The Pursuit of Happiness—An American Wild Goose Chase

​Okay, I have nothing against happiness. I think it’s great. In fact, I am always happy when I’m happy. So, what’s my problem? I think pursuing happiness is an exercise in futility. I’m a fan of the late Victor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) and the post-war founder of logotherapy, a psychotherapeutic healing process based on helping the client find and/or create meaning in his or her life. Frankl believed, and I agree, that chasing happiness directly is like running to find the end of the rainbow and, of course, the pot of gold said to be buried there. Since rainbows are visual rather than material phenomena, one can never do more than see one of its ends. Pursuit, as the Borg in Star Trek would say, is futile. And by the way, which end conceals that pot of gold anyway? Frankl’s basic point here is that happiness is the byproduct of something else. And to his mind, that something else was logos, meaning. Hence the term logotherapy. So, our Founding Fathers would have been more helpful had they only known to give us a national motto that read “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Meaning.” Then, per Frankl, as the day follows the night, happiness, or its more stable sister, contentment, would be sure to follow...

Now the original motivation for early non-Native settlers of North America to come here was the second goal in the American motto: Liberty. They wanted to be free of social strictures back home, wherever that home might have been, that kept them from entering a career they felt called to or empowering their children to do better than their parents in life. They wanted a place where they could grow in their own way and not be stifled by a society determined to keep them in their place, whether serfdom, their father’s field of work, or in the case of European Jews, their inability to own and work their own land. Ironically, many of these same immigrants ended up persecuting First Nations people, slaves from Africa, and later immigrants.

​At some point a second major detour entered American culture: the belief that the achievement of happiness depended on amassing things, prestigious things, and the wealth needed to buy them. The good life thus became a chasing after material wealth as mocked in the ‘60’s bumper sticker: “Whoever dies with the most toys, wins!” What? Having a better class of worms to devour one’s mortal remains? This American wild goose chase has been depicted for its ultimate emptiness in such novels as Dreiser’s The American Tragedy (1925) and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (also 1925), and in E. A. Robinson’s poem “Richard Cory” (1897). A better but less traveled road to happiness is in fact doing things that are personally meaningful, that draw on our true talents, and that have a positive impact on self, others, and the wider environment. In sum, happiness can’t be successfully pursued per se, but there are ways to find it. Blessings for your personal pilgrimage, which shouldn’t be a matter of...