when “happiness is a choice” misses the point

It's not true that happiness is a choice.

Not at first. Not for a lot of people. Maybe not for you.

When you're deeply unhappy, “happiness is a choice” isn't so much wisdom as an accusation. It assumes you have that choice available. A lot of us don’t—at least not yet.

At best, it’s a half-truth.

If someone is unhappy, being happy is less like a choice and more like a practice. More like a skill. More like a habit. Something learned over time. A way of relating to the world. A way of deciding how to be in the world.

But it is not automatic.

The people who toss out "happiness is a choice" as a kind of platitude are often people for whom the conditions of happiness were already automated. The ability to orient to the world in a positive way was either taught to them early, or they just happened to have a more cheerful disposition, or they grew up in a relatively stable family where the choice really is simpler.

Being upset about something that happened is easier for them to escape. The feeling of "I'm hurt, but I'll be okay" is just… built in. They grow into that kind of emotional wisdom in the same way they grow into an adult body.

But that is not a given.

These ways of seeing the world are not baseline settings. They're developmental achievements. They're skills. They are not guaranteed in one's emotional or psychological development. Some people never get them, at least not early on. Others have them partially and then lose them under the weight of life.

And then there's another layer: the people who haven't had it easy, but also haven't had capital T Trauma—no obvious, cinematic catastrophe, but a level of hardship that leaves wounds deep enough that happiness isn't even on the decision list. It's not that they won't choose happiness. It's that happiness doesn't even show up as an option.

Even when someone wants to be happy, when they genuinely strive to be happy, they can find themselves consistently beaten down by their own wounds. That can stretch all the way into serious mental illnesses—psychosis, BPD, bipolar, and other real and serious afflictions. For many of them, happiness isn’t just “hard.” It’s often neurologically and psychologically out of reach for long stretches. It is not a simple choice.

While I'm no doctor, nor am I omniscient, I can at least speak for myself.

happiness that wasn’t even on the menu

I wanted to be happy for as long as I can remember. I knew I wanted to live a good life. It was also really, really hard for me to be happy. I didn't understand why.

This goes back to childhood and my teenage years. I struggled with a very serious depression for a very long time and was told that it was normal. I became unconscious to it because it was narrated to me as a universal human experience. This is just life. Life is suffering.

And yes, everybody suffers. But my unconscious interpretation was: I guess everybody is just sad all the time.

It took a very long time to realize that no, that is not what is meant by the idea that being human entails suffering. Yes, suffering is an unavoidable part of the experience, but it is not the inability to be happy. Those are distinct things.

I had to claw my way up to being happy.

Now I can proudly say that I am happy. I live a good life. It is not without suffering. It is not without struggle. But in the past year or two, I've experienced more happiness than in my entire life before that.

It took me that long to gain the skill of being happy. To actually enable the choice. To create an option that simply did not exist for me before.

I repeat: happiness was not an option.

“look on the bright side” doesn't help

I had family and friends who were genuinely perplexed by why it was so hard for me to be happy when, on paper, so many good things were in my life. I was capable. I got into good schools. I hit achievements. I excelled at different things.

So I got all the classics:

"Don't be so negative."
"Look at the bright side."
"You have so much to be grateful for."

For me, it was confusing. I have an obsessive mind. (Still do.) That obsessive mind was not able to unlatch itself from painful experiences. It hyper-focused. It obsessed over small things that caused me pain: a social mishap, a fear that I had offended someone, a worry that my financial life would collapse, anxiety about whether I would ever be a "successful person," fear that people didn't actually like me.

The content of the obsessions ranged from tiny to grandiose: social, financial, existential. The common thread was fixation.

And I simply did not have the tools to choose happiness with that kind of mind. Telling me "just choose to be happy" was like telling someone without legs to "just run a marathon."

Years of therapy. Years of spiritual seeking. Some experimental psychiatry. Exhaustive reflection.

All of that, over a very long time, is what finally opened up the possibility of choosing happiness.

Now, most of the time (not all the time, but most of the time), I can shift my perspective. I can turn disappointments or frustrations into opportunities instead of wallowing in them. Instead of letting them derail me or define my emotional state, I can use them.

I have a whole toolkit now—stories, frameworks, apertures—that I can use to change what would otherwise be a frustrating or painful moment into something I can at least tolerate, and sometimes even thrive with.

This ranges from big things, like losing tens of thousands of dollars in financial mistakes (extremely painful for me, having grown up with tight finances), to small personal disappointments, like a friend not texting me back to hang out.

I'm able to shift those into perspectives that let me let them go—or better yet, turn them into a practice ground for my own spiritual growth.

mandalas, missing photos, and letting things go

One of my favorite frameworks for this is the idea of a mandala.

I think about this a lot when I travel. I want to capture everything: every image, every detail, every moment. I'm excited to record and preserve it. I imagine 85-year-old Sasha, who may not be able to do these things anymore, wanting to revisit them.

And then… sometimes I miss the moment. I forget my camera. I'm tired. I'm overwhelmed. The file corrupts. The thing I wanted to hold onto gets swept away.

In those moments, I try to remember:
That's part of the mandala.

You build something beautiful and intricate—and then it goes away. That is the point. Non-attachment is the virtue. The loss is not a bug; it's baked into the practice.

turning a tax gut-punch into a donation

So too with financial loss.

I joined a company recently. I had the opportunity to do an early exercise on my equity and I missed it. Now I have that opportunity again, but at a much higher threshold, where I’ll take a significant tax hit.

Ouch. Painful. Not easy.

The idea of "just losing" that money because of a mistake was eating at me for months.

Old me would have taken that as proof that I’m careless, doomed, irresponsible. Another reason to spiral.

Instead, I started asking: Okay, this hurts. But is there any way to be more skillful about it?

That’s when I learned about a DAF, a donor-advised fund—a structure where you can put money into an investment account that will eventually be donated to a charity or nonprofit. The money can sit and grow; it doesn’t all have to go out right away.

I’ve wanted to build a nonprofit to help musicians study non-Western music around the world. So I can direct some of that money there. When it's eventually formed—whether under a fiscal sponsorship or a formal 501(c)(3)—those funds can flow into it.

This gives me a lot more peace. Instead of thinking, I just lost all that money to taxes because I messed up, I can think:

At least the portion I would've paid in taxes can be directed to something I care about.

Maybe I would've used that money differently if I'd acted earlier. Maybe this is a forced path. But at least now I can turn what would’ve been a pure loss into seed funding for a dream—or, if not that dream, other charitable organizations or my religious community.

The mistake is still real. The pain is still real. But I can do something with it. That’s the skill.

so… is happiness a choice or not?

SideQuest stories aside, here's the main thing I'm trying to say:

Yes, in a reductionist way, happiness is a choice. But I think "choice" is fundamentally the wrong word.

Happiness is a skill.
Happiness is a practice.
It's something you learn over time.

And sometimes people can't learn it for a while, or not in full, because of their afflictions, their wounds, and the cards they've been dealt.

Yes, people are still responsible, ultimately, for their own happiness. It is still on each of us to climb our particular mountain and see if we can live a good, fulfilling, happy life.

And if not a happy one, then at least a meaningful one.

As Viktor Frankl suggests, there's a kind of alchemy available to us: turning suffering—even the worst kind—into meaning. Sometimes that meaning is more important than "being happy" in the conventional sense.

So my call here is for more empathy, especially toward those who struggle.

Don't dismiss them.
Don't assume they just don't want to be happy.
It's far more likely that they can't—yet.
They don't know how, and they're frustrated by that.

Nobody actively wants to be unhappy.

And if you are experiencing unhappiness in your life—struggle, stuckness, that sticky, gray heaviness—you may not believe this, but:

There is hope.
There is a path forward.
There is an ability to learn how to be happy.

It can take a long time. It can require help. It can demand many years of persistence and a frankly unfair amount of suffering. At least, my journey did.

But it's possible.

Happiness is not a simple switch you flip.
It's not a single moment of willpower.

It's a process.