Abbie Schiller on the Misguided Pursuit of Happiness

Gwyneth Paltrow (0:00)

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SPEAKER_2 (1:11)

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He squints, reads it again, smiles, and says, dang, that's a good offer. The highest form of approval. No haggling. No hassle. No one called him boss. He's still on the couch. Astonishing. Sell your car today on carvana.com. Pickup fees may apply.

SPEAKER_3 (1:44)

When you are pioneering anything or introducing new ideas to the culture, you get criticized.

Abbie Schiller (1:50)

You do?

SPEAKER_3 (1:51)

Yeah.

Abbie Schiller (1:52)

Did you hear about that?

SPEAKER_5 (1:53)

I didn't find the one. I found someone I respected, and we made it the one.

SPEAKER_6 (1:58)

In the sort of longing kind of view of love, people understand each other as if by magic.

SPEAKER_7 (2:03)

Nothing in itself is addictive on the one hand, and on the other hand, everything could be addictive if there's an emptiness in that person that needs to be filled.

SPEAKER_5 (2:11)

I now know that nobody changes until they change their energy. And when you change your energy, you change your life.

Gwyneth Paltrow (2:19)

I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. This is the goop podcast, bringing together thought leaders, culture changers, creatives, founders and CEOs, scientists, doctors, healers and seekers here to start conversations. Because simply asking questions and listening has the power to change the way we see the world.

Here we go. One of our favorite returning guests, goal coach and author Abbie Schiller is back. And today she's making the case that happiness might be the wrong goal. It turns out the more we chase it, the more it slips away. And what many of us are really after isn't happiness at all. It's relief.

In this episode, she explains why heavy emotions like jealousy and resentment are actually helpful and why so many of us feel overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time. She also shares nine small shifts we can make starting today to feel better. Here's Abbie.

Abbie Schiller (3:22)

Hi, I'm Abbie Schiller. I'm a goal coach specializing in helping women figure out and get what's next. And I'm so glad to be back on the goop podcast for my fifth time. Today, I want to talk about the misguided pursuit of happiness. Don't get me wrong. I think happiness is an amazing feeling. And as I've mentioned in past podcasts, all feelings are simply vibrations that we experience in our body. They're just messages that we get from our thoughts.

But happiness and the over indexing of happiness, particularly in Western culture, has gone bananas. The pursuit of happiness is a massive, multi-billion dollar global ecosystem. It is deeply ingrained in what we think we should be striving for. We wish people happy birthdays. We have it written into the Constitution, the pursuit of happiness. Every parent I've ever spoken to says they just want their kids to be happy. And we don't put any context around this, because the assumption without that context is that we're supposed to, that we deserve, that we should be granted, that it is our right to have a life filled with happiness. And my friends, that's just not how reality works. Do you know one person in the history of human beings that has lived their entire life filled with just happiness? Thankfully, no, because responding to tragedy with happiness would be super weird. Responding to complicated challenges with happiness would also be weird. Responding to death and awful circumstances that are part of life would be weird. Happiness is one note in the symphony of human emotions that we could be paying attention to. We might instead want to say we want our children to grow up to be full of aliveness, or full of presence, or full of purpose, or full of possibility.