Pursuing Happy-ness

Tonight we watched The Pursuit of Happyness at home during movie time. Will Smith delivers an incredible performance, capturing the emotional weight of poverty while also showing something even more powerful—resilience. That quiet, stubborn determination to keep going, no matter how many times life pushes back.

From https://medium.com/@LilyLii/a-dive-into-the-pursuit-of-happiness-106090232749

His job is to sell these expensive bone density scanners to doctors. Just selling two in a month would be enough to cover basic expenses like groceries. But the sales don’t come. Instead, things fall apart one by one. He loses some of the machines while rushing through city buses, constantly moving, constantly trying, yet failing again and again.

At home, the pressure builds. His wife, overwhelmed and exhausted, eventually leaves. The landlord kicks them out. And still—he keeps going.

What struck me most was not just the hardship, but his focus. In the middle of all this chaos, he is laser-focused on getting an internship at a stock brokerage firm. He keeps showing up. He asks people simple but powerful questions: “What do you do? And how do you do it?” He waits outside the building just for a chance to talk to a manager.

One day, he manages to ride in a cab with one of the firm's partners. During that ride, coincidental but as an unrelated opportunity, he solves a Rubik’s cube that the man had been struggling with. It’s not his resume. Not his background. Not his experience. It’s his persistence—and his ability to solve a problem—that leaves an impression.

Watching his journey made me stop and think:

What does it mean to "pursue" happiness? Do we have to chase happiness to get it?

The Bird That Carries Us

I started imagining it like this:

A wild, tropical bird—colorful, strong, flying forward with purpose. And I am riding on it.

Each part of the bird represents something different.

The left wing is support and trust—family, friends, even pets. The quiet forces that keep us balanced when things feel unstable.

The right wing is financial stability and mental health. Without these, flight becomes shaky, unpredictable. In that case, laser focus on goals and the resilience helps (as in the movie).

The legs of the bird are effort and resilience. The ability to keep pushing, to keep trying, to stand back up after failure.

And the bird’s head—its direction—is everything: Goals, dreams, meaningful contributions. That thing in the distance that gives the flight a reason.

But the bird is not flying in still air. There are winds. On one side, forces that can push down—risk, rejection, feeling unqualified, being excluded, comparing ourselves to others.

On the other side, forces that lift and help —luck, opportunity, being supported, starting a little ahead, being seen.

So the question becomes:

How Do We Keep Flying?

Maybe it’s not about perfect conditions. Maybe it’s about learning how to move with what we have. We lean on support when we feel weak. We build stability from within when things outside are uncertain. We keep showing up—even when results don’t come immediately. We adjust. We adapt. We try again.

And maybe most importantly, we learn to let go—of comparison, of the feeling of being behind, of the constant voice saying “I am not enough.”

The Equation of Happiness

In the book The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel presents a simple equation that inspired me:

Happiness = Results – Expectations

Such a simple idea—but so powerful. So we DO have a lever here. If I cannot always change my results, maybe I can adjust my expectations.

Because the opposite is also true. We can easily make ourselves unhappy by constantly increasing expectations. Wanting more. Comparing upward. Looking at the “next table.” The book talks about people who had everything—wealth, success—but kept chasing more, looking at billionaires while being millionaires, and eventually losing everything. Not because they didn’t have enough—but because they didn’t know where to stop.

The Power of “Enough”

The lever to keep the expectations balanced is to say "Enough". What I have is enough. What I’ve done is enough. Where I am right now… can be enough.

I remember as a child, struggling with washing dishes cleanly—and my mom would say, “Good enough.”

Enough is not giving up. It’s knowing where to stop asking for more.

What Money Really Gives

Another idea from the book: The greatest intrinsic value of money is not luxury—it’s freedom. Freedom, flexibility, and time. The freedom to choose.The flexibility to adjust your life.The time to focus on what truly matters.

And those three things are deeply connected to happiness. In that case we can definitely say money will make us happier.

In Var Misin? Dogan Cuceloglu lists many factors unrelated to happiness: age, gender, being beautiful or not, IQ level, education level.

There are 7 things, including money are correlated with happiness:

1) Family relationships

2) Up to a certain point: income ($60k/year.)

3) Finding your job meaningful

4) Close friendships

5) The courage to exist and be independent

6) Health

7) The alignment between your values and your actions

So there is a correlation of money with happiness in second place, mostly for giving us the power to regulate our time. Secondly, in Rewired, Nick Ortner says "our relationship with money" is one of the biggest stressors, so in a way money can release the mental distress due to our bodies' survival instinct in our modern daily life. We are not being chased by bears, but bills and credit cards. Up to a certain point, yes, money correlates with happiness. Conversely, what about "greed?" and keep asking for more? Does that correlate with sadness? This brings us back to the "enough" point.

Letting Go of the Self

There is a Turkish saying:

“Without a goal, the mind is filled with self.”

When we don’t have a direction, we turn inward too much. We compare. We overthink. We feel behind. We question our worth. But when we move toward something meaningful, towards something bigger than ourselves, that noise quiets down.

Back to The Flight

There are many things we cannot control. The winds will not always cooperate. The path will not always be clear. But we are not powerless. With what we do have—a direction (laser focused), a willingness to adjust (using the lever), and the resilience to keep going (this was good enough)—we can hopefully continue flying toward something meaningful.