2010, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert used an iPhone app to ask 2,250 adults how they felt and what they were doing, in a study published in Science. Minds wandered in 46.9% of the samples. People reported being less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were focused on the task at hand. What people were thinking about predicted their happiness better than what they were doing.
How did ancient traditions treat the present moment?
Buddhist teaching on mindfulness, called sati, is set out in the Satipatthana Sutta, which directs attention to the body, feelings, mind, and mental qualities as they arise. The Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations that a person lives only in the present moment, since the past is gone and the future unseen. The Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote in On the Shortness of Life that the greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.
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