Making the happiness crisis in America even worse, especially for young people, are completely wrong diagnoses. What’s needed to increase happiness is not more money, more stuff or more “authenticity.” As Biola University professor and author Dr. Thaddeus Williams explains in his book “Don’t Follow Your Heart,” at the root of our problem is the terrible advice about how to achieve happiness that’s been repeated across our culture for over a decade now.
Here’s Dr. Williams to explain: “For years my children and I have played a game together called Spot the Lie. If they can identify a false idea in whatever we happen to be watching, they earn $1. When she was 9 years old, my daughter Holland (“Dutch” for short) came cheerfully bounding down the stairs, saying, ‘You owe me another dollar!’ ‘What did you find this time, Dutch?’ ‘The commercial told me I should follow my heart,’ she answered. ‘OK, so where’s the lie?” I asked. Her answer, and I recall it verbatim, was, ‘Daddy, I don’t want to follow my own heart. My heart is fallen. I’d way rather follow God’s heart.’ Cue the proud daddy tears. Let’s just say she earned $5 for that one.”
Some may think, “What a shame – he’s indoctrinating that poor girl.” The opposite is true. I’m trying to make a heretic out of her. I want her to question and ultimately rebel against the doctrines of our day. According to Barna, 84% of Americans believe the “highest goal of life is to enjoy it as much as possible,” 86% believe that to be fulfilled requires you to “pursue the things you desire most,” while 91% affirm that “the best way to find yourself is by looking within yourself.” It was Apple co-founder, black-turtleneck enthusiast and former Pixar chairman Steve Jobs who publicly declared, “There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
Let’s resist the propaganda of expressive individualism of our day and answer the late Steve Jobs with four good reasons not to follow our hearts.
First, our hearts are too dull. Validating our every feeling might be exhilarating at first. Yet we end up as what David Foster Wallace called “lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.” Looking inside our hearts does not give us limitless freedom so much as a bad case of claustrophobia. Don’t get me wrong, I have no doubt that our hearts are fascinating. But compared with following the heart of God, our hearts hold all the thrill of a prison cell.