Finding Lasting Fulfilment in a World of Empty Pursuits

Edited extract from Calmony by Jess Stuart, Being Publishing, RRP $30.00

Where is the life we’ve lost in living? – TS Eliot

We fill our lives with the business of searching for happiness – yet the very pursuit is taking us further away from the goal.  We may think we want a new house, car, job or partner, but what we really want is the consequences we believe these things bring: love, status, wealth.

I think we’ve all been there. We think, ‘If I could just have this then I’ll be happy’ – but when we obtain the thing we’ve been looking for, it becomes a case of, ‘I just want that then I’ll be happy’.  It’s a bottomless bucket of constant craving.

When we do get what we want, we are left wanting more, or we become sick from overindulging.  Many of us in today’s world of instant gratification find it easy to obtain what we desire, but we can also easily have too much.  This is when pleasure turns to pain.  In the western world, we eat as much as we like as often as we want to. This results in obesity and associated diseases.  We love to enjoy a good party with friends, but then we inevitably suffer a hangover the morning after.

This way of living means we’re always focusing on what we’ve not got, rather than on all the things we already have.  It’s this constant striving that leaves us feeling like we’re never arriving.

If we stopped searching for the things we think make us happy, we’d find we have everything we need for contentment – so we can call off the search!  I’m here to present the case for cultivating calmony, not pursuing happiness. I reckon that that cultivation will lead you to more fulfilment and joy than you’ve previously been able to experience and ultimately help you to build a life by design.

I’m talking about the difference between empty happiness and lasting fulfilment. Calmony is true contentment and happiness.

Empty happiness is like an unfulfilled promise.  It’s what happiness looks like in the media and the movies. We may experience fleeting moments of light as we chase these things down, yet the happiness never sticks around.  Even when we get the things we pursue, we’re not satisfied.  Soon the novelty wears off and we’re back chasing something else.

We live in the most advanced, developed and wealthy world that has ever existed, and yet we’re also the most unhealthy and depressed population that has ever been. Why, when we have so much?  And when we’ve invested so much into our happiness already?  For the last decade or more, happiness has been big business.  There have been thousands of books written on the subject, apps designed to support our pursuit and classes and movements designed to get us happy: and yet the stats say we’re unhappier than ever.  We’ve got a mental health epidemic in the developed world, and rates of burnout are at record highs.  We’re living a fast life but not a good life.  We do more things in fewer hours of the day, but we have no time to do what really matters.  We’re full but not fulfilled.

I’m passionate about bringing the ‘being’ back to human-being.  To connect to ourselves and also each other: to connect to something bigger; to know who we are, what lights us up and how we can be in the world.

Happiness often relies on an external pursuit. We look for it in things – and when those things leave us, our happiness leaves us too.  Calmony, on the other hand, is always there inside us, irrespective of external circumstances.

On my global travels, I’ve witnessed these conversations play out between humans from privileged backgrounds.  Seeing how simply the ‘poorer’ people in our world live, we sit over our cocktails in our fancy hotel, exclaiming, ‘they all seem so happy, despite not having much at all’.

Maybe we’re the ones who’ve got it wrong.  It’s funny that we value money and wealth so highly, when real wealth is found in the things money can’t buy.  In reality, if we have everything that’s important, regardless of our financial success or the extent of our material things, we are wealthy.

Often, the wealthier materially we are, the more we have to lose, the more there is to worry about and the less we appreciate what we have.  Wealth is not about money. It’s about how we feel, not about how many things we have.  What’s the point in having a million dollars in the bank if you’re miserable? As monk Matthieu Ricard once put it, ‘If you’re suicidal and I give you a five-star penthouse apartment all you’re going to do is look for a window from which to jump’.

To be happy is also a choice. This is hard to believe, especially in the toughest of times, and yet mindset mastery proves we can choose to be happy at any given moment.  Calmony is an inside happiness that is not dependent upon external circumstances.  Think about that for a moment.  You have the opportunity to be happy no matter what the weather is doing, the house you live in, the job you have.  This is true freedom: a life well lived. It’s all there for us to cultivate.

Achieving calmony is a little bit like baking a cake.  You’ve got all the ingredients in the tin: you just need to figure out how to turn the oven on to turn those ingredients into something delicious.

In developed countries, most of us are fortunate enough to have all of our basic needs met.  In other words, we have all the ingredients required to be happy; we just haven’t switched the oven on.

It’s easy to be happy when life is going well: we know that.  It’s a much bigger ask when we face challenges, when things happen that are outside of our control, or when life gets tough.

Over the years, I’ve learned that happiness is not the mere absence of suffering, or the temporary cessation of unhappiness.  It’s less about elation or perfection and more about purpose and fulfilment: being connected to who you are.  Being happy doesn’t mean a lack of suffering. As Thich Nhat Hanh says in No Mud, No Lotus, ‘the art of happiness is also the art of suffering well’.  To be happy, we must embrace and manage our suffering.

The lotus grows in the mud before it blooms above the water line. Without the mud, we don’t get the beautiful bloom – no mud, no lotus!  The things that help us grow and make us stronger often feel like the very mud we’d rather avoid.

Let’s start by looking at the difference between happiness and contentment.

What’s the difference between happiness and contentment?  There isn’t really one, except in terms of the way we view those concepts and our approach to them – and whether that approach works.

Calmony is not empty happiness but lasting fulfilment: true happiness.

Empty happiness is a bit like empty calories. Eating something that has no nutritional value leaves us feeling hungry, so we keep eating more of it, to fill the gap.  In this way, we’re never truly satisfied.

Happiness is so often something we pursue. We see it as external to us: it belongs in things and achievements, and we can’t feel happy until we get those things.  External happiness like this is short lived.  We know this because the house we have and the car we have – even the partner we have – was once new and exciting. We thought those things would make us happy.  Now they’re a drain on our bank account, and we’re left only with dirty dishes in the sink.  My point is that once the novelty wears off, we often realise the external things did not make us happy – so we continue the search for more and better.

It’s not our fault. Our economy is built on this phenomenon.  We’re taught to continually pursue things, and that we can never have enough. We buy more and more, and the economy grows.  That’s how marketing psychology works: if I see an advert and feel bad about myself – if I feel I need the product to feel or look better – I’m more likely to buy it.

Our economic growth relies on us feeling unhappy, so we search (and spend more) to become happier.  Happiness is not good for the economy – crazy, right? Even though literally every advert we watch promises us that whichever product is being sold will deliver exactly that.

Inner contentment, or calmony, is a different type of happiness.  It’s a happiness that we control and that is always there. Most importantly, it’s a happiness that’s not dependent on anyone or anything else.  We don’t have to have the latest gadget or meet the person of our dreams to achieve calmony.

Our society teaches us to compare ourselves to others and chase after what they have, so we can feel as successful as they are. Again, this is what our economic growth has taught us: it leads to us feeling like we need to spend more, have more, be more: in fact, to ‘have it all’.  Our social media evolution has exacerbated this further. Everyone posts air-brushed photos of their ‘perfect’ lives: leaving us all feeling like we need to be and have more.

You might be thinking, ‘Isn’t a bit of discontentment good for us, though?’  Won’t it mean we keep working harder to change, driving us to do better?  I believe we can already do that; unhappiness doesn’t need to be the motivating force.  In fact, I’d argue, we’ll get a better result when our desire to do better comes from a positive place, not one of lack.  I don’t believe we need to feel unhappy to strive to live a better life.  In fact, if we’re happy we’re more likely to continue to do the things that create a life by design – by virtue of the work that got us to that point.  We’ll have the necessary skills that make this drive more aligned and effective when that striving is coming from a place of calmony, not discontentment.  But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.  We’ll talk more about life by design at the end of this book.