Stop Chasing Happiness E-Book

Frank Martela

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 271

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

LIFE LESSONS FROM THE HAPPIEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD The secret to happiness? Stop trying to find it - it's not all it's cracked up to be. Finding happiness is less about learning new tricks and more about unlearning ways of thinking holding you back: Stop chasing happiness, stop obsessing over what others think, stop caring too much about how you feel, stop making sacrifices for personal success. Here, academic and philosopher Frank Martela unpacks why we value happiness, and why chasing it is actually making you miserable. He reveals the secrets to Finland's continued top rankings in the global happiness reports by showing that, actually, living with purpose and contentment is much more beneficial that striving to be happy. Building on Frank's personal encounters with people from all walks of life during travels around Finland and abroad, this book blends personal stories and quirky anecdotes with the latest scientific research and ancient traditions to deliver a strong message about how you should approach life: what you should stop doing and what you should start doing instead, to find an enduring sense of contentment and an energizing sense of purpose for your own life.

Leseprobe

Frank Martela, PhD, is a philosopher, assistant professor and researcher of psychology at Aalto University in Finland, specializing in happiness, meaningfulness, human motivation, and how organizations and institutions can unleash human potential. He has lectured at universities around the world, and his last book A Wonderful Life – Insights on Finding a Meaningful Experience (HarperCollins, 2020) was translated into twenty-nine languages. Frank is a key authority on why Finland is so happy, having written extensively on Nordic well-being, alongside being the Principal Investigator for a research team developing a well-being module for European Social Survey 2025.

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2025 by Allen & Unwin, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Frank Martela, 2025

English language edition published by agreement with Frank Martela and Elina Ahlback Literary Agency, Helsinki, Finland.

The moral right of Frank Martela to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 80546 373 3

E-book ISBN: 978 1 80546 374 0

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CONTENTS

Introduction:

Are You Ready to Be Born for the Third Time?

PART I:

Kill the Ego

Chapter 1:

Stop Caring About Your Own Happiness

Chapter 2:

Stop Caring About What Others Think

Chapter 3:

Stop Caring About How You Feel

PART II:

Kill the Expectations

Chapter 4:

Stop Caring About Your Past

Chapter 5:

Stop Caring About What Happens in the World

Chapter 6:

Stop Caring About Your Future Success

INTERMISSION

Chapter 7:

The Centre of Indifference

PART III:

Start Living Your Own Life

Chapter 8:

Start Caring About Yourself

Chapter 9:

Start Caring About Others

Chapter 10:

Start Caring About Building a Better World

Conclusion:

The Delicate Art of Not Caring, While Caring Deeply

Acknowledgements

Notes

INTRODUCTION

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ARE YOU READY TO BE BORN FOR THE THIRD TIME?

I was twenty-four and living the dream as an exchange student in Thailand. Together with my classmates, I spent the weekends (which lasted four days as we didn’t have lectures on Fridays or Mondays) at beach resorts, sleeping in cheap bungalows, drinking buckets of vodka mixed with energy drinks and dancing on the beach until sunrise. Other nights were spent in the most luxurious nightclubs of Bangkok, where the buying power of Western salaries meant that it really felt like the world was our oyster. The bars were our temples, and we felt like gods, living the kind of dream life that we thought only existed in music videos.

I was young and it was, of course, a hell of a lot of fun. But as one weekend of shenanigans followed another, a nagging feeling began to grow. I started to realize I was living in someone else’s dream. This was the lifestyle that advertisements, music videos and movies had programmed us to enjoy. This was supposed to be the dream life. But while it was fun, I felt that I was missing out on something. A sense of emptiness started to trouble me. Eventually, I realized that I was missing the ‘boring’ parts of life, like reading and writing. It dawned on me that the way of living best suited for who I truly was involved more books, not more beach parties.

So I went to the university library. I read philosophical classics like Friedrich Nietzsche and William James. At some hippie bookshop on a beach in Koh Pha-ngan, I found a worn copy of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Then and there, during the most hedonic period of my youth, I decided that what I wanted to do in life was to solve the riddle of human happiness. What makes our lives happy, fulfilling and meaningful? And, ultimately, what should we strive for in life?

In the decade that followed, I graduated, started and completed my PhD, found a person to love in sickness and in health, had three lovely children with her and found my calling in research, publishing both psychological and philosophical works on the grand questions of life. Beyond this, I travelled to six continents, interviewing and having a few beers with people from all walks of life and gaining experiences – all in the service of acquiring a deeper understanding of what living a good life entails for us humans.

When Finland was crowned the happiest nation on earth for the first time in 2018, I realized that what I had been looking for had been hiding in plain sight. Perhaps the secret to good living was not to be found on the beaches of Belize, in the bungee jumping in New Zealand, in Singapore, Silicon Valley, Winchester, or even in the psychology department of the University of Rochester in upstate New York, where I spent a year and a half as a visiting researcher. The secret was waiting for me where I had started: at home. At the time of writing, Finland has topped the rankings of the World Happiness Report for seven years in a row, leading to journalists from all over the world trying to figure out how this tiny Nordic country with long and cold winters can have such happy citizens. Consequently, as a Finnish well-being researcher, I’ve been sharing my take on Finnish happiness with media from all over the world, including the New York Times, BBC, CNN, and even Fox News.

Our secret? Finns don’t care too much about happiness. When the country was first nominated the happiest nation, the overall reaction in Finland was one of disbelief and scepticism. The people of the land of darkness, heavy metal and valorized melancholy, where winter is always coming, were not ready to believe it to be true. But it is – I’ve researched the topic for over a decade and have been able to convince many Finns that they, indeed, are happy. I see Finland as the land of quiet satisfaction – people accept life as it is, not making a fuss about what is bad or good in their life. But at the end of the day, when pushed to answer, they admit that they are actually quite satisfied with their lives. The art of accepting life as it is is something wisdom traditions all over the world – from Stoicism and Taoism to Buddhism – have taught us. And, in Finland, people have taken this message to heart.

However, contentment in the present is just half the story. You also need excitement for the future. A healthy human life is not one of passive satisfaction, but of active engagement – you need goals and values, the pursuit of which energizes your present. Being content with what you have should not lead you to settle with what you have – that is a recipe for boredom. We need challenges and goals to stretch ourselves; we need something to look forward to. The trick to good living is the ability to hold these two seemingly contradictory attitudes simultaneously: accepting the present unconditionally, while pursuing goals and projects you find valuable. This is the attitude of energized contentment that I will be offering to you in this book.

At the end of the day, happiness is not about some grand mind tricks or external signs of success. It is about an attitude towards life. Learning to approach life with energized contentment is mostly about unlearning harmful attitudes and unhealthy cultural norms that stand in the way of your happiness. As Brené Brown puts it, we can talk about the good things in life ‘until we sound like a greeting card store’, but such well-meaning ‘how-to’ advice does not help, because ‘I’ve never seen any evidence of “how-to” working without talking about the things that get in the way.’1 On our way to unconditionally accepting life as it is, we have to deal with how we approach our past, how we approach our future, how we deal with our emotions and setbacks, and what others think of us. In the end, we also have to deal with how we approach happiness itself and what our attitude towards our own happiness is. All of this is necessary groundwork for clearing the way for being able to combine acceptance and excitement towards life.

So, if unconditional acceptance of the present combined with excitedly pursuing whatever project you have chosen for yourself sounds like something you would like to master in your own life, let’s go on a journey together!

Do You Dare to Liberate Yourself?

What if I offered you a life that is not about jumping through hoops in the pursuit of a carrot you did not choose?

This is a book about liberation – about letting go of the false attachments that keep us anchored in life courses and choices that are harmful to us. We are entangled in a web of expectations, prejudices and fears that keep us trapped in a narrow path. In the worst-case scenario, you are stuck doing work that you don’t like, to get money to buy stuff you don’t need, to impress people you don’t care about. This book aims to set you free.

I will not promise you success. I will not promise you riches. I will not promise that your problems will go away. Putting into practice the insights in the following pages will make these outcomes more likely – so, this book is not against success – but this is a book that aims to change your perspective so that success becomes a nice potential side effect, not the end goal of life.

What I promise you is perspective. The ability to deal better with whatever you are dealing with. The capacity to more energetically pursue whatever it is you want to pursue. And, most of all, I promise you self-awareness – the wisdom to know what is worth pursuing in life (and, just as importantly, what is not). The goal is to make you love your life as it is, while being excited to pursue what you value.

The aim is to stop living a life where you are just a commodity, just an instrument for something else, such as success, fame, a productive career or being accepted by others. Whatever you come to pursue in life through reading this book, I want it to be something you chose yourself and something that you personally value.

I want to make you live more alertly, more reflectively, more freely and, ultimately, more fully.

Existentialism for People with Baggage

In being a book about liberation, there is a strong strain of existentialism running through these pages. Existentialism was a movement of philosophers and artists that aimed to awaken people to the notion that they are free and should thus start living more authentically.2 The German Friedrich Nietzsche, Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky and Danish Søren Kierkegaard are often quoted as the nineteenth-century predecessors of existentialism, while post-World War II France was the epicentre of the movement, with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus leading the charge. In Finland, philosopher Esa Saarinen has been at the forefront of nudging people to start steering their own lives. From a young ‘punk doctor’ in leather trousers in the 1980s to a professor of life philosophy in leopard-patterned suits in the 2000s, he still draws full lecture halls and his videos gather hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube – not bad for two-hour-long university lectures. As Esa’s former PhD student and mentee, it is my turn to carry the torch forward and fulfil the oldest duty of philosophy: awaken people to choose their own way of approaching life.

This book could be labelled as existentialism for people with baggage. While existentialists often took it as a self-evident starting point that human beings are ‘cast in this world… condemned to be free’, as Sartre famously put it,3 I think that we actually carry quite a lot of baggage that stands in the way of our freedom. Some of this baggage, such as many of our emotional reactions, is a result of evolution – for example, a fear of darkness and dread of abandonment both served our survival in the savannah. Lots of this baggage, though, such as our ideals about what a successful and admirable life looks like, comes from the culture we grew up in. To a large degree, our evolutionary and cultural programming determines how we approach situations, what options we see for ourselves and what things we value.

If we ignore this baggage, we will not be able to liberate ourselves. This is why the emphasis in this book is on unlearning. There is a liberated way of living through combining contentment with excitement. But to get there we have to recognize and tackle our baggage. Quoting Master Yoda from Star Wars, ‘you must unlearn what you have learned’.4 That’s why the first six chapters are about what we should stop doing, before we get to what we should start doing. Once we break free from following the wrong demands, starting to do the right things will come quite naturally.

This Is Not a Book About Success

What if you sacrificed everything – your time with family and friends, your hobbies, even your health – in order to be successful? And then found out that it was all a hoax: life equipped with all that success does not taste any sweeter. This is a familiar narrative to many. It has its roots in people rushing towards ‘success’ without stopping to think what ‘success’ actually means for them.

It is not a compliment to humanity that, if you want your self-help book to succeed, publishers recommend putting ‘success’ in the title. The majority of self-help book buyers are not actually interested in learning about themselves or about how to be better people. They are interested in success. And by success they mean running faster than the guy next door in a narrowly defined race they did not choose to be part of. Aiming for success – what a waste of a perfectly good life!

The pursuit of success is a syndrome of not knowing what you want out of life. You don’t know what is valuable in life or what pursuits are worth the effort. You have found nothing worth fighting for. And, because of that, you settle with the second-best goal: impressing others by doing or having more – better grades, more money, a bigger house or a more expensive watch or dress. This life of one-upmanship is a terrible waste of energy. You were given a unique life to live, but you’re throwing it away in empty competing, because you never took the time to think about what you want out of life. It saddens me to see how many people are so busy with accomplishing that they never take the time to think what is actually worth accomplishing.

One comic strip that has stuck with me throughout the years depicts two men dragging a heavy load. A third man offers wheels to put under their cart, but they say, ‘Sorry, we are too busy…’ That’s how I sometimes feel teaching my ‘Art of Living’ course at Aalto University in Helsinki. As it is an elective course, the students taking it tend to be those already on the path to better living. The ones most in need of the course, the ones rushing through life with the narrowest horse blinkers, completely miss out on the lessons of the course. They look at the course description and see that it does not help them to get from A to B. What they don’t see is that the course would help them to select better ‘B’s to aim for. Only when a major life crisis forces them to stop later on will they come to realize the value of learning to re-evaluate such a narrow life direction.

This is not a book with optimized strategies to get from A to B. There are too many success-help books out there about that already. Would it not be wiser to first learn to identify which goals are worthwhile for you? Management guru Peter Drucker expressed this well: ‘there is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all’.5 This is not a book about how to improve your efficiency, but about what you should and should not pursue in your life. This book will not teach you about doing things right, but about how to do the right things.

Too few books discuss what the end goals worth striving for in life are – or how to identify the right things to pursue. This latter genre necessitates more introspection, challenging our assumptions and learning to listen to our soul. For the sake of ease (and to distinguish it from ‘self-help’), let’s call it self-search. It guides you in choosing goals worth pursuing, values worth fighting for and attitudes worth having towards life. This genre has a long history – its (Western) roots can be found in ancient Greece and Rome, where philosophers like Socrates, Aristotle, Epicurus, Seneca and Epictetus were the stars of their era, gathering younger and older followers. We could even think of self-search as a sub-genre of self-help, complementing the vast stock of success-help books already on the shelves. Meditations by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius is a self-help book – quite literally, as it seems to be the life advice that he wrote for himself. My book aims to be part of the same noble tradition of self-searching, but it anchors its advice to the latest findings in behavioural and social sciences.6

So, this is a book of science-based self-search, about existentialism for people with baggage, where my understanding of this baggage is informed by the latest psychological research. Use this book to recalibrate your North Star. Use it to challenge the constraints of your current world view that keep you stuck. Use it to find energizing and valuable goals for your life. Then read a book about the best strategies to get there.

The Opportunity to Be Born for a Third Time

Allow me to offer one final way to describe what this book is about. The mission of this book is to aim to offer you a chance to be born for a third time.7

The first time is the physical birth – when a child emerges from the mother’s womb and breathes for the first time. The second time is the cultural birth – those first years in which you acquire the language of your caregivers. Simultaneously, you also internalize their values, prejudices, taboos, norms and life goals. In a word, their world view becomes your world view. No longer a helpless baby who merely eats, grows and poops, you become an encultured self, capable of thinking and guiding your behaviour by the world view you acquired from your surroundings. This is the second birth.

The third birth takes the longest and is something people accomplish to varying degrees in their lives. Some never go through this birth. This is the birth of an individual – becoming aware of your inner life and values, and having the courage to let them guide your actions.

Immanuel Kant, one of the foundational modern Western philosophers, described this as the ‘human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority’.8 Too easily, we humans subsume our will to the direction of others, lacking resolution and courage to carve our own path. In his groundbreaking 1784 essay ‘What is enlightenment?’, Kant offered a motto for the enlightenment movement that was then sweeping through Europe: ‘have courage to make use of your own understanding!’9 In harsh terms, Kant condemned the ‘laziness and cowardice’ that had led too many humans to live like ‘domesticated animals’ afraid to take a single step ‘without the walking cart in which they have confined them’. Even highly successful people are nothing but successful domesticated animals if they have not defined their own terms of success, and if they do not follow their own heart. Like lions afraid of the whip, they are just jumping through hoops on someone else’s command. Kant’s was a battle cry for the freedom of spirit: the ability to use our own reason in all matters, to be in charge of our own life choices and to carve our own path in life.

In the spirit of enlightenment, the goal of this book is to help you to become who you are. You have a mind, but do you have a self? And is that self something you yourself have chosen? I want to help you to build that self; to have more clarity about who you are and what you value. In the words of author Bill Deresiewicz, I want to help you to ‘find out not just who you wish to be, but who you are already, underneath what everyone has wanted you to think about yourself’.10 Deresiewicz notes that everyone is born with a mind, but only through the ‘act of introspection, of self-examination, of establishing communication between the mind and the heart, the mind and experience’ do you become ‘an individual, a unique being – a soul’.11

I want to help you step off the treadmill for a second, see the rat race for what it is and see the opportunities that exist outside of it. Taking a moment to breathe outside of your current strivings helps you to figure out ‘just what it is that’s worth wanting’.12

The aims of this book can be summarized in two steps:

• Step 1: Detach yourself from all the unnecessary expectations, fears and pressures to be able to accept life as it is. This is the task of Part I: Kill the Ego and Part II: Kill the Expectations.

• Step 2: Liberated, pursue the things that you most value in life. This will be explored in Part III: Start Living Your Own Life.

In distilling the recipe for good life into those two steps, I have synthesized all the wisdom I have gained over the years about how to approach life, through conducting psychological research in the laboratory, reading the classic wisdom teachers – from Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius to Lao Tzu and Confucius – and, most importantly, by hitchhiking across Finland, attending rock festivals and stumbling upon various larger-than-life characters across the country. You’ll learn about the moment of revelation on human connection I had in a basement party full of philosophy students, about what happened when I stumbled into a karaoke bar during a work trip to the remote city of Kajaani and what my grandfather taught me about the years he spent in the trenches during World War II, fighting against the Soviet Union’s invasion. I will offer to you the most reliable signposts I have identified to help you steer a steady course towards what good life is for you.

So here we are, at this moment. You arrived here, in the words of Deresiewicz, ‘inscribed with all the ways of thinking and feeling that the world has been instilling in you from the moment you were born: the myths, the narratives, the pieties, the assumptions, the values, the sacred words’.13 While your current world view has taken you to where you are now, parts of it hold you back, forming an invisible cage that limits what you dare to dream about and what choices you have the courage to make.

I want to help you to liberate yourself from those limits, and enable you to identify goals and values that are truly your own – something you wholeheartedly embrace.

But before we can learn what these meaningful things are, we must first clear a few obstacles from our way. Because often the problem is not that we do not know what is valuable in life, but that there are certain deeply ingrained false cultural narratives holding us back. Thus, in the next few chapters, you’ll practise the art of unlearning by stopping caring about things you should not care about – others’ opinions about you, your past, your future and even your vain pursuit of happiness. Despite their strong grip on you, ultimately they don’t matter. You’ll need to practise the art of acceptance to make room for the art of excitement. This will lead you towards the excited acceptance of life, where, content with the present, you are energized to pursue a better future for yourself and those around you.

PART I: Kill the Ego

CHAPTER 1

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STOP CARING ABOUT YOUR OWN HAPPINESS

So you want to be happy? Don’t.

I am not saying you shouldn’t be happy. What I am saying is that you shouldn’t aim to be happy. There is nothing wrong with being happy when the occasion arises. I have been known to be happy myself. However, happiness is a poor goal for life.

In recent decades, Westerners have become more and more obsessed with happiness. The quest for happiness has become an industry, with annual spending on mental wellness estimated to be at $130 billion.14 Companies like Amazon, Google and SAP employ Chief Happiness Officers, and the United Arab Emirates even has a Minister of Happiness. Newspapers and YouTube influencers promise ‘five tricks to make you happy’, while advertisements bombard us with campaigns filled with happy people, telling us to purchase a ‘Happy Meal’ or to ‘Open Happiness!’ Even storybooks for small children in Western countries, when compared to East Asian storybooks, contain more excited faces and wider smiles, silently pressuring children to think that they are expected to always be happy.15

‘Good vibes only’ might sound like an innocent slogan, but it is just another way of telling you how you should feel. It pressures you to bury the negative and hide your sadness from others. It is toxic positivity in action.

All of this has led to a situation where being happy has become a cultural norm and a self-evident aim of life.16 Don’t we all want to be happy? Isn’t that what we are supposed to strive for in life, more happiness? Happiness has become the holy cow of our age, and we are willing to make many sacrifices to please this smiling idol of worship.

There are certainly many benefits to being happy. Positive emotions broaden our thinking and make our imagination fly.17 Sharing a laugh or smiling together helps us to connect with other people.18 Being happy might be good for our health, too.19 Also – and this almost goes without saying – it feels good to be happy.

But while being happy can be a good thing, pursuing happiness might actually be bad for us. The tyranny of toxic positivity, that allows no negative feelings, is harmful. As Professor Adam Grant summarized the state of the science: ‘There’s reason to believe that the quest for happiness might be a recipe for misery.’20

Don’t be fooled by the false prophets. Don’t sacrifice the good things in life in the vain hope of becoming happier – there are detrimental downsides to this. Below, I’ve outlined four reasons why you should not pursue happiness.

1. You are seeking happiness in the wrong places

When you think about a happy life, what images come to mind? The chances are you start thinking about yachts and champagne, trips to expensive resorts with infinity pools and the kind of polished and carefully curated pictures of luxury you see on Instagram. In other words, you associate expensiveness with happiness.

This is no surprise given that the companies selling those products have spent billions in advertising to associate happiness with material products. They want you to forget that many key sources of happiness don’t cost money: for example, hugging a friend you have not seen for a year, going to play in the park with your family or going for a hike in the forest near your home. Doing things you enjoy with people you care about is typically the best way to find happiness – and that does not have to involve much money. The happiest moments are the ones when you are too immersed in the actual experience to remember to take a picture of it.

This is the first problem when it comes to our chase for happiness. The search for happiness leads us to follow a narrow cultural script focusing on materialistic pursuits. We strive for a bigger house, a bigger car, the latest electronic gadgets or a holiday under the palm trees. Professor Jean Twenge, an expert on generational differences, has been alarmed by the ongoing rise of materialism: ‘Compared to previous generations, recent high school graduates are more likely to want lots of money and nice things, but less likely to say they’re willing to work hard to earn them.’21

If you are like those 62 per cent of high-school students who think that it is important to have a lot of money,22 then I hate to break this to you: you are not heading for happiness with that goal. Many studies have shown that people pursuing the infamous trio of money, fame and good looks as their life goals are less happy than those who have found more valuable goals for their life (more on that later).23 Money is, of course, a useful tool that can help you achieve many worthy goals in life, and can give you a sense of comfort and security, but making money your life goal is putting the cart before the horse. To get their fingers moving, pianists practise by playing scales. It is repetitive and boring, but necessary to build up the ability to play Beethoven’s sonatas and other masterpieces of music. Having money as a goal in life is like having playing scales as your only aim – boring, and missing what makes life beautiful.

2. The attempt to maximize happiness ironically diminishes it

Think about watching a short clip where a popular figure skater wins a gold medal. The crowd goes wild and the skater enthusiastically celebrates with her coach. Would watching the clip make you feel happy? The probable answer is yes, because this kind of film clip triggers positive feelings in people. But here is the twist: before researchers showed this film to an audience, half of the participants were asked to read a short note that stated that ‘happiness not only feels good, it also carries important benefits: the happier people can make themselves feel from moment to moment, the more likely they are to be successful, healthy and popular’.24

So evil! The researchers in effect made people value happiness more to see how this affected their feelings after watching the film. It turned out that it did have an effect: the people who read the statement reported being less happy after watching the film than other people watching the same film. In other words, valuing happiness made them feel less happy. The reason: they reported being disappointed with their own feelings. Perhaps the figure skater’s joy made them smile a bit, but they would have wanted to derive even more happiness from the film, and this made them frustrated.