Free Yourself from the Happiness Trap
The day my mother went into the emergency room last winter changed everything. After decades of good health, her 89 year-old body took a turn. A trip to the emergency room revealed severe peripheral arteriosclerosis. We drove home later that night in silence. “What’s that mean?” she suddenly asked me as if abruptly awakening from a dream. “It means all of your veins are blocked up,” I said, my eyes riveted on the dark highway. “Will it get better?” she asked hopefully. My fists clenched the steering wheel. “No, Mom. No…it won’t,” I replied. We continued to drive in silence back to the ranch. Our journey together since then has been predictably tedious—doctors, surgeons, hospitals, and nursing facilities, rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat again. Hope rises, stumbles, and falls to its knees again.
As her primary caregiver, I never imagined the gargantuan feat required, emotionally, physically, and mentally. I mean, some people talk about it. But until you’ve experienced it, you have no idea. I slipped past my father’s care, a man from whom I had long been estranged. I remember swanning into the hospice room while he was dying. We had 20 miraculous minutes alone together as he peacefully left his body. Other people had done the heavy lifting for two years while he disappeared into the shadowlands of dementia. I’m sure they resented my timing. One doesn’t toil over the final stages of a loved one’s life, only to be usurped by an interloper the moment you step away to run errands for a couple of hours. This time with my mother has been vastly different.
The privilege of walking alongside her during this chapter of her story is nothing short of beautiful and profound. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. And, it’s nothing short of other things, too. Her most recent procedure was an artery bypass.“It’ll be a cakewalk,” the cardiologist reassured her in an overtly chipper tone of voice one uses with children who are afraid to sit on Santa’s knee. I rolled my eyes, bracing myself for something far more grim. Why do doctors always feel they need to tell you that you’ll be up and dancing around in no time? After her surgery, hours turned into days, which turned into weeks at the hospital.
One afternoon, during this most recent ordeal, a colleague asked how I was doing. I paused for a long moment and felt into the squalor that had become my inner experience. “I’m aligned,” I said succinctly. I was surprised by my response. Somehow, my psyche had transcended the good-bad polarity and entered something deeper and more true. They raised a questioning eyebrow. “Yeah,” I asserted. “Aligned. I’m right where I need to be. It’s not fun; I’m exhausted, brittle, and resentful. I’m hostile most of the time and am taking it out on the drivers on I-25 between here and the Albuquerque hospital. I’m uncharacteristically fragile. I’m not sleeping. But I’m totally in alignment with my values and my purpose, and exactly where I need to be, and that feels…well…aligned.”
That proclamation felt curiously empowering and, above all, liberating. What was I liberated from? Happiness. I thought about it as I was muscling my mother and me through traffic to yet another doctor’s appointment. The idea of happiness, and being happy, is such a trap. When is life happy? Sometimes, seldom, a lot? And when one is not happy, does that mean things are bad? The entire argument for and focus on happiness flattens the human experience into a two-dimensional mockery.
And yet, happiness is the gold standard of successful living, or so we are told. A cursory look at happiness in the marketplace reveals countless books, retreats, subscriptions, apps, and even alcoholic beverages are branded as “happiness in a can,” touting a multi-billion-dollar industry worldwide. In short, happiness is treated like a commodity: something you can buy, measure, improve on demand, or fast-track with the right product, service, or coach. Instead of being seen as one of dozens of nuanced states of being, happiness is sold like a vitamin, a silver bullet.
Here’s the catch. Lionizing happiness as an optimal state above all others has a sinister edge. The pressure to be happy is relentless. It hides in the doctor’s sing-song reassurances, telling my mother she’ll be “up and dancing in no time,” as if despair, agony, or dread would somehow sabotage the healing. It lurks as “toxic positivity” in the subtle shaming of complaints and grievances — don’t ruin the vibe, don’t be negative, don’t bring the room down. This is how grief, anger, exhaustion, and honest fear are banished, demonized, turned into enemies of the so-called good life. We are bullied to be something we are not in the face of extremely hard circumstances.
And of course, the happiness industry makes sure you keep trying. There is always another upgrade, another retreat, another app with a fresh promise of joy, and a better, happier version of yourself just around the corner. The treadmill never ends, and that’s the point. Your unhappiness fuels the market; your hunger sustains its growth.
What’s worse, this obsession with individual happiness blinds us to the broader landscape. No app can dissolve gun violence. No retreat can heal the climate crisis. No positive affirmation can undo the weariness of poverty or the loneliness of a culture that equates worth with productivity. Unhappiness and anger are not pathologies — they are sanity, a right and natural response to a world in peril.
But in this culture, happiness is privatized. It’s my personal journey, my mood tracker, my smile to maintain, my kindness and patience to assert at all times. Collective joy, solidarity, the simple medicine of belonging — all of these are eclipsed. And when the retreat ends, when the glow fades and the world comes rushing back, we are left emptier than before. The disappointment deepens: Why can’t I stay happy, even after all this effort?
Nature does not seek happiness; it seeks congruence. This is not because nature is ‘simple’ or ‘unintelligent’. Such bias is a byproduct of colonized and denatured conditioning. Almost four billion years of evolutionary intelligence points to a whole different orientation for wellbeing than that of happiness—alignment, connection, congruence—these are the eternal compass settings.
At the ranch, the horses do not aspire for happiness; they seek connection to what is true in any given moment. The aspens do not count their green leaves; they align with the seasons. The dogs and barn cats cycle through a dozen feeling states in one hour alone—from outrageous silliness, to serious concern, to confusion, to sublime contentment lying in the warm sun. Perhaps we, too, were meant for this—not happiness, but congruence and alignment with what is ours to be and do and carry.
Kelly Wendorf is an ICF Master Certified executive and personal coach, published author, spiritual mentor, disruptor, and socially responsible entrepreneur. As founder of EQUUS® she specializes in the liberation of robust leadership capacities in those who are most qualified — the empathetic, the conscientious, the accountable, the generous, and the kind. Did you like this essay? Kelly is available for a wide range of services including Coaching, Workshops, The EQUUS Experience®, Retreats, Keynote Speaking and more. 