Type in the word “happiness” and do a quick Google search. Odds are that the large majority of your search results will involve the following words or phrases: striving for happiness, chasing happiness, small steps that may lead to happiness or just generally the pursuit of happiness. Now think about it: how many times have you tried inculcating something in your day to day life, habits or thoughts, that you believed would ultimately lead to a happier self?

Taking control of one’s own happiness — however they may choose to understand and define it — is incredibly important. Being happy is not a static state; rather, it is a completely individual journey and an ongoing process. We live in a world that is constantly in flux and yet insists upon conceptualized happiness and individual well-being in increasingly counter-intuitive ways. At the core of our current, mainstream framing of happiness is the idea that we can achieve our own well-being through our own efforts, determination and grit. It is simply a matter of changing how we think, reforming our habits and actions and, in doing so, being responsible for boosting our happiness. Of course, this is not just on you alone — you can learn methods and skills that set you on the right path of striving for happiness. There are whole isles and shelves stacked with a wide range of self-help books waiting to be devoured. There are innumerable phone apps, coaching, consultancy and courses that claim to have gotten the science behind happiness right. But this message does not capture the full reality.

Here’s the thing: as college students, we are already under pressure to perform well in all or most of our endeavors, whether it be from peers, professors, academics, our families or simply ourselves. Think about your freshman week at NYU Abu Dhabi. You see and hear stories of students doing and achieving it all, from academics to Student Interest Groups to jobs and everything else in between. An environment that fosters exceptionalism as the norm is bound to be counterintuitive to achieving and sustaining mental wellbeing and happiness in the long run. But the emphasis here is not only on doing well; there is an equal emphasis on being well, perhaps in recognition of our competitive college environment, extending not just to our experience as NYUAD students but worldwide. We are taught to value our individual wellbeing, contentment, satisfaction and happiness above everything else, and rightfully so.

In the same space, however, we are also being taught and equipped with tools to continue to strive for socially acceptable ways of happiness. Indeed, we’re ultimately perpetuating the idea that being happier is also an outcome of effective performance and an acquired skill, one that can be learned from the range of resources made available to us — commercial or otherwise. And herein lies the problem.

Not only are we propagating a culture that compulsifies the need to constantly strive to be happy among all the other things that we ought to strive toward, but we are also overvaluing the power of our own individual thoughts and actions while somewhat choosing to deny the effect our environment has on our emotional well being. Emphasizing the ability of people to radically alter their own levels of happiness, packaging happiness as “thinking happy thoughts” and simply selling it as a thing that ought to be chased puts it into the same frame of things that are sometimes the actual cause of our dissatisfaction and lack of emotional wellbeing.

There is also the fact that we don’t always have to be happy or content and sometimes our mental space will not allow it. Our happiness is not completely in our control, since even the power of positive thinking cannot undo the range of things and structures that continue to make individuals unhappy or cause distress.

It’s important to join the dots: by making the pursuit of happiness a checklist that bases its ideas of success on performance and notions of productivity, happiness ceases to be an emotional response to our experiences. It cannot be turned into a formula that can be taught and learned and packaged as a hierarchy of things that one does to feel better and happier. So then, do you fight the system and change the paradigm? Maybe. Or maybe not — not if it doesn’t make you happy. Ultimately, being happy is an individual journey.