Oct 3, 2026
I am a child of the 1980s who idolized Madonna and Michael Jackson, playing their records on repeat on my beige and white Fisher Price record player as a kid.
I finally got to see a Madonna concert in 2015, and a few years before that, I was so excited to finally be able to see Michael Jackson perform live. He had reemerged from a long hiatus and was hosting a comeback tour called “This Is it.” It started with 10 shows at London’s O2 Arena and quickly expanded to 50 shows because of internet-breaking demand for tickets. Eighteen days before the first show, Jackson died of an overdose and all ticket sales were refunded. That was it.
I spend a lot of my life dreaming about the future. I am constantly dreaming and scheming about something I want to create or get or somewhere I really want to go. The miracle of our twin girls who came to us after 10 years of wanting and waiting helps me to remember the lesson I intellectually knew but couldn’t truly embrace during that period of time: Attachment creates suffering. I knew that. I believed it. I felt it as I suffered month after month. But, I couldn’t change the attachment to the outcome that I felt. Until I did, and it took a very long time. Now, I have what I so desperately wanted for so long, and what does this monkey mind do but wander over to other things I want, wading into the waters of attachment once again. Oh, I won’t bore you with the whole list. Suffice to say, it is long and full of help-the-world type of aspirations to end suffering and abuse of children and women and the planet (why can’t we just ban plastic and pollution and guns and bombs?) as well as live in Italy or Costa Rica or maybe on a boat and to learn to surf better and to write a book and maybe a song and maybe I have ADHD and maybe I’ll never be satisfied … or, maybe, I’ve just been doing the math all wrong.
Harvard Professor Arthur C. Brooks suggests happiness or life satisfaction equals all the things you have divided by all the things you want. You can be happier by wanting less, not by getting more of what you want. This is it. What you have right now. You can temporarily increase happiness, like very temporarily, by getting the things you want, but you can permanently and sustainably feel happier and more satisfied by reducing your wants. How do you reduce what you want? You can become a Buddhist, a Stoic or a Yogi, which I highly recommend, and/or you can create a reverse bucket list where you write down all your big dreams and ambitions and things you want and then cross them out one by one. You let them go and stop being attached to them. You still want them but in a cleaner way. You let go of needing them or thinking they will fulfill you. Can you get to a point of saying, “this is it” and truly feel ok about it? If you can, you’ll be happier.
The allure of more money, power, fame and pleasure will never replace meaningful relationships with friends and family, a sense of faith or spirituality and a life of purpose based on service, love and kindness. Those are the variables that equal a happy life. I’ve never been very good at math, but this equation makes a lot of sense.
This post originally appeared in my monthly column in The Aspen Times.
