Getting the Life You Want: Why Happiness Isn’t the Goal

What do you want from your life?

It sounds like a simple question, but it is surprisingly difficult to answer. Maybe an even harder question is this: do you have what you want from your life?

Most of us are so busy living that we rarely stop to ask where our lives are actually heading. We keep moving from one week to the next, hoping that if we can just solve the next problem, reach the next milestone, or get through the next season, life will somehow feel complete.

When I began reading Getting the Life You Want by Arthur C. Brooks, who has spent decades researching what helps people flourish, what struck me almost immediately was how often his conclusions echoed wisdom the Bible has been teaching for thousands of years.

Over the coming months I want to explore that conversation: bringing together our lived experience, the wisdom of Scripture, and the findings of modern research. They do not always ask the same questions or use the same language, but together they help us think more deeply about what it means to live a genuinely whole life.

This article is the first step in that journey. Before we ask what happiness really is, we first need to let go of a few misconceptions about what happiness is not.

We Were Made for Hope

One of the reasons this conversation matters is that the Bible assumes our lives should carry a kind of hope that other people can see.

Peter writes, “In your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15).

That assumes something important. It assumes we have relationships with people who do not yet share our faith. It also assumes there is something different about our lives that they can only describe with the word hope.

That does not mean our lives are easy. It does not mean we are always cheerful. It does not mean we pretend everything is fine when it is not.

But it does mean that the life Jesus offers should gradually make us more whole, more free, and more hopeful. Not merely hopeful about what happens when we die, but hopeful in the way we live now.

The Happiness Fallacy

We all want to be happy. Augustine was right when he said there is no one who does not want to be happy. But one of the traps many of us fall into is what Brooks calls the happiness fallacy.

It is the belief that says, “I want to be happy, but this thing outside my control is stopping me.” It might be my relationships, my health, my family, my money, my education, my past, or my circumstances.

The problem is that happiness is not simply the product of our circumstances. Circumstances can contribute to our happiness, but happiness is not an end point we finally reach once we get rid of all the things that annoy us.

Happiness is not a destination. Happiness is a direction.

We will not find complete happiness this side of eternity. But no matter where we are in life, no matter how old or young we are, no matter what our situation is, we can become happier, and then happier, and then happier still. We can move towards a more whole and free life.

Happiness Is Not the Absence of Sadness

One of the first things we need to recalibrate is this: happiness is not the absence of unhappiness.

Sometimes we assume that if we feel sad, something must be wrong. If we are upset, something must be broken. But sadness itself is not wrong. The shortest verse in the Bible is only two words: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35).

Sadness and joy are often linked. Joy and sadness kiss each other at every moment. Even in our happiest moments, there is often a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitation. In every embrace, there is the knowledge that we will have to let go again.

That does not mean something is wrong. It means we are human.

In fact, unhappiness is often, not always, but often, a good thing in our lives. Chances are we would not make changes if we never became unhappy. Regret can help us learn. Grief is connected to love and loss. As C.S. Lewis points out, the only way to be safe from sadness is not to love.

So part of a healthy life is learning to be sad about the right things in the right way. It is possible to be both happy and sad at the same time.

Happiness Is Not Avoiding Pain

Another mistake is thinking happiness means freedom from mental disturbance and physical pain.

That is the dominant assumption of our society. If you are stressed, or in pain, or facing something hard, then something must be wrong and you need to get rid of it as quickly as possible.

But the Bible tells a different story.

Paul says, “Join with me in suffering, like a good soldier of Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:3). Peter tells us that God can use suffering to refine us and help us become free (1 Peter 1:6–7). Sometimes pain comes because we have made foolish choices. Sometimes pain comes because life is broken. Sometimes pain comes because we are following Jesus in a world that does not understand him.

But the answer is not always to run from pain.

God can use some of the pain in our lives to form us.

Happiness Is Not Just Doing Your Duty

There is another path people take. If the world around us is obsessed with feelings, we can react by becoming dutiful. We put on the stiff upper lip. We do what has to be done. We try not to let anything move us.

But Jesus did not say, “I have come that they might be dutiful.”

He said, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10).

Following Jesus is not a recipe for losing everything precious. It is the key to finding our life. Jesus says that if we are willing to trust him with our life, we will find it (Matthew 16:25).

Duty matters, but duty by itself is not the full life Jesus promised.

Happiness Is Not Pleasure

The fourth trap is simply chasing pleasure.

Pleasure is not wrong. We all have nerve endings. A good meal, a warm day, a beautiful view, a hug, a laugh, a moment of comfort — these are good gifts. But pleasure makes a terrible purpose.

Brooks says pleasure is easier than enjoyment, but it is a mistake to settle for it because it is fleeting and solitary. All addictions involve pleasure, not enjoyment.

Peter warns that people can be promised freedom while becoming slaves, because “people are slaves to whatever has mastered them” (2 Peter 2:19).

That is a confronting question: where have I reached for pleasure and found that it has started to master me?

The more we get of something, the less benefit we often receive from it. We can organise our whole lives around pleasure if we want to. Plenty of people do. But it will not make us happy and whole.

What Real Happiness Looks Like

So what does real happiness look like?

A whole and healthy life includes enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.

Enjoyment is more than pleasure. It includes pleasure, but it adds consciousness. It adds presence. It adds relationship.

I have had to work at this. I tend to be someone who wants to get on with things. I am often thinking about what is next. But over the last ten years or so, I have tried to practise stopping and saying, “I think this is a moment.”

That is what real enjoyment is. It is consciously stopping and allowing yourself to be here, with the people you love, in the moment God has given you.

My grandson is teaching me this. He lives in the moment. He looks up, wanting connection, and it is so easy for me to be somewhere else — on my phone, watching television, thinking about the next thing. But enjoyment is found in the moment.

Sometimes we need to learn from Darryl Kerrigan: “How’s the serenity?” Sometimes we need to be able to say, “This is going straight to the pool room.” We need to celebrate the moment.

The kind of person who produces hope in others is not someone who is always worried about the future or destroyed by the past. It is someone who is present, with people, enjoying the beauty that is right in front of them.

Satisfaction is the joy of achieving something worthwhile.

There is something good and proper about celebrating achievement. Paul tells the Thessalonians to make it their ambition to lead a quiet life, mind their own business, and work with their hands so that their daily life may win the respect of outsiders (1 Thessalonians 4:11–12).

In other words: make stuff, do stuff, contribute, do not just take up space.

Ecclesiastes says there is nothing better than for a person to enjoy their work (Ecclesiastes 3:22). Achievement is temporary, of course. You finish one thing and then there is another project. But learning to celebrate good work is part of becoming healthy, happy, and whole.

Then there is purpose.

Purpose is the knowledge that there is meaning to your life. And this is where the heart of Christian faith speaks so clearly. You are not an accident. You are not just molecules that happened to turn up.

Paul says you are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for you to do (Ephesians 2:10).

The world says, “Do what you want. Follow your feelings.” But that is a recipe for becoming self-centred and small.

The Bible says something much bigger. You were created for more than following your feelings. God has a plan for your life. It is not an accident that you are here.

So the question is not just, “What do I feel like doing?” The question is, “Am I stepping into the life God created me for?”

The Life Jesus Offers

Happiness is not the goal, and unhappiness is not the enemy.

The goal is a rich life. A whole life. A life where we can enjoy the honey and also appreciate the bees responsible for it. A life where we can face reality without fear, manage our internal world, and build on the pillars that help us become happier for the rest of our lives.

One of the dangers in our culture is that it is designed to keep us immature. We can avoid the difficult things in life like no other culture in history. We can sit at home, watch television, scroll our phones, and avoid reality.

But Jesus does not take us by the hand and lead us back to avoidance.

He asks us to face the mess that holds us back. He asks us to step into life in the moment. He asks us to enjoy our lives, but that will take some work.

All of us have been hurt. None of us have been loved perfectly. All of us have experienced pain along the way. And all of us are, as the Bible says, sinful. We are all a bit broken.

But the more we are willing to face our brokenness, the more whole-hearted we can become.

Jesus did not come to make us religious. He came to give us life. He came to make us truly ourselves.

Perhaps the first step towards a better life is not trying harder to be happy but asking better questions.

What if happiness is not the goal?

What if sadness is not the enemy?

What if the life Jesus offers is deeper than either of those?

Jesus said, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10). That sounds like an invitation worth taking seriously.

The conversation between our lived experience, the wisdom of Scripture, and the findings of modern research has only just begun. If it helps us become more whole, more hopeful, and more fully alive, it will be a conversation worth continuing.

As C.S. Lewis said, “The more I let Jesus take me over, the more truly myself I become.”