Waking up every morning, going to work, spending 8–10 hours on the job, and then using the tiny bit of leftover time on TV, social media, eating, drinking, and other shallow activities—can we really call that a life? And in such a life, is it something a smart person would expect happiness from?
In my earlier series, How to Know Yourself, I said that happiness is not a place you arrive at. If it were, the number of truly happy people in the world wouldn’t exceed the fingers on one hand.
So why do we search for happiness?
Technically speaking, what we call “happiness” is linked to hormones like dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins, and to the parts of the brain that process emotions—namely, the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. So in a sense, you can be “happy” with a little bit of chemistry and electricity.
But that’s not really the answer to why we search for happiness. These are just shortcuts to it. Let’s take an evolutionary view—why do we even have these hormones and neural circuits? Couldn’t we just go through life stone-faced, like a rock?
The feeling of happiness actually increases a person’s desire to survive and reproduce. After thousands and millions of years of evolution, nothing much has changed. The brain’s reward system pumps dopamine when you eat, releases oxytocin when you socialize to help you relax, and plays on your instincts for protection and belonging through sex and family to produce happiness.
As happiness increases, so does our willingness to solve problems. We fight challenges with more enthusiasm. Social adaptation also improves, and trust, connection, and empathy toward others grow stronger.
In short, our pursuit of happiness is the result of a biological process.
political note
My evolutionary explanation for my belief that racist, ultra-nationalist, and conservative people are often unhappy and resentful of others’ happiness is exactly this. And by “conservative,” I don’t just mean religious people—an atheist who considers their own values to be the absolute truth, feels disturbed by others’ lifestyles and happiness, and wants to interfere with other people’s lives is also conservative.
end political note
Why can’t we be happy—or why is it so hard to be happy?
If you’re saying, “No, I’m perfectly happy,” you can skip the rest and share your secret in the comments.
For the unhappy ones, let’s continue:
One of the biggest reasons is our dependence on simple dopamine and serotonin sources—social media, consumption, wanting to be like everyone else (in makeup, clothing, hobbies), entertainment culture, games, TV, sugar, alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, money, etc. Many of our daily habits completely mess up our brain’s reward system. Our happiness threshold is now sky-high. Even if heaven were real and the Messiah descended from the skies, you couldn’t make a devout believer happy; even if you gave the world to an atheist, you couldn’t make them happy. If tomorrow everyone turned into superheroes, they still wouldn’t be happy—yet millions can be happy just by listening to Uzi (the ones who’ve cracked the big secret).
The ones who haven’t cracked the secret keep struggling. They try and try, but it doesn’t work. They don’t realize how helpless their addictions make them. These addictions either turn us into completely indifferent individuals—inevitably isolating us—or into attention-hungry maniacs, where unconscious comparisons become the food that fuels our unhappiness.
On social media, even with “normal” use, we spend at least 3 hours a day. While scrolling through the timeline, watching funny videos, waiting at the bus stop, while our friend goes to the bathroom, during our own bathroom breaks, when we grab our phone to take a picture, or when we lift it to check the time—we inevitably end up on social media. This affects both our attention and our expectations from life.
Our minds are affected hormonally and physically. Some actions turn into reflexes and habits. Our bodies want to touch the phone, to open social media, without us even thinking about it. It’s no different from a drug or cigarette addiction.
Every time we look at the phone, tons of information flows in. Our brains can’t process all of it—it overloads, and like a browser with too many tabs open, it keeps trying to refresh those processes in the background. The result? We “crash” like a browser. Our brain says “wait,” but because our hormones aren’t being fed, that waiting turns into stress and a sense of unnecessary pressure.
As we consume this much information per second, our brains get used to the flow. That’s where the shift in our life expectations begins. We want everything to move fast. We want the good things in life, the things we’re waiting for, to happen right away. We want to reach our goals instantly. But life doesn’t move at that pace—not even at a millionth of it.
We develop reactions to negative things and keep chasing perfection. Because the stories, vacation photos, and selfies we see on social media are always the best. The best shot of the photos you take. The best shot you’ll ever see from someone else. Usually, it’s that person’s best moment. And it’s the same with negatives—the most extreme, the most shocking form of negativity. So we start thinking in extremes, which is just a basic survival shortcut the human brain uses: either 1 or 0, this or that. But real life isn’t like that. There is no such thing as a perfect you can actually reach.
We compare ourselves. We compare our lives to success stories, careers, family lives, relationships, the situations of our friends, what they share. We compare ourselves to whatever goes viral. Naturally, we form an image of what we “should” be—and if we don’t match it, we feel like we’re doing something wrong.
Marketing pushes us toward standardization. From our clothes to the places we visit, from the photos we take to even our physical appearance, we lose our originality by following “fashion.” We try to be like everyone else and push away difference—or we define difference itself within social media’s norms.
The result? When we think “sports,” we imagine a gym; “summer” means beach photos; “winter” means snow and skiing; “aesthetic” means lip fillers, breast implants, lifted hips, pushed-up chests, six-pack abs, broad shoulders, carefully styled hair, made-up faces, flawless looks. It’s the same in relationships, finance, career, music, art—everywhere.
Our success criteria become skewed. We normalize insane standards until they become the lens through which we judge ourselves and even our dreams. Can you really be happy that way?
We become lonelier. The more accessible everything gets, the more we “socialize,” the lonelier we feel. Our perspective on life becomes shallower. We fall into the illusion that there’s always something better out there, that everything is replaceable, that if one person leaves, another will come.
Our minds are always on what we don’t have. Because consumer culture is built on this: own something and feel special. Always do better, have better, so you can be different. We start thinking the same way in human relationships too—what we don’t have becomes more tempting. We boil down our unhappiness to what we don’t possess.
“If I had this, it would be better.”
“If I had that, things would be good.”
“If I did this, it would be better.”
“If I achieve that, my problems will be solved.”
And in the end, we become people constantly comparing, disconnected from our own reality and from ourselves—people who can’t build deep bonds with what they do have, with what’s around them. Which leads us to craving attention.
We seek attention. When we’re with friends and having a great moment, we instantly take a photo and post it on social media. Why? Isn’t living that moment enough? Aren’t the people who are there enough? Sharing it with people who aren’t there—doesn’t that become showing off? Or for the person who’s not there, a negative feeling?
Saying “you guys look amazing, I wish I were there” and posting a moment online for likes are both the same kind of attention craving. Likes, followers, comments, replies to comments—they’re all tools we use to feed our ego because the rules of today’s marketing world demand it.
We have to be special. Because we want to feel special. Just living, managing on our own, seeing as achievements the things we’ve done without an audience or reward—those don’t make us feel special anymore. They don’t feed our hunger for attention. So we use everything we have to feed it: the people we know, the possessions we own, the places we go, our families, our kids, our jobs, the things we do during the day—in short, our entire lives. We turn it all into fuel for this ego game.
We create a virtual reality for ourselves, and that virtual identity starts to overshadow our real one. We’re not the person we truly are, nor even the person we genuinely want to be—we’re the person most likely to get empty, meaningless attention from the majority.
If what the majority wants and thinks is always “right,” then there would never have been world wars or dictators. If the majority’s word were truly taken seriously, none of the scientists, artists, or heroes we know today would ever have existed.
The other problem with turning a virtual identity into your real one is that reality will never actually be like that. Life isn’t that easy, and it’s not full of perfection. Life isn’t just a collection of success stories, and nothing in life comes instantly. Behind every achievement, there’s hard work and sacrifice.
Relationships aren’t easy either—they grow stronger through arguments and conflicts. Normalizing our virtual selves inevitably creates conflict—both with our surroundings and within ourselves. The result of this conflict? Unhappiness, insecurity, a sense of failure, feeling inferior.
If you sat down calmly and thought about it, you’d see that the things you’ve achieved aren’t so small after all. The real problem is in your criteria—the ones that don’t belong to you but feel like they do.
Maybe even as I write these lines, deep down, I want attention. Not because I think what I’m writing is so important or so well-written, but because I have the urge to be heard. Maybe it’s just so I’m not talking to myself. Who knows? But even that is a good reason to ask myself—why am I writing and sharing this?
In the end, being bald or losing your hair, having big lips or small lips—it’s all normal. Wearing unbranded clothes, not following fashion, not wanting kids, preferring to spend your summer holiday in the mountains, not taking a winter holiday, being an introverted manager, not taking selfies, not sharing photos, not following influencers, not watching funny videos, not using hashtags, not being popular at work, not drinking coffee, never going to Starbucks, preferring public transport, not going to the gym, having a belly, being skinny, not wearing shirts, not wearing ties, never visiting exotic places, not being up to date on everything, not watching the news, not knowing the trends, not getting likes, not following, not having followers, not wearing accessories, not using perfume, not being into showing off, not dressing revealingly, not sunbathing, not feeling the need to talk about every topic, not having hundreds of hobbies, not going to concerts, not liking festivals, not caring about politics, not reacting to social events… all of these are NORMAL.
Chasing happiness is also normal and natural—but our criteria are wrong. To break free from this cycle, we need to free ourselves from simple pleasures and focus on our own lives. We need to shake off the constant feeling of “missing out.”
When we discover our real identities, reconnect with nature, slow down our lives, and learn to live by our own values—our pursuit of happiness will break free from its mainstream definition, and happiness will simply become a natural part of life.
bahadirhancicek 
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