“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
–Albert Camus
We are all curious about the meaning of life and about the best route to happiness, and most of us have some very specific thoughts along these lines. But they are only thoughts–not facts. The human mind has limitations that prevent us from ever knowing more than a small fraction of what we would like to know, so we have to live our lives with limited knowledge and an incomplete understanding of life.
I believe that happiness comes from being productive citizens and trying to help other people, and I think that life is to be lived, but not necessarily understood. Certainly, we should be trying to gain a better understanding of life, and we should all be seeking the “truth.” I very much admire and respect anyone who is seeking the truth, but I am not impressed by those who claim they already know the “truth.”
I have had a total of 20 years of formal education, and I have been doing research of one kind or another throughout my entire life. Logic tells me that all those years of schooling and research should have increased my knowledge. Nevertheless, I am more awed today by how much I don’t know than I was when I entered the first grade. When I graduated from high school, I was satisfied with what I thought I knew. However, after completing a four-year college degree, I had been exposed to so much new information that I didn’t know existed that I felt less comfortable about what I knew than I had at the end of high school. I felt even more this way when I completed my Ph.D. degree in economics four years later. It has been my experience that the more you know, the more you realize how much you do not know.
Our time on this earth is so limited that we dare not waste much of it trying to figure out the meaning of life or how to be happy. We learn about life by living it, so we should live it to the fullest. Some of the happiest people I have known were not consciously trying to find happiness. Instead, they were trying to live productive lives and to help others. It is no accident that people who are focusing their attention on others rather than on themselves end up being happy even though they never deliberately seek happiness. The happiness that almost always comes to such people is a byproduct of their effort to make others happy.
My favorite quotation consists of a few short words uttered by Sir James Barrie, the Scottish author and dramatist best known for his character Peter Pan. Barrie said, “Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.” I have used this quotation over and over to illustrate the self-evident truth of these words. It is virtually impossible for people who bring happiness to others to be unhappy themselves. We do not have to seek happiness in life. If we just use our God given talents to make life better for others, we will automatically make life better for ourselves, especially when we are not focused on ourselves.
Think about it.
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Copyright 2025
Allen W. Smith
