Happiness

Relentlessly pursuing desire

Trueness lost in the chase

Peak experiences compared

I’ve been reflecting on happiness as something we increasingly pursue head-on, only to push it just out of reach.

Modern life trains us to treat happiness as an outcome to be optimised. We chase moments that promise intensity, visibility, or validation, measuring ourselves against curated peaks—our own and everyone else’s. In that pursuit, desire accelerates, but orientation is lost. The question quietly shifts from Is this true to me? to Is this enough yet?

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When happiness is framed as a peak experience, comparison becomes unavoidable. Peaks invite ranking. Someone else’s joy appears higher, cleaner, more decisive. What follows is not contentment but restlessness: the sense that whatever we feel now is provisional, inadequate, merely a step on the way to something better.

Trueness is often the casualty. The subtle satisfactions of alignment, steadiness, and meaning do not photograph well. They lack drama. They unfold slowly, without the adrenaline that signals achievement.

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Happiness, approached sideways rather than directly, seems to behave differently. It emerges from absorption rather than pursuit, from practices that fit rather than moments that impress. It is less about height and more about ground—about standing somewhere that feels sound, even if unremarkable.

Perhaps happiness is not what crowns the chase, but what appears when the chase relaxes. Not a peak to be reached, but a texture of life that becomes visible once desire stops pulling us away from where we already are.