Photo by Kyle Head on Unsplash

The Most Important Goal of All Isn’t Happiness

It’s Joy. Here’s the Why and How.

Clifford Jones
6 min readAug 1, 2024

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I love Rollo May’s work. He was a legendary and well-respected psychologist who, in 1953, wrote Man’s Search for Himself. I finished reading it for the third time and was compelled to share more of what I learned.

We Keep Missing the Mark

In the 1950s, far before the days of social media, long after witch hunts, and during McCarthyism, also known as the Second Red Scare, we learned how lonely, anxious, and clinically depressed we were.

It might seem not much has changed.

Millions of us are still searching for what we were missing back then. And it’s been this way since we moved into the Industrial Age.

It’s only gotten worse since then. As a kid growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, I vaguely remember the political repression and persecution of radical left-wing and a campaign spreading fear of communist and Soviet espionage in the United States during the late 1940s through the 1950s.

Sound familiar?

We keep repeating the same mistakes. But maybe there’s a way to find joy despite the…

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Clifford Jones

I write about the art of human transformation, transcending suffering, and overcoming challenges in the School of Life with unconditional love and forgiveness.