Intentionality vs Happiness and Success
I therefore admonish my students both in Europe and in America: ‘Don’t aim at success - the more you aim at it, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the byproduct of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.
Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run - in the long run, I say! - success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.
-Viktor Frankl
I’ve recently been reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, as I found it difficult to reconcile my decisions with the guiding principles for how I want to live my life. Nietzsche famously said that “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how”, and I feel that I’ve spent the last few years attempting to discover that why for myself.
Emotion and Meaning
It ain’t about how hard you hit, but about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. That’s what winning’s about!
-Rocky Balboa
Frankl posits that much of the search for meaning is itself the why people search for: the journey of finding purpose is itself the purpose of life. For the same reasons that people don’t commit suicide: loved ones, jobs, dependents - are often the veins from which purpose flows. He grounds this message in his experience at Auschwitz, which highlights how even in the most unimaginable of human suffering, there are lessons to be learned of man’s capacity for perseverance. Frankl goes further as to say the appreciation and cherishment of one’s suffering is itself critical in discovering meaning. For as the cliches of a night being darkest before the dawn, the men who survived Auschwitz were those who accepted and found gratitude in their ability to suffer.
The heart of man’s struggle to discover his reason for being is in a paradoxical battle between wanting to feel everything and nothing at the same time. In the age of infinite scrolling, instant gratification and on-demand doomerization, it’s easier and more appealing than ever to hand over control of your faculties to the Instagram, YouTube or TikTok algorithms. The brain is pumped so full of dopamine that the desire for more is satiated temporarily, but its absence is felt even more strongly, catalyzing a vicious cycle of dopamine seeking and craving. Artificially inflated dopamine replaces the resting levels of dopamine in the nervous system, which triggers numbness and crafts a link between higher levels of dopamine and the subsequent numbness associated.
Emotion and Meaning
I’ve got some issues that nobody can see, and all of these emotions are pouring out of me. I bring them to light for you, it’s only right
-Kid Cudi
I want to feel and be moved more than anything in the world, but I’m scared of getting started because it’s so much easier to be comfortable now more than ever. The “Happiness Machine” exists at the touch of a screen and if that satisfies the craving, why continue to pursue its source? Of course, the reasoning is in that constant yearning for stimuli that reshapes ones worldview and somehow transforms a depressed, demotivated sedentary imitation of a human into a fully-fledged go-getter with drive, dreams and goals. With each hit of dopamine comes an even larger hit of self-hatred for the disappointment of one’s wasted potential.
The strongest willed of people find refuge in work, or relationships, or hobbies. These provide an outlet for real, earned dopamine - free of the fraudulent, guilt-ridden dopamine derived undeservedly from an algorithm. For the desperately disillusioned and demotivated, however, such sources are insufficient and unappealing, to which we turn to art. Films, TV, music, books, paintings, sculptures embody spirited resistance to the banality of day-to-day living, and in it we observe a vision of another’s inspiration, so meaningful as to spark creation. Art shows us who we are and what we can be, which provides further motivation not for success, but for the suffering in the path forwards. It is this suffering that shapes us into the person we need to be for ourselves and the people in our lives, and it is the privilege of suffering and indignity that must be celebrated.
Success and happiness aren’t to be courted or seduced, but are to be prepared for by wholehearted dedication to forces outside oneself. Once the absent ache of a drive for success is a distant memory: a twinkle in the cosmic vastness of a life well lived, you’ll find it reclining in your sitting room chair, greeted as an old friend. In a world determined to eradicate ambiguity and strive for certainty, the serendipity of success crafts the greatest fulfillment and satisfaction for craft. Success, failure, acceptance, rejection: these are all arbitrary, abstract metrics for immeasurable uncertainties. So long as each day is filled with incremental progress across any artery of the greater purpose beyond oneself, the offices of Happiness, Meaning and Success will chase you down.