For about thirteen years, I treated happiness like a project. Something to research, optimize, and eventually achieve. I read the books. I tried the practices. I moved countries, changed careers, built a business, found a partner. Each of these things was, on some level, an attempt to arrive at a place where I could finally say: this is it. I’m happy now.
I never got there. Not because the things I built weren’t good. They were. My life with my wife and daughter, the company I run with my brothers, the writing that reaches millions of people – all of it is meaningful. All of it matters. But for years, none of it felt like enough, because I was always measuring the experience against an imagined state of happiness that was supposed to feel different from how I actually felt.
Then something shifted. Not dramatically. Not in a single moment I can point to and say “that’s when it happened.” More like a gradual loosening of something I’d been gripping too tightly for too long. I stopped trying to be happy. And that’s when happiness showed up.
I want to tell you how that happened, because I think a lot of people are stuck where I was – working hard at being happy and wondering why the work isn’t paying off.
The project that can’t succeed
Here’s the problem with treating happiness as a goal, and I say this as someone who spent years doing exactly that. The moment you make happiness something to pursue, you’ve created a gap between where you are and where you think you should be. That gap is the problem. Not the circumstances of your life. Not your job or your relationship or your location. The gap itself.
Because the gap says: you’re not there yet. And as long as you’re not there yet, every present moment is a waypoint rather than a destination. You can’t enjoy Tuesday because Tuesday isn’t the finish line. The finish line is the future version of your life where everything has come together and you finally feel the way you’re supposed to feel.
I lived inside that gap for my entire twenties and most of my early thirties. Every good thing that happened was assessed not for what it was but for how close it brought me to the imagined state of happiness I was chasing. Got the business off the ground – great, but am I happy? Met an incredible woman – wonderful, but is this the happiness I’ve been looking for? Published a book – amazing, but do I feel the way I expected to feel?
The answer was always no. Not because the achievements weren’t real. Because the question was rigged. You can’t feel a permanent state of arrival when you’ve built your entire psychological framework around the idea that you haven’t arrived yet. The pursuing and the having are mutually exclusive. You can’t chase something and hold it at the same time.
What the research actually says
I have a Graduate Diploma of Psychological Studies, so I should have known this sooner. The research on happiness has been saying the same thing for decades, and I read it all while somehow exempting myself from its conclusions.
The data is remarkably consistent. People who directly pursue happiness – who make it an explicit goal and organize their lives around achieving it – consistently score lower on measures of subjective wellbeing than people who pursue other things. Meaning. Connection. Engagement. Contribution. The people who score highest on happiness measures are almost never the ones chasing happiness. They’re the ones absorbed in something that matters to them.
Psychologists call the goal-oriented version the “arrival fallacy” – the belief that happiness lives on the other side of the next achievement. Get the promotion, and you’ll be happy. Move to the right city, and you’ll be happy. Find the right person, and you’ll be happy. The research shows that people who reach these milestones experience a spike in positive emotion that doesn’t last long. Then hedonic adaptation kicks in. The brain recalibrates. The new normal becomes just normal. And the goalpost moves.
I experienced this cycle so many times that I should have seen the pattern. Moving to Vietnam felt transformative for about a month. Launching Hack Spirit felt incredible for about two weeks. Each milestone delivered a burst of exactly what I was looking for, followed by a return to baseline, followed by a scan of the horizon for the next thing that might make the feeling permanent.
The feeling was never going to be permanent. That’s not a flaw in my life. That’s how the human brain works. It wasn’t designed to stay happy. It was designed to keep wanting. Happiness, from a neurological perspective, is a signal, not a state. It arrives to tell you something is going well, and then it fades so you’ll keep pursuing things that help you survive. Expecting it to stay is like expecting the “you have arrived” message on your GPS to play continuously after you’ve parked the car.
What Buddhism had been trying to tell me
I’d been studying Buddhist philosophy for years before any of this clicked, which is embarrassing in the way that only a writer who gives advice about mindfulness can be embarrassed. The entire framework was right there. I’d written about it. I’d quoted it. I’d explained it to millions of readers. And I’d completely failed to apply it to my own pursuit of happiness.
The Buddha’s core teaching on this is devastatingly simple. Suffering arises from “tanha” – craving. The craving for things to be different from how they are. The craving for pleasant feelings to stay. The craving for the present moment to be something other than what it is. And happiness, when treated as a goal, is just another form of craving. You’re craving a feeling. You’re demanding that reality deliver an emotional state on your schedule. And the demand itself is what creates the dissatisfaction.
The Buddhist alternative isn’t to stop wanting happiness. It’s to stop making happiness conditional on outcomes. To stop placing it on the other side of achievements and milestones and life changes. To recognize that the capacity for contentment isn’t something you build through external circumstances. It’s something you uncover by removing the conditions you’ve placed on it.
I must have read that idea a hundred times. It took me until last year to actually understand it. And the understanding didn’t come from reading. It came from living.
The morning it arrived
I was sitting on a plastic stool outside a cafe in my neighborhood in Saigon. It was early – maybe six thirty. My daughter had woken me up at five and I’d done the morning routine with her while my wife slept. Changed, fed, held. Then my wife took over and I walked to the cafe the way I do most mornings.
I ordered a ca phe den – Vietnamese black coffee, strong enough to restructure your personality. I sat on the stool. The street was waking up. A woman was setting up her pho cart across the road. Motorbikes were starting to flow. A man was doing tai chi in the small park next to the cafe with the absolute seriousness of someone performing an ancient art at dawn.
And I noticed something. I wasn’t thinking about whether I was happy. I wasn’t assessing the moment. I wasn’t comparing where I was to where I thought I should be. I was just there. Drinking coffee. Watching the street. Feeling the heat start to build. Present in a way that didn’t have a project attached to it.
The feeling underneath that presence was quiet. Not ecstatic. Not the burst I’d chased for years. Something steadier. Like a room that’s been noisy for a long time and someone finally turned the volume down. The room was always there. The silence was always there. I just couldn’t hear it over the sound of my own pursuing.
That’s what happiness felt like when it finally arrived. Not a peak. An absence. The absence of the gap. The absence of the measuring. The absence of the question “am I happy yet?” which, I realized, had been the loudest sound in my life for over a decade.
What I do differently now
I haven’t stopped wanting things. I still have goals for the business. I still want to be a better father, a better husband, a better writer. I haven’t achieved some monk-like state of desirelessness. That’s not what this is about.
What’s changed is the orientation. I used to organize my life around the question “what will make me happy?” Now I organize it around a different question: “what am I willing to be absorbed by?” The answers are the same – family, writing, the business, learning Vietnamese, riding my bike through Saigon traffic – but the framing is completely different. One question puts happiness at the end of the process. The other puts engagement at the center of it. And engagement, unlike happiness, is available right now. You don’t have to earn it or achieve it or optimize your way into it. You just have to show up and pay attention.
I still have bad days. I still get anxious. I still catch myself slipping back into the old pattern, scanning the horizon for the thing that will finally make everything click. The difference is that I can see the pattern now. I can feel the gap starting to open – the distance between where I am and where I think I should be – and instead of filling it with a new goal, I can close it by coming back to whatever’s right in front of me.
Usually it’s something ordinary. Coffee. My daughter’s face. A sentence that needs writing. The particular quality of light in Saigon at 6:30am that looks different from any other light I’ve ever seen. None of these things are happiness in the way I used to define it. All of them are happiness in the way I’ve come to understand it.
What I’d say to the person still chasing
If you’re where I was – doing everything right, building a life that looks good, and still feeling like something’s missing – I want to suggest something that might sound like giving up but is actually the opposite.
Stop looking for happiness. Not because you don’t deserve it. Because you already have the raw materials for it and the looking is the thing that’s blocking your view.
Happiness isn’t a destination you reach after enough achievement. It’s not a feeling you unlock after the right combination of circumstances. It’s a thing you notice when you stop building long enough to look around. It’s the coffee. It’s the street. It’s the person next to you. It’s this moment, exactly as unremarkable and imperfect as it is, experienced without the filter of “but is this enough?”
It’s enough. It was always enough. The only thing that made it feel insufficient was the project of trying to make it more.
I’m 37 and the happiest I’ve ever been arrived the year I stopped trying. Not because I gave up. Because I finally looked down and realized I was already standing in the place I’d been running toward.
The coffee was good. The street was alive. And for the first time in thirteen years, I wasn’t going anywhere. I was just here. And here was more than enough.
