Nobody optimizes happiness

There’s a tremendous friction that arises when you don’t allow yourself to do what you really want to do with your life. You make a lot of halfway decisions to negotiate your competing priorities: what you want, and what you want to want.

We don’t, and it’s probably because we think we already know how to find happiness, which usually involves acquiring something we don’t have. More money, better security, more affection. In other words, we think happiness is created by making some kind of change in the material world. Putting something into our possession, eliminating a threat, sei... See more

Most of the time, achieving goals won’t make you any happier than you are right now.1

While some believe this fact about human nature implies striving is wasteful, I think it’s more accurate to say that while achieving goals is overrated, striving toward them is underrated.