You were not built to be Happy

You were not made to be happy. Natural selection built you to chase happiness. Natural selection shaped you to seek dopamine and serotonin.  You chase pleasure like a dog chases treats from its owner. Evolution made you. Evolution molded you to do one thing, reproduce before you die. Your purpose is to replace yourself before your body stops pumping blood and excreting waste. You were not made to be happy. Evolution built you to make more of you. Happiness is the carrot on the stick that evolution uses to keep you moving in the desired direction. 

If you seek happiness as a life goal, you will wander.  You will chase fleeting highs on the hedonic treadmill. Chasing happiness is the mindset of the addict. Seeking fleeting happiness will leave you with a hangover and credit card debt the next day. So what should you seek in your life? Should you limit your goals to reproducing before you die? Well, you can. But you will need something else, if you want something more lasting and resilient than 

Humans figured out the answer to this tens of thousands years ago. Humans need purpose. We need a mission, a cause bigger than ourselves. We’ve built innumerable causes. We’ve invented mythologies. From there we invented Religions. We invented nation states and nationalism. We’ve built political ideologies. We’ve built philosophies and self help systems. We’ve built stories to which we can contribute. And that’s what has worked for the two million years that humans have been human. 

In the last ten thousand years some humans have discovered a trick. They learned how to chase happiness through their stories. These would be kings have learned how to use these stories to steal the efforts of other humans. They bent your work towards providing for their happiness and pleasure. They tricked us into believing that these would be kings provided their own happiness. They sold us the myth of the self-made man. They have conned us into continuing to labor on the king’s pyramid. They told us that doing so will get us our share of the happiness pie. It won’t. They’ve turned the story against us. 

If you wish to find lasting satisfaction in life, you need to abandon that corrupted story. You will need to build yourself a story that doesn’t feed off you like a cloud of mosquitos.