Stop Trying to Be Happy and Start Working Towards Your Ideal Self

If you have to try to be cool, you will never be cool. If you have to try to be happy, then you will never be happy. Happiness, like other emotions, is not something you obtain, but rather something you inhabit. It's the long-term pursuit of your goals and your ideal self that gives you fulfillment.

This post originally appeared on Mark Manson's blog.

When you're angry at an annoying neighborhood kid, you are not self-conscious about your state of anger. You are not thinking to yourself, "Am I finally angry? Am I doing this right?" No, you're just riled up. You inhabit and live the anger. You are the anger. And then it's gone.

Just as a confident man doesn't wonder if he's confident, a happy man does not wonder if he's happy. He simply is.

What this implies is that happiness is not achieved in itself, but rather it is the side effect of a particular set of ongoing life experiences. This gets mixed up a lot, especially since happiness is marketed so much these days as a goal in and of itself. "Buy X and be happy," or "learn Y and be happy." But you can't buy happiness and you can't achieve happiness. It just is, once you get other parts of your life in order.

Happiness Is Not the Same as Pleasure

When most people think they are seeking happiness, they are actually seeking pleasure: good food, more sex, more time for TV and movies, a new car, parties with friends, full body massages, becoming more popular, and so on.

But while pleasure is great, it's not the same as happiness. Pleasure is correlated with happiness, but does not cause it. Someone developing a drug habit, for example, was probably pursuing pleasure but may end up far from happiness. Someone having an affair might hurt their loved ones in pursuit of pleasure. The pursuit of immediate pleasure rarely results in long-term satisfaction.

Research shows that people who focus their energy on materialistic and superficial pleasures end up more anxious, more emotionally unstable and less happy in the long-run. Pleasure is the most shallow form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest. Pleasure is what's marketed to us. It's what we fixate on. It's what we use to distract ourselves. But pleasure, while necessary, isn't sufficient. There's something more.

Happiness Does Not Require Lowering Your Expectations

A popular narrative lately is that people are becoming unhappier because we're all narcissistic and grew up being told that we're special unique snowflakes who are going to change the world and we have Facebook constantly telling us how amazing everyone else's lives are, but not our own, so we feel all like crap and wonder where it all went wrong. Oh, and all of this happens by the of age 23.

I think we should give people a bit more credit than that.

A friend of mine recently started a high-risk business venture. He dried up most of his savings trying to make it work and failed. Today, he's happier than ever for his experience. It taught him many lessons about what he wanted and didn't want in life and it eventually led him to his current job, which he loves. He's able to look back and be proud that he went for it because otherwise he would have always wondered "what if?" and that would have made him unhappier than any failure would have.

The failure to meet our own expectations is not antithetical to happiness. Rather, I'd actually argue that the ability to fail and still appreciate the experience is a fundamental building block for happiness.

If you thought you were going to make $100,000 and drive a Porsche immediately out of college, then your standards of success were skewed and superficial, you confused your pleasure for happiness, and the smack of reality hitting you in the face might be one of the best lessons life ever gives you.

The "lower expectations" argument falls victim to the same old mindset: that happiness is derived from without. The joy of life is not having a $100,000 salary; it's working to reach a $50,000 salary, and then working for a $60,000 salary, and so on.


Happiness is Not the Same as Positivity

Chances are you know someone who always appears to be super happy regardless of circumstances or situation. But they might be putting up a false front. Positivity is fine, but always denying negative emotion can lead to deeper and more prolonged negative emotions and emotional dysfunction.

It's a simple reality: shit happens. Things go wrong. People upset us. Mistakes are made and negative emotions arise. And that's fine. Negative emotions are necessary and healthy for maintaining a stable baseline happiness in one's life.

The trick with negative emotions is to 1) express them in a socially acceptable and healthy manner and 2) express them in a way which aligns with your values.

A simple example: A value of mine is to pursue non-violence; therefore when I get mad at somebody, I express that anger, but I also make a point to not punch them in the face. Radical idea, I know. It's still okay to acknowledge that I feel angry.

There's a lot of people out there who subscribe to "always be positive" ideology. I avoid these people just as much as someone who thinks the world is an endless pile of shit. If your standard of happiness is that you're always happy, no matter what, maybe you've been watching way too much Leave It To Beaver and need a reality check. Realistically, life just isn't as placid.

I think part of the allure of obsessive positivity is the way which we're marketed to—being subjected to happy, smiling people on television constantly. Maybe some people in the self help industry that want you to feel like there's something wrong with you all the time.

Or maybe it's just that we're lazy, and like anything else we want the result without actually having to do the hard work for it.

Which brings me to what actually drives happiness...

Happiness Is the Process of Becoming Your Ideal Self

Completing a marathon makes us happier than eating a chocolate cake. Raising a child makes us happier than beating a video game. Starting a small business with friends and struggling to make money makes us happier than buying a new computer.

And the funny thing is that all three of the activities above are exceedingly unpleasant and require setting high expectations and potentially failing to always meet them. Yet, they are some of the most meaningful moments and activities of our lives. They involve pain, struggle, even anger and despair, and yet once we've done them we look back and get misty-eyed.


Because it's these sort of activities that allow us to become our ideal selves. It's the perpetual pursuit of fulfilling our ideal selves which grants us happiness, regardless of superficial pleasures or pain, regardless of positive or negative emotions. This is why some people are happy in war and others are sad at weddings. It's why some are excited to work and others hate parties.

It's not the end results which define our ideal selves. It's not specifically finishing the marathon that makes us happy—it's achieving a difficult long-term goal that does. It's not having an awesome kid to show off that makes us happy, but knowing that you gave yourself up to the growth of another human being that is special. It's not the prestige and money from the new business that makes you happy, it's process of overcoming all odds with people you care about.


Cue statements about "finding happiness within," and "knowing that you're enough." It's not that happiness itself is in you, it's that happiness occurs when you decide to pursue what's in you. It's the long-term pursuit of what you want rather than the trophy at the end.

And this is why happiness is so fleeting. Anyone who has set out major life goals for themselves, only to achieve them and realize that they feel the same relative amounts of happiness and unhappiness, knows that happiness always feels like it's around the corner just waiting for you to show up. No matter where you are in life, there will always be that one more thing you need to do to be extra-especially happy.

And that's because our ideal self is always around that corner, our ideal self is always three steps ahead of us. We dream of being a musician and when we're a musician we dream of writing a film score, and when write a film score, we dream of writing a screenplay. And what matters isn't that we achieve each of these plateaus of success, but that we're consistently moving towards them, day after day, month after month, year after year. The plateaus will come and go, and we'll continue following our ideal self down the path of our lives.


Let go of the imagined result; it's not necessary. The fantasy and the dream are merely tools to get you off your ass. It doesn't matter if they come true or not. Live, man. Just live. Stop trying to be happy and just be.

Stop Trying To Be Happy | Mark Manson

Mark Manson is an author, entrepreneur, and life enthusiast who writes about a reality-based form of self development on his blog.

Image remixed from gameanna (Shutterstock).

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