Member-only story
Are You Damaging Your Own Work Happiness?
The paradox of searching and the science of ambition
You know, you wouldn’t be the first one that is perplexed by human behaviour.
Amongst some of most peculiar observations, is the idea that whilst we are in control of our own decisions, actions and behaviours, often we land miles away from our desires.
Most of us have ambitions to rule the world, build an empire or create a work life of joy, one that we love, one that we’re proud of. Often though, we fall shy of those ambitions, the science says that most people are unhappy at work.
I wanted to know why.
Searching leads to the inevitable demise
My coffee mug reads ‘woof day’, it’s been like that lately.
Amidst my coffee and early morning reading, I bumped into a paper that started to challenge how I thought about happiness. In 2011, Professor of Psychology, Iris Mauss, decided to ask a rather interesting question: Can seeking happiness make people happy?
The paper posits an paradoxical idea, in that, perhaps those people who spend a hefty amount of their time thinking about the happiness, may well be inadvertently pushing themselves in the opposite direction.
