Road to Long-Term Happiness

I was looking through my past posts this week and came across one that mentions a great book, Authentic Happiness, by Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D. and was reminded of how important it is to have goals that give us authentic happiness.

In his book, Dr. Seligman talks about what real authentic happiness is and how we can capture it and keep it. Finding and enjoying real happiness is not done through seeking and finding pleasure and the same goes for seeking happiness through just staying busy—it just doesn’t work. Great and authentic happiness is experienced from earned gratification. So how do we become gratified?

Much of our gratification comes from producing something of great value to others and/or ourselves. This gives us a great feeling of satisfaction. Dr. Seligman lists 8 common components of gratification we want to have in the things we pursue:

1. The task is challenging and requires skill.
2. We have to concentrate.
3. There are clear goals.
4. We get immediate feedback.
5. We have deep effortless involvement.
6. There is a sense of control.
7. Sense of self vanishes.
8. Time seems to stop.

Dr. Seligman goes on to talk about depression in today’s world and how widespread it is. It has increased by a huge amount in the last 40 years and the average age of depressed people is much younger today.

Depression is also unexpectedly high in wealthy and healthy countries. The author’s theory is that “an ethos that builds unwarranted self-esteem, espouses victimology, and encourages rampant individualism has contributed to that epidemic.” Another reason is our huge reliance on shortcuts to happiness… online entertainment, drugs, shopping, spectator sports, and high sugar food and drinks. These things are enjoyable in the moment but don’t give us any long-term satisfaction.

A major symptom of depression is self-absorption, which a lot of shortcuts to happiness can feed. Depressed people think about how they feel a great deal of the time. When they detect internal sadness, they ruminate about it, projecting it into the future, this in turn increases their sadness in their life and across all their activities.

What we all need to do more of is realize that there are no shortcuts to the kind of fulfilling gratification we all crave, and realize we need to focus more and more on our goals, taking on big tasks, and increasing our long-term production as well as giving up the constant self-worry and self-absorption.

You may have noticed that really happy people, for the most part, spend the least amount of time home alone, involved in these shortcuts to happiness. They tend to have a rich and fulfilling social life along with jobs, goals, or hobbies they are passionate about. When your life is built around social and productive activities, you get more of that long-term happiness, feeling gratified for days or weeks or even years to come.