Why is happiness so difficult to achieve?

While everyone wants to be happy one way or another, there’s a big difference between aspiration and achievement. That is the tragedy of human beings. We fear misery but run to it. We want happiness but turn away from it. The very means used to ease suffering often fuel it. How could such a misjudgment occur? Because we are confused about how to go about it. We look for happiness outside ourselves when it is basically an inner state of being. If it were an exterior condition, it would be forever beyond our reach. Our desires are boundless and our control over the world is limited, temporary, and, more often than not, illusory.

We forge bonds of friendship, start families, live in society, work to improve the material conditions of our existence — is that enough to define happiness? No. We can have “everything we need” to be happy and yet be most unhappy; conversely, we can remain serene in adversity. It is naive to imagine that external conditions alone can ensure happiness. That is the surest way to a rude awakening. As the Dalai Lama has said: “If a man who has just moved into a luxury apartment on the hundredth floor of a brand-new building is deeply unhappy, the only thing he’ll look for is a window to jump out of.” How many times do we have to hear that money can’t buy happiness, that power corrupts the honest, and that fame ruins private life? Failure, separation, disease, and death can occur at any moment.

We willingly spend a dozen years in school, then go on to college or professional training for several more; we work out at the gym to stay healthy; we spend a lot of time enhancing our comfort, our wealth, and our social status. We put a great deal into all this, and yet we do so little to improve the inner condition that determines the very quality of our lives. What strange hesitancy, fear, or apathy stops us from looking within ourselves, from trying to grasp the true essence of joy and sadness, desire and hatred? Fear of the unknown prevails, and the courage to explore that inner world fails at the frontier of our mind. A Japanese astronomer once confided to me: “It takes a lot of daring to look within.” This remark — made by a scientist at the height of his powers, a steady and open-minded man — intrigued me. As Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Look within; within is the fountain of all good.”

It is something that we must learn how to do. When we are thrown into confusion by inner troubles, we have no idea how to soothe them and instinctively turn outward. We spend our lives cobbling together makeshift solutions, trying to imagine the conditions that will make us happy. By force of habit, this way of living becomes the norm and “that’s life!” our motto. And although the search for temporary well-being may occasionally be successful, it is never possible to control the quantity, quality, or duration of exterior circumstances. That holds true for almost every aspect of life: love, family, health, wealth, power, comfort, pleasure. When you spend your time trying to fill a leaky barrel, you neglect the methods and above all the ways of being that will allow you to find happiness within yourself.

Wealth, pleasures, rank, and power are all sought for the sake of happiness. But as we strive, we forget the goal and spend our time pursuing the means for their own sake. In so doing, we miss the point and remain deeply unsatisfied. This substitution of means for ends is one of the main traps lying across the pursuit of a meaningful life.

If, conversely, happiness is a state that depends on inner conditions, each of us must recognize those conditions with awareness and then bring them together. Happiness is not given to us, nor is misery imposed. At every moment we are at a crossroads and must choose the direction we will take. If we try resolutely over the course of years to master our thoughts as they come to us, to apply appropriate antidotes to negative emotions and to nourish positive ones, our efforts will undoubtedly yield results that would have seemed unattainable at first.

Read more here