You're Expecting the Wrong Things to Make You Happy

Superficially, this seems like a sensible way to live, especially in a hypercompetitive economic climate, in which it feels as though you must constantly make the most judicious use of your time if you want to stay afloat. (It also reflects the manner in which most of us were raised: to prioritize future benefits over current enjoyments.) But ultim

Of course, it’s not easy to find the right balance between achievement and enjoyment. But when things are out of whack, the symptoms are pretty obvious. The people around us are talking, but we aren’t listening. We’re divided between what is happening here and what is happening somewhere else. Or we’re thinking about what will happen tomorrow . . .

Seeing things this way helps explain the otherwise mysterious truth that rich people in capitalist economies are often surprisingly miserable. They’re very good at instrumentalizing their time, for the purpose of generating wealth for themselves; that’s the definition of being successful in a capitalist world. But in focusing so hard on instrumenta

In a nutshell, if your life goals revolve around lots of money, prestige, and other worldly things, you are setting yourself up to have exploding wants and low life satisfaction. You kind of knew this, didn’t

You’re so fixated on trying to make the best use of your time—in this case not for some later outcome, but for an enriching experience of life right now—that it obscures the experience itself.