I don’t wish you joy and happiness…

I wish you joy happiness success. No. On second thoughts, I just wish you pleasure and sense of achievement.

Joy and happiness are unstable emotions. Success is subjective. They lull you into a false sense of well-being. They make you gasp in the face of expectations of long-lasting joy and MORE happiness. Those emotions are more often than not dependent on other people. The spouse, the child, that friend who is fatter than you, a strong bottle of Russian, an organic joint…

Till this morning, my advice to my daughters was to do what makes them happy.

Then I had a conversation with a colleague (who, ironically, introduced me to her friend as the person who makes her happy at work). We discussed whether maintaining someone’s appearance of being always happy was more important than giving them a sense of purpose and a chance at achieving something.

Well, that’s when my own hypocrisy hit me.

I don’t want my children’s main pursuit in life to be happiness. It isn’t mine, and I’ve been the saddest in the moments that it has been. Happiness will come and go, and wreck you along the way.

I want them to pursue pleasure and achievement.