"I have given up trying to be happy. It is no use an leads to nothing"

A voice of exhaustion speaks here, the resignation of someone who has discovered the paradox at the heart of happiness: the harder it is chased, the faster it recedes. Trying to be happy so often means monitoring one’s feelings, manipulating circumstances, curating experiences, and staging smiles. The self turns into both actor and audience, perpetually checking whether joy is present yet. That vigilance crowds out the very spontaneity and absorption that happiness requires, leaving only a hollow performance.

There is also a critique of purpose embedded in the phrase “leads to nothing.” Happiness, when treated as an end in itself, offers little direction. It can motivate consumption, distraction, or self-optimization, but it rarely anchors a life. Pursuits with contours, craft, love, service, truth-telling, give us handles to grasp. They organize time, set limits, and invite sacrifice. Emotional states emerge as byproducts of such commitments but cannot replace them. To give up “trying to be happy” is not necessarily to embrace despair; it can be a refusal to mistake a feeling for a telos.

For a performer, or anyone living under the gaze of others, the pressure to radiate cheer magnifies the problem. When joy becomes a professional duty or social expectation, sincerity becomes suspect and fatigue inevitable. Renunciation, then, can be an act of self-protection: no more compulsory sparkle, no more internal policing of mood. The space cleared by that refusal is where somber realities, grief, and ambivalence are allowed, and with them a more durable, less brittle kind of wellbeing.

What remains after letting go is the quieter work of attention. Instead of engineering happiness, one attends to what is real: the texture of a task, the needs of a friend, the pattern of light on a wall. Serenity, delight, even laughter may appear, but as grace rather than goal. The surrender is not to nothingness, but to life as it is, untidy, unguaranteed, and, when we stop insisting on it, unexpectedly generous.