Do you ever feel harassed by the world telling you to “be happy?” It's like we're obsessed with happiness, hungry for the secret sauce and inundated with how-to's: “10 Ways to be Happier”; “How to Be Happy: 7 Steps to Becoming a Happier Person”; “10 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Incredibly Happy.”  On and on (and on) it goes. Expert advice is everywhere and relentless: literally hundreds of articles and listicles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, “get happy” memes and vines, magazine covers, podcasts...

Stop it, already! It’s as irritating to me as being told by some well-meaning man to “C’mon, smile!” (Public service sidebar: If there is anything that will make a woman less likely to smile than being told to, I don't know what it is).

Advice, tips and tricks to lure happiness is big business: So. Many. Books. Weekend happiness workshops; seasonal courses; professional happiness coaches. Yes, you can hire a happiness COACH!

Apparently none of us has the magical amount necessary for satisfaction, either. We need more. Because it’s not just “happiness” in and of itself that is our cultural holy grail - quantity counts too.

Must. Have. More. Happiness. Sound like an addict, much? We are infatuated with finding the next, bigger “hit,” the perfect dealer, some elusive golden arch through which we can pass to a land of infinite happy. So we read, study, and spend money to find it.  

Like so much big business, the Happiness Industry is founded on making us feel like we are missing out or doing life wrong if we’re not sufficiently blissed-out. Even simple contentment isn't enough, the subtext "you could always be happier!" a constant thrum. Endless “how-to’s” in your Facebook feed and inbox making you feel like you could or should be doing happy somehow “better.”

There’s an envious, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses aspect too, where it feels like everyone is happier than you are – that somehow other people have found the keys to “true happiness,” while you're late for your date with extra-happy, madly digging around the sofa cushions, rummaging through jacket pockets and swearing like a pirate. 

Happiness, however, is not a one-size-fits-all key. It’s not even a one-size-fits-one key: what happy looks like for me changes from day to day. One day, perfect happiness is sitting in a hot bath, in an empty house; another it’s a downtown, midnight dance party; another it’s having my kids jump on me mid pillow-fight. And it might be that none of those things, ever, are on your “things that inspire happiness” list. To the contrary, some might slightly horrify you. It’s OK. Your perfect Sunday watching 9 hours of football looks like the 9th circle of hell to me. Even-even.

There are many ways up the mountain. Many, many, many ways. And they are all right.

My issue is really this: Unhappiness (sadness, confusion, anger, etc.) is an utterly natural and necessary state of being. In the stampede towards happiness, there is little discussion or even reminder that unhappiness is part of our normal, human, emotional ebb and flow. I would argue, in fact, that it's rarely wise to try and "skip it." A little unhappiness is essential to know the difference, if nothing else.

Life gives us endless reasons to NOT be happy. In the macro there's war, politics, poverty, divorce, mental illness, death, disease. In the micro there's the romanitc break-up, a fight with your best friend, your boiler exploding, your phone smashing, a $5000 reassessment from the tax-man or a bad haircut among endless others.  You are not failing if you are not incessantly happy. Rather, it means you are a good, kind, complex and feeling person.

Do you know what we call someone who is happy-happy-happy, regardless of circumstance and who constantly wants more of the same? Yeah, that’s right: High on crack. Or crazy.

The problem is that most of the advice around happiness is really about how to avoid suffering. Like the addicts we are, we seek to alleviate or dodge discomfort, rather than solve the ongoing and changing riddle of what’s at the root of being unhappy.  My experience is that when we purposefully dodge or avoid our pain by chasing temporary joys, the only outcome is misery. Attending a happiness workshop is like putting lipstick on a pig. You’ve learned how to make it look better, but your life still stinks.

Part of the challenge is that we often confuse happiness with what feels good. When we seek solutions to our happiness “problems,” most of us are really thinking “more pleasure, please.”  We run from pain, towards pleasure - not towards true happiness. Pleasure is fleeting. When the wine and cheese is gone we’re mostly back to where we started: an insatiable hunger to feel better.

Maybe suffering needs a marketing makeover. Less “bad in and of itself,” more “it’s a means to an end!” Like, you don’t want to avoid pain, because in order to get to the good stuff you need to wade through and poke around its black heart. Pain is an internal maze to navigate: Lots of dead ends and places to get turned around, but meaning – and ultimately happiness - is there. The exit lies in wait, within each of us.

What IS "happiness" anyway? Yes, there is the specificity of our own, particular joys, but there are generalities too. It's interesting, for instance, that most of the "8 keys to a Happier You" type of advice really boils down to what I would call self-care: Get outside, move your body, eat better, priorize sleep, have a spiritual practice, spend time with friends, be grateful for all of it. 

Precisely when life becomes overwhelming and we need it the most, self-care is the first to go. We're too busy to sleep or exercise like we know we should, there's no time to see friends or meditate, we overeat or drink too much because we need to get energy to keep going from somewhere.

What does all that amount to? UNHAPPINESS.

Unhappiness is part of the normal wave of life everyone has to surf, and we know from having been there a thousand times before that "this too shall pass." We just sometimes forget. Latent happiness (like love) is always within reach. Suffering is like an internal maze we need to navigate: lots of dead and places to get turned around, but the exit - where happiness is - is there. Inside all of us. Maybe the key to happiness is to ground yourself with self-care, then pile on the small pleasures. I think this is what running towards - not running from - looks like. 

Just don't tell me to smile or harass me with how to do happy better in the meantime. I got this.