Let Go of the Happiness Myth

By Tim Hague Sr.

What’s the difference between happiness and joy?

Happiness is an ice cream on a warm summer day. Joy is infinitely more than being made to feel good by our circumstances.

I like this definition by Rick Warren—that joy is “the settled assur­ance . . . the quiet confidence that ultimately everything is going to be alright.” An ice cream on a warm summer day can never bring about that kind of feeling. Living through hardship and coming out the other side can.

Suffering, if we allow it to, can draw us deeply into an ability to persevere. Hardship can teach us how to stay in the race even when all seems lost. It can teach us how to hold on when we feel as if we can go no further.

I’ll never forget stand­ing on the mat at the end of leg three, having come in last place in The Amazing Race Canada. Even when we didn’t end up being sent home, part of me just wanted to quit.

Sometimes we wish the struggle we’re facing would just go away.

Mine was the threat of humiliation and my ongoing battle with Parkinson’s. What is your strug­gle that you wish would go away? I would encourage you to name it, and to walk hand in hand with it. Discover the means to stay on your journey and win.

We’ve been sold a lie: the lie that we should pursue only those things that make us happy.

As my daughters have grown up, I’ve often told them not to believe the lie of all those beauty ads that promote a fake, unnatural look and an unrealistic size for most women. I say the same here in our context: don’t believe the lie that our lives should be free of pain and hardship. Life just doesn’t happen that way.

Think of the many grueling, difficult tasks that we have to work hard through and that ultimately lead to joy. Those triathletes who daily slog through the intense training of three demanding sports with the hopes of one day becoming an Ironman are a great example of embracing hardship.

Are those athletes always happy to swim at five in the morning in a cold pool? To run fifteen miles in the rain?

These things don’t always bring them happiness, but they often produce joy—the sense of having accomplished something meaning­ful, having overcome something difficult, having done what you didn’t want to get up and do but did anyway.

There is no joy without suffering. Do not believe the lie.

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