The pursuit of happiness.

I've often thought, and remembered again yesterday during a conversation with a friend, that one thing people rely too much on which leads to their unhappiness is the very pursuit of happiness. I think happiness cannot be a goal in itself. It an elusive goal, found best when not looked for. Have you ever been in a really dark room and tried to focus on the few things in the room that have a tiny bit more light on them? For some reason, when you look straight at it, it disappears, but when you focus on something else and look at it out of the corner of your eye, it's much clearer. I think alot of people are depressed because they find that they are not happy. Know what I mean? One of the best therapeutic approaches to depression is to give the patient an activity that he/she must do; by giving them an activity, their focus is brought down to the task before them instead of their misery and unhappiness; eventually they often can enjoy the activity and in the end there is some satisfaction to be derived from the completed task. Or, take a marriage, for example. If the whole purpose of marrying someone is for that person to make you happy, or you both to make each other happy, you will inevitably be disappointed at some point and possibly become very unhappy with each other. But if your purpose in the marriage is something beyond mere happiness, then perhaps happiness can grow out of the meeting of that purpose. If your purpose as a couple is to help each other grow and to become better persons, then encouraging each other and watching each other develop will bring some joy in itself. If at some point you find yourself unhappy it is a sign that something is not going right. But to focus on that happiness, or lack thereof, would be pointless; instead you have to figure out why it is that you are unhappy, what it is that is going wrong and fix that. Happiness will inevitably follow when the couple works together toward the same goal.
I'm doing a course on decision making; one thing that I read recently was that people constantly over- and under-estimate how they will feel about certain outcomes. We are terrible at predicting our emotions. In particular, we often think that our response to those things that we are dying to have or to those things we absolutely dread will be much greater than they are in the end. We are affected by so much more than just that one thing in any given situation and when we predict our emotional response we tend to forget that it will not be the only thing we are responding too. In our pursuit of happiness I am convinced we do the same thing. We focus on those things that we think will bring us great happiness, but when we actually get it, we are disappointed because it wasn't everything we thought it was...or rather, we had overestimated its capacity to bring us happiness. Instead, if we were to put our energies into other things, perhaps more noble activities like work or helping others or whatever it is that we feel called to do, we might find much more happiness in the mere process and outcome than we could have hoped for.