How the pursuit of happiness can hinder certain aspects of well-being—like building resilience when we experience setbacks. Our culture places a high value on happiness—having the best job, house, the most friends, things in general. We’re constantly in a state of grasping for something—filling ourselves up from the outside.

And it’s totally bumming us out.

Susan David is a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life. She says our obsession with happiness hinders our ability to do the hard work of living: being able to recover from setbacks when we inevitably make mistakes, or lose a job—you know, when that picture-perfect veneer we were working away at starts to erode. To read more from Stephany Tlalka, click here.