Pursuit of Happiness

By Madison Musser

It starts in the home. Most people teach their kids that the pursuit of happiness is the key. Sometimes not even with words, just with how they model their lives. From there we can find it in schools and textbooks. Kids are raised to want happiness. We tell them to work hard and dream big.

After high school, people continue to pursue their dreams. They think, “If only I can be happy. I’ll be alright.” They get married in hopes of a greater happiness and they achieve their ambitions to pursue it. It’s practically pummeled into our brains since birth. It’s all we know.

In some ways, this can be dangerous. 

Being happy is not the issue here. Im talking about the dangers of a closed mind. It’s a narrow mindset to think that everything we do is in pursuit of happiness. There’s an intersubjective agreement in the Western world that happiness is the ultimate peak of living and I find this extremely alarming. It leads to a phobia of sadness and pain and all other feelings or experiences that do not lead to complete happiness. It’s crippling. We end up handicapped with this mindset that our lives are useless without some end result of never ending pleasure. If we fear this exposure to failure, hurt, irritation, or any other feelings other than happiness, then we fear health. If we are scared of experiences that will wear down our beating hearts, then we are scared of living.

Without the parts of our lives that leave us scarred and bleeding, without the moments of failure, or the time when you yelled at your sister, when you ran the red light and totaled your truck, after your best friend stopped talking to you, or you were fired from the tea room because you sucked at cutting pastries, without any of this we would be lost. We would be in complete darkness. These moments teach us how to live, and without them we wouldn’t know how to hold a pencil or brush our teeth. At some point there was a time when we messed up and held the pencil wrong or failed to put the toothpaste on correctly.

Every point of living should be like that. When we’re happy, we don’t always learn very much. We celebrate all the wrong things. We should celebrate this learning experience that we call life just as it is with all its cuts and bruises because that’s the end result right there.

Something my dad used to say when I would complain about a worn out shirt or my old skateboard was, “It’s better because it’s got character.” And I think that goes for people too. 

By Madison Musser

"I think the things we want most in life, the things we think will set us free, are not the things we need." - Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz