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**Considering that we live in a society that is so focused on finding happiness, we are remarkably bad at it. One of the best known general findings of the "science of happiness" is the discovery that countless benefits of modern life have had little success in improving our collective mood. The inconvenient truth is that increasing economic growth does not necessarily result in a happier society, just as growth in personal income, above a certain basic level, does not create happier people. Better education or more choice in consumer products? the same result. Larger and more upscale houses? The only thing you have is more space to feel sad.** 
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Perhaps it is not necessary to tell you that self-help books, the modern apotheosis of the search for happiness, also fall under the things that fail to make us happy. For the record: [research](http://sciencenordic.com/get-better-life-say-no) indeed shows that they seldom really offer help. This is why some self-help books publishers talk about the 'eighteen-month rule': it is most likely that someone who buys a self-help book has already done so in the previous eighteen months - a book that clearly hasn’t solved all their problems.

If you look at the shelfs with self-help books with an objective view, this is not entirely surprising. That we desire compact solutions in book format for the problem of being human is understandable, but as soon as you strip the books’ finery, you discover that the messages are often very banal.

For example, in *"The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People"* you are told that you have to decide what is most important in your life and that you then have to do it; in *"How to Make Friends and Influence People"* it is made clear that it is better to be nice than unpleasant and that you have to use the first names of people a lot. One of the most successful management books of recent years, *"Vis!"* (Fish), aims to promote happiness and productivity in the workplace and gives the tip to hand out small toy fish to the employees who work the hardest.

These self-help gurus often make claims that are not supported by solid research. For example, several good studies show that ventilating your anger does not cause it to disappear and that visualizing your goals does not make it easier to achieve them. (I know there are a lot of youtube videos that claim otherwise)

And whatever you think about the surveys about national happiness per country, which appear regularly, it is remarkable that the 'happiest' countries are never the countries that sell most self-help books, nor the countries in which professional psychotherapists are most visited. The existence of a successful 'happiness industry' is clearly not enough to produce national happiness, and it is not unreasonable to suspect that they even make things worse.

Yet the ineffectiveness of these modern strategies to become happy is actually only a small part of the problem. There are good reasons to believe that the whole idea of 'seeking happiness' is problematic to begin with. Because: who says that happiness is a goal in itself? Religion has never put that much emphasis to it and every evolutionary psychologist can tell you that evolution has little interest in your happiness, as long as you do not feel so miserable and lethargic that you no longer want to procreate.
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But actually, I didn’t really want to talk about that. See the foregoing as an intro. After several years of reading about psychology, I realize that there may be a third option, besides on the one hand, the vain attempts to follow advice that does not work and, on the other hand, just to give up. I began to see that there was something that brought together all the ideas on this subject from psychologists, philosophers and self-help gurus - ideas that maybe really made a difference.

> The surprising conclusion to which these thinkers came in different ways was as follows: the effort to try and feel happy is precisely what makes us feel miserable. Our constant efforts to eliminate the negative - unsafety, insecurity, failure and sadness - make us feel unsafe, afraid, insecure and unhappy.

Yet these psychologists and philosophers did not think this was a depressive thought. Instead, they argued that it points to an alternative approach, a 'negative path' to happiness. This goes along with a radically different attitude towards the things that we try to avoid most of our lives. It requires that we learn to enjoy uncertainty, embrace insecurity, stop trying to think positively, become familiar with failure and even learn to appreciate death.

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In short, all of these people seem to suggest that in order to be truly happy, we have to experience more negative emotions - or that at least we should learn not to try to run away from them so incredibly hard. This is a bewildering insight that not only questions the methods with which we try to achieve happiness, but also our assumptions about what 'happiness' really means.

Perhaps the most clear metaphor for this strange philosophy is a small children's toy called the 'Chinese finger trap' (although it probably is not originally from China at all). On the desk in his office at the University of Nevada, psychologist Steven Hayes (1948), an outspoken critic of counterproductive positive thinking, has a whole box of it, which he uses to illustrate his arguments. The 'trap' is a tube of woven bamboo with an opening at each end about the size of a human finger.

The naïve victim is asked to put his index fingers in both sides of the tube and is then stuck in the trap. In response to attempts to pull out his fingers, the openings on both sides become narrower. The harder he pulls his fingers apart, the more he gets stuck. It is only when he stops his attempts to escape and presses his fingers further into the trap that he can make the end of the trap wider, whereupon it releases and he is free.

With the Chinese finger trap, Hayes observes, doing what seems logically works counter-productive. That is how it is with the path to happiness. In order to follow the negative path to happiness, we must not pursue happiness, but we must do what seems illogical.
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