Happiness is probably the most abused word in the human vocabulary, yet it continues to slip like sand through the fingers of those who pursue it with the most determination. There is something paradoxical in all this: the more you actively look for it, the more it seems to recede. And the reason, surprisingly, has nothing to do with bad luck or character.
Let’s start with a simple thought experiment: if you could make only one wish for the people you love most, what would you choose? Health, of course. But immediately afterwards, almost inevitably, comes her: happiness. That word there, hanging like a colored balloon above your head, beautiful and very light, ready to fly away at the first gust of wind.
The problem is that the happiness that people talk about, the one that is achieved by buying the right house, reaching the right professional goal, earning the right amount, is temporary relief. It’s the satisfaction that lasts as long as the smell of a new car: nice, for goodness sake, but after three weeks you can’t smell it anymore.
Aristotle already knew this, and he didn’t need a smartphone to understand it
The Greek philosopher had given a precise name to this concept: eudaimonia. A word that does not translate well into Italian, because it does not simply mean “to be happy”. It means to flourish, in the fullest sense of the term. It means knowing who you are, what you really want, and moving in that direction with a certain coherence. It means arriving at the end of a day – or a life – without that dull and annoying feeling of having played a part written by someone else.
Today that part is written by consumer society, and it does so with disturbing precision. The script says: earn more, climb the hierarchy, accumulate, show. And it works very well as a script, in the sense that everyone knows it and many follow it. The point is that it doesn’t deliver where it promises.
A study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by a group of researchers from Harvard Business School analyzed the data of over four thousand millionaires, trying to understand if and how much money really influenced their well-being. The results have the flavor of those truths that you prefer not to hear: only above eight million dollars of net worth do you begin to notice an appreciable difference in happiness levels, and even then the difference is modest. Below that threshold, having more changes very little. The mechanism even applies to those with enormous assets: the more it accumulates, the further the goal moves. It’s one of those discoveries that make you laugh bitterly.
The same study found an even more interesting detail: millionaires who earned their wealth through work were moderately happier than those who inherited it. Satisfaction, therefore, has to do with the journey and the sense of building something, much more than with the number on the account. A distinction that Aristotle would probably have appreciated.
On the professional front the situation is equally revealing. A survey published in 2025 of more than seven thousand doctors found that nearly 45% were experiencing burnout. Among lawyers, one in five has a serious problem with alcohol and more than one in four shows depressive symptoms. Among dentists, more than half are at medium or high risk of depression. Professions that in the collective imagination represent the arrival, the definitive settlement, the “I made it”. Yet, behind that veneer of respectability lies a malaise that no end-of-year bonus can completely cover.
The human brain sabotages happiness for a specific reason
The brain wasn’t built to make us happy: it was built to keep us alive. From an evolutionary point of view, dissatisfaction was a very powerful survival tool. Our easily satisfied ancestors risked finding themselves without supplies during the winter. Those who continued to worry, to accumulate, to imagine worse scenarios were the ones who survived. That same tendency still lives on in the modern brain today, even when the only real threat is the shopping cart that doesn’t close properly.
This means that waiting for happiness to come on its own is like waiting for the garden to water itself: theoretically it could rain, but it would be better not to count on it too much. Mindfulness and daily gratitude, practices that sound a bit like a motivational poster, we know, but they really work, serve exactly this: to counteract the brain’s natural tendency to dwell on what is missing, on what could go wrong, on what others have and we don’t.
Then there are the relationships. The longest study on happiness ever conducted (decades of research, generations of people followed over time) has demonstrated only one thing with disarming clarity: deep emotional bonds are the factor that most of all determines health and well-being. Sacrificing them on the altar of your career is one of the most common and costly mistakes that exist, and you usually understand it in a quiet moment, looking at the ceiling at two in the morning, when the goals achieved make less noise than you hoped.
Then there is a last element, perhaps the most uncomfortable: happiness coexists with pain, always. The dream house brings with it unexpected infiltrations and mortgage payments at the worst times. The loved one is also the one with whom you argue the most fiercely. Children are an inexhaustible source of tenderness, but also of constant worry, the kind that nestles in the stomach and doesn’t go away completely even when everything is going well. No significant achievement comes without its specific weight. Recognizing this is having a more honest view of what it really means to feel good and stopping chasing a version of happiness that doesn’t exist outside of life insurance ads.
Chasing success and economic stability makes all the sense in the world. The problem arises when they transform into substitutes for happiness instead of tools for building it. The price of happiness is paid with the care of relationships, with presence, with the ability to go through difficulties without dissolving and with the clarity of understanding that the goal is not out there, somewhere, waiting to be reached. It’s already here, hidden in the things we tend to take for granted until they are missing.
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