Watchtower ONLINE LIBRARY
Watchtower
ONLINE LIBRARY
English
  • BIBLE
  • PUBLICATIONS
  • MEETINGS
  • g85 3/22 pp. 3-4
  • Happiness—In Pursuit of It

No video available for this selection.

Sorry, there was an error loading the video.

  • Happiness—In Pursuit of It
  • Awake!—1985
  • Similar Material
  • True Happiness Is Up to You
    The Watchtower Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom—1981
  • Is Real Happiness an Impossible Dream?
    Awake!—1977
  • Where Can True Happiness Be Found?
    The Watchtower Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom—1997
  • Are You Content with What You Have?
    The Watchtower Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom—1980
See More
Awake!—1985
g85 3/22 pp. 3-4

Happiness​—In Pursuit of It

THE United States Declaration of Independence proclaims the right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ For many today, the key word is pursuit. They do it avidly, filling every minute with frenzied activity. Pouring into stadiums for sporting events, hunched over computer screens for electronic games, glued to TV programs to fill the evening hours, planning weekends packed with excitement, touring the world on flying junkets, and otherwise busily involving themselves in a whirl of social events. Many even resort to harmful drugs to reach emotional highs. Anything and everything to avoid unfilled spaces where they might have to sit quietly and face themselves​—and boredom. This frenetic pursuit of happiness, however, never catches up to genuine happiness.

Some pursue new life-styles in their happiness quest. Marriage is no longer considered binding​—easy come easy go, divorce on any grounds or no grounds, children bounced back and forth between the parents. Single individuals promiscuously indulge in free sex. Couples live together without marriage​—no commitment, no strings attached, free to split and run on any whim. Couples live together in homosexual relationships, or individually pursue their perversions. In all this trial-and-error experimenting, people are only sowing to the flesh and will ultimately reap mental anguish, guilt feelings, jealousies, traumatic breakups, and diseases​—often incurable. The “new morality” harvests even greater miseries than the old immorality.

Many others equate happiness with material possessions, but their accumulation only heightens an acquisitive itch that craves ever more scratching. Ad agencies happily scratch it, peddling glamorous images for them to project​—images to be sustained solely by the right brand-name clothes to wear, the wines to drink, the cars to drive, the homes to acquire, plus an endless string of other externals with which to surround themselves.

Science swells the materialistic flood, as biologist René Dubos complained: “All too often, science is now being used for technological applications that have nothing to do with human needs and aim only at creating new artificial wants.” These wants, he says, when satisfied “have not added much to happiness or to the significance of life.” In the affluent nations technology has been harnessed to witless production for mindless consumption. For many the splurge of consumerism borders on the compulsive. Spiritual values all but suffocate under the materialistic avalanche.

When Stewart Udall was United States secretary of the interior, he said: “We have the most automobiles of any country in the world​—and the worst junkyards. We’re the most mobile people on earth ​—and we endure the most congestion. We produce the most energy, and we have the foulest air.” He said that years ago, and he called it “a catastrophe of continental proportions.” Now, years later, it is a catastrophe of global proportions. Years ago the mayor of a large American city quipped that “if we weren’t careful we’d be remembered as the generation that put a man on the moon while standing knee-deep in garbage.” Now, years later, many scientists are warning that we may be the last generation​—period.

If our feelings of self-worth are nurtured only by external possessions rather than internal values, those feelings soon become anemic and leave us prey to a gnawing discontent. Materialism with its superficial trappings does nothing to satisfy the deep inner needs of the human spirit, and it will never lead to happiness. “Unrestricted satisfaction of all desires,” psychoanalyst Erich Fromm said, “is not conducive to well-being, nor is it the way to happiness or even to maximum pleasure.” But long before Fromm, an inspired wise man said it more pointedly: “I have also learned why people work so hard to succeed: it is because they envy the things their neighbors have.”​—Ecclesiastes 4:4, Today’s English Version.

Some, discouraged and disillusioned, seek satisfaction by submerging themselves in meaningless preoccupations with self. Of this endeavor The Culture of Narcissism says: “Having no hope of improving their lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement: getting in touch with their feelings, eating health food, taking lessons in ballet or belly-dancing, immersing themselves in the wisdom of the East . . . They cultivate more vivid experiences, seek to beat sluggish flesh to life, attempt to revive jaded appetites.”​—Pages 29, 39, 40.

To pursue happiness through a whirl of activity, or new life-styles, or material pursuits, or preoccupation with self​—not one of these ever catches up to the real and lasting happiness.

What does it take, then, to make you happy?

    English Publications (1950-2026)
    Log Out
    Log In
    • English
    • Share
    • Preferences
    • Copyright © 2025 Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania
    • Terms of Use
    • Privacy Policy
    • Privacy Settings
    • JW.ORG
    • Log In
    Share