Our Life-Long Pursuit of Happiness

Our Life-Long Pursuit of Happiness
by
July 14, 2026

I hope you can join us on Wed night at 5 pm to hear from Vanderbilt and two-time SEC Coach of the Year Clark Lea. We will talk about how Clark has built a winning culture at Vandy and how college athletics continues to change.

As we celebrate 250 years as a nation, we remember that Thomas Jefferson and our founding fathers boldly wrote into the Declaration of Independence that all have a God-given right to life, liberty, and the “pursuit of happiness.” I mentioned Sunday that I have always been intrigued by this phrase. What exactly did they have in mind? Everybody enters this pursuit differently. It is clearly a lifelong endeavor. All people long to be happy, but we all recognize that happiness is fleeting. It comes and goes. One day we are up, the next day we’re down. One day we are on top of the world, the next day, the world has crushed us. Life will always be full of ups and downs, joys and sorrows, highs and lows.

In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt identifies three distinct theories of human happiness that are worth noting. The first theory is the “progress principle:” happiness comes from success, achievement, and acquisition. This is the principle that dominates our consumer culture and meritocracy. We feel that we will be happier if we make more money, buy a nicer car, a bigger house, or more toys. However, King Solomon figured out just how disappointing this mindset can be when he writes: “Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and again, all was vanity and a chasing after the wind.” (Ecc 2:11) Time and time again, we find that the person with the most toys is still not happy or content. They still want more. The second theory is the one most common in Buddhism and other eastern religions. “Buddha, Epictetus, and many other sages saw the futility of the rat race and urged people to quit. They proposed a particular happiness hypothesis: Happiness comes from within, and it cannot be found by making the world conform to your desires.” The goal here is to move away from desire and attachment because it inevitably leads to suffering and disappointment. Meditation, contemplation, and yoga are common ways to achieve this. This approach involves letting go and trying not to control the uncontrollable. There is great wisdom here. This theory also recognizes the shallowness and superficiality of our materialistic culture. Enough is never enough. Somebody else will always have something newer, shinier, and better than us. Haidt ultimately concludes that both of these theories are inadequate, so he proposes a third theory that he believes is most convincing: happiness in life comes from between. “Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly: you have to get the conditions right and then wait.” The conditions to which he is referring have to do with relationships and community: “relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself.” Once we are able to get these relationships in place and prioritized, happiness will come.

Pursuing happiness in American culture is really about pursuing a meaningful life and healthy relationships. There are certain factors that will make this difficult. The Dalai Lama and Bishop Desmond Tutu once referred to these as “obstacles to joy” that every human being must navigate: stress and anxiety, frustration and anger, sadness and grief, loneliness and despair, envy and jealousy, suffering and adversity, illness and the fear of dying. We must learn to anticipate and navigate these things. They must be replaced with perspective, humility, humor, acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, compassion, and generosity. For Jesus, the heart of all of this is love, compassion, and treating others the way we want to be treated. Faith, spirituality, and emotional intelligence should lie at the heart of any happiness pursuit.

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