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Day 3

The Goal: True Happiness

God wants you to be happy. The problem is, you’re not. Your life is filled with problems that need to be fixed, worries that keep you up at night, and responsibilities that call for your complete attention every waking hour of the day. Sometimes life becomes so overwhelming that you feel the need to escape.

So you do what millions of other people do at any given moment — you reach for your phone, tablet, or laptop, and you begin to scroll. Like a dive into a lake on a hot summer day, you eliminate the sights and sounds of the world and delve into the cool waters of the technological distraction.

I know. I’ve been there. I’ve escaped more than my fair share of times from the world in the same way. I’ve spent so many hours below the surface in this underwater retreat that I could have grown gills if I were biologically capable of doing so. The problem was, I’m not able to grow those gills, and as I spent more and more time in the abyss of technology, I began to drown.

The primary goal of this book is your happiness. Consider this retreat to be the life preserver that rescues you from the depths of technology overuse and guides you across the many rip currents of life toward a final destination of true, pure, and unfiltered joy. The journey will be long, difficult, and, at times, strenuous, but such is the way of living a truly Christian life. Imitating Christ demands we take up our cross and follow him regardless of the realities that exist in our lives. Good or bad, God beckons us to use these experiences to attain our potential for personal excellence.

You have been given a specific task to complete in this world, one that only you can complete. We are constantly changing — mind, soul, and body — in order to achieve this task. God grants us graces in every lesson we learn, every experience we have, and every relationship we make. Through these he forms us, always shaping us into a more perfect being. We become the best version of ourselves when we depart from this life and ultimately see God, for it is then that we achieve the fulfillment of all we have ever desired. This is what is meant by the potential of our personal excellence, that we will spend our lives seeking God and becoming more like him so that one day, according to Saint John, “we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 Jn 3:2).

However, many things in our lives do, indeed, make us weaker and less able to fulfill the potential of our personal excellence. I believe technology overuse to be one of them.

Our Longing for Happiness

The world is obsessed with happiness. We seek it in our daily actions in the people we meet, the food we eat, the music we listen to, and even in the screens we use to distract us from the pressures of the world. Happiness is sought across genders, ages, social classes, cultures, continents. We are spiritually, mentally, psychologically, and physically built for it.

So the question we must begin with is, What is happiness? How can we properly define it?

The World’s Definition of Happiness

According to the World Happiness Report, an annual index put out by the United Nations, happiness is measured by three subjective elements of well-being, which include:

1. Life Evaluation — a reflective assessment on a person’s life or some aspect of it.

2. Affect — a person’s feelings or emotional states, typically measured with reference to a particular point in time.

3. Eudaemonia — a sense of meaning and purpose in life, or a good psychological functioning.

The people who participate in this report are asked to answer the following question: “Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”

The results are just what you might expect: richer countries fair better than poorer countries, and income, employment, education, family life, and both physical and mental health emerge as key factors when people determine which rung of the ladder their happiness is at.

While the factors evaluated are important and necessary in a person’s well-being, safety, and ongoing growth, the metaphorical ladder can only reach so high. Even if one climbs up as high as rung number ten, he or she is only arriving at the sum of their physical and emotional feelings. True happiness goes beyond feeling or emotion. True joy is found in the soul.

The Catholic Definition of Happiness

According to Saint Thomas Aquinas, medieval scholar and Doctor of the Church, there are four levels of happiness, each of which can be mistaken for true, final happiness.

Natural Wealth

This level of happiness consists in possessing the basic needs that satisfy human survival as provided by nature. Food, drink, and shelter fit into this category, among other things. People who think they find happiness in this level believe that tasty food and drink and large elegant homes are the source of their joy. They fit as much on their plate as possible and stuff themselves to the point of gluttony in order to fall asleep in their king-sized beds, waking up only to do the same thing again the next day. Nature itself tells us that natural wealth can’t be true joy, because after a certain point the body will refuse to take in another morsel and rebel through sickness and sloth. This is the shallowest form of happiness.

Artificial Wealth

If you lived before the implementation of money, you and your community would have traded resources such as cattle, land, cloth, etc. He who had the most resources was considered the wealthiest person. This person would gather wealth and, to a certain extent, you could say this person was happy; but, as it is true with money today, the feeling would be fleeting. Gathering artificial wealth (“artificial” in the sense of “manufactured or produced”) is conditional. The more you have, the more difficult it becomes to sustain, because the future is always unknown.

For example, you might own a rather large plot of land along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean on which you have built several hotel chains and restaurants, a seemingly unstoppable flow of income. But if a natural disaster such as a hurricane hits the coast, or if the stock market crashes, all of that money you saved will be needed simply to rebuild. Artificial wealth creates a kind of psychologically deceptive happiness. It makes us believe that we are secure in a particular level of luxury. It produces a false security and a dependence on things, which ultimately leads us to yearn for something more, something greater than just things.

Interestingly, we see this idea of artificial wealth manifested every time a new device, especially if it is a phone, is unveiled to the public. People from all over the world stand in lines for days hoping they will be one of the first to shell over hundreds of dollars and unbox this new technology that will make their lives equally, if not more, distractible than the “older” version they currently hold in their pocket. This, and all forms of artificial wealth, do provide a certain degree of happiness, but it too is fleeting.

Honors and Glory

Honor and glory can be defined as the giving or receiving of accolades based upon acts made by people that are judged by society as worthy of praise. For example, when soldiers return home from war and receive a medal of honor, they are praised by the government for their acts of heroism. Or when musical artists win a Grammy, they are praised by the recording industry for their creativity in song.

When we seek happiness through honors, we inch closer to true happiness, but we inevitably fall short. When we recognize a particular good in another person, or when others recognize a particular good in us, we are doing something admirable. In fact, when you are the person being honored, this feeling of accomplishment can be life-changing and, depending on the good act, even world-changing.

The problem with happiness achieved through giving and receiving honor is twofold. First, sometimes the act that merits recognition was not done willfully, but on accident. People who receive honors merely for being in the right place at the right time, or simply for being popular, reasonably feel a sense of unworthiness for their “accolade” because they never meant to do it in the first place. This is surely the exception to the norm, but nevertheless, it is brought up here to illustrate the defect in the argument for happiness through honors.

Second, the people who receive the honor live many other aspects of their lives as sinners. Granted this does not diminish the happiness they feel from their acts which are deserving of praise, but they still have room to grow in their potential for personal excellence. They still lack what they need to be truly fulfilled.