Does The Pursuit Of Happiness Lead To Contentment?

“If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time.” (Wharton, 1908, p. 40)

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In 2012, journalist and author Oliver Burkeman wrote a book titled “The Antidote”, where he wrote about the popular emergent trend fixated on feeling happy or looking at the bright side of things all the time, “positive thinking.” Since then, this worldly trend of increasingly being fixated on the pursuit of “happiness” has just continued to grow — compulsively fixated on the lookout, scanning for the next thing that will make me happy.

I have found this to be counterproductive, as I easily find myself ending up in a chase looking for the next thing that will give me the next high, never truly feeling content and satisfied. I learnt this the hard way and in relation to the meaning of life I had written,

“That there are times where we find ourselves caught in a hard-bound search for the “meaning of life”. What is the meaning of life? It’s a question with an unfathomable answer. So hard is the question to answer that it leads one into an exhausting…