A happy ending?

At the beginning of this book, I said that I couldn't guarantee you will be happier by the end of it (and that there was a good chance you’d be the opposite). Despite having the word ‘happiness’ on the cover, it's just not that kind of book. What I did promise, however, was that you would have a better understanding of what it means to be happy without being blind to what really matters. I hope I have come true on that promise.

The problem with the way we think about happiness in modern society is that we think it comes from control. We think that happiness comes from achieving the list of things in our heads – having a meaningful job, a loving relationship, a beautiful home, a healthy body, a calm mind and so on. These things may all be perfectly worthwhile. But no matter how important each of them seems, what we have in our head will not come close to being an exhaustive list of the things in life that matter most. Our lives are simply too messy and complex for that.

We cannot control everything in our lives to our liking and expect to receive a lasting sense of satisfaction and meaning in return. We will still be insecure. We will still be vulnerable to things falling apart or not going to plan. The idea of receiving happiness through the means of control is a fantasy.

We have seen that there is another way – one that switches our focus from control to understanding. This does not mean that we abandon the items on our list, or try and escape the list in our heads altogether. It means we can aim to achieve the things we care about while remaining open to what we don't know. We can both question the items on our list and pay more attention to what might be missing. Of course, we may well continue to think that, ‘if only we had ___ then we’d be happy’. But we can recognise that this is an illusion – that, whatever we fill in the blank with, achieving it will not make us happy.