All that anybody really wants is happiness. We may spend every waking hour working hard at achieving the goals that we hope will make us happy. But does it really have the effect that we hope it will?

Share on Pinterest Does your pursuit of happiness make you happy?

I’m pretty certain we’ve all been there: you go to college to get a degree, thinking that a diploma will make you happy, and then you graduate and happiness still seems far off.

And then you think, “O.K., if I manage to get this amazing job, that will make me happy for sure.”

So, you work really hard, invest time and resources, and land your dream job, but then you start wondering if it was really worth all that hassle. And so on, for years.

Pursuing happiness as a goal, despite the fact that happiness is such an abstract, fluid — and even fickle — concept, has become something of an epidemic. A quick Google Trends search will reveal that global interest in the question of “how to be happy” has remained pretty steady over the past 5 years.

The top related query is “how to be happy or at least less sad,” and the countries that seem to have expressed the most interest in this question are the United States and the United Kingdom.

But what is this relentless quest for happiness actually doing to us? It may not come as a surprise that, apparently, dedicating so much energy to finding happiness is likely leaving us bitter and dissatisfied.

“People generally like to feel happy, try to feel happy, and want to be happier,” write the authors of a paper recently published in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, “even if they are already fairly happy.”

Aekyoung Kim, from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, and Sam Maglio, from the University of Toronto Scarborough in Canada, have been intrigued by the effects that making a goal out of happiness could have on the psyche.

So, in order to see what happens when we actively decide to try and make ourselves happy at whatever cost, the research duo devised four related studies, mainly looking at one specific outcome: how the pursuit of happiness impacts our perception of time.