Happiness, By the Way: Why Obsessing Over Being Happy Backfires—and What to Do Instead

Ryan Meachen

Psychology & Science

“Happiness is the sole end of human action,” proclaimed John Stuart Mill, arguably the most influential philosopher of the 19th century. Put another way, everything we strive for—whether it is a promotion at work, a new pair of shoes, or falling head over heels in love—is but a pathway to the ultimate destination of happiness. 

But Mill recognized a paradox in this pursuit: focusing too intently on our aim to be happy undermines our efforts to experience happiness. Our happiness “will not bear a scrutinizing examination”, he noted in his autobiography. Although all human activity is aimed toward attaining happiness, if we focus too directly on appraising whether we’re happy with our aim, or whether we’re getting our dose of feeling good, then our feelings, according to Mill, will be “immediately felt to be insufficient”.

Our contemporary cultural norms, at least in many countries in the West, all seem to agree with Mill’s contention that happiness is the be all and end all for mankind. The United States Declaration of Independence, for instance, famously asserts that “the pursuit of Happiness” is a “self-evident” and “unalienable” right—situating the pursuit of happiness front and center in the American national psyche. Modern day commercials reinforce the very same message: buy this perfume, this new car, these new shoes—this is what you need to be happy once and for all. Even as children this message is instilled into our hearts and minds in the fairy tales and stories with which we grow up. The modern renditions of Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Three Little Pigs, and Little Red Riding Hood, all end with some variation of “…and they all lived happily ever after”. We’re a world obsessed with happiness.

But, taking our inspiration from Mill, is it possible that our obsession with happiness could go wrong?

What happens when we strive to be happy?

Intuitively, one would assume that prioritizing and pursuing happiness should be a reasonable goal. Research on goal pursuit and attainment generally supports this intuition. If you want to be fit and healthy, for example, then you’re likely to have goals related to your health and fitness, which will then prompt you to seek this goal, work hard toward realizing it, and think through how to manage your response to any obstacles that may impede your progress. The same mental process does, in theory, apply to the pursuit of happiness: if your aim is to be happieryou have a goal to be happier, you will set goals toward this end and consider how to manoeuvre around barriers that would impede your progress. 

Our values and goals What we value, and the goals we set our intent upon, set the standards by which we judge ourselves. In the our example of being fit and healthy, if you steadily make progress toward your goals by eating a well-balanced diet and going to the gym regularly, then you’re likely to experience some satisfaction and happiness as a result. You’re making progress and improving in a part of your life that’s important to you—great. If, on the other hand, you spent the week eating food devoid bereft of nutrients, and the only exercise you got was walking to and fro the refrigerator, then you’re probably not going to feel too good about yourself. The gap between the healthy and fit self that you aspire to be, and who you actually are today, has widened (as well as your waist).

However, that very discontent can be a powerful motivator for getting you back on track. The discontent can act as an emotional signal orienting you back toward the path you want to pursue. As such, in the context of goal striving, your unhappiness (by proxy: your “negative affect,” in the parlance of psychology) can be a helpful compass that tells you that you’re not making progress toward where you want to be. In situations where individuals highly value their personal goals, and they feel like they have control over determining whether they can achieve them, some negative emotions—like anxiety or anger—can have an “activating” effect, which can then be harnessed to mobilize effort and persistence. 

In short, feeling bad because you’ve failed to live up to your personal standards can be the motivational catalyst that drives your desire to make progress on what you really value.

But does this logic still hold when happiness is your goal? In the case of happiness, the negative emotions—like disappointment—that may emerge from failing to live up to your goal to be happy are fundamentally incompatible with being happy. Feeling disappointed or upset because you broke your healthy diet can lead to increased effort in the gym the next day to make up for your sugary blunder. However, feeling disappointed because you failed to live up to your goal of being happy can lead to the paradoxical effect of undermining your happiness altogether. As the researchers Mauss and colleagues contend: “People who highly value happiness set happiness standards that are difficult to obtain, leading them to feel disappointed about how they feel, paradoxically decreasing their happiness the more they want it”.

To test this contention, Mauss and her colleagues conducted an experiment where participants were randomly split into two groups. The first set of participants were the “valuing happiness” group, where they read the following paragraph to induce them to value and pursue happiness:

“People who report higher than normal levels of happiness experience benefits in their social relationships, professional success, and overall health and well-being. That is, happiness not only feels good, it also carries important benefits: the happier people can make themselves feel from moment to moment, the more likely they are to be successful, healthy, and popular. (…). In fact, recent research shows that people who are able to achieve the greatest amount of happiness (…) can experience long-term beneficial outcomes. (…).”

The second group (in the control condition) were instructed to read the same paragraph. However, it had been amended to replace “happiness” with “making accurate judgements” instead.

The study participants were then randomly allocated to watch a 2-minute video clip, pretested to evoke either happiness (in this case, a video of a figure skater winning a gold medal, accompanied by the reaction of the audience and her coach), or sadness (a video of a husband after the sudden death of his wife—heck!). After watching these clips, participants were asked to report on a scale of 1 to 9 how much they had experienced two positive emotions (joy and happiness) or negative emotions (anxiety, sadness, shame, worry, nervousness, frustration, tension). As an implicit measure of emotion, they were also asked to rate how much they liked two abstract polygons—where higher ratings of how much they liked the polygons were used as a proxy for indicating the degree to which the participants were in a positive mood (people tend to rate things more highly when they feel good). And finally, the participants in the “valuing happiness” group were asked to rate the extent they had “tried to feel more positive during the previous film clip”, whether they “felt disappointed during the previous film clip”, and whether they “should have enjoyed the film clip more”.

The participants in the “valuing happiness” group demonstrated more negative emotions than the participants in the control group. However, this was not the case for those watching the sad video. These results led Mauss and her colleagues to argue that “valuing happiness leads to less happiness by setting people up for disappointment”. Indeed, this instinct can become a clinical problem: researchersrRresearchers writing in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology found that highly valuing happiness is associated with symptoms and a history of depression. Put plainly, making happiness a standard to live for predicts more disappointment, more self-monitoring, and—over time—can be a risk factor for depression.

Mill didn’t require social science to posit this truth: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so," he wrote. By focusing too intently on being happy, we can undermine the very happiness we’re seeking.

When Ruminating on Happiness Becomes Self-Defeating

This is why clinicians see the same pattern Mill intuited. The more you value happiness, the more you ruminate over whether you’re happy enough. Rumination is the oxygen that depression breathes upon.

Indeed, one of the hallmarks of depression is excessive self-focused attention. Human beings are perhaps the only species on Earth with the capacity for self-reflection and meta-cognition—to think about ourselves, and to think about our thinking. Although our ability to self-reflect and think about our thinking is a significant cognitive advantage compared to other animals, it can also become maladaptive when our self-reflection spirals into self-rumination, which is linked to both negative affect and depressive symptoms. 

Self-reflection becomes self-rumination when your thinking gets stuck on failures, flaws, or regrets without moving toward insight or action. Instead of constructively thinking “How could I live a happier life?”, the question becomes “Why aren’t I happier? What’s wrong with me?”. By focusing excessively on yourself and your failure to live up to any grandiose expectations of happiness, you’re likely to experience misery rather than joy. Ruminating on your perceived defects becomes the focus of attention, rather than constructively reflecting about the next step to take. In other words, treating happiness as a standard to be met invites exactly the self‑rumination process that keeps unhappiness in place.

This dynamic can be exacerbated by cultural expectations to be incessantly happy or to mask negative feelings. Perceived social expectations not to be sad or anxious predict increases in the vast majority of depressive symptoms. Not only is our quest for happiness undermined by excessively focusing on trying to be happy, but it can also be accelerated when we feel that we’re failing to live up to the social expectation that we should be happy all the time. In fact, in a study recently published in Nature, Delonckheere and colleagues found that the societal premium placed on the pursuit of happiness in many countries “paradoxically relates to fewer and less intense experiences of positive emotions (with an opposite pattern for negative emotions), lower life satisfaction evaluations, and more symptomatic complaints related to depression, anxiety and general distress.” 

The pressure to be incessantly happy isn’t just enforced by societal norms, but also by “toxic positivity” norms enforced in our workplaces, too. Toxic positivity refers to the expectation that employees should be incessantly positive or happy while at work. Organizations may plaster their office walls with posters with shallow mantras like “good vibes only”, “stay positive, no matter what”, or “no negativity in this office”, which then implicitly outlaw any expressions of fear, doubt, or worry at work—or anything other than performative positivity. A meta-analysis examining 95 studies (which included 23,574 study participants) found that surface acting—like faking or suppressing real feelings to meet “be positive” rules—was consistently linked to burnout, worse job satisfaction, worse organizational attachment, and worse task performance. In sum, enforced happiness in the workplace also tends to backfire, and in fact, amplifies the negativity that some organizations mistakenly wish to avoid.

Beware the Positive

IfSo, if happiness is what many of us are after, then why do we have the capacities for other not-so-pleasant emotions? Why feel fear, or sadness, or anger, when they feel so very clearly unpleasant? Human beings have evolved over the course of millions of years, and over that time, Mother Nature has had ample opportunity to shape the software in our brains. Emotions are, in a sense, the algorithms that guide our internal software—they’re the guides of our minds. Positive emotions are signals that there’s an opportunity worth moving toward. Negative emotions are like alarms—warnings of a potential threat that you need to avoid.

If your ancestors were cursed with the malady of perpetually experiencing happiness, then it’s unlikely that they would have survived a prowling tiger’s advances when out foraging for food. Instead of quickly discerning they may become the tiger’s lunch, and attempting to avoid that fate by fighting, hiding, or running away, perhaps their interest—a basic positive emotion—would have spiked, and they would have tried to pat the predator instead. In fact, modern evidence shows that individuals with high positive emotions, like joy, may tend to overlook important threats or dangers. Some individuals, when caught in the rapture of positive emotion, have a higher likelihood of engaging in potentially precarious behaviors—like excessive eating, risky sexual behaviour, alcohol consumption, or drug use. Or, in the case of our example above, trying to pat the predator. Too much positive emotion can miscalibrate your appraisal of risk.

For those of you wise enough—or fearful enough—to scoff at the foolishness of someone trying to pat their new Panthera tigris friend, consider a brief case study in how maladaptive optimism fares versus a tiger. A wildlife volunteer in Colorado’s Prairie Wind Animal Refuge received an honorable mention from the Darwin Awards for her misadventure trying to demonstrate how gentle their captive Siberian tiger was to a group of visitors. She placed her arm inside the cage and beckoned the tiger forth for a pat, and unfortunately, did not get her arm back. Instead, after scratching the tiger’s nose, it closed its jaw around her hand and tore her arm off within two seconds. Another volunteer reported that they tried to retrieve the arm from the tiger, but "the tiger did not want to give it back”. True story. Maybe a few more “bad” feelings would have led to a better outcome here.

The desirability of particular emotions is not dependent on whether they are ‘positive’ or ‘negative’, or ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Rather, what matters is whether our emotional responses are fit for the situation we’re faced with. For example, it might be perfectly valid to be angry when something that we value is threatened. In fact, an experimental study published in Psychological Science by Tamir and colleagues demonstrated that when individuals anticipate they need to confront someone, they prefer activities that increase their anger over activities that make them feel excited. The angry study participants also performed better subsequently in confrontation, demonstrating that individuals can desire to feel unpleasant emotions when the situation calls for it. 

On the other hand, research from Van Kleef and colleagues found that happiness can be an expensive emotion to express in conflict and negotiation. In experimental studies, negotiators who displayed happiness ended up with worse deals because their counterparts saw happiness as a signal they were satisfied. Seeing a happy counterpart, negotiators inferred there was slack to give in the deal and pushed for more, so the smiling party ended up conceding and getting worse terms. By contrast, displays of anger were read as toughness, prompting the other side to lower demands to avoid a standoff. Negotiators strategically used the other side’s emotions to infer their walk-away point and adjusted their demands accordingly. In short, expressions of happiness in conflict can invite exploitation, telling the other side there’s more to take.

Thus, feeling happy might not be the best response in the face of confrontation—whether it be confronting a person or a tiger. But the mistake we commonly make is to assume happiness is the feeling we should prefer in every situation. Sometimes the “right” feeling isn’t the “nice” feeling.

Happiness is Not a Feeling to Pursue

If we equate “getting happier” with “feeling more good feelings,” we’ve missed the mark of what a happy life is—and we’re misleading ourselves with our efforts. As we examined earlier, cConstantly monitoring our emotionsal state and chasing happy feelings undermines our chance of experiencing them.

The corrective isn’t to give up on happiness or leave it up to the whims of feelings. The better strategy is to reorganize what we pursue. Rather than constantly evaluating monitoring our internal states—“Am I happy yet? Am I happy enough?”—our best plan is to aim at the practices and situations that are upstream of happiness. Instead of placing our attention on how I feel right now, we should aska better aim to focus on is: am I building the life I want?

Asking “do I feel happy?” anchors our attention on ourselves, which, as we discussed earlier, is a shortcut to rumination, disappointment, and depression. Asking “how do I build the life I want?” focuses our attention outward beyond ourselves, toward the foundations that let happiness ensue.

Feelings still matter, of course—they’re the internal signals that help orient us in the world. But feelings are an unreliable—and potentially detrimental—object to pursue directly. Across all the aforementioned studies on the dark side of pursuing happiness, the common mistake is treating happiness as a mood to maximize. What matters for our happiness is the life we build, not the feelings we chase.

Conclusion: So If You Want More Happiness, What Do You Do?

The research outlined above seems to indicate that Mr. Mill was right in his contention that “happiness is the sole end of human action”. We are a people obsessed with our own happiness, but, paradoxically—and ironicallyand even in a cruel irony—our obsession with seeking happiness might not be the best way to attain it. Mill acknowledges this himself in his autobiography, and offers his own antidote, and perhaps a wise best practice shot for the rest of us seeking a bit more happiness in our lives. He states:

“I never, indeed, wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all rules of conduct, and the end of life. But I now thought that this end was only to be attained by not making it the direct end. Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”

If happiness is indeed the sole end of all human action, then the best way to attain it may not be to aim for it directly. Nor constantly be ruminating or reflecting on whether we are sufficiently happy. Mill saw this paradox in the pursuit of happiness: if you treat happiness as your target, it slips away from your reach.

Instead, our best hope for happiness is to focus on activity beyond our meager self-concerns, and let happiness find us along the way—whether it be friends and family to love and give your heart to, a worthy cause that serves others, or a faith or philosophy that connects you to that which is greater than your self-focused concerns. In short, faith, family, friends, and work that serves others, as Professor Arthur Brooks contends, are the pathways that give us the best shot at a happy life.

Importantly, these pathways are not directly aimedaims at happiness. The practical move is to stop the incessant focus on chasing a feeling, and instead, focus on the inputs that give us the best shot at fostering happiness as a by‑product. A life that is built upon the four pillars of happiness – family, friends, faith, and work that serves—is a life built upon activities beyond mere self-concern and our own meagre quest for happiness. But these pillars pave the pathway for happiness to follow.

1.     Family. Married people tend to report greater happiness than those who were never married, or those who have been divorced, separated, or widowed. This has been consistently found and replicated in international studies. A meta-analysis across 93 studies finds that the quality of your marriage is consistently linked with higher happiness and well‑being. Even for the unmarried, those who live with their beloved tend to be happier than those who live alone. The quality of our loving bonds, not just their legal status, deeply matters for our happiness.

2.     Friends. Friendship accounts for almost 60 percent of the differences in happiness across individuals, regardless of how introverted or extroverted they you might be. The clear consensus across decades of research into happiness is that friendship is one of the essential ingredients. The importance of friendship expands beyond just happiness—but also for our health, wellbeing, and longevity. Happiness and health follow the friendships you maintain.

3.     Faith. Faith, broadly defined as self-transcendence—whether through a religious community, spiritual practices, or other lived connections to something larger than oneself – are the pathways we pursue to find meaning in life. As the great Viktor Frankl contends, “Self-transcendence is the essence of existence. Existence collapses and falters unless there is a strong idea…or a strong ideal to hold on to”. We lean on our faith, our ideals, and that which is greater than us as an anchor for meaning and resilience. Faith, in whatever form you practice it, is your connection to your reason for being.

4.     Work That Serves. FocusAim your work on bringing about the good of anotherat someone else’s good. As Mill himself argues, those who have their minds fixed “on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind” are the ones who find happiness themselves. Individuals who understand how their work serves others and contributes to making the world a better place are happier—not just at work, but in their lives outside of work too. If you work to serve others, happiness often has a way of meeting you along the path.

Mill may be right in contending that “happiness is the sole end of human action”. But, if happiness is the ultimate end that we’re all after, then the research above prudently suggests that we ought not aim at it directly. Instead, set your aims on the worthwhile activities and situations that generate it—family, friends, faith, and work that serves. Set your aims on the life you want to build.

The good life isn’t the pursuit of happiness, but instead the pursuit of tangible ways that engender happiness. That is an adventure worth pursuing—on a path far less likely to backfire.

Ryan Meachem

November 2025