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May 8, 2018 - The Matt Walsh Show
27:08
Ep. 25 - Your Career Won't Make You Happy

We have fled the home and family life in pursuit of happiness, but in the process we have become the most depressed and confused society in history. That's because happiness and fulfillment is found not in professional achievement or material wealth, but in service to God and family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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So there's an article on the Daily Wire yesterday about the former first lady, Michelle Obama.
Maybe you remember her. She was at some kind of women's conference, and she was having a conversation on stage with an actress from the show, Blackish.
The actress's name is Tracy Ellis Ross.
Never heard of her, but she's an actress, apparently.
And the women were lamenting the fact that girls still dream of weddings.
And they still dream of Prince Charming.
This is a problem in the eyes of Michelle Obama and this other woman.
The two agreed that some women, Tracee Ellis Ross apparently included, can sacrifice family for the sake of a career and for professional ambition and for success and be happy as a clam.
It's a perfectly legitimate, fine, great choice that a woman can make.
In fact, it would seem that Mrs.
Obama, who is married with two kids, you may remember, thinks that this path is actually preferable, given the fact that she considers it a problem, that girls aspire to get married and have kids.
She wouldn't call it a problem if a young girl said she wanted to grow up to be an astronaut or a CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
That wouldn't be a problem.
But if a girl says she wants to get married and have kids and that's what she's dreaming of, In Michelle Obama's mind and in the minds of a lot of feminists and a lot of people in our culture, that is a problem.
It's an interesting thing because Americans are increasingly looking outside of the home for happiness.
We have fled the home in search of happiness and in search of fulfillment.
And the people who have rejected family life We're good to go.
She said, she provided during this interview or whatever it was, she provided some compelling evidence to prove that her decision to forgo family life for the sake of a job was the right call.
She said, she turned to the audience and she said, look where I'm sitting, right?
Because she's sitting, she's on stage and she's sitting next to the former first lady, which that of course is the peak and pinnacle of all happiness.
And so that proves that, look, my life is great, wonderful.
I'm a 45 year old woman.
I have no kids.
I have no family. But my life is so awesome.
And we're always told this.
The child-free people are always telling us how wonderful and great and just awesome and exciting their life is, which is the first hint that their life is not so great.
because when someone feels the need to constantly tell you their life is great and they're happy, it means their life is not great and they are not happy.
And I am talking here specifically about the quote, child-free, that is people who, they don't say childless, they say child-free, because childless makes it sound like they're missing something, child-free makes it sound like a child is a disease that they're free from.
So I'm talking about the people who choose to forgo family, to forgo kids for the sake of just a job and professional success.
That's what I'm talking about.
I'm addressing that because that is what Michelle Obama is pushing.
It's what a lot of people are pushing in our society.
I'm discussing that.
I'm not talking about people who are unable to conceive children or people who are never able to get married even though they want to or they choose not to get married for the sake of some other vocation.
Not discussing that.
I'm specifically talking about the people who choose this life of self-centeredness.
Okay? Just to clarify here, so you know who I'm talking about.
And the people who make that choice, again, they're always insisting that their life is so great.
And it's just so straightforwardly great.
The way they present it is they never have any feelings of loneliness whatsoever.
None. No, it's awesome.
Remember, there's this, you may remember the Time Magazine cover, a cover story on Time Magazine a few years ago.
And it was a cover about the child-free life.
And there was a picture of these two, this married couple smiling on the beach, kicking back in the sand.
And they were, you know, they were just so happy.
And then the headline there said, when having it all means not having kids.
And that's the way it's presented.
They have it all. They've got everything.
And they're just happy laying on the beach.
And that is what the child-free life is.
It is just a life on the beach.
No sadness at all.
It's utopia.
And yet, when I look around society...
I don't really see a lot of evidence of happiness.
In fact, what I see is a depressed, anxious, stressed-out nation of addicts and narcissists and people who compulsively stare at their phones and watch TV. Their entire life is lived on screens, and they're popping antidepressants.
I mean, that's what I see when I look around.
I don't see this I don't see people who are living in bliss.
I hear sometimes people claim that they are and they present themselves as if they are on Instagram or on Time Magazine covers or when they're giving interviews or when they're talking with a first lady on stage at a women's conference.
I hear that, but when I look around, I don't see any evidence of it.
I see a bunch of just zombies walking around who are barely just confused and lost and feeling hopeless.
That's what I see. And that isn't to say that all unhappy people are childless.
There's a lot of unhappy people with children.
What I'm saying is that we have a very flawed idea about happiness and our concept of how you attain happiness, which is, in our minds, you attain it selfishly through self-centered pursuits, through pursuing things for your own sake.
That clearly has not worked out.
As much as we claim that it has worked out, it hasn't.
We are more depressed and anxious now than we've ever been in history.
We're probably the most depressed, anxious country in the history of the world.
And so, obviously, we're not going about things in the right way.
With everything about our modern attitudes and our modern philosophies, there's constantly this disconnect between What is claimed and what is actually happening.
We're told that, okay, we adopt this philosophy, this way of life, and then XYZ will happen.
But then I look around and XYZ is not happening.
The exact opposite is happening.
Now, there are some studies that will insist that people without kids are, in fact, much happier than people with kids.
If you Google it right now, and I'm sure there are people furiously Googling it so they can disprove me with science, and they can leave a comment saying, no, Matt, scientifically, you're wrong, okay?
Because science has measured human happiness and fulfillment, and you see it's been tabulated here on this bar graph, and obviously, clearly, you're wrong.
And if you Google it, you will find, you'll see headlines saying that People without kids are way happier, way happier than people with kids.
There's a problem with these kinds of studies.
Number one, they assume an honest self-assessment.
The only way to measure someone's happiness is just to ask them, are you happy with your life choices?
Are you happy with the path you've taken?
Has it worked out for you? Do you feel fulfilled?
All you can do is ask them.
And it would require people who have sacrificed family for career, it would require them to look honestly at their lives and at themselves and to assess it.
But most people don't have the courage for that.
So instead they'll just say, oh yeah, sure, I'm so happy.
But they're not trying to convince us, they're trying to convince themselves primarily.
The second problem is that these kind of studies and surveys, they assume that people have a correct understanding of happiness, which most people don't.
Most people don't know what happiness is, so they don't know how to find it.
And they're unhappy, but they don't even know that they are unhappy because they don't understand what happiness is.
In other words, they don't know what they're missing.
They don't know what they could have and what sort of happiness and joy they could actually attain because all they've ever gone for is just this shallow, selfish, immediate kind of pleasure and indulgence.
That's all they've ever gone for. It's all they've ever had.
So they say, oh, yeah, well, I guess that's happiness.
It's not. It would be like if you wanted to find out whether people who exercise are happier or less happy than people who don't exercise.
And so you go to a guy on a treadmill who's on like mile three of the treadmill and he's sweating and he's exhausted.
And you go up and you ask him in the moment, hey, are you happy right now?
And the guy is uncomfortable and he's in pain and he wants to get off the treadmill, but he told himself he'd do five miles.
So right now, in this moment, he's probably not, he would not self-identify as happy.
And then, let's say then you go and you find a guy who's sitting on a couch eating Cheetos, and he's on hour five of a Netflix binge, and you ask him, are you happy right now?
Probably, as he's relaxing on the couch and just sitting there on his butt, he'll probably say, oh yeah, I'm so happy.
I'm just, I'm relaxing.
It's great. I'm happy.
Does that actually prove which path brings greater happiness?
Or does that prove that the guy on the couch is deluded and numb And the guy on the treadmill is working for something greater and bigger than what the guy on the couch is working for.
So maybe if you're doing your survey, you should wait a couple hours.
Wait till the guy is off the treadmill after a day spent eating healthy and getting exercise after an active full day.
Ask him then. And then ask the guy who spent all day watching TV as he's finally fading off to bed with his brain half melted.
Ask him. Ask them then how happy they are.
Better yet, come back in a few years.
Come back in a few years when the guy on the treadmill has been working out and exercising and being healthy this whole time.
And now he's older, but he's in great physical shape.
And he doesn't have a lot of the health problems that people his age have.
And then go to the guy who's been sitting on the couch the whole time and he's overweight, he's fat, he's got diabetes.
Let's do a comparison then to find out who's happier.
Who chose the better path?
Likewise, I'd be interested to see a follow-up study with one of these happy people, one of these happy, child-free people.
I'd be interested to see a follow-up study a couple decades from now.
Take some woman who chose profession, career, success over family, over kids.
Yeah, right now, when she's relaxing and she's getting ready for her third vacation of the year, yeah, maybe she'll say, oh, I'm so happy.
Check back in a couple decades.
When she's alone.
Maybe she was married before, but people who marry and choose not to have kids, their likelihood of divorce is much, much higher than people who do have kids.
So she's probably divorced by now.
And she's 55, 60 years old.
She's on the tail end of her career.
A lot of her high-flying ambitions have long since given way to reality.
She's being replaced by younger, more skilled people.
And she comes home every day to her great, wonderful, nice house that the housekeeper has kept in great shape.
And she's got all this nice stuff, all this nice, wonderful stuff, but nobody there to use it.
And she's got all this space, but nobody to fill it with.
In all these rooms, but no one to sleep in.
And she can take any vacation she wants, but she's been on all the exotic vacations.
They've lost their novelty by now.
And also, frankly, it's kind of depressing to go on vacation by yourself.
And most of the people at work are much younger than her, but the people that she knows, her friends who are her age, most of them, they're planning weddings for their grown children.
They're going to baptisms for their grandchildren.
They're planning family reunions.
They have all these landmarks coming up.
They've got the grandchildren coming over on the weekend.
They're going to go over a picnic. They're going to go down to the lake.
They've got this whole thing planned.
And her, all she's got is herself, her loneliness.
Her success. Ask her then how happy she is.
And then maybe come back a couple decades from then when she's elderly and she's in a nursing home and there's nobody there to care for her because she never had any kids and so she's alone.
And then come back when she's on her deathbed and she's dying alone with nobody there to mourn her because she has no family.
Ask her then how happy she is.
She's leaving no legacy behind except for the work she did at some job, some job that's long since forgotten her.
Even if she had success, she worked for a great big company and she became a manager and she managed people.
She had an office. She had everything.
I mean, she had an office.
Wow! But that's not a legacy.
Because she left that job and she was immediately replaced by someone else.
And the work she did just didn't matter that much.
That's the thing about a job, about being an employee.
That's why it's so ridiculous for us to worship it as some great achievement.
You work at a job, you can be replaced in an instant, like that.
Whatever your job is, that's what I hate to tell you this, and it's true for me too.
Whatever your job is, you can be replaced like that.
And nobody will even notice.
Maybe if you retire, they'll throw a nice party for you.
If you get fired, when you're walking out the door holding your box of stuff, maybe they'll say, oh, so we'll miss you.
I'm so sorry to see you leave.
They won't miss you. By tomorrow, they'll have forgotten about you, and things will just continue along without you.
It's different when you have a family.
You've got kids, when you have a spouse you love, you've got grandchildren, you've got a whole family.
You're not replaceable.
When you leave, they mourn you.
Something real is missing.
When you leave a job, nothing real is missing.
There's no legacy there.
It doesn't matter. So ask her then how happy she is.
Has anyone in the history of mankind, has any dying person in the history of mankind ever lay on their deathbed and said to themselves, I am so happy that I sacrificed family for material possessions?
Has any dying person ever in history felt that way?
Of course, there are many people who do have kids and yet follow a similar trajectory to the one I've just described.
There are many people who have families and yet still sacrifice their families for the sake of professional ambition and success.
And they're also going to end up alone and miserable.
Because their kids...
We're raised by TVs and by babysitters because both parents were out working 10 hours a day to just amass all of this wealth and all of these possessions and all of this success.
And they feel like it's okay and their kids aren't missing anything because at least they can go on a nice vacation to Disney World once a year and they can buy them a lot of nice toys for Christmas and birthdays.
But in the end, the kids are being neglected and they're missing the one thing they really need.
Which is a family, which is parents who are there for them.
Now, I'm not saying there are people who fall on tough financial times, and so both parents really have to work in order to make ends meet, and they're just struggling and doing what they can.
There are a lot of people in that position.
And on some level, the kids will, you know, maybe not now, but at some age, when the kids get older, they're going to look at that, they're going to look at what their parents had to do, struggling and fighting, and they're going to respect that.
They're going to know that they were not neglected.
What I'm talking about, which is very common, especially in upper middle class America, I'm talking about families that are well off and plenty of money.
You know, the dad on his own is making plenty of money to care for the family.
But still, both parents just go out and their primary concern is their careers.
That's the case in a lot of families.
For the parents, that's the main thing they're worried about.
Those are their priorities.
And the problem is that the kids, as they get older, are going to realize that.
And they're going to see that they play second fiddle to the stupid jobs that their parents have.
And their kids are going to grow to resent them.
And as those parents get older, probably they're going to end up divorced too because their priorities are out of whack and they care more about their jobs than they do about their families, which leads to divorce.
It also leads to affairs and all kinds of things.
So most likely that marriage isn't going to last.
And both those parents are going to end up alone as well.
And as they get older and they look back and they see all that time that was wasted and they see that now their kids are older now and don't need them anymore.
And they look back and realize that, man, all this time I could have been spending time with my family, taking them fishing, building tree houses, doing all this stuff with them, reading them books, making memories.
I didn't do any of that.
And now they're going to want to try to forge a relationship and all of a sudden now become real parents to their kids.
But their kids are going to look at them and say it's too late for that.
We don't have any connection.
There's no bond. There never will be.
You had a chance to build it and you never did.
You had a chance to be a parent and you never did.
And now you want to be a friend. It's not going to work that way.
And so they're going to be alone.
And they're essentially going to die alone too.
And the words that are said about them at their eulogies by their kids will be perfunctory and half-hearted as their kids struggle to conjure up any warm memories to mention and tribute to them.
There are a lot of people in America who are on this path of just loneliness and disappointment.
Because a lot of people have been made to believe that professional achievement is the highest goal in life.
It's the whole point of life.
To achieve professionally.
To have success. That's what we think is the point.
But it's not.
The way that we find...
If you really want to find happiness and fulfillment and meaning in life, you don't find it through a job.
I know this sounds corny, but it only sounds corny to us because we're silly and selfish people.
You find purpose, joy, and meaning in service to others.
Service to God first, and then to your family, and then after that to neighbors and communities in that order.
Everyone in the world is called to dedicate their lives to service.
Everyone is called to that.
And only those who heed that calling will find any meaning, any purpose, any real joy in their lives.
And it is quite possible that you have people who are called to serve in another capacity.
There are people who never get married and so they You know, they enter into a different vocation and they serve in a different way.
They feel called to serve differently.
They enter into the religious life.
They become missionaries. I mean, whatever.
But they serve through some other way.
There are people in that. And that's a beautiful, wonderful thing.
And those people will find meaning and joy and purpose in their lives.
And they're going to leave behind a legacy.
And then there are married couples who can't have kids.
And so they become parents some other way, maybe through adoption, which is wonderful.
I met a married couple once who discovered that they couldn't conceive children, and so they went overseas and became missionaries and became kind of spiritual parents to a whole host of people.
And they also are leaving a legacy.
They're finding meaning and joy and purpose in their lives, and that's a great thing.
It is possible to have a family and not to serve it, just as it is possible to not have a family and yet to serve Nobody's suggesting otherwise.
I'm certainly not.
What I am suggesting is twofold.
Number one, most people are called to have families.
And so it is objectively a bad thing that we treat family life as kind of this afterthought.
And the average age of first marriage for men now is like 30.
And the average age of having a kid is being pushed back further and further.
And it would be one thing if a few people, if some people took that path and waited longer.
But when you get to the point where everybody is putting it off and waiting to start families until they're out of their young adulthood and out of their 20s, that means that our priorities as a society, our priorities have just been flipped upside down.
Everything's been turned upside down.
Because we're putting professional achievement and financial security ahead of family.
So that's what I'm saying. I'm also saying nobody is called to just have a career and to have that be their life.
Because if you have no family or if you're married but you both work and you have no kids, then your career is just about you.
It's just about sustaining you.
It's about money for you. It's about achievements for you.
It's about success for you.
That's what it's about. And you might say, well, I help people in my career.
I provide a product or a service or whatever.
Great. I mean, really great.
That's awesome. But when you go work a job, the primary point is the money.
You wouldn't do it for free, right?
If your career is something you do for free to help others, well, that's different.
That's a ministry.
But most people, their career is primarily they do it to make money for themselves.
If they have a family, they do it for their family.
But if there's no family, they're just doing it for themselves.
And that's not a life. That's not a life of meaning and purpose.
That's just a life about you.
And the average American who says, I'm putting off family for career or I'm not having a family because I'm focusing on my career.
The average person who says that it's not because they want to help people, despite what they might say.
They're not going to help people.
It's because they want money for themselves and they want stuff for themselves.
They want nice vacations and they want to avoid the hassle and the hardship that comes with having kids.
Because we've decided, you know, what we think is that...
Finding happiness, you find happiness through avoiding suffering and avoiding hardship and avoiding sacrifice.
And we don't realize that that's not where you find happiness.
You find happiness through hardship, overcoming it, in the midst of it.
That's where you find happiness.
So if you spend your whole life trying to go around hardship and sacrifice, you're going to miss it because it's right there in the middle.
You've got to plunge in and find it.
So that's where you find happiness.
And look, if you don't have kids, if you don't have a family, then there are things you can do that those of us with kids can't do as much.
You can go on nice vacations and everything.
But even that, even that is empty and meaningless if that's all your life is.
You know, I have the opportunity as part of my job to travel all across the country when I'm doing speaking gigs.
And I see lots of different sites.
And it's great, but when I go and I'm by myself and I'm in some new location seeing some beautiful view or making some great memory, you know, the first thing I always think to myself is, man, I wish my wife was here.
Man, I wish my kids were here to see this and to share this memory.
I can appreciate the thing on my own, and I do, but how much greater would it be if I could share it With the people that I love.
How much greater is the happiness when you share it?
How much greater is happiness when it's not just about you?
There's a reason why a lot of people who, in our society, who have families and have kids will still report that they're miserable and it's awful and they'll complain about it.
Because even though they have families, they're still selfish people and they're shallow and they're cowardly, really.
So they're not able to find a happiness that isn't about them.
But the real happiness in family life, and it is a real happiness, you find that when you're not looking for it, when it's not about you.
You find it in the moments that are not centered around you.
You find it in the moments that you give to your family and to your spouse.
That's where you find that real true happiness.
But if you never give yourself to them, if you never give them any time, If you never sacrifice anything for them, then you're never going to find the happiness in family life.
You're going to miss it. There's a movie called Into the Wild about Christopher McCandless, a true story.
And he was the guy, he left society behind.
He burned his driver's license, his credit cards.
He walked across the country on foot, ultimately into the Alaskan wilderness by himself.
And when he made it there, To this beautiful place.
He accidentally ate poisoned berries, and he ultimately died alone out in the woods.
And as he was dying, he scrawled a message for whoever would find his body, and the message said, happiness is only real when shared.
And that is a profound truth.
If your whole life is about making yourself happy, you will never be happy.
Not a real happiness.
The real happiness is that which is shared.
The happiness you find in family life is complicated, difficult, challenging, even painful, but it's real.
It's real and it's worth it.
And I really pity those who forgo it for the sake of mere selfishness.
I even more pity those who have the opportunity to experience that happiness because they have families, yet they miss it because they can't stop looking in the mirror.
What a waste. I mean, what an utter total waste.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
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