…it’s caring for others. Not just in your mind, but with your actions. That’s it. That’s really all there is to it. Finding a way to do that, and making it your chief purpose, is the best chance at happiness.
Even if you have a job you hate, as long as you make your chief purpose outside of work caring for others, and you can see that work as a means to enable you to care for others outside of work, you can be happy, in my experience.
FWIW it is not just your experience. There is lots of research that backs it up -
A wealth of research now demonstrates that altruism is often positively correlated with subjective well-being, which comprises both high life satisfaction and experiencing more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions in daily life.[15] Two recent global investigations have found this at both the geographic and individual level using data collected from countries around the world.
I am skeptical that caring for others will make an unhappy person happy. I think it’s the other way around: a person who is already happy will want to care for others.
I thought Charles Dickens had settled this:
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness.
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”
Not sure if it is enough to make an unhappy person happy, but experimental interventional studies are supportive that it can make the average person happier.
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/14/2/61?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Not just selection bias.
In a larger sense it’s about having a sense of purpose. A reason to get out of bed every morning.
Caring for others is the best way to have a sense of purpose. It’s possible to maintain a sense of purpose without really caring for others, say for example a job that is considered ‘important’ but doesn’t really do much to directly help people, like being a high-level businessman or a stockbroker, or something like that. But there’s a hollowness at the center of it. I think that’s why people who depend on their jobs for their sense of purpose often die mere months after they retire. But if caring for others is your sense of purpose, you can always find some way to fulfill that.