You think you’re surrounding yourself with people and making your life easier. But in reality you’re just isolating yourself from the real world, and, in my experience at least, the more isolated you are from reality – the more removed you become from the person you’re naturally supposed to be – the harder you’re making your life and the less happy you become. You end up with something like a medieval court, with you as the monarch and everyone around you jockeying for position, scared of losing their place in the pecking order and fighting each other to see who can be closest to you, who can exert the most influence on you. It’s a grotesque, soul-destroying environment to live in. And you’ve created it yourself.

In an intriguing book called Bring Me the Rhinoceros: And Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life, John Tarrant, a Western Zen teacher and psychotherapist, outlines seven qualities that explain how Zen Buddhism uses koans to achieve this kind of breakthrough. Koans are riddles for which there are no rational answers.

Tarrant paints a vivid picture of how challenging this can be. In one of my favorite

passages, he puts it like this:

If you are used to living in a small room and suddenly discover a wide meadow, you might feel unsafe. Everyone thinks that they want happiness, but they might not. They might rather keep their stories about who they are and about what is impossible. Happiness is not an add-on to what you already are; it requires you to become a different person from the one who set off seeking it.

You may be blind to the very thing that will make your life feel worth living. You may be repressing the very source of your deepest satisfaction. You may be gullible, taking in the world’s insidious lessons in superficial satisfaction. Therefore, you have to dig deeper. Discover who you are and who you want to be. Don’t be dissuaded from that objective by the illusory promises of commercial life. Instead, be yourself.

Throughout this book, we’ll be addressing some of the common reasons why people have a hard time finding happiness and satisfaction in life, but there are a couple of general truths that should be acknowledged right off the bat.

The first is this: the good life may be a central concern for most people, but it is not the central concern of most modern societies. Life today is a haze of competing social, political, and cultural priorities, some of which have very little to do with improving people’s lives. The modern world prioritizes many things ahead of the lived experience of human beings.

The second reason is related and even more fundamental: our brains, the most sophisticated and mysterious system in the known universe, often mislead us in our quest for lasting pleasure and satisfaction. We may be capable of extraordinary feats of intellect and creativity, we may have mapped the human genome and walked on the moon, but when it comes to making decisions about our lives, we humans are often bad at knowing what is good for us. Common sense in this area of life is not so sensible. It’s very difficult to figure out what really matters.

These two things—the haze of culture and the mistakes we make in forecasting what will make us happy—are woven together and play a role in our lives every single day. Over the course of a life, they exert significant influence. The culture we live in leads us in particular directions, sometimes without our even noticing, and we follow along, outwardly pretending that we know what we’re doing, but inwardly in a state of low-grade confusion.