In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson asserted that the pursuit of happiness was a self-evident truth and an inalienable right. The concept is everywhere, from advertisements to “happily ever after.” A search for “happy” on Amazon Books produces over 70,000 results and at least as many definitions of that word. We live in a culture built around the belief that we should pursue our own happiness. What if that pursuit is making us miserable?
The evidence says it might be, especially for young people. In the U.S., one in two twelfth-grade girls and one in three twelfth-grade boys are not satisfied with themselves. Nearly four in ten high school students report persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness. They look for community online instead—94% of teens log on daily—and even when they are physically together, they’re still on their phones: proximate but alone. These are the students who are coming into our college classrooms.
This is a life-and-death issue. Loneliness and social isolation carry health risks comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes per day and can increase the risk of premature death by more than 26 percent. Statistically, in a high school class of 30 students, six students have considered suicide, four have made a plan, and three have attempted it. In the most recently reported year, we lost 6,533 Americans ages 10 to 24 to suicide. The pursuit of happiness does not seem to be going well and is the reason I wrote The Happiness Crisis: How Adversity Can Build a Resilient and Joyful Next Generation.
I see at least two problems with pursuing happiness as a goal. The first is how we seem to live out our definitions of happiness. For many of us, happiness is circumstantial and self-focused, and it withers in struggle: if reality exceeds our expectations, we’re happy; if it falls short, we’re not. Second, happiness as a goal requires measuring progress toward it, and that measurement erodes it. The very act of measuring happiness establishes the distance between our ideal state and reality, which breeds the dissatisfaction it was meant to solve.
Joy > Happiness
To be fair to Jefferson, his version of happiness was based on Aristotle’s eudaimonia—the pursuit of virtue that results in flourishing. That’s a far cry from our modern version, which centers on self rather than others. The Declaration’s happiness would look, to us, more like joy.
I work with school leaders from all over the world and find that when people believe joy is durable and grounded in lives lived for and with others, those same people often realize the depth of their struggle determines the peak of their joy. As Christians, we should be the most joyful people in the world because we serve a God who exists in a three-in-one relationship, and we are the overflow of that relationship. We know that joy is not freedom from struggle; joy is the fuel to struggle well.
To find more joy, we need to call our students back to the ABCs: adversity, belonging, and curiosity.
Adversity
When we read scripture, joy is almost always paired with struggle (e.g., Psalm 30:5, John 16:33, Hebrews 12:2, James 1:2). Over the past four summers, I have given Baylor University’s academic welcome talk to over 20,000 students and parents. In that talk, I welcome students into four years of struggle. That might seem counterintuitive, but it is one of the best gifts we can give students if we believe that struggle and joy are connected. To prove this, we only need to ask ourselves: who are the most joyful people we know? They are probably not the people who have the easiest lives. Additionally, our students might be happy if they get an “A” on a paper that ChatGPT wrote for them, but that is not joy. They experience joy when they work hard and earn the reward that is often much more than a grade. Students do not need “to grow a backbone;” they need to do hard things that develop the muscles around the backbone that will let them do harder things in the future.
College exams are always a challenge, but as professors, we hope they do not cause students to spiral. Sadly, that is exactly what happened for one college student when she had a panic attack during an exam.
Later, when she met with a therapist about it, the therapist asked her to describe in detail what had happened.
The student said she became “flushed, and lightheaded”; her heart “was pounding, and her hands felt clammy.” She felt like running out of the room—but she did not leave. She took the test and “did okay.”
The gripping fear of another panic attack, however, was keeping her from attempting a second test.
The therapist tried to help the student positively reframe the first test as an example of perseverance through anxiety, but the student was resistant. She persisted in telling herself a story of anxiety that was keeping her from functioning adequately.
“Yes, but I had a panic attack,” was her habitual reply to the therapist.
For the student, the story was all about the panic attack and her deficiencies. Even though perseverance was evident in her story, she would not focus on anything positive and found herself in a vicious cycle of paralyzing inadequacy.
She needed to understand how she overcame the panic attack and own the fact that she persevered. Only then would she release her sense of unworthiness and enter a world where she was capable of becoming more.
Belonging
Baylor is an ideal place to welcome students into adversity because we can pursue joy through Truth and love. Regardless of the faith background students bring to Baylor, we can hospitably welcome them into conversations where they can hold their perspectives up against Truth in a loving community. That is not always the case at universities or disciplines where faculty “steeped in postmodern theory,” assert that “the insistence that a single truth exists is a fallacy and objectivity itself, a tool of oppression.” As Christians, we know that Augustine was right when he asserted that, “All truth is God’s truth,” and we are free to pursue joy when we are grounded in truth. We do that best when we are in communities where we know we matter.
Belonging is the knowledge that we matter to others and they matter to us, which is knowledge we gain by going through hard things together. We may enjoy the fun-loving, carefree friend, but we need the person who shows up when things are hard. Carrying burdens together is what confirms that we belong. Sadly, our students feel increasingly disconnected from other humans. In 2025, 72% of teens reported using chatbots for companionship. Before we criticize teens, one in five adults report having had an intimate relationship with a chatbot. That is not belonging.
Curiosity
We need to help our students know they matter so they can be more curious in an increasingly incurious world: instead of dismissing others we disagree with, we can lean into the experiences that shaped their view. When I meet people, I often ask: What was the high point, low point, or turning point of your life? It’s a question that asks for a little adversity up front, but it gets us closer to belonging and curiosity than small talk about the weather ever could.
The goal is not to see some students, or even all students, but each student. God does not see all of us; He sees each of us. As scholars, professors, and humans, that should always be our goal as well.
As a country, we are blessed to live in a place where joy emerges every day through life and liberty. Maybe we can improve upon the Declaration’s aspiration by ending our pursuit of happiness and beginning to embody joy.
Jonathan Eckert is the Lynda and Robert Copple Chair for Christians in School Leadership and Executive Director of the Baylor Center for School Leadership and the author of The Happiness Crisis: How Adversity Can Build a Resilient and Joyful Next Generation.
