Why Chasing Happiness Is Making You Miserable (And What to Do Instead)
8 min read You have been told that happiness is what you are after . And yet, the harder you chase it, the worse you feel. In this post, we explore what Confucian harmony and Christian shalom reveal about a deeper kind of wellbeing — one that arrives not when you chase it, but when you stop and start living differently. Here is the irony at the heart of the happiness industry: research consistently shows that people who make happiness their primary goal are, paradoxically, less happy. The harder you pursue the feeling directly, the more it recedes. Modern psychology calls the pleasure-driven approach hedonic wellbeing, which is maximising positive emotions, minimising pain. The result is a roller-coaster of highs and lows, with each peak slightly less satisfying than the last, and the troughs deepening with each cycle. Ancient wisdom across multiple traditions calls this by a simpler name: the wrong question . Two traditions — Confucianism and Christianity — offe...