Pleasure and happiness tend to elude those who pursue them directly, and arrive as by-products of pursuing something else.
Sidgwick named it in The Methods of Ethics (1874). Mill had put the same thought in his autobiography, that the only people who are happy are those whose minds are fixed on some object other than their own happiness. The modern evidence agrees: Mauss and colleagues found in 2011 that people who placed a higher value on happiness reported less of it, especially in circumstances where happiness was available, because monitoring the feeling interferes with the absorption that produces it.
In practice
- A team told to enjoy the away day spends it assessing whether it is enjoying the away day.
- Someone takes up a hobby in order to be happier, and is happiest on the days he forgets that is why he took it up.
- Standing
- Compare flow, which is the state this paradox describes from the inside.
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Moralists, aphorists and the self-help tradition