What if life isn't about the pursuit of happiness?

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Happy Sunday and thank you for opening this week’s #TheLifeofJLOWE newsletter!

This week Wednesday, January 29, 2025 is Chinese New Year, so Kung Hei Fat Choy in advance! This outgoing Lunar Year was my year - the year of the Dragon 🐉 - and last year this time I wrote about how to define success for yourself. As we go into the new lunar year, I’m reflecting again on where my mind is with an axis rooted in how I defined success from last year.

Last week I wrote a piece about appreciating the beauty of music (and other things in life) because we often take them for granted. If you’ve been here for a while, you’d know that I often write about practices that you can employ to further your pursuit of happiness, and ways in which you can ensure that you’re living the life that you want to and should be living.

In many ways, my newsletter talks about self-help practices, which mostly stem from gratefulness practices. In reflecting on it all, I’ve begun to think about what really is the true mission of this whole thing called life?

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Is happiness truly the mission?

I remember a few years ago (I just looked it up, it was actually 10 years ago… 👴 ), Major Lazer released an album called “Peace is the Mission” and they had a concert in Jamaica that really was a canon event for anyone who attended.

I really think they were onto something with that title.

Happiness is in fact one a mission in life. But what if it’s just a side quest or checkpoint as a part of the true mission of peace?

As I write about pursuing happiness, and describe all the various techniques that you can employ in that pursuit, the question that I keep asking myself is - “what if the meaning of life is that we get to deeply feel and embrace a range of emotions?”

What if the point of life is to learn how to engage with and maturely embrace happiness, sadness, excitement, anger, fear, disgust, anxiety and all the other emotions that life throws at us? What a beautiful thing it is to be able to fully experience all that life has to offer.

The movie Inside Out, which I wrote about last year, is a great depiction of this thought.

So what does it mean to maturely embrace an emotion?

As humans, we have the privilege of getting to experience multiple states of being through our emotions and our reactions to them. It’s interesting in a psychological way, because more often than not we can’t just will emotions away.

If you’re upset with someone or something, you can’t just tell yourself not to be upset. If you’re frustrated with someone, you can’t just ignore that feeling and brush it off because you “just want to be happy”.

Because of this, to me, life becomes less about avoiding “negative” emotions like anger, fear, disgust or sadness and more about learning to treat with them in the same way that we enjoy experiencing “positive” emotions.

It means allowing yourself to fully experience an emotion - to sit in anger, sadness, happiness or anxiety for example - and remember that it is temporary. It means experiencing those emotions and not letting your reactions to them affect the people around you.

It means developing your own emotional intelligence in such a way that you can self-regulate your responses to others and to the environment around you when you begin to experience various emotions, whether positive or negative.

So what does that mean for happiness?

To put it simply, it means that while yes, I still believe that you should pursue happiness - whether through advocating for yourself, being patient with yourself as you learn new things, or doing the things that you always wanted to do - I think that the true mission, as Major Lazer put it in 2015 - is peace.

It means happiness, like any other emotion is temporary. It means embracing the fact that you can’t always be roses and sunshine. It means embracing the rainy days just as much as you enjoy the sunny ones, and it means finding joy in the things that we’ve societally labelled to be negative.

For me, if I feel a negative emotion such as sadness coming along, I try my best to give it the space it needs to pass.

What does that mean?

I could mean I’ll sit in the dark, lay on the ground and listen to sad music if I have to. It means I’ll fully experience the emotion until it passes. It means not brushing it off because it’s something “negative”, but rather tackling it head on because it’s a privilege to be able to experience it.

Conclusion

Building emotional intelligence is hard. Really hard. It’s not something you do overnight, and honestly, like any other kind of intelligence, I don’t think it’s ever finished being built. There is always something else to learn, something to re-learn or something you thought was right that you later proved to be wrong for yourself.

What I can tell you from first-hand experience though, is that allowing yourself to experience the whole range of emotions that life throws at you is the only way to develop that emotional intelligence.

Each emotion that we have the ability to experience is important because it leaves space for contrast and for the ability to experience another.

What do I mean by that?

It means there’s no knowing happiness without knowing sadness. There’s no knowing anger without knowing calmness. Being able to experience both sides of a spectrum of emotions allows us to appreciate them each in their own right.

And it doesn’t mean it will always be pleasant. Learning emotional intelligence from fully experiencing an emotion does not promise that the experience will be pleasant.

However, once you begin to develop the ability to properly manage and appreciate your emotions, you quickly begin to feel at peace with them when they arise. You’re able to feel less flustered, to react less haphazardly and to less affect the people around you and your relationships with them as a result.

Nobody is perfect, and you will inevitably mess up as you learn. The important thing, however, is recognising that life may not just be about the pursuit of happiness, but more so about pursuing and completing the mission of peace. Peace is the mission.

Until next Sunday,

Justin