Is It Always Best to "Do What Makes You Happy"?

The paradox of comfort and struggle, with reference to ice cream, quests, and transformation.

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Hopefully I have noted the concerns with just doing more. Being obsessed with achievement was a major problem for me. I changed my life in response to realizing this, and I’ll say more about it as we go.

But these concerns could also be misunderstood as wholesale rejection of hard work and challenge—which isn’t the case at all!

I actually love working hard on something I’m excited about. I believe in challenge and striving as core values.

So while I have no problem critiquing the cult of productivity for productivity’s sake (and there is more to be said on that in other posts, stay tuned), there’s also something else we need to discuss.

This topic can be summed up as: Challenge is good for you.

Doing hard things doesn’t always feel good at first, but it usually does afterwards. You can’t just “do what makes you happy”—at least, not if you want to live the most meaningful life.

alternatively: 

What makes you happy in any given moment or situation is not always what’s best for you later.

so now let’s get to it… 

Ice Cream for Dinner

Let’s start with an example, from a New Yorker profile of Jesse Itzler. I’ll paraphrase this slightly and add the emphasis. 

His home is an incubator for optimization. Itzler recently told an audience, “I said to my brother about my son, ‘He’s a good swimmer, but he doesn’t really have that eye of the tiger,’ and my brother said, ‘That’s O.K., as long as he’s happy.’ ” There were murmurs of approval. “And I’m, like, ‘No! He’d be happy playing Fortnite and eating Häagen-Dazs every night. We want him to live up to his potential.’ ” 

Itzler is married to Sara Blakely, the billionaire founder of Spanx. No doubt their son will experience plenty of pressure in growing up in such a household. And maybe some people will have a problem with the burden of “living up to [one’s] potential.”

All fair points. But I think the much greater point is … Itzler is right. His son might actually be happy playing Fortnite all the time and eating ice cream for dinner, but as parents, Itzler and Blakely have decided that these are not great life choices for him.

Mmmmm I do enjoy a nice ice cream—or pint of ice cream—from time to time.

It’s Not Just the Fortnite-playing Teenager

MOST OF US are like the adolescent who would happily choose to check out. Or at least, most of us can be. What we want in the short-term is not always what’s best for us in the long-term, or even the medium-term.

So this is what we have to navigate, if we’re going to be long-term or medium-term happy.

Yet the answer we are sometimes pointed towards is to opt out. In China a version of it is called lie-flat. In the west it takes on a different hue. Sometimes it looks like:

Capitalism is killing us, so we should roll over and do nothing.

The world is hard, the system is rigged, so there’s no sense in trying to rise above it.

Nothing I do matters, so I’ll just stop trying.

Somewhere along the way, “Just do what makes you happy” becomes “stop striving.”

But if you opt-out, you end up back with Fortnite and ice cream, or whatever that looks like for you. It’s not just hard work you retreat from—you walk away from your big dreams!

Before long, you end up with existential nihilism. Everything is meaningless.

Activism Is Hard

Speaking of nihilism, consider the “just do what makes you happy” model in the context of activism, whether social, environmental, or something else.

To be clear, I’m not saying you should build your inner life around monitoring every problem in the world. In fact, I think that’s a pretty terrible idea. You can’t be effective in doing something about everything, and you’ll just be miserable if you try.

BUT! Imagine there’s something you really care about—some sort of injustice or inequity or just a big problem somewhere that you feel called to respond to.

Your work in this area is almost certainly going to be hard and difficult. It will NOT make you happy all the time.¹

If it’s not hard, isn’t it just performative? There’s a cost to disruption. Most of the people I’ve known who work in extreme situations—including humanitarian aid workers, in the kind of activism I’m most familiar with—aren’t really in it for the day-to-day joy.

This is not to say there aren’t moments of joy. And most of them would say it’s all worth it in the end. But it’s also hard! More than one has told me they really would rather be doing just about anything else.

“If this problem were fixed, I wouldn’t ever want to relive it” is a common sentiment.

Whether activism or just something hard for the sake of itself, many things worth doing provide little to no sense of instant gratification.

Dream Your Dreams … but Also Get to Work 

What it comes down to is that some dreams are DIFFICULT to achieve.

You don’t just manifest them into existence, you have to work for them. Progress is not usually linear. You advance, retreat, encounter obstacles and find ways around them, and so on. It’s the hero’s journey and you are the hero. 

The hero must answer a call that is different than “kick back and relax” or “give up when things get hard.” 

You must navigate the tension between these things, not giving yourself over too far to either side—or you’ll be missing out.² Obsessed with outcomes? No fun in the end.

Abandon all sense of challenge and hard things in your life? Might seem fun, but again, map it out and see where it leads. 

So you can’t just do what makes you happy, at least not if you’re in search of what’s most meaningful. You need to find what feels purposeful. You’ll be made better through the process, the search, and the discovery. 

Just as I see many people making the mistake I’ve made, in going too far down a rabbit hole of pursuit, my sense is that others are making a different mistake that is equally harmful: turning away from anything that requires strenuous effort. 

That’s the answer I’ve found: work hard, on the right things. It’s a big part of what I’ll continue to share with you this year.

Naturally, I encourage you to adapt it in your own way. Take what suits you. Or, of course, discard all of it. It’s your life! 

But just be careful of pushing away from the edge, and rejecting anything that seems ambitious or difficult. The edge is good for you. It might be tough, but ultimately it will make you happier. 

Conversation Starters

1. What was the last really hard thing you did? 

2. Challenge the argument in this post. It’s okay, I can handle it. :)

3. Just to be clear, nothing wrong with ice cream. What’s your favorite flavor?

4. Should I visit every country in the world again? Seriously thinking about it. 

Coming Up

• I’ll be in New York City for a talk on getting a book deal next week. Would love to see you if you’re around!

• Big thanks to everyone who took the “Doing Things” survey last week. I’ve learned a lot from your notes and will share an update soon.

1. Should we also give up on hard causes because they are hard? I’m often reminded of the Jewish dictum, "Even though we cannot solve a problem, we are not free to desist from trying."

2. Not the kind of missing out that’s good for you—being content with what you have—but the kind that is easily fixable.