Look around, and everyone is selling (and craving) happiness and health. From podcasters to politicians, there’s been a cry for doing something to help people in these two domains. In a viral post on social media, a US senator Chris Murphy implored us to acknowledge our “crisis of meaning and purpose.” In a recent New York Times essay, health was framed as an important past time and hobby.
Let’s start with happiness. For the longest time, since the days of Aristotle, happiness has been an aim for us humans. But we’ve taken happiness to a place that Aristotle could not imagine. We’ve monetized it and turned it into a marketing hook. We’ve created the happiness industrial complex: books, podcasts, courses, and of course social media posts on the topic, all promising to provide us with the keys to a good life.
What ends up happening, however, is that the supposed solution to our ills exacerbates the problem. We compare our lives to a staged and airbrushed ideal, which is usually fake, or at least highly contrived. We’ve made the comparison point an unimaginable standard, and thus are left with a brain that thinks, “If I don’t have this shiny object or status, or if I don’t accomplish these nine core happiness habits, how can I be happy?”
Life is hard. It’s certainly not supposed to be perfect. Progress is slow, non-linear, and full of frustrations. Long-term satisfaction always includes short-term challenges. So many lifestyle gurus are like swans: they appear calm and put together above the surface, but underneath they are paddling frantically. Happiness is largely a function of your reality minus your expectations. If you are comparing your real life to a staged, highly-processed, and sometimes unrealistic benchmark, you’ll never be happy.
Our chase for happiness all too easily backfires. The same is true for health.
As the writer Ashwin Rodrigues pointed out in a brief essay, for him, health and fitness has become a hobby: “Like any hobby, wellness can provide a sense of purpose and community, and maybe even some personal growth. The constant reminder of health may help reinforce the important stuff. It can make health practices feel like less of a chore and more of an enjoyable, self-expressive activity,” he writes.
The problem is that, like happiness, when health gets turned into a quest for perfection or optimization, it has the ironic effect of making us less healthy. We obsesses over our sleep score, creating anxiety that makes us sleep worse. We become convinced that eating a specific diet is necessary to reach our goals, and become so hitched to it that even slight deviations ruin our day. At worst, a person obsessed with tracking their weight or muscle mass develops an eating or body dysmorphia disorder, both of which are on the rise.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be happy and healthy. But when we make health and happiness our ultimate aims, we risk running astray.
Happiness is best when it comes as a byproduct of living the kind of life you want to live. My guess is that when you are most happy you aren’t trying really hard to be happy—you probably aren’t thinking about happiness at all, but instead absorbed in an activity you enjoy or hanging out with people you love.
Like happiness, health is probably best conceived not as an ultimate end—but rather as a a supportive factor to living the kind of life you want to live. Though certain influencers, most notably Bryan Johnson, are essentially making living longer the focal point of their lives, most people find life more fulfilling when they have other central aims. For example, the healthiest people we know aren’t exercising because some online guru told them that running or rowing or lifting weights is the ultimate exercise to increase their longevity; rather, they do it because they learn to enjoy the activity itself. A good existence is not just about the years in your life but also about the life in those years.
If happiness is a byproduct of engaging in other activities, and health is a foundational support for engaging in other activities, then what are the other activities in which we ought to engage?
Here, the research is compelling: decades of research show that we feel most satisfied and fulfilled when we pursue mastery and belonging.
Mastery means participating in activities where we get better over time, and where there is a clear connection between the effort we put forth and the results we attain. You can pursue mastery in powerlifting, running, gardening, guitar, sculpting, woodworking, writing, baking, yoga, swimming, architecture, science, surgery, counseling, and on and on. Mastery is about having a craft in your life that affords you a concrete path to progress. We need to pursue mastery like a fish needs water.
Belonging means connection to something beyond yourself—be it a team, community, lineage, or tradition. When we have belonging, we feel less alone in the universe and more like we are contributing to something that will outlive us. In our modern world, we’ve often replaced genuine belonging with a superficial variety. We feel connected because we have lots of friends or followers online, but we spend less and less time with real people in the real world.
Health supports you in pursing mastery and belonging, and happiness is a common result. But neither health nor happiness are the main aims.
As we think about the year ahead, we’d be wise to select a mastery goal and to prioritize belonging. We should focus on health insofar it supports our ability to live a meaningful life, but not as an end in and of itself. And we should not let a quest for perfect happiness become a source of everyday stress.
