Happiness: The Unachievable Achievement

All our lives, we get told that the purpose of existence is to achieve happiness. No matter how, at what cost, with what tools, just by the end of it, we are to die happy. That is our life’s goal. And to achieve this mystical, almost mythical thing that we call “happiness”, we embark on phenomenal journeys, often times unprepared and woefully ignorant of consequences or costs.

In the end, is happiness achievable? Is it an item we can reach out and grab, only to add to our subconscious collection of feelings, so that one day we may say that yes, we have achieved true joy? Perhaps our entire lives are spent in search for this obfuscated objective, blissfully unaware that all the roads we follow just keep going and going, seemingly without end, with only but a glimmer of light to remind us of what we might have, and what we have not yet obtained.

Yes, that is indeed the case. Happiness is a fallacy, one so great that nobody wishes it to be so. We partake in these extraordinary adventures during our lives, not because we hope to find joy by the end of it, but because it is the search that keeps us going. Life is meaningless without the hunt, and we would be lost without the purpose that it gives us.

Happiness is the gold-filled pot at the end of the finitely existing rainbow that we call our lives, and our insistent need to find it is the leprechaun that keeps pushing us towards that ever-so-elusive goal. Except, by the time we get there, the pot is nothing but fiction, and the leprechaun has gone sooner than we could protest. And as for the rainbow, well, that’s already gone by the time we’ve realized that our search was fruitless. Folk tales were invented so that we may remind ourselves every so often of the dangers of the space we inhabit. As per the tale of the golden pot at the end of the rainbow, we should know that no one single task will give us true joy, whatever it is. Not money, not knowledge, nothing.

We should not stop looking, however. A person who has stopped looking for happiness has effectively given up on life. Depression, anxiety, sorrow, all of these come with the deeply-rooted idea that no matter how hard we try, it just doesn’t seem to be enough. And if our efforts thus far have been unrewarded, how do we know our continued struggle will do it? We can’t, and we don’t. The search for happiness is something we all have within our very core, and we are the only ones responsible for continuing it.

No one other person or thing can convince us that we should stop looking, or if we have stopped, that we should continue. Our strive to better ourselves in body and spirit is but a reflection of our inner need to find happiness. If we believe being fit will result in our joy, then we will be fit. If a loving relationship comes to mind when we think of a happy life, then we will seek out exactly that. The key is that we are the ones to seek, not for the good of anyone else, but for ourselves.

Without the hunt, life is meaningless. Existence as we know it is wholly dependent on our desire to discover happiness. If that driving force were to disappear, our willingness to keep existing goes with it. Within this sad predicament, we are lost. The path hasn’t ended, we’ve just lost track of it, and have started mindlessly meandering in the woods, hopeless and alone.

The logical follow-up question then is, how do we rediscover the path? To that, I have no answer. I don’t believe anyone else does either, as there is no one universal way to getting back on track. The search is deeply embedded within us, and only we can know how to find the willpower to continue. And, if the search will never produce the true final result we seek, why should we continue? Again, there is no answer to that question. The opposite questions are just easier to answer. So, why shouldn’t we rediscover the path once lost? Why shouldn’t we be looking for true joy?