Happiness...what's it mean to you?

Feb 19, 2012

Elizabeth Moore shares how she arrived at a road called happiness...

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Happiness...what's it mean to you?

Before I graduated college I knew everything. I had all the answers and I knew the best way to do just about anything. I landed my first job a month after graduation and took over the social media initiative of my new company. Easy. I spoke up in every meeting and had an opinion about everything we did and how we did it. I was convinced I would set up a Facebook empire in a single day, tweet with all the brilliance of someone who grew up with social media and blog with the confidence of a professional writer. This is not what happened. I spent just over half of the next year convincing my company that we even needed social media. Exactly one year later, we have a slow growing social media presence, I'm no longer an intern and I'm much quieter in our meetings. I’ve learned more about “the real world” in the last year than I ever thought possible—which sounds great in theory—but I don't feel successful. A year in the working-world taught me the rules but it also dimmed some of my enthusiasm. Much of the youthful naïveté that made me think I could conquer the world has been tempered with reality. I thought I was supposed to be running my own business by now. Or living in England. Or I would be the CEO of some major publishing company. 

So why, despite having a college degree, a decent apartment and good job, am I having a quarter-life-crisis? The answer is simple: because it's not where I expected to be by now. In an article entitled "Why Millennial Women are Burning Out by 30," Larissa Faw suggests this is because many millennial women (and I would assume    men as well) never thought past landing their first job, they—and here I will begin using we—“spent our childhoods developing well-rounded resumes" to try and get into good schools so we could get good jobs. And that's exactly what we've done. It’s what comes next that appears to be problematic. We’ve been climbing our “goal-ladders” but forgotten to build platforms along the way to rest and enjoy how far we have come. 

So what do we do? The solution to the burnout and the discontent is to reconfigure our definitions of success and happiness. We've heard a million times that seeking happiness in things, tangible objects, will never be fully satisfactory. So we've moved our happiness to our accomplishments, what we are capable of doing or attaining, how far we can push ourselves. The thought is that we will immediately get the jobs we want and be successful in our careers and family lives and social circles and this will make us happy. The problem with this is that there is always a next level to attain. We are a goal-oriented culture and so our happiness becomes contingent on our achievement of these goals, which leads to a never ending cycle of new goals and new levels and new accomplishments. In this model there is no level we can reach where we will actually have achieved enough to be happy and live in that contentment. It leaves us constantly reaching and never resting or appreciating. The concept of goals is not a bad thing. Our dependency on their completion for happiness, however, is problematic when they can never be entirely completed.

There is no clear cut path to happiness or joy, but perhaps the best solution is to find what gives us peace and clarity. How much more effective would it be to focus on what makes us laugh rather than what we have yet to accomplish? Happiness should be something eternal, something internal. I’m a far cry from personal enlightenment, but I’ve found peace in running and being around my friends—and to be honest, cheese—and these things make me happy. I’m still in the midst of a quarter-life-crisis but it isn’t earth-shattering anymore. Break-ups and work stress and financial burdens are much easier to bear when you choose to rethink about the way you think. I suggest that whether it is journaling, exercising, moving to a new city or just eating cheese, we focus on the things we can control and what brings us peace in the hope that, slowly and over time, our personal definitions of happiness will be less subject to the expectations of the outside world and more indicative of our independent strength.