I’ll be happy when…

For as long as I can remember, my life has always been structured with an obvious overarching goal in mind. When I was six, I started attending school, and from then on, my main goal was to graduate elementary school; afterwards, to graduate high school and get accepted to a university; and finally, to graduate university and get a good job. Of course, there were other minor goals along the way – make the soccer team, win the class award, etc., but I always had a larger sense of direction that was guided by the societal system that I was lucky enough to be born into. I never really thought about “what’s next”, up until a year ago.

It’s an odd transition moving from school into “the real world”. Last year, I graduated from Boston University and accepted a full time offer at the DFCI PMO as a project analyst. This was a huge achievement from my perspective, and I thought something along the lines of, “Great, all my work in school has paid off. I can finally be happy now!”

I guess I hadn’t really thought about what comes after I get that job. I’d had my sights set upon it for so long that I’d made the naïve mistake of assuming that I’d be happy afterwards with life, a very shortsighted thought. Throughout the past year I’d often felt directionless without a goal to be working towards, and I kept on searching for the next thing I could achieve to tell myself, “I’ll be happy when I attain this.”

Recently I listened to an episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast (skip to 1 hour mark), where he interviews Tal Ben-Shahar, a professor who taught an extremely popular class on positive psychology at Harvard University. One of the topics Tal discusses is the common misbelief that people have about happiness that leads to the thought process of “I’ll be happy when…”.

My interpretation of Tal’s idea is that many people tend to relate happiness to tangible achievements or goals – buying a nice car, getting a large salary, retiring, etc. In this way, many people, including myself, trick themselves into believing that they are always on the cusp of being happy – “I just need that one thing, then I’ll finally be satisfied.” It turns out that after achieving these things, what people find is that what they’ve classified as “happiness” tends to wear off fairly quickly, and they then decide that what they actually need to be satisfied is the next thing. One can liken this to climbing a tall mountain – every time you reach the top of what you thought was the peak, you look up and realize there’s another peak, just out of reach. This thought process usually results in unhappiness, as once people realize that the next thing won’t actually make them happy, they may start to think that nothing will make them happy.

I was trying to approach life as if it was a project, with a charter and a go-live, and with success metrics that I needed to achieve so that I could say for certain that I had accomplished happiness; it turns out that life isn’t so easy to break down. I’ve come to the conclusion that happiness is not determined by momentary milestones like buying a new car or getting a promotion. Reaching these milestones is certainly notable, and may cause joy, but I think of joy as temporary and happiness as a lasting state of mind. I’ve begun to believe that happiness is a mindset that you as an individual have control over.

What makes someone happy is different for everyone, I’m sure, but for me I believe it stems mainly from forming lasting relationships, being appreciative of what I have now, and always trying to look on the bright side of life. Going forward, I will try to focus on paying attention to the aspects of my life that cause lasting happiness, rather than temporary joy.