The problem with pursuing temporal happiness. We’ll never achieve it.
“This is the lie we tell ourselves our whole lives: as soon as we get the next meal, party, vacation, sexual encounter, as soon as we get married, get a promotion, get to the airport check-in, get through security and consume a bouquet of Auntie Anne’s Cinnamon Sugar Stix, we’ll feel really good. But as soon as we find ourselves in the airport gate area, having ingested 470 calories’ worth of sugar and fat before dinner, we don’t bother to examine the lie that fuels our lives. We tell ourselves we’ll sleep it off, take a run, eat a healthy breakfast, and then, finally, everything will be complete. We live so much of our lives pushed forward by these “if only” thoughts, and yet the itch remains. The pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness.” ― Dan Harris, 10% Happier
The answer written 450 years ago.
“All men ought properly to aspire after perfection and union with God. As only God, who is the highest and unchangeable good, is able to satisfy and quiet the desires of a rational soul, every man ought, according to right reason, to aim with ardor the most earnest after this end, namely, that by attaining to a perfect life, he may be intimately united to God Himself in this exile.
For if man attained to this union he would truly find, by intimate experience within his own soul, Him, who by His joyful presence would make all want to vanish clean away, would enrich him with treasures the most solid in value, and would fill him with unspeakable joy. From that moment would man be unable to wander forth in search of spurious delight derived from created things, for all to him would be insipid and bitter which was not GOD.
In fact, the rational spirit is so noble that no perishable good is able to satisfy its cravings. For it cannot be filled and made perfectly happy by those things which are below itself ; but the sky, the earth, the sea and everything visible and sensible is below itself.
Therefore, only with its maker, God, can it be content and happy, for He is incomparably better and more worthy than itself. As a wanderer that can find no rest, and a poor famished beggar without food, so is man until he perfectly embraces with the arms of charity Him, the immensity of whose dignity makes it impossible not to desire Him. With whatever riches, delights and honors he may abound, he cannot be truly satisfied unless he possesses God by the contact of love. But when once he has found God in the highest part of his being, namely, in his mind or inmost soul, he willingly bids adieu to all created things, and sings with the psalmist: “It is good for me to hold fast unto my God” (Ps. Ixxii, 28).”
A Book of Spiritual Instruction – Chapter 1 Blosius (Louis de Blois) +1566
