This futile search for happiness || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2014)

Question: At every point in our life, we want to get rid of the burden, and become happy. But that point doesn’t ever come. How to achieve true happiness in our life?

Speaker: Now that you have realized that happiness hardly ever comes by wanting to be happy, the obvious thing is to not to want to be happy. For so long we all have wanted to be happy, tried to be happy, without being happy.

It has been years, years and decades that you have been wanting to be happy, trying to be happy, trying to achieve happiness, and planning for happiness. And none of that seems to be working. Not for you, not for me, not for anybody else. Obviously, it is futile. Drop it, don’t follow it. Don’t want to be happy. Recall your moments of ecstasy, when you were so joyful that you had forgotten everything else. Recall those moments. In those moments, were you still trying to be happy? In those moments, were you planning about the next day?

Who plans for happiness? The one who is not happy. What is happening is, that in planning for happiness you are constantly telling yourself that- “I am not happy.” In constantly looking at a great future, you are telling yourself that there is something wrong with this day, this moment. When you are constantly telling yourself that- “I am not happy right now, there is something wrong with this day,” then what is happening? You are always ending up finding that there is something wrong with this day. You are always ending up finding some reason to be unhappy.