Viktor Frankl
Happiness cannot be pursued
Some targets disappear the moment you aim at them
Man's Search for Meaning
The people who make happiness the goal are the ones who miss it. The mechanism he gives, and the route around it.
What actually happened?
He puts it plainly. Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to be happy, and the reason does not live inside happiness. His instruction to his students is the same one: do not aim at success, because the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. In the clinic he kept meeting the reverse case — the harder someone forces sleep the longer they lie awake, and the closer they monitor their own happiness the more anxious they get.
Some states are readings, not activities
Happiness, relaxation, confidence, being liked. What they have in common is that they are gauges on a process rather than the process. Chasing the gauge is breathing on the thermometer to warm the room. His clinical name for it is hyper-reflection: monitoring the state is what wrecks it.
Monitor your nerves while speaking and they double. Put the whole of your attention on what you are actually saying and they leave on their own.
The route around it is the reason
If happiness needs a reason, then the reason is the thing to work on: something worth going into, one particular person you are answerable to. Get that in place and the state settles itself as a side effect. His whole therapy is built on the turn — treat the reason, not the symptom.
Flat for months, cheer yourself up is a dead end. Take on one thing that is of use to one named person, then read the gauge two weeks later.
The same holds for organisations
A team that manages morale, happiness and belonging as targets in their own right collects performed readings. Those are by-products of having done something that mattered, and a by-product cannot be manufactured directly. It only arrives through the actual product.
Instead of a wellbeing initiative, kill one process everybody hates, or win one fight everybody was in. The readings move by themselves.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: you are working directly at a state — calm, confident, happy — and it recedes as you push.
Ask first: which process is this state the reading of, and can I move the effort onto that process instead?
Where it goes wrong: reading do not pursue it as giving up, so the reason never gets looked for either; or setting a happiness target for a team and collecting performances.
Lines to keep
The unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.
Chasing the reading is breathing on the thermometer to warm the room.
Same situation, other people are asking
Every day is the same and I don't know what it's for.I'm good at all of it and I don't know what I want.Do I have to leave this life to find the real one?What I do all day is the opposite of what I care about.None of it means anything · all 7 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.