This article got me thinking about happiness and our unquenchable thirst for it. The article is about online dating, and how it can be risky, esp. since it feeds our insatiable need to follow unrealistic feelings which are built upon scary foundations. Here’s a quote from the article:
We are living in a “Have it your way” culture. When we want it we got it, from on-line shopping with next day delivery, to bootleg movies being sent to our cell phones before coming to theatres. We have created a culture in which we expect to get what we want when we want it, and in the way we like it. It is no wonder then that on-line dating has exploded as a means for finding that special someone. Just log on to the site and search through a menu-list for your perfect soul mate.
What we do, however, is find this perfect soul mate, and a few years later, dump them for a more perfect soul mate. After all, I haven’t been happy for a long time!
But such we are. We have been trained in our world that we deserve happiness and have the right to pursue such happiness, regardless the cost to others around us. J.P. Moreland does an outstanding job of pointing out, in several places, that our definition of happiness is a pleasurable feeling, specifically, a sense of pleasurable satisfaction. He goes on to demonstrate that due to its fragile and volatile core, we can never keep this feeling going. We’re left with longings, tied in with a disconcerting feeling that we’ve been cheated, and we go on our journey in the pursuit of happiness, which we can never ultimately find – at least not the way we understand it. We actually end up depressed in the midst of abundance. I cannot recommend highly enough the two books linked above. You see, people of old (like those who first wrote about the pursuit of happiness during our country’s founding) defined happiness as a life well lived, a life of virtue and character, a life that manifests wisdom, kindness, and goodness.
The implications of our current pursuit of happiness are at least 2 fold. 1) we’ve been duped. Our goal is impossible to attain. 2) it makes us self-centered and selfish. If we had grown up with the classic definition of happiness stated above, we wouldn’t be living selfish lives pursuing feelings of happiness, but we might have a shot at living the kind of life that yields a deeper sense of a life well lived (and feelings of well being, satisfaction, and – happiness?)
Honestly, look at your life, and think of how many decisions you make based on what will give you those pleasurable feelings we call happiness. How often do you feel cheated by life because you don’t have those feelings more often.
Working in the field I do, I am constantly torn by this dilemma. You see, I have a really merciful disposition, so when someone is in my office telling me how unhappy she is with her husband, or he’s explaining why he doesn’t like to sacrifice for people who have less than he, because . . ., well, I feel their pain. I find myself identifying with them and their pain. It’s how I’m gifted. But if I give in to it, I cheat them out of redemptive truth.
Someone close to me recently left her husband for a wealthy man. She’s “happier than she’s ever been.” It’s those fragile pleasurable feelings that make us do whatever it takes to find happiness. She’s being duped. She has left a lot of hurt people in her wake. She doesn’t understand why I’m not happy for her. After all, we’ve been trained to believe that someone’s happiness is what we should wish for them above all else (A major talk radio host has interviewed hundreds of people over the last few years by asking the question, “What did your parents want most for you – success, wealth, to be a good person, or happiness?” 85% said “happiness”)
Would it surprise you to find out that I believe the pursuit of happiness is wired into our very being, and that God passionately wants us to devote our lives to finding it? John Piper explains it well in Desiring God. The difference between our current pursuit of happiness and the biblical call to pursuing happiness is that the scriptures direct us to finding our happiness in and through a relationship with Jesus. In that relationship, Jesus will direct us to lose our life to find it, and take up our cross (die!) and follow him. In studying Jesus’ call to life and happiness, we find out that the ancients got it right. Their understanding of a good life was one lived well, not one lived selfishly.
Jesus designed the world such that in pursuing happiness through him and living like he insists, we find that well spring of life and satisfaction, AND we don’t leave a scattering of hurt people and shattered lives in our path. Instead, we GIVE life, and FIND life. And happiness.
Go get it.
Catch a Wave 
