There’s a secret to contentment that selfish people never accept

I’m going to tell you a secret.

You can get far more satisfaction in your own life by bringing joy to others than you can by pursuing pleasure for yourself.

This shouldn’t be a secret, but it seems to be. Almost everyone I know spends his or her time chasing pleasure and ego satisfaction and material goods. For the most part, these people seem remarkably uninterested in making anyone else happy. They’re often indifferent to the people they claim to care about — their friends and family, even — and they’re frequently hostile to strangers.

So if it’s true that bringing joy to others is a clear path to satisfaction for you, why don’t people do that? They either don’t know this secret — or else they can’t believe it’s true.

But I’d like to suggest something simple. If you don’t believe what I’m telling you is true, why don’t you try it? Even if you’re the most selfish person you know, wouldn’t you be a fool not to test what I’m telling you?

If you could have much more life satisfaction and happiness in your life — at little real cost to you — wouldn’t that be an incredibly good deal?

Here’s what I’ve learned from painful experience. The more I strive to make myself happy through pursuing the things our culture values — and the less I pursue connections that bring joy to others — the less happy I am.

That doesn’t mean that pleasure and money and ego-satisfaction never bring me any happiness. They often do. But the happiness those things bring is fleeting. I can be excited about getting something that I’ve thought I wanted, only to find that all the work that went into that thing quickly seems worthless.

The thing I’ve wanted — which I’ve been sure would bring me happiness and excitement — quickly seems routine. In a few days or weeks or maybe months, I find myself feeling the need for more.

And every time I want a new “more” thing, that becomes another time-consuming mountain I have to climb. The things I have to do to gain these pleasures and material goods tend to consume more and more of my time and effort — and the satisfaction seems to shrink all the time.

For me, this has been a terrible tradeoff.

What I’ve learned is that we humans are hard-wired for connection with one another. You can say that evolution programmed it into us over the millennia — by allowing those who showed this trait to survive — or you can believe, as I do, that our creator designed us this way.

Whatever the reason, we need each other. We need the connections we find with friends, family and strangers. But we lose sight of that — because we buy into the idea that the more selfish we are, the more we’re going to get ahead.

We look at people with money and power and material things that we don’t have — and we’re envious. We think we deserve those things just as much as those people do. Maybe even more. We look at their faults. We see their selfishness and their striving for more.

And we often imitate those people, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously. We forget that connection brings us satisfaction. (Not just big, long-term connection, but even brief, momentary connections.) We believe that nicer cars and fancier houses and expensive gadgets and vacations will surely bring us what we want.

This becomes our programming.

More. We want more. We want what he has. We believe we would be happy — finally — if we could just have a life like hers.

As this sickness spreads to more and more of our society — reinforced by almost all of popular culture and business culture and an overall culture of envy — we forget that connection with friends, family, neighbors and strangers brings more satisfaction than that new Mercedes ever will.

We become blind. We become zombies wandering through life — imitating the behavior of those around us who are pursuing these same goals.

So how can we have more satisfaction in life?

We can stop constantly pursuing more. We all need to produce enough to live at a basic, decent level. We could argue about what that level is. I’d make the argument that it’s less than your ego thinks, but it’s undeniable that the vast majority of us have more than what we need to be at that basic level.

If we could get off the merry-go-round that our culture tells us is normal, we could have minds that were more clear to think and to feel. We could notice the people around us.

We could talk to others and care what they have to say. What they think. What’s happened to them. We might find that when we care about what happens to these strangers — or friends and family — they’re a lot more interesting than we noticed when we were so consumed by our selfishness.

I’ve learned that most people are interesting if you take the time to talk to them and learn their stories. Even if your interaction with a person isn’t long enough for that, you’ll find that just being sincerely interested in others — being polite and welcoming and decent to them — will often make people feel genuinely connected to you. At least for a moment.

Making those connections — with friends, family and strangers — costs us nothing. But when we start feeling the connections that come from such interactions — the big ones and the small ones — we realize that people appreciate us. They like us. At least some of them do.

And the connections that come from those interactions will change the way we feel about ourselves and about them. It will make the world seem brighter. It will give us more of a sense of joy and satisfaction — about others, about life and even about ourselves — than it will to pursue the things we’re taught to chase.

I’ve found all of this to be true. I’ve proven it to myself through experience. I stumbled into this truth by accident, but I’ve found that it never fails me. I sometimes forget it. I sometimes fail myself. But this principle has never failed me.

So even if you’re selfish and don’t care about anybody but yourself, you might prove this to yourself through experiment. If you pursue it honestly and consistently, it will work.

But by that point, you won’t be the selfish and unsatisfied person you used to be. You might be shocked to discover that this secret can change your life.

You have remarkably little to lose by trying. And if you do it honestly, you may discover that what you’ve been chasing was never what you needed at all.