Abbie Schiller on the Misguided Pursuit of Happiness

[MUSIC PLAYING] When you are pioneering anything or introducing new ideas to the culture, you get criticized. You do? Yeah. Did you hear about that? I didn't find the one. I found someone I respected, and we made it the one. In the sort of longing kind of view of love, people understand each other as if by magic. Nothing in itself is addictive, on the one hand. On the other hand, everything could be addictive. If there's an emptiness in that person that needs to be filled. I now know that nobody changes until they change their energy. And when you change your energy, you change your life. I'm Gwyneth Peltrow. This is the Goop podcast, bringing together thought leaders, culture changers, creatives, founders and CEOs, scientists, doctors, healers, and seekers, here to start conversations. Because simply asking questions and listening has the power to change the way we see the world. Here we go. One of our favorite returning guests, goal coach and author, Abby Schiller, is back. And today she's making the case that happiness might be the wrong goal. It turns out the more we chase it, the more it slips away. And what many of us are really after isn't happiness at all. It's relief. In this episode, she explains why heavy emotions like jealousy and resentment are actually helpful. And why so many of us feel overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time. She also shares nine small shifts we can make starting today to feel better. Here's Abby. Hi, I'm Abby Schiller. I'm a goal coach specializing in helping women figure out and get what's next. And I'm so glad to be back on the Goop podcast for my fifth time. Today I want to talk about the misguided pursuit of happiness. Don't get me wrong. I think happiness is an amazing feeling. And as I've mentioned in past podcasts, all feelings are simply vibrations that we experience in our body. They're just messages that we get from our thoughts. But happiness and the over-indexing of happiness, particularly in Western culture, has gone bananas. The pursuit of happiness is a massive, multi-billion dollar global ecosystem. It is deeply ingrained in what we think we should be striving for. We wish people happy birthdays. We have it written into the Constitution, the pursuit of happiness. Every parent I've ever spoken to says they just want their kids to be happy. And we don't put any context around this because the assumption without that context is that we're supposed to, that we deserve, that we should be granted, that it is our right to have a life filled with happiness. And my friends, that's just not how reality works. Do you know one person in the history of human beings that has lived their entire life filled with just happiness? Thankfully, no. Because responding to tragedy with happiness would be super weird. Responding to complicated challenges with happiness would also be weird. Responding to death and awful circumstances that are part of life would be weird. Happiness is one note in the symphony of human emotions that we could be paying attention to. We might instead want to say we want our children to grow up to be full of aliveness or full of presence or full of purpose or full of possibility. But we don't because we only look at it through the lens of what we've been told, which is we should be pursuing happiness. So I want to spend this episode taking a step back, giving you some tools to go ahead and pursue happiness if that's the track you're committed to, but hopefully also opening up your mind to all the other experiences that are available to you as a human being, given our short time to be on this Earth. I hope that you leave this episode feeling inspired and full of possibility. Notice I didn't say happier. So let's learn a little more about what happiness is, why pursuing it is misguided, and what to aim for instead. Here's something wild to know about happiness. Nobody even agrees on what it actually is. There is not one universally agreed upon definition for happiness. We've been using this word our entire lives, striving for relentlessly. And if you stop and ask 10 people to define it, you'll get 10 completely different responses. And that's because happiness is entirely subjective. It lives inside the person experiencing it. My happiness might look nothing like yours. What makes me feel deeply genuinely content might leave you feeling uninspired and vice versa. Scientists have tried to pin it down philosophers, our mothers, no consensus. The word happiness comes from the old medieval word hap, meaning luck or good fortune. The most literal definition of happiness is having lucky or fortunate circumstances. But does that mean that we have no agency over our own happiness and have to just wish for luck? No, of course not. Author Sean Acre, whose work I love, defines happiness as the experience of positive emotions combined with deeper feelings of meaning and purpose, a positive mood in the present and a positive outlook for the future. Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, breaks it into three components-- pleasure, engagement, and meaning. Here's the takeaway, even among the experts, even with all the research, happiness remains stubbornly, beautifully wildly personal. And yet, we treat it like a one-size-fits-all. We treat it like it's a destination that everyone is heading toward, and some people just haven't arrived yet. Which brings me to the second problem, which is the happiness trap. We have been conditioned by culture, by advertising, by well-meaning parents, by the literal United States Constitution, to believe that happiness is not just available to us, but that we are entitled to it. That we deserve it. That if we are not happy, something has gone wrong. So we chase it harder. We optimize for it. We build our entire lives around the pursuit of it. And then we arrive at the relationship, or the career, or the house, or the salary. And we stand there thinking, is this it? Why doesn't this feel the way it was supposed to? Most people call me for coaching after they've done everything right because they aren't feeling right at all. They want help figuring out what they even want anymore, and how to feel better about what they have. Here's the cruel twist the research gives us. The more directly and desperately we pursue happiness, the more it alludes us. Psychologist Iris Mouse found that people who place a very high value on happiness, who treat it like the primary goal, actually end up less happy, not more. Because the act of constantly monitoring, whether you're happy enough, creates a kind of internal surveillance that makes genuine joy almost impossible. It's like trying to fall asleep by really, really trying to fall asleep. The effort defeats itself. I'll share something personal. Before I had these tools, before I knew this research, before I learned how to apply any of this to my own life, I spent a period of time in a really dark place. And I would see posts on Instagram that said, choose happiness. And I would want to throw punch the person who posted that. Because I didn't understand how happiness could possibly be a choice. I felt like I was a victim to circumstances in the world and being blamed for my own unhappiness. Like, oh, my unhappiness is my own fault. Must be my choice. Thanks, Instagram. And I have come to understand that that's not what it's saying at all. But for anybody who is struggling right now and can't see how happiness could be an inside job, I see you. I shared that frustration. I shared that despair. These tools helped me climb out of that trench. And that's why I do this work. Because happiness is a practice of thought and of action. And also, it's not the only goal in life. And that, today, is the bigger point. Let me illustrate this with a story. The classic fable of the fisherman and his wife by the brother's grim perfectly captures a character whose relentless quest for more happiness creates total misery. It's the story of a fisherman who catches a magical talking fish who asks to be thrown back. The fisherman complies. but when he returns to his small shack of a home and tells his-- wife, she insists that he goes back and asks for a more beautiful home. So he does, and they're granted a cozy cottage. Seeing how easy that was, the wife ups the ante, a stone castle. Then she wants the fisherman to be made king, then emperor, then the Pope. With each escalation, the sea grows darker and more turbulent, reflecting the wife's growing inner torment. Despite gaining unprecedented power and wealth, she remains deeply frustrated, unable to enjoy what she has because she's so fixated on what she could have next. Eventually, she asks for her husband to be made equal in status and power to God. Finally, the fish has had enough, and instantly, all the blessings are revoked. Presto magic, she's back in their original shack. Her misguided pursuit of happiness is a lesson to all of us, certain that the feeling is just out of reach on the horizon, and that when we get the raise or remodel the kitchen or get the relationship or whatever we're ordering online these days, we'll finally feel happy. We will have achieved the holy grail of enoughness, but that's not how it works, because when the goal of happiness is external, it becomes endless, and we become disheartened chasing it. We acclimate to the spike in happiness we feel upon first getting it, and turn our sights to what's next, and what's next after that. This is what's coined as the hedonic treadmill. That tendency we have to return to our baseline level of happiness after peak or difficult times are tendency to acclimate, for that achievement, that gold medal to lose its shine and its emotional impact. The pursuit itself blinded the fisherman's wife to the beauty of her present life, ultimately destroying the very comfort she started with. That story is why we're here today, because I think we've been sold a bill of goods about happiness, and I want to spend this episode unpacking that, reframing it, and giving you something more helpful to reach for. First, let's expand the language we use when talking about what we actually want. You might be surprised to learn that most adults can only identify three human emotions. Happy? Mad? Sad. This makes me sad. What a limited experience of being human if you can only have those words to describe your emotions. Years ago, I co-founded a children's media company called The Mother Company, where we created a children's television show for preschoolers called Ruby's Studio. In our first episode called The Feeling Show, we had an animated story that taught preschoolers the word "frustrated." And when the show was in just script format, I sought the opinions from other veteran TV execs, and every single TV exec we spoke to told us that a three-year-old wouldn't be able to grasp the concept of "frustrated," they wouldn't know that word. But at the time, I was the mother of a three-year-old who felt frustrated at least once a day, and she knew the word and used that word, which gave her real agency over a very big feeling. When she said, "I feel frustrated," it helped me help her. So we kept the scene in the show, and actually meld Brooks even narrated it. And if you have a preschool in your life, please go look up Ruby's Studio, The Feeling Show, on Amazon Prime, and let me know if it helps your kid. But having words for our feelings is hugely transformative in how we experience the feelings themselves. Researcher Barbara Fredrickson, one of the world's leading experts on positive emotion, identified 10 different emotions that we might just be grouping under the umbrella of "happy." 10, not one. So listen to these as I say them, and feel how they hit differently, like subtly different crayon colors all in the box. Ready? Joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, love, 10 completely different feelings, 10 completely different textures, 10 completely different colors in the spectrum of what it means to feel good. We've been collapsing all of them into one word, happy, and here's what else. Aiming for happiness, and all 10 of its expressions, is still just one shade in that spectrum. It is still just one note in the orchestra, a beautiful note, an essential note, but one note. And we've been so focused on that one note that we've been missing the entire symphony. We could be open to all the notes as a part of a full, gorgeous, textured, adventurous life. What would that look like? What if we could have the whole emotional orchestra that we could have the whole human experience with all the notes, the high, the low, the sharp, the flat ones, stay with me. Harvard professor Arthur Brooks, who teaches happiness at Harvard Business School, which I love, defines it not as a feeling, but as a combination of three things. He calls them the macro nutrients of happiness. The three macro nutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Enjoinment is not the same as pleasure. Pleasure is the surface hit, the good meal, the perfect latte, the 20 minutes of scrolling. Enjoinment is deeper. Brooks formula is pleasure, plus people, plus memory, equals enjoyment. It requires real presence, which most of us are in short supply of right now. Satisfaction is the real reward that comes from struggle, from the mastery of something hard, not from having it handed to you, but from the effort that it took. Brooks makes the point that the reason people aren't as happy as they think they should be is that we're never actually hungry. They haven't had to wait for the meal, quite literally. They haven't had to work for the result, and so the arrival feels hollow. We live in a world surrounded by comfort, soft beds, temperature-controlled air, clean water, food that's delivered with the push of a button. None of that requires striving or earning. And then meaning is the why of your life. Coherence, does my life make sense? Significance, does my life matter? Does what I do matter? Am I moving toward something? When I look at those three macro-nutrients, what I notice is that all three of them require something we often think as optional at best, and threatening at worst. They all require discomfort. You cannot have satisfaction without struggle and overcoming something hard. You cannot have meaning without surviving periods of grief, illness, fear, and failure to learn what matters to us, and you cannot have real enjoyment without earning it. He says that pleasure happens to you, but enjoyment requires effort. Pleasure plus people plus memory. This is exactly what the fisherman's wife was missing. She had all the trappings, the castle, the power, the status, but zero satisfaction because she never had to earn any of it. No struggle, no meaning, no learning, no earning, no real presence in her life, just escalation. Now here's what I want to name about the happiness we've actually been chasing, most of us. If we're honest, aren't chasing enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, we're chasing relief. We want the mental noise to stop. We want to not be needed for five minutes. We want to not wake up at 3 a.m. with a running to-do list. We want the world's atrocities to stop already. We want to feel okay. And relief is genuinely wonderful when you're exhausted. Relief is exactly what the body needs. Relief is the space between demands. And if relief is what you're optimizing for, you will spend your entire existence in a rinse and repeat cycle of managing and recovering, but never actually building towards something, never actually growing, never actually thriving. Here's something else the research is clear on. We habituate to the happiness. Our brains are extraordinary adaptation machines. The peak moments of joy, the promotion, the relationship, the milestone, the achievement you work towards for years. Our brain will compress that, the intensity of it, the intensity of the joy will fade. the thing that was going to make you happy stops making you happy, and then we need the next thing like the fisherman's wife, which means the pursuit of happiness as a permanent destination is literally, quite literally, neurologically impossible. Happiness is a peak experience, not a sustainable emotion. I ask clients, what percentage of your life, how often do you want to feel happy? And most of them say honestly 100% of the time. You don't want to be happy 100% of the time. You don't want your kids to be happy 100% of the time either. You want to be feeling what's appropriate to the circumstance that you're living. Your feelings, the vibrations that you feel in your body, come from your thoughts, which are just sentences you say in your head. Feelings do not come from that comment that your mother-in-law or boss said, they come from your thought of that comment. You don't have feelings from the promotion, the relationship, the salary, or the number on the scale, but from your thoughts about those things, which means that happiness, or relief, or excitement, or enjoyment or any emotion, was never actually out there waiting for you to earn it. It was always available to you by examining the thought you have in your head. The fisherman's wife could have been like, what a miracle. You found a fish that spoke to you how incredibly cool. I'm so glad your home safe and sound. And she would have felt satisfied. You too could look around right the second and notice all the things you've ever wanted in your life when you were a kid and wished for as a grown-up. Just notice all the things that you actually got, whether that's health, or a place to sleep, or a nice thing to wear, or a person who loves you, or a thing you do, and just realize what an insane blessing it is that you got that thing you always wanted. Just thinking about it will actually make you feel happier. Do it. Like, take a second and realize how badly you wanted that scented candle and what it felt like to buy, or how blessed you are to have food in the fridge. And then realize my point that just by having those thoughts, you are changing your emotions because our thoughts create our feelings. Hence, I no longer want to throw punch the people that post "choose happiness" on Instagram, because now I get how it works. If I choose certain thoughts, I can create my own happiness, or aliveness, or peace, or meaning. So if happiness is available through our thinking, and we've had more material abundance, more safety, and convenience than any other generation before us, why do we all collectively feel so flat? Why, according to a recent Gallup poll, why has the United States fallen to 24th in global happiness rankings? Why is the US now ranked among the top five loneliness countries in the world, with 21% of Americans reporting they feel lonely always or almost always? Why does the national depression rate remain at a historically high rate of 18.3%? Because between happiness being theoretically available, and thus actually feeling it, something is getting in the way. Several somethings. I'm going to take you through them. Our attention has been stolen. Think about what enjoyment requires. Presence. Real presence. The full experience of being somewhere with someone doing something with all of you actually there. No phone on the table, no checking the gram during bedtime with the kids. Now think about the last time you had that. Actually had that. When were you so fully there that you noticed the light on the walls or the freckles on a face or the sound of a voice or the temperature in the room? Every app, every notification every platform is engineered by very smart, very well compensated people to interrupt that presence. These platforms don't actually deliver pleasure. They deliver anticipation. The little buzz before you check. The flicker of what if this is the good one? That's dopamine. And dopamine isn't the feel good chemical that I thought it was. It's the wanted chemical. It's the itch, not the scratch. So just like a slot machine, the rush isn't really in winning, it's in the waiting. The moment between pulling the lever and seeing what comes up, that's where the dopamine lives. The second the wheel stop, win or lose. The spike is already gone and your brain is reaching for the next pull. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube shorts, they're all built on that exact same architecture. Every swipe is a pull of the lever. You don't know if the next video is going to be boring or brilliant. And that uncertainty is the entire hook. We're not addicted to the content. We're addicted to not knowing what's coming next. So every scroll gives you a hit of wanting. Rarely a hit of actually feeling good, which is exactly why an hour of scrolling can leave you feeling more empty than when you started. You were not fed. You were just kept hungry, over and over and over one more flick at a time. Your brain's attention, ability to focus and decide, become totally depleted. This isn't the side effect of it. It's literally the whole business model. And when your attention is constantly hijacked, when you're living in a low grade state of craving instead of a state of presence, real human enjoyment becomes almost impossible. You cannot be moved by your own life. When you are perpetually half present to it, chasing the next little itch instead of feeling the one thing actually in front of you, nothing better happens on screens than in real life. But we keep thinking it does. And it's not just that social media wears down our capacity for pleasure. It actively throws harm in our path with distressing news, divisive politics, traumatizing imagery, one after another with no pause button in between. Very little warning. There's a real difference between being thoughtfully informed about what's happening in the world and being completely immersed in every gory detail of it. Our brains were never built to take in this much information, this much imagery, this fast. And it is genuinely harming our mental health and our happiness. And I want to be clear, I am not on some holier than now soapbox proselytizing from a place of purity. I absolutely use social media. I get real value from it. It's a meaningful part of my business. But I am constantly in a tug of war with it. So I use apps to block my own access. And I worry genuinely about the generation being raised on these fast, frictionless videos with brains that are still being built by what they're fed. We are chasing cheap pleasure versus rich pleasure. Let's be clear that our pursuing happiness and pleasure has never actually been easier. But the quality of that experience matters. I think it helps to see it laid out plainly. Cheap pleasures are the quick hits, fast, easy, potent, and readily available and easy to obtain. The social media, the video games, the ultra-processed, hyper-flavored food, the stuff engineered in a lab to be nearly impossible to stop eating. Porn, online shopping, that little ping of ad to cart or your package is shipped, gambling and betting apps, the constant checking of notifications. Dr. Anna Lemke, the Stanford psychiatrist who wrote dopamine nation, which I loved, has spent her entire career studying this category. Her finding holds across every single one of them. The easier and faster the pleasure, the steeper the crash afterwards. The easier and faster the pleasure, the steeper the crash. You don't just return to baseline, you dip below it. Which is why 20 minutes of any of these can leave you feeling worse, not better than before you started. And why you return to it again and again and need more of it, or a more potent version of it to feel the same high. Which is why we can develop compulsive habits and become addicted to so many more things today. It's the neurological equivalent of eating candy all day and one of them. wondering why you feel terrible and still hungry. Now, here's the rich list, the slower, harder-won pleasures that don't spike in crash, but actually build something that lasts. A real conversation where you connect, the kind where you feel heard, physical movement, a hike, a swim, a hard workout, making something with your hands, hence the rise of all the needle arts we're seeing. Keep focused work on something that matters to you, time in nature, being of service to someone else, learning something difficult, a shared meal slowly with people you care about. The rich list almost always requires effort, presence, or other people. It pays out slower dividends, and that's exactly why we under-choose it. Our brains are wired to prefer the guaranteed quick hit over the slower, less certain reward. Even when the slower one is the one that actually fills us up. We are consuming far more than we are creating, and creation, making something, contributing something, writing, serving, expressing something, is one of the primary ways human beings feel most alive. You cannot scroll your way to feeling fully alive. No one lies on their deathbeds wishing they'd watched just a few more YouTube shorts. The former U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness as a public health epidemic. The research shows that it carries health risks comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, almost a pack a day habit, and we are in the middle of it right now. The cruel irony is that we are more connected than we've ever been, more followers, more messages, more ways to see everyone's life, and we are lonelier than we've ever been. Because social media creates the dopamine signal of connection without the actual experience of being seen. Scrolling through someone's photos is not intimacy. It's a simulation of intimacy that satisfies just enough of the hunger to keep us from seeking the real thing. Journalist Bridget Schultt, in her book Overwhelmed, coined a term that I think is one of the most accurate descriptions of modern life I've ever heard. Time confetti. Because of constant digital pings, multitasking, and blending work with life, we are left with short, useless bursts of time like tiny pieces of confetti that don't allow for deep work or restorative rest. We have created days filled with multitasking, no reasonable breaks, and the illusion of busyness. When we have ten minutes between calls, we fill it with scrolling or switching to personal responsibilities only to hit the day's end exhausted with a hundred open tabs and no sense of accomplishment. Schultt found this hits women particularly hard because even our leisure time gets usurped. By coordination, by mental load, by the sense that every available second should be productive, and busyness has become a status symbol. I'm so busy, has become the answer to how are you? As though the number of demands on our time is proof of our worth. The result is something I see in clients constantly. They are equally overwhelmed and underwhelmed, exhausted from constant motion and starved for anything that actually matters. If this is you, you are responding rationally to the broken environment. The problem is not your mindset or your gratitude practice or your inability to just be happy. The problem is that we've been trying to fill a meaning-shaped hole with things that were never designed to fill it in ten minute increments. I want to give you tools not just to add to your happiness, but to allow the full spectrum of human-emotional experiences, tools to add to a better experience of life. Here are nine things, not a complete life-overhaul, just tiny little shifts that you can start today. And I want you to just pick one and start there. Ready? One, become emotionally literate. Just as my daughter needed to know the word frustrated for her daily experience, you too need to have the words to describe the emotional vibrations you're experiencing. Name it and learn how to move through it. Feel it and heal it. Then learn how to listen and connect to the thought in your head. Open up to pursuing other worthy emotions. I like a liveness, wonder, curiosity, determination, feeling expansive, on occasion competitive, helpful, amused, and of course loved. But I would also remind you that some of the heavier emotions are also enormously important. Anger and frustration help motivate us to change. Delicy keys us into what we might want, resentment tells us where we might need a boundary, grief connects us to profound loss, disappointment shows us where our expectations lie. I could do this all day. Do not avoid the dark, heavy emotions in life. Please remember, we can strive for a full symphony, not just one note. Two, practice savoring micro moments in life. Most of us live inside good moments for about four seconds before our brain moves on to the next thing. Savoring is the practice of stopping and noticing and lingering in a moment on purpose. When we take a bite of food or hear a piece of music or spend a moment with someone or even wash the dishes, just pause, just pause in that moment. Notice the details of that moment. Let the micro details of it actually land before you move on to the next thing. The temperature of the water, the scent of the soap. Notice the satisfaction of cleaning a dish. Researchers who study this call it stretching out a positive emotion. It sounds small, it is not small. It is one of the fastest ways to retrain a brain that has gotten very good at rushing past the good stuff on its way to the next thing. Three, build an actual gratitude practice. There's a difference between gratitude as a thought and gratitude as an embodied feeling. The research on this is some of the most replicated in all of positive psychology. People who regularly write down think about notice or name specific things they're grateful for. Report higher life satisfaction, better sleep, and even fewer physical symptoms of stress. But be as specific as possible. It's less of, I'm grateful for my family. And more of, I'm grateful for my daughter who texted me a stupid meme today and I laughed out loud in my car. Specificity is what makes it real instead of performative. Four, invest in your relationships like your retirement account. Harvard has been running the longest study on human happiness ever conducted over eight decades. They followed people from their 20s into their 90s. And the single clearest finding replicated again and again is this. The quality of your close relationships predicts your happiness and your health better than money, better than fame, IQ, and better than genetics. Not how many people you know or how many followers you have, but how safe and connected you feel with the ones who matter to you. So invest in your relationships like the asset that they actually are. This requires effort on your part. You need to actually call, not just send a meme to, call the friend, make the plan, show up for the thing, put the phone away when you're with the people you love. This isn't a nice to have, according to the longest running study we have on what makes a human life good. It is the thing. And I just want to underline that because it isn't about happiness. It's about pursuing connection and belonging and feeling seen. 5. Do more things that fill your soul. What is it in your life right now or ever that makes you feel like you are pouring into your soul? When were you last so absorbed in something that you forgot to check your phone? Some people come alive in creating, some in deep conversation, some in physical challenge, some in learning, some in service. For me it's travel. But what? What's yours? When did you last actually do it? Do that. Six. Seek novelty on purpose. Your brain needs newness. Schedule it. Maybe one new thing a week, a different route, a new book in a genre you've never tried, a conversation with someone whose worldview is completely different from yours. A food you'd never think to try. A novelty activates the brain in a way that routine cannot. It creates the conditions for curiosity, for wonder, for presence. Seven. Create something new every day. The ratio of creating to consuming in most of our lives is wildly off. Even 10 minutes of creation changes your entire relationship to your own day. Journal, plant something, cook, paint, send the message you've been composing in your head for three weeks. The goal is not the output. The goal is to become the author of something and not just the audience of it. Eight. Lean into discomfort. This week I sent a cold email to a thought leader I really admire. Then I had to manage my thoughts that she was going to think I was a crazy follower. Maybe something will come of it. Maybe not. But practicing discomfort builds resilience for me to take risks and chances that helped me grow. So maybe for you, that's the call you've been putting off. The class you've been curious about. The boundary you've been afraid to set. Self growth lives outside of our comfort zone. Lean into the discomfort. Lean into it and know you'll acclimate to it and benefit. And finally, nine. Get in the pool. I tell a story at the end of my visioning program about the first year of the pandemic. My son was nine and hadn't seen his friends or been in class for months. And it was his third grade year. It was June and school was out and he had nothing to do and no friends to do it with. And we bought him an inflatable pool for our yard and I filled it up. He got his suit on and I encouraged him to go out and assured him I'd just be inside watching from the kitchen while I did my work. Then he asked, "Will you get in the pool with me?" And I quickly shot that idea down. I had so much to do. I hated the idea of getting my suit on and getting wet. It all sounded so terrible to me. There was no way. But then he asked again, "Mama, come in with me." And it pierced straight into my heart. What was I doing not getting in the pool with my kid who was feeling so alone during this pandemic? What even mattered more than at that moment than getting in that bug-ridden, dinky, inflatable pool? Nothing. So I got in. And for 20 minutes, we tossed a little ball around while he told me about every single superhero character I'd never heard of. And then his heart, his little love bank was full and mine was full. And after that we felt closer. We had a shared moment that we both got in the pool. So this is your invitation to stop standing at the edge of your own life. Stop planning it. Reading about it. Stop thinking about it. Stop waiting for the right conditions. Stop thinking you'll do the meaningful thing later. There might not be a later. Live your values. Do the thing that matters. Show up fully as yourself. The one who is curious and scared and hopeful and uncertain and completely undeniably alive. The water will be cold at first. Get in anyway. That moment wasn't about pursuing happiness. It was about pursuing alignment to who I wanted to be as a mother and as a human. I want to end with a question. What are you going to pursue? Has your prioritization on happiness shifted? Can you see how one noted it is to just want to be happy? I hope so. Let's go for the biggest, most alive version. We've got a shot at. If you are the hero, the main character in a movie of your life, don't you want it to be the best story ever? Like an epic sweeping adventure of love and loss, growth and redemption sprinkled with humor and lots of love and maybe some heartbreak and comebacks. When you walk the dog or wash the dishes or tuck yourself in at night, you can bring that perspective with you. Imagine a narrator voicing it all. There she is, bravely attempting to live a life that is full and good while also juggling the adversity of the world. But she's got a fire in her, a fire that, if you look closely, is being stoked by her tenacity and courage to achieve a life against all odds that defies average. One in which she savers everyday coffees and feels rays of sunshine as if they're fuel for her good fortune. That's my best narrator voice. But seriously, have fun with it. Why not? Take the risk. Let yourself dream. Do the uncomfortable thing. Get in the pool. Stop waiting for the perfect song and start dancing to whatever is playing. Happiness, real happiness, the enjoyment and satisfaction and meaning kind is a byproduct of that. You don't need that to start dancing. You feel it once you are dancing. So this is your call to stop chasing it and start actually living it. Thank you so much for being here. If you'd like to continue this work, I have plenty of free resources on my website at abishiller.com. That's A-B-B-I-E-S-C-H-I-L-L-E-R.com. I hope you reach out and let me know what you're taking away from this. Until next time, thanks. Have a beautiful week. Thanks for tuning in. I hope you'll listen, follow, rate, and review all of our episodes, which are available for free on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Goop holiday gift guides are our calling card. 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