The Myths of Happiness summary

Your wedding day is supposed to be the happiest day of your life, right? That seems kind of crazy, given how much stress and social pressure weddings involve! 

Even crazier? The expectation that your marriage will bring you a consistently high level of happiness throughout your life. It won’t. 

Let’s say you and your partner have been together for a couple of years. Dinner dates at hot restaurants have given way to takeout and box sets on the couch. Once upon a time, you’d look at your partner and think, I can’t wait to tear their clothes off! Now, you’re just as likely to think, I should remind them to pay the gas bill.

All this is normal. It’s the result of hedonic adaptation and of passionate love metamorphosing into companionate love. Does that mean you should settle down and resign yourself to living a satisfying, yet spark-free, life? Absolutely not! 

It’s a myth that marriage leads to happiness. But there’s also a mythical flip side to this belief – that happiness is impossible after divorce or the breakdown of a long-term relationship. This myth is so entrenched in our imaginations that many people persist in broken marriages. They think they’re saving themselves from the unhappiness of a divorce.

Of course, it would be disingenuous to say that divorce doesn’t bring unhappiness. But that unhappiness probably won’t be as debilitating or as permanent as you imagine it will be.

You hate the sound of your alarm on weekday mornings. By the time you arrive at your desk at 9:00 a.m., you’re already counting down the minutes until you can leave. You’re disengaged in meetings, your coworkers irritate you, and you perform your tasks with all the enthusiasm of a robot.

It wasn’t always like this. Your first few years in this job were enjoyable and challenging. But that’s definitely not the case these days.

Remember that old saying, money can’t buy happiness? Well, psychological study after psychological study has proven it to be false. After all, money can buy comfort and security, take care of fundamental needs, and provide pleasures and luxuries. Generally speaking, the more wealth someone has, the higher levels of happiness they’re likely to report.

But there might be a grain of truth in the old saying, too.

Every life is marked by events that come, out of the blue, to disrupt our happiness and comfort. A life-changing event like that can rock us to our very core. A diagnosis of a serious or terminal illness is one such event. 

If you or your loved one is dealing with a difficult diagnosis, you may feel you have no capacity for happiness anymore. But you do. And now, more than ever, it’s essential that you tap into it.

There are dreams that you grow out of, like a childhood wish to be an astronaut or a princess.

And then there are dreams you are forced to give up – the dream of making partner at your firm, the dream of professionally pursuing your love of painting, the dream of being married or having a child.