About the Pursuit of Happiness

written and narrated by: Zaheer Merali

published: Sep 05, 2024 in this book published by Elite Impact Publishing

🎧 There’s something different that happens in our understanding when we listen vs read.

It’s primal… you learned who you are via sound, well before you learned how to read. So, if you’re inclined this way, join me as I narrate this to you.

Sit back, relax and enjoy the next 20 minutes in peace… with no obligation.

I wrote this for my children. The expression of my decade-long journey to understand happiness.

Fuelled by love’s desire to spare them unnecessary suffering. Tempered by understanding that each life journey is unique and will play out as it must. Grounded in a universal insight.

The insight is this:

For a few people, there is instant perception on reading this insight, and they are ready to apply it. If you need more convincing, keep reading and allow the words to do their work. Keep an open mind and investigate for yourself if what’s written is true.

I have heard:

“Don’t go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path…and leave a trail.”

I took a path less traveled. Here's my trail.

WHAT IS HAPPINESS AND WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

Words can mean different things to each of us. So let’s start with the simple, universal understanding of happiness as a sense of well-being, joy, or contentment. Keep that in mind as you read.

We all seek eternal happiness. We are hardwired to do so. As are all living beings. But, to most of us, a permanent state of happiness feels elusive. It comes and goes. And so we're constantly on the hunt for it, consciously or subconsciously.

We learn to strive for the things that make us happy and we learn to avoid what makes us unhappy.

On the surface, this may not seem like an issue. And if everybody seems to be in the same boat, who wants to jump out and test the waters?

That’s why I’m writing this.

Because I jumped out, tested the waters and found something quite different than I had been taught. I had to go through a couple of major life crises to figure this out. I’m sharing my experience to save you the suffering.

I know it works because I've done it.

You can choose to apply it to your life, or you can choose to discover it for yourself.

All paths lead to the same realization.

You get to pick how long it takes and how much you suffer along the way.

SURELY PEOPLE HAVE FIGURED THIS OUT ALREADY?

That’s what I thought when I started on this journey. And no, they haven’t — despite thousands of books being written about it. Amazon alone has a collection of 23,000 titles about happiness! If these books solved the problem, more people would be happy and fewer books about pursuing happiness would be published.

Instead, we have lower overall happiness and greater happiness inequality across ages, geographies and genders. The happiness divide is most stark in young people in developed countries. The United States of America has fallen out of the top 20 for the first time since the World Happiness Report was first published in 2012, driven largely by a large drop in the reported wellbeing of Americans under 30. In Canada, there’s a 50 spot difference in reported happiness for people over 60 (8th) vs people under 30 (58th). (Gallup et al., 2024)

Over the last 10 years, I have read hundreds of books, researched scientific journals and interviewed experts to understand happiness. I also watched movies and plays, listened to music and poetry, explored ancient rituals, plant medicines and traditions, and experimented with all types of mind-altering substances. I’ve tried everything at least once. There’s no silver bullet. But, some people left clues, which led me to a magic key that I want to share with you.

Everything we learn about happiness is rooted in an assumption that it is a state to be pursued. We are taught happiness must be sought and achieved through effort.

This creates an inescapable paradox. If happiness is a state to be pursued, and our lives are constantly changing, then its existence can only be momentary and forever elusive. If we ever catch it, it can never be permanent. A never-ending treadmill.

It is your lived experience too — happiness followed by unhappiness. Long or short, they always have an ending. Which means that there is a constant pursuit. And a perpetual lack. It’s an unsolvable problem because we keep looking at it from the same limited perspective. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I discovered a way to liberate myself from the problem entirely—to get rid of the hammer and the nail!

To understand how that’s possible, let me share an analogy: standing on Earth on a clear day, the sky appears blue and solid. However, at night time and from every other vantage point in the universe, that same sky doesn't appear at all. Instead of blue and solid, it appears to be infinitely deep and dark, punctuated by billions of celestial bodies that are invisible from Earth during the day.

It's not that one is right and one is wrong. They describe appearances from different perspectives. We've been coming at the happiness problem from a flawed perspective that creates a perpetual pursuit. Let’s replace it with a fresh perspective that eliminates this flaw so you don't spend your lives building ladders up against the wrong walls.

OK, SO WHAT’S THIS FRESH PERSPECTIVE?

The pursuit of happiness gets in the way of you being happy.

Drop the pursuit and you'll be happy.

Permanently.

Pursuing happiness makes you unhappy. I’m going to show you how I arrived at that conclusion. But first, let me set some context for why I set out to figure this out.

10 years ago, I seemed happy—married, healthy children, a good job, lots of friends, a nice house, fancy car; all the goodies. Life looked pretty great with all those boxes ticked.

But then, everything changed in one crazy year. I broke rules and made mistakes. I was separated, and my children were now living 5 hours away. I lost my job, friends and all the goodies I’d accumulated.

With the help of a kind therapist, I started the journey to figure out what had gone wrong and make amends. In our work, I realized I'd been unhappy for a long time. I didn’t realize it because I was distracted by the check boxes.

It made me wonder—do I understand what it means to be happy? This question has been at the root of my journey for the last decade. What I discovered is so simple, yet it profoundly changed my experience of life and happiness completely.

To see the truth clearly, you need to remove the false.

As a baby, you were in this natural state almost all the time (yes, even when you cried because you needed to be fed or changed - it’s communication not suffering), but you weren't aware of it.

In deep sleep, you are in this natural state. Like a baby, you are simply unaware of it.

In flow states — when you're playing a game or instrument, engaged in a creative pursuit or helping someone in need — you are happy.

It’s the same natural state.

The evidence is inescapable but our attention is drawn away from reality and focused on the distractions. Most of your conscious waking life is spent pursuing a state that exists naturally, without pursuit!

After any disturbance, you are hardwired to return to your natural state—a psychological equilibrium.

It's the gyroscopic centre of your conscious experience.

Happiness — remember: a sense of well-being, joy, or contentment — is the unconstrained expression of your natural state in each moment you experience.

IF IT'S YOUR NATURAL STATE, WHY AREN'T YOU HAPPY ALL THE TIME?

Because you are taught something that gets in the way. Everyone and everything in your life contributes to this misunderstanding.

From birth, we teach you to desire things that we think will make you happy. And we also teach you to fear things that we think will make you unhappy. There's nothing wrong or malicious at play; we're doing the best we can, applying lessons that we learned from our parents, families and society.

We teach you what we were taught—that in order to be happy, you have to pursue it through acquisition or addition—your natural state filtered and shaped by what you have been taught to believe.

Our whole society and civilization is geared towards the pursuit of happiness this way. An acquired habit. Reinforced by what I call the 5 Cs.

1. Conditioning: You are raised with traditions, expectations, and messaging suggesting your happiness requires external achievements, material possessions, and societal validation.
2. Comparison: You are exposed to social comparison, and evaluating worth based on external standards of success. Our culture values competition, achievement, and status.
3. Confusion: You are bombarded by fear-based messaging that creates anxiety and depression, clouding your perception and leading you to believe that you are deficient or flawed.
4. Conforming: Your psychology is manipulated and distorted to skew your perceptions of reality. You are encouraged to closely identify with peer groups and mimic them.
5. Consumption: You are inundated with messages that link happiness to consumption and accumulation. Consumer culture reinforces the belief that your happiness is tied to material possessions, wealth, and status symbols.

The combined effect is powerful. Together they shape a flawed, limited perception of who you are and your place in the world.

No person can claim exclusive credit for this. Its roots lie in the repetition of human beliefs and traditions we inherit when we learn languages and cultural history. The amplified, modern incarnation points to Edward L. Bernays, likely the most influential person you’ve never heard of. Bernays is widely acknowledged for applying and rebranding Sigmund Freud’s (his uncle) propaganda techniques and beliefs to advertising, marketing and public relations. His 1929 campaign branding cigarettes as "Torches of Freedom" framed smoking as an act of female empowerment and liberation - cigarette sales to women grew from 5% to 33%! The following words are a direct quote from his book, Propaganda, in 1928:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses.It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” (Bernays, 1928)

HANG ON. YOU'RE TELLING ME THAT I CAN BE HAPPY ALL THE TIME?

Yes! Your natural state is happy. Unbroken. Unblemished. Pure. I promise you.

From birth, we teach you to seek and desire things or experiences for happiness, instead of showing you that it exists naturally in each moment. Each desire or fear creates a screen over your natural state.

When you acquire a thing or experience, that screen disappears and your natural state shines through. But it's quickly masked by more screens, and that continues as long as you have fears and desires. Your experience becomes a lifetime of effort to satisfy them, resulting in momentary states of happiness. That's the trap. It's a never ending set of desires whose root is an unquestioned belief: that you need to acquire, pursue or strive for happiness.

It’s like a solar eclipse that won’t go away.

Your natural state of happiness is like the sun. Your desires and fears are like the moon, covering up the sun. In the beginning, it's quite easy for our happiness to shine through. As we develop more desires and more fears, these gradually cover up the sun until we cannot experience it without more extreme attempts to remove what's covering it up. More money, more status, more power, more, more, more.

Real happiness is free. We pay dearly for the knockoff version.

SO, WHAT DO YOU NEED TO DO TO ACHIEVE THIS HAPPINESS?

Remember, you realize this natural state through subtraction, not addition. The most important thing is to perceive the truth. Being happy is your natural state. Then apply your understanding to every moment or experience you encounter.

However, the influence of culture and society is very strong, which can create a barrier to your perception. Here are a few ways I found helpful to start to explore this for myself:

1. Observe your desires. Your needs and your wants. Write them down. Ask yourself–how many are truly yours? How many are inherited from influences around you?
2. Track when you say Should/Shouldn't and Must/Musn’t—internally in your thoughts or externally when you speak. The 5 Cs work through those words.
3. Develop your awareness of the content you consume. Mass media, social media and other forms of entertainment are the source and fuel for your desires. Go one week without them and see how quickly your perspective shifts.

WHAT TO EXPECT?

Being happy is your natural state.

It is the manifestation of a state of consciousness where you feel whole.

Where you have no desire for anything other than what is present in this moment. The only reason you don't perceive that state now is a belief in what you've been told about the need to acquire, pursue or strive for happiness.

Nothing may change outwardly in your life, but this perspective shift will change everything about how you experience life.

It is the difference between:

“Do what you love” and “Love what you do.”

They are the same 4 words but their meaning is completely different. One will have you trapped in an endless search. The other will bring instant happiness to you no matter what you're doing.

An eternal state of happiness is your birthright—forget everything you’ve been taught and explore this for yourself. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed by what you discover.

Reader

If you want to ask me a question about my experience or share your perspective, contact me.

© 2025 Zaheer Merali.

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