Iris Mauss

But it did stop raining and we went ahead and other things went wrong, of course.

The piñata, you know, had gotten...

drenched in rain.

And so when the piñata bashing was supposed to happen, it took just one swing and the whole thing just sort of sadly flopped down.

And kids, they didn't want to play the games that I had planned for them.

They did their own thing.

And it was a big disappointment and sort of like

bordering on disaster.

When my son was bawling, standing in the rain, I thought, wow, this is actually the worst birthday party ever.

we found that people who are very intent on being happy, those same people, somewhat ironically, in general, have lower levels of wellbeing, higher levels of depressive symptoms, and paradoxically, lower levels of overall happiness.

So it seems that

the more perhaps the more intent they are on being happy, the less they actually manage to be happy.

High expectations in other life domains can be a good thing, right?

We might strive toward doing really well in school and then we work hard toward getting a good grade.

We might fall short of it, feel disappointed, and that might motivate us to work harder and

But in the domain of happiness, there's sort of a paradox there, right?

In that if we're disappointed when falling short of our goal that we're striving for, the high standard, that disappointment in itself contradicts the very goal.

So the more we strive toward the goal of happiness, the more we undermine our ability to actually get there.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

Yeah, so this was actually for New Year's Eve 2000.