Why You Will Never Be Completely Happy

One of the first things psychologists did to study happiness was a simple survey. They took large groups of people and gave them pagers (remember, this was the 80s and 90s), and whenever the pager went off, each person was to stop and write down TWO things:

1) On a scale from 1-10, how happy are you at this moment?
2) What has been going on in your life to cause these feelings?

They collected thousands of ratings, from hundreds of people, from all walks of life. And what they discovered was both surprising, and actually, incredibly boring. What they discovered (when pretty much everybody wrote ‘7,’ like, all the time, no matter what), is that nobody is fully happy all the time. But similarly, nobody is fully unhappy all the time either.

It seems that both total happiness and total unhappiness are not sustainable. Instead, it seems that humans, regardless of our external circumstances, always gravitate back to a constant state of mild-but-not-fully-satisfying happiness.

Put another way, aside from the occasional dips or jumps due to various life events, things are pretty much always fine. But they could also always be better.

So tell me, why the hell are we all constantly chasing our tails to find happiness?

I discuss the answers in this video. Check it out. And be sure to like, subscribe and leave your comments below.

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FREE EBOOK: YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY

Happiness doesn’t work in the way most people think it does. In fact, it operates in kind of a “backwards” way. I wrote a free ebook that explains what I mean. Check it out:

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I’m Mark Manson, #1 NYTimes bestselling author of:
Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope -
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck -

And in early 2020 I announced my new audiobook on Audible, called Love Is Not Enough:

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