Career News 24/7: The Cynical Girl: The eternal quest for happiness is boring.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

The Cynical Girl: The eternal quest for happiness is boring.

The eternal quest for happiness is boring.

Posted: 19 Aug 2013 06:45 AM PDT

As always, Americans are obsessed with happiness.

Some say that experiences, not material objects or more money, that will make you happy. And here are five questions science can’t answer about happiness. Oh yeah — if you have more sex, you are happier and make more money.

Just google “happiness” and you’ll see that it’s exhausting to be happy in 2013.

But I do have one incredibly happy moment in my life that I want to share with you.

A few years ago, we discovered that Scrubby was a pee cat. We put him on medication, charted his pee incidents and tried to determine a cause/effect relationship.

(Long story short: Scrubby is a dick.)

Having an intermittent peecat is humbling. There was a moment where my husband and I were explaining Scrubby’s behavior to an animal-behaviorist-professor-vet at NC State. We described our home — full of toys, shelves, treats and expensive cat condos — and we went into great detail about our playing and feeding rituals.

The vet listened to our story and took one look at our charts and said, “Wow. It seems like you really enjoy your cats.”

And oooooooooooooooooooooooooh my god did we feel like losers.

Except, in retrospect, it is hilarious. And it is true. We really do enjoy our cats.

Our cats — all of them with ridiculously sad rescue stories — came into our lives through volunteerism. We were involved in our local community. We love our cats selflessly. And how we treat our cats is a good example of our core values.

(And when we consistently offer selfless love and kindness to one another in our marriage, it is great. We are happy.)

So instead of finding yourself on an endless journey for personal and professional happiness, which is wholly unattainable and will cause you to pee on a couch for no apparent reason, maybe you can go do something for someone (or something) else.

Did you lose a job? Volunteer. Did you lose a loved one? I am sorry for your loss. Go talk to someone who has suffered a similar loss. Did you lose your way in this world? Go spend some time with people who are lost, too.

The eternal quest for happiness is boring. It is also narcissistic and empty. Go into the world and spend some time serving others. I think your life will be better for it.