Quartz

It’s good to be positive, sure. But that doesn’t mean being sunny side up all the time. Keep your frown right where it is. Let your bitch face rest. And together we’ll contemplate the hard facts of life and the tools we can use to deal with difficulty.

Americans seem to be down these days. Only one-third of Americans in a 2017 Harris Poll of 2,200 adults said they were happy. Millennials are declaring themselves the “burnout generation.” Meanwhile, “elites” are “miserable,” according to recent stories by Charles Duhigg in the New York Times Magazine and Derek Thompson in The Atlantic.

Duhigg argues that the source of privileged people’s unhappiness lies in overly high expectations and too little practice struggling with obstacles early on. Thompson, meanwhile, blames devotion to work—the fact that people have replaced God and family with careers and callings as the source of meaning in their lives. Because we no longer want to make “time for happiness,” he says, we are busy, confused, and sad.

Both are right, in part. Struggle helps cultivate resilience, and American “workism” is misguided. But Duhigg and Thompson also ignore a more fundamental issue. It’s clamoring for happiness that makes people miserable.

Brock Bastian, a social psychologist at the University of Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences in Australia, argues in a 2018 paper in Emotion that trying too hard to be happy yields the opposite result. People who are deeply invested in the idea of achieving happiness are more likely to obsess over failure and negative feelings. Because these are unavoidable in any life, the high expectations create more stress that leads to increased negativity. “Happiness is a good thing, but setting it up as something to be achieved tends to fail,” Bastian told Time. “Our work shows that it changes how people respond to their negative emotions and experiences, leading them to feel worse about these and to ruminate on them more.”

The fact is that you have to consider misery and discomfort in any existential calculation. These are essential elements of being—a lot of things don’t go right. Even under the best circumstances, we get hungry and tired, and need to pee. The best relationships involve pain, and the greatest jobs are also tedious. Nothing can be fun all the time, and some stuff that ends up enjoyable may seem dreadful while you’re doing it. Pretending otherwise, expecting a steady sense of pleasure and satisfaction, only compounds suffering.

Although the pursuit of happiness is enshrined in the US Constitution, to act upon that right guarantees displeasure. Desire causes suffering, or so the Buddha believed. In fact, this is one of the Four Noble Truths realized by the Nepalese prince upon attaining enlightenment.

Still, liberating yourself from the expectation of happiness lightens your load. It makes life a little easier when you are realistic but resolved, rather than deluded, desirous, and determined to have the impossible. By calculating discomfort and struggle into the mix, you can remain cautiously optimistic, knowing there’s surely trouble ahead, but that you will face it with grace.

“We should not be afraid of suffering. We should be afraid of only one thing, and that is not knowing how to deal with our suffering,” the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh writes. ”Handling our suffering is an art. If we know how to suffer, we suffer much less, and we’re no longer afraid of being overwhelmed by the suffering.”

So how do you suffer properly? You don’t have to become a Buddhist or follow the eightfold path per se. You do have to cultivate perspective.