My Rant Against Happiness.

Everywhere you look there is a push for happiness. "Being happy is the most important thing". "Do what you want, as long as it makes you happy" or further, "Do whatever it takes to be happy". Sometimes there’s a caveat of “…as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone…”. 

I’ve seen celebrities, brands, and sadly, even churches talking about how important happiness is. And it makes me sad.

I'm sad because what then is the take-away for this generation, really? The idea of personal happiness has become something to be achieved and honored above all things. We are taking a “selfie” generation for whom self is already celebrated to a concerning degree and further pushing them into becoming a completely “self-centred” generation.

Here’s my concern. In this new philosophy, your happiness is yours alone. It’s all about you. It doesn’t take others into consideration. Perhaps if you are a mature and emotionally healthy adult, you might well know that life does indeed mean considering those around you…or that sometimes it just isn’t all about ‘you’. (Take a vacation with children, and you quickly learn that lesson!) But that isn’t the new messaging. What we are telling this generation is that their own personal happiness trumps everything else. It trumps those around them, it trumps society, it even trumps the bible. It is entirely about you, and how you feel. And to make things worse...the focus is about external changes. (job, career, family, living situations, plastic surgery etc...)

I know people who have left their jobs because they weren’t happy. And then they left the next job, and the next, and the next. I have friends who have left marriages (and their entire families) because they simply weren’t ‘happy’ anymore. And in this new shift to achieve happiness, they have left not only their spouse, but their sweet children in the dust. (With the message that they simply weren’t enough to make Mommy/Daddy happy.)

If technology hasn’t done enough to make us insular and non-relational, this new philosophy of “only my happiness matters” is only exasperating this further.

Am I suggesting you shouldn’t desire happiness?

Well, to be honest, I’m not sure what I think about the concept of happiness at all.

But what I do feel is that perhaps our focus instead should be thankfulness, contentment and joy. Because let me tell you, if you think that you can find happiness by changing your external situation, you are quite likely to never find the peace you are searching for. However, if instead we make our focus thankfulness, and true joy in our circumstance (no matter what it is)… I think then we will truly find ourselves content.

I’ve purposely left God out of the above. Not because I don’t think that He is the root of real joy and/or happiness, or that I don’t believe that putting Him first, above self, is the only route to peace…but because even if you’re reading this and have no belief in God, I want this to make us all pause and question.

What direction are we purposely aiming our compass at (just because that is the messaging we are hearing) and how healthy actually is it?

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End of rant.