Outsourcing our happiness

Can you truly find happiness in life if the people close to you refuse to accept you completely for who you are? In Pakistani society, we often outsource our personal happiness to circumstances outside our control, like meeting social expectations, making family and friends happy, as well as experiencing external markers of success at every life stage (graduating from a top university, finding a great job at an MNC, having a fairy tale wedding, etc.). We tick every check box that life has to offer and still wonder why durable happiness eludes us. When our uneasy arrangement for outsourcing happiness falls apart and turns into a midlife or quarter-life crisis, we try to search for quick fix solutions to overcome the emptiness; from 40-year-old former playboys turning to religion as a cure all to bored housewives shopping away their husband’s earnings to make up for the lack of attention they receive from them and the children — we manage to find distractions that help muddle the core of our problems.

Five years after graduation, a recent reunion of close friends from university brought the strangest of life insights to surface. Each and every one of us has different dreams, hopes, fears and failures that we carry around with us. While each of us had different apparent sources of happiness (a high-flying career, successful personal relationships, a newborn child) and unhappiness (saas bahu conflicts, financial dependence on a family business, failed relationships), there was one underlying principle that cut across all our discussions: our lives no longer reflect the intrinsic nature of our personalities. Over time, we had compromised our own individuality to make people around us happy and meet social expectations. While this is natural to some extent when transitioning into adulthood, what was surprising was that we genuinely believed that making others happy and meeting social expectations was the way to ‘achieve’ happiness and that we should compromise — paradoxically — our own personal happiness to ‘achieve’ this happiness.

Just like you would work hard on building a career or a relationship, happiness is something that requires a lot of effort to be made, before it can be realised. It’s frustrating when we’re making a lot of effort to be happy but not realising any tangible difference in how we feel. That’s because we’re often trying to build happiness from the outside in rather than the inside out. Imagine constructing the exterior or the roof of a house without putting a foundation in place: you will give the appearance of making progress quicker but eventually the building will fall flat.

Why do we build happiness from the outside in? That’s because we don’t just want to be happy or make others happy, we also want others to perceive us as being happy and successful. We need others to tell us that we’re ‘happy’ using objective markers of happiness (careers, relationships, health, wealth, etc.) because we’re too afraid to develop and own a definition of happiness that is unique to us. It’s easier to have other people tell us we’re happy rather than telling ourselves we’re genuinely happy (somehow it’s less believable when we speak to ourselves). As a result, we outsource our happiness because it’s easier to understand what other people want from us as opposed to what we want from ourselves. In the end, this triggers a vicious cycle where we compromise our personal happiness to haplessly generate happiness for those around us and project a perception of our happiness within others.

How do we create happiness from the inside out? We need to ask ourselves what makes us happy rather than asking what ‘should’ make us happy. This task is significantly more challenging in a judgmental society like Pakistan but this is a difficult journey we must embark on to discover ourselves. Once we understand our drivers of happiness, we need to have the confidence to build a life that reflects our core values. We need to stop thinking this is selfish. After all, we can only bring joy and meaning in the lives of people we care about when we know how to bring joy and meaning in our own life.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 24^th, 2013.

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