If You Follow This Pattern for Happiness, You'll Never Have It

An article about millennial home ownership is currently making the rounds. The headline reads, “THE HOMEOWNERSHIP OBSESSION: How buying homes became a part of the American dream—and also a nightmare.” Based on that, I thought the author of the piece would dive deep into the reality of owning your own home, which is often decidedly less rosy and romantic than most people assume.

I’m thinking of the parts of being a human in charge of a building that no one glorifies in the real estate listing: The responsibility and obligation of regular maintenance (and unexpected repairs). The commitment of time and energy in every direction. The financial burden it can place on people who buy too much house, who count on the structure they live in to appreciate significantly because it’s the only actual asset they have.

While the writer touched on some of these themes, I wished she would have been more explicit about the idea that owning your own house is not a requirement to be a successful, self-actualized, happy human. It’s an option, and owning or not owning means nothing about you as a person.

I wish the piece explained more clearly that a single-family house you live in is not inherently an investment, not inherently better than renting, and not inherently something that provides stability, security, and success.

Same Mistaken Pursuit of Happiness, Different Square Footage

Then again, perhaps that’s the point — we are still obsessed with the dream (or, like the article alluded to, nightmare) of literally mortgaging our financial futures on a piece of construction that we believe will somehow make us happier once we own it than we were previously.

The only thing that feels different about how people my age pursue the home ownership ideal is that we’re not trying to buy McMansions in the ‘burbs anymore, like our parents did. We pat ourselves on the back, self-congratulatory and smug that our preference for smaller homes or options outside of cookie cutter neighborhoods located a traffic-clogged, hour-plus commute away from our jobs make us smarter than the boomers, who were foolish enough to think 5,000 square foot houses in suburbia were good ideas.

But how are millennials any better? The housing we want might look different, but the motivation to act seems the same:

Once I acquire this thing, I will be happier with my life.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a house or a car or a piece of clothing or a better body or a smartphone or a TV or a KitchenAid stand mixer — the default of human thinking around how to improve life seems to be “when I get ___, I will be ___.”

The False Formula That Causes Us to Covet Homes (and Other Things That Don’t Actually Make Us Happy)

The obsession we have isn’t necessarily “home ownership.” That’s just a common way we fill in the first blank. The obsession is seeking an external force to fulfill an internal desire.

When I get this particular outfit, I will belong in the group.
When I get visible abs, I will be loveable.
When I get a raise, I will deserve to be heard.
When I get , I will be confident.
When I get a house, I will be secure, stable, and successful.

Your “when I get ___, I will be ___” will vary depending on the day, the situation, the people around you. But I guarantee you have versions of these scripts and unless you do something about them, you’ll always find yourself stuck believing in the same pattern: when you finally acquire something you don’t have right now, you will finally be the way you want to be. More confident. Happier. More secure. In a better relationship.

I can promise you that because I am the exact same way. In fact, it took living this out on a huge scale with massive consequences for me to first see the pattern and then start the process of breaking it.

I bought my first house in 2012 because I thought it would make me an adult who finally had her life together. I committed to a serious relationship for the same reason. I thought these things were checkboxes I could tick on some finite list and if I only crossed off enough to-dos and to-gets I would stop feeling miserable, lost, and unfulfilled.

This should surprise precisely no one, but it didn’t work. Of course, I did what almost every human tends to do in that situation: I doubled down on chasing more things to acquire. When the first thing I got didn’t make me happy, I concluded my mistake was not getting enough of that thing. I needed a better thing. Three years later, I sold the first house and bought a bigger, more expensive one.

When I walked into the second house the first time, I sat down and cried all night. I had this dreamy little farmhouse on acres of land that was all mine, just like I (thought) I always wanted. It was the worst I have ever felt in my entire life. It finally hit me that the formula I trusted to equate to the happiness I wanted so desperately to feel still didn’t work. And that it would never work. The pattern of “when I have ___, I will be ___” was false.

Want to Be Happy? Here’s What Actually Works

It would take me the better part of the next 5 years to figure out that anytime you stake your well being, happiness, fulfillment, joy, or satisfaction on an external force or thing, you’re condemning yourself to never actually capture those feelings on a meaningful, lasting basis.

Yes, stuff and experiences can spike your happiness for a period of time. But eventually, that stuff or that experience either fades or it becomes your new normal, and you adapt. You adjust accordingly and return to your normal ways and modes of being.

Let’s say that, on a scale of 1 to 10, you rank your average happiness around a 6. Things are okay, but you feel stressed or anxious pretty often; you feel like you haven’t quite achieved what you think you should have accomplished by now. Maybe you feel that buying a house would increase your happiness because you’d be more secure and less anxious, and you’d feel more successful because you’d have something to show as proof of making it. You think that, after you manage to buy a house, your happiness would move from a 6 to an 8 because of these factors.

So you set out to increase your number on the happiness scale. You buy the house. Your happiness does increase as you settle in to your new home and buy a lot of new stuff for it and enjoy many new experiences. There are days you do rank your happiness at an 8.

But eventually, things aren’t so new. They become normal, part of your routine. Things may go from being a novelty (my own yard!) to a nuisance (my own yard that I have to spend 2 hours mowing every weekend). Before you know it, you feel like you’re back to days of happiness-at-a-6-on-a-scale-of-1-to-10.

External factors and forces — from homes to new iPhones — do not ultimately dictate whether or not you will be happy with your life. The “when I get ___ I will be ___” formula is a lie. So what does work? What’s the truth? What allows you to actually experience lasting happiness, joy, and satisfaction in life?

You do.

Happiness Comes from Internal Forces (i.e., You)

It’s internal. You, ultimately, decide how happy, satisfied, content, fulfilled, joyful you will be despite whatever external factors exist in your life right now. You can’t control a lot of those externals, but you get a say in how you react and respond to them.

You are the only one who makes meaning out of those externals, out of your circumstances or the situations you experience. A house is not inherently the thing that makes you successful, secure, happy, an adult, doing well, important. A house is inherently a building and that’s pretty much it. We control what it means to own a house (or to not).

Does any of this mean “don’t buy a house?” No. It means, “don’t buy a house and think it will make you happy if you are not happy right now.” In fact, I’m actually in the very first stages of exploring the idea of buying a house with Eric somewhere in New England. Our idea is to find a place we can buy and hang on to for the long-term, using it as a vacation property for now (we’ll keep renting in Boston) and eventually moving to it full-time.

That’s the idea, anyway, and we’ll see how it plays out. Like I said, it’s early. We’re exploring the options. We haven’t decided on anything. But when we do, we won’t base that decision on the falsehood that buying something = more happiness. Whether we buy or not, we know our joy comes from within us and from our decisions in how we act, respond, and react — not in our decisions around what we own or don’t own.

If you chase external factors and hope catching one will make you happy, you will never stop running. I’d invite you to step off that treadmill. Take a break; stop. Breathe. You don’t have to go anywhere or keep following false formulas that will never equate to the happiness you want.

You are the only person who can deal with you, meaning the internals that set your average happiness temperature. If you’re miserable, things and stuff and even experiences will not save you. You can’t look to externals for relief. You have to look inward and see what’s there.

There might be a lot to work through, and much to clear away first — but among all the mess there is also your source of joy and light and happiness with your life. That will always be in you, not outside of you.