The Pursuit of Happiness

One of the most important lessons I learned in my early twenties came during my second year in Israel. From the outside, life looked full of promise. But internally, I was struggling more than I knew how to name. All of my closest friends had moved away. I went from bubble and high energy to something entirely unfamiliar. I found myself facing depression without much understanding of how to meet it.

What stays with me from that time is not only the difficulty itself, but the framework that slowly gave me a way forward.

Not long after I arrived in Israel, I came across an idea from Rav Eliyahu Dessler in Strive for Truth that has stayed with me ever since: the things most capable of bringing a person lasting happiness are those within that person’s control. The implication is both simple and demanding. If we want to build stable inner lives, we have to build them around goals that are actually ours to pursue.

At first, this sounded obvious. Most people have heard some version of the same advice: do not base your happiness on other people; focus on what is in your control. But understanding an idea intellectually and living by it are two very different things.

At the time, much of my emotional life felt tangled up with the people around me. If my mother was having a hard day, I felt it deeply. If someone I cared about did not text me back, my mind could move quickly from uncertainty to self-doubt. I was not simply affected by other people’s moods and choices; I often felt governed by them. My sense of peace rose and fell with circumstances I could not actually control.

What changed for me, slowly, was not that I stopped caring so much. It was that I began to understand more clearly what was in my control. I could care deeply about another person without being in charge of their emotional state. I could love people without being able to secure the outcomes I wanted for them or from them. I could not make someone happy, make someone answer me, or make someone choose me. What I could do was decide how I wanted to show up: with kindness, honesty, steadiness, prayer, generosity, and self-respect.

That distinction changed more than I expected. A goal like “make another person happy” is not really a goal in the deepest sense, because its success depends on someone else’s inner world. A goal like “be supportive,” “respond with dignity,” or “act with generosity” belongs to me. The outcome may still vary. The relationship may still be complicated. But the work itself is mine.

Over time, I came to see that this is true far beyond relationships. So much of our unhappiness comes not only from pain, but from misdirected effort—from trying to carry what was never fully ours to carry. We exhaust ourselves chasing outcomes, responses, and reassurances that remain outside our hands, and then interpret our inability to secure them as failure.

One practical way I learned to consider what decisions are in my control are by thinking about goals in terms of layers. There are the large goals that give shape to a life. There are the medium goals that move those larger hopes forward. There are daily practices that keep a person grounded. And then there are the tiny good actions—the ones that may seem almost too minor to matter, but they stay with you when things feel stagnant and help restore movement.

The large goals are about the kind of contribution you hope to make in the world, what you want people to say about you at the end of your life, it’s your vision for you who you want to be. The medium goals are the projects and responsibilities through which that vision takes concrete form: the jobs you take, your hobbies and volunteer projects, the commitments you try to honor. The smaller daily goals are the practices that create steadiness: learning, gratitude, meditation, attention to health, care in how you speak and live. And then there are the tiny good things: taking a walk, making a real meal, reaching out to a friend, finishing one needed task, doing one thing that helps you feel a little more present in your life.

When I feel low, I try not to demand that I solve my whole life at once. I return instead to a much smaller question: what is actually in my hands today? Sometimes the answer is modest. Sometimes all that is available is one tiny good action. But often that is enough. Not because it erases pain, but because it interrupts helplessness. It reminds me that I am not powerless, and that a meaningful life is built not only through major decisions, but through small acts of alignment repeated over time.

This, I think, is part of what it means to take responsibility for happiness. Not to deny vulnerability. Not to pretend that other people do not affect us. Not to imagine that faithfulness always produces the outcomes we want. Rather, it is to keep returning to the space in which choice is still possible. We may not control every circumstance we live through. But we do retain some power over how we respond, what we practice, and what we build.

That lesson began for me in a painful season. But it has remained with me because it turned out to be larger than that season. It is not only a strategy for surviving difficult moments. It is a way of understanding human responsibility itself: to release what is not ours, to take up what is, and to keep moving—sometimes one very small act at a time.

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