Does happiness come from accumulating things or letting go?

At first, he was in a state of panic, wondering how he was going to survive. He didn’t speak Spanish and didn’t know anyone in the city.
At first, he approached people at the airport, telling them what had happened and asking for money, but no one believed him. He went to the police, but they were unhelpful too. For the first few nights, he slept rough on the streets, or on the beach, and stole food from finished plates outside restaurants.

However, once the initial panic and fear faded away, he felt a strange sense of well-being. One night, after about two weeks of being homeless, he fell asleep on the beach with a feeling of liberation inside him, and a sense of being – in his words – ‘in tune’ with a deeper part of himself. As a Buddhist, he recognized that this was a spiritual feeling, connected to ‘letting go of my normal identity and status.’ From this point, his perceptions seemed different too – his surroundings seemed more real and beautiful. Eventually, he went to the British Embassy, who loaned him the money for a return flight, but he felt no hurry to go back home – in fact, he waited another week before buying a ticket.

At first, when she realized that her beauty was fading and that men were no longer as attracted to her, she felt a sense of loss. But soon this switched to a sense of liberation, as she began to realize that she didn’t actually need the attention. She began to let go of her attachment to her appearance and realized that, by placing so much emphasis on it, she’d lost touch with her true identity. She began to feel more authentic and much happier.

The key to understanding these experiences is the concept of attachment. Normally, as human beings, we’re psychologically attached to a large number of constructs, such as hopes and ambitions for the future, beliefs, and ideas about the world, knowledge, status, and achievements. At the same time, there are more tangible attachments such as our possessions, our appearance, and our jobs or roles. All of these attachments support our sense of identity like scaffolding. They are the building blocks of our sense of ‘I’. We feel that we are ‘someone’ because we have hopes, beliefs, a job, or because we’re successful and attractive, and so on.

We think we need these attachments to feel happy, but paradoxically, letting go of them can bring – at least for some people – a deeper kind of well-being. Letting go makes us aware that the attachments actually clutter up our minds, and overburden us with demands. We feel a sense of clarity and openness, now that our ‘identity scaffolding’ has dissolved away. There’s a new sense of energy too since our mental energy is no longer consumed by maintaining the attachments.

But even more importantly, psychological attachments seem to obscure a deeper, more authentic part of ourselves. This ‘core’ of our being doesn’t need external happiness, because somehow it exists in a natural state of fullness and contentment.

In other words, it may be that we’ve been looking for happiness in the wrong place: not outside, but inside. It may be that true well-being comes not from accumulating things, but actually letting go of them.

About the author: Steve Taylor is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University and the author of several best-selling books on psychology and spirituality. For the last four years, he has been included in Mind, Body, Spirit magazine’s list of the ‘100 most spiritually influential living people.’ His books include Waking From Sleep, The Fall, Out of the Darkness, Back to Sanity, and The Calm Center, and  The Leap: The Psychology of Spiritual Awakening. His books have been published in 19 languages, while his articles and essays have been published in over 40 academic journals, magazines, and newspapers, including Philosophy Now, Tikkun, The Daily Express, The Journal of Humanistic Psychology, and others. Learn more at https://www.stevenmtaylor.com

Picture by Jolanta Talaikiene from EMN Museum of Art (above)