Want to be happy? Destroy your dreams.
When I was growing up, I wanted to be a pediatrician at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri. From second grade all the way until the last week of my senior year of high school, that would be my answer for any and all inquiries about my future. There were no other considerations. All because when I was in the second grade, I saw a video in school about the sick kids at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital and, after witnessing my grandpa’s own battle with cancer, my little seven year old self wanted to help them. I thought watching that video at that time in my life meant it was my Calling™ in life to become a pediatrician at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri and remained dedicated to it for my entire adolescence because it was my Dream™ and you can’t give up on dreams.
But, fun fact, it turns out you can give up on your dreams! Especially when you’re staring down the barrel of your future during the final week of your senior year of high school and you realize pursuing a path of pre-medicine would lead to a lot of math and science and you hated math and science. And then not only do you hate math and science, but you also straight up flunked your senior year math class and dropped AP Chemistry earlier that year because the class got too tough so perhaps a life of math and science was never your Calling™ like you thought. Maybe it was just a path to consider and realize it wasn’t meant for you before following another.
I’ve followed a couple of other paths and dreams since that first childhood one to become a pediatrician. I wanted to be a famous YouTuber running my own media empire for a while and had a lot of fun chasing that wild dream before realizing fame wasn’t my thing. I also wanted to be a successful author writing all day and night for a living until I realized I liked having a stable income and insurance more than starving on the intermittent freelance income that came with following my Dream™.
Luckily, my happiness in life never came from accomplishing my dreams. In fact, my dreams actually gave me more grief in life than good. I thought I was given a Calling™ with all of these dreams and I was failing to answer that call by not succeeding at them in the ways I thought I should, which added a degree of misery to otherwise enjoyable experiences. My YouTube channel was a success in my eyes, but it wasn’t getting me a headlining panel at VidCon or even earning any sponsorships to maintain the channel as a viable full time career (except for the occasional free merch and books from Thriftbooks who appreciated my haul videos, ily Thriftbooks <3). I managed to publish two books that sold okay-ish in my eyes, but they weren’t putting my name anywhere close to the authors I admired. My current career pays the bills, but it doesn’t provide the same perceived significance and meaning that becoming a pediatrician at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri would’ve given me (or paycheck, for that matter).
Instead, my joy in life has grown from the journeys pursuing these dreams and the realizations they provided in their failures. My time building my YouTube channel, while grueling and problematic in other aspects, was thrilling and gave me opportunities in life that I never would’ve had without it. I met so many interesting people through YouTube and worked on so many fantastic projects that were a ton of fun to create that I’m still proud of to this day. I also built an incredible amount of skills with content creation and technical applications that I still use in my day to day life. It’s the same for my books. Writing and publishing my books is still a true pleasure to pursue. While the dream of making it a full time job is mostly dead, I enjoy writing what makes me happy rather than what I think is expected to be published and as a way to decompress. Chasing my dreams delivered me through some rough times in my life and gave me hope that there would be a shining light at the end of the tunnel if I just kept going.
Fulfilling my dreams never provided my happiness. Instead, I found my joy in life because chasing my dreams gave me an excuse to actually live my life. There’s a quote from the Pixar movie Soul (2020) that reflects this mentality:
“I heard this story about a fish. He swims up to an older fish and says, “I’m trying to find this thing they call ‘the ocean.'”
“The ocean? the older fish says, “That’s what you’re in right now.”
“This?” says the young fish. “This is water. What I want is the ocean!”
If you spend your life chasing a dream and wait to live your life until you succeed at that dream, you’ll miss the fact you’re already in the ocean. You’re already living your life. Let a dream give you the frame to live your life if you want, but don’t let it blind you to the joy of living your life as is. I spent a lot of time waiting to live my life until I fulfilled my dreams. I told myself I’d only ever be happy and find my freedom or do certain things if I had my media empire or became a household name on every bookshelf. But my happiness only came when I conceded my dreams and started living my life for myself with the resources I had, not the resources I perceived I’d have once I “made it” wherever “it” was.
So if you want my not-so expert advice: if you want to be happy in life, destroy your dreams. Let the Calling™ to let them die be as strong as when they were demanding to be created. A dream should be, at best, a guiding star on your journey rather than a blinding sun demanding your full attention. Accept that life is going to life and give you speed bumps that you don’t expect while chasing your dream, like the fact you realize you don’t even like math or science while pursuing a dream that focuses pretty much exclusively on math and science, and not every dream needs to be fulfilled.
There may only be one life, but there can be multiple paths on it. Don’t limit yourself to the one path because of a perceived singular Dream™ or Calling™ and see where life can take you on this fabulous journey. Maybe it’ll take you to St. Louis, Missouri or maybe it’ll keep you in your hometown. You’ll never know until you embrace the waves of your ocean and start swimming.
Interested in more of my thoughts about happiness?
Read more here: The Happiness Project and How Happiness Doesn’t Always Make You Happy