“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But what if the pursuit itself makes happiness less likely?
BY BILL MURPHY JR., WWW.BILLMURPHYJR.COM@BILLMURPHYJR
For Inc.
Illustration: Getty Images
t’s the time of year when people quote the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…
But what if our 21st century brains are wired in such a way that an 18th century idea like, “the pursuit of happiness” makes it less likely that modern people will actually become happy?
Mind blown, and that’s sort of the point. Because a growing body of research suggests this is exactly how our brains can work, and maybe what we can do to turn things around.
Writing in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, for example, Aekyoung Kim of Rutgers University and Sam J. Maglio of the University of Toronto, conducted experiments to investigate how the idea of the “pursuit of happiness” influenced people’s perception of time.
Ultimately, the sheer pressure of feeling as if they were running out of time to find happiness paradoxically made it even harder for them to achieve happiness in the first place.