’Tis the season for good cheer. This is why you don’t have to feel guilty for not feeling it, according to science

Faced with constant societal demands to achieve happiness, spiritual fulfillment, and well-being, it is unsurprising that an average employee will feel guilty and extra miserable if they fail to achieve and maintain positivity, even when dealing with objectively challenging situations. Perhaps this explains why nearly 20% of Americans report consuming mood-enhancing prescription drugs daily, with a similar figure reported for daily consumption of cannabis (now legal in 50% of U.S. states).

In line, many corporations (at least 4,000 according to LinkedIn data), have appointed chief happiness or chief wellness officers, formally in charge of enhancing their workforce morale, well-being, and happiness. This includes some of the most successful and attractive employers in the world, but also many businesses that, like the average employer, struggle to provide employees with a positive experience, a sense of belonging, or a higher sense of purpose.

As Oliver Burkeman noted in his brilliant book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking:

“The effort to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative—insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness—that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.”

“The effort to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative—insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness—that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.”

In that sense, the quest for happiness appears to conform to the so-called backward law from the English philosopher and entertainer Alan Watts, who explained: “When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float,” and that “insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.”

There’s no reason to beat yourself up for not being in a better mood, or not reaching higher levels of joy or happiness through your job. The reasons are well-known to organizational psychologists and behavioral scientists.

Personality

Your typical and ideal level of happiness or satisfaction is largely determined by your personality. Just like some people are a different size than others, people differ in their general tendency to experience positive and negative emotions. These differences are firmly engrained in their personality, character, and temperament, and largely based on genetics and early life experiences.

So, just like it would be silly—not to mention discriminatory—to force short people to become taller, we should not force people who are naturally predisposed to experience negative emotions (including sadness, concern, ruminations, and self-doubt) to just cheer up, feel good, stop worrying, and be happy.

You may be inclined to do so if the person is your friend or spouse, but understand that ostracizing or stigmatizing people for their melancholic, nostalgic, or pessimistic mindset equates to an oppressive bias that ignores the rich cognitive and emotional diversity that underpins human nature.

Accepting people for who they are and creating an inclusive culture where people who are naturally grumpy feel as strong a sense of belonging as those who are naturally happy, should be the goal. Leveraging this rich psychological diversity to create balanced teams that can see, think, and feel situations in different ways, and where individuals are more likely to provide a different perspective, is far better than striving to create a homogeneous team.

Performance

What your boss and employer care about is not your happiness but your performance. If they did, you should surely get a bonus, promotion, or pay raise after many years of being happy at work—something you would duly note in your yearly performance review. It might look like this: “I know I didn’t achieve any of the expected results, but hey, I was always in a good mood and very happy to be part of the team.”

Accordingly, employees would be incentivized to fake happiness and positivity just to impress their managers. Luckily, employees are under no illusion their employer actually cares about their mood and happiness, except for the assumption that these positive feelings and emotions will lift their performance. In other words, a positive mood, a feel-good state of strong engagement, and happiness are all seen as means to better performance, productivity, and results. That said, there is not as much evidence that a happy employee is a good employee as we tend to think.

Organizational benefits

The organizational or performance benefits of being happy have been vastly exaggerated. Contrary to popular belief, there is only a trivial effect of happiness and well-being on performance, with the best academic studies in the field indicating that there is only around 9%.

This means many people will be happy at work but deliver little while others may be top performers and more driven by other factors, including their talent and ability, or even a sense of dissatisfaction. Moreover, once you control for past performance, how people feel about work is only weakly related to their future performance. A significant percentage of the shared variance between people’s engagement and future performance is accounted for by their past performance. In other words, if you do well at work, you will be more satisfied, which will boost your future performance, albeit marginally.

A certain level of dissatisfaction is essential to motivate yourself to boost your performance and results. The most valuable employees and leaders in an organization are often those who are unhappy with the status quo, to the point that they are grumpy and annoyed with the current state of affairs, which propels them to take action to fix and improve things.

A team in which everybody is extremely happy, where the dominant mood is always a feelgood state, and where people really love getting along with each other, is a team that will probably fail to engage in constructive dissent or experience the necessary non-conformity to enjoy pushing for change and driving for improvements. In other words, there is a difference between a high-performing team and a recreational club.

Alternate paths to fulfillment

There are many other ways to find meaning, happiness, and fulfillment than work. Despite the popular appeal of the bring your whole self to work mantra, which tends to underpin the pressure to be happy, engaged, fulfilled, and fully immersed at work, it is still the case that for most workers there is much more to life than work, and much more to their identity than their professional self.

Recent data from Pew suggests the percentage of people who see work as a central, somewhat relevant, or totally irrelevant part of their identity is roughly the same: one-third in each group. The majority don’t think of work or their career as a critical part of themselves.

Why? Well, because there are many sources of meaning outside work. To some, their most authentic self can be found in their hobbies. To others, it may be religion, community, family, or their friends. To others, it may be art, music, or the experience of aesthetic chills that emerge from contemplating an artistic masterpiece.

Throughout many parts of our evolutionary history, and for many people, work would not feature very highly in our sources of purpose and meaning. It has always been more of a chore, a necessity, something that needed to be done, and that we would happily avoid at the earliest convenience. There’s a reason we (still) call it work, and few of us would do it unless we get paid for it.

Expectations

The secret to happiness is lowering your expectations. Economists Manel Baucells and Rakesh Sarin have argued that happiness can be largely understood through this simple equation: happiness = reality – expectations. This indicates that if reality exceeds expectations, happiness increases.

Conversely, high expectations can lead to disappointment when reality does not meet them, resulting in unhappiness. This simple equation explains why, even though working conditions have improved significantly over the past 100 years, we are generally not happier, but grumpier, than before. As soon as things get better, our expectations increase in turn, causing perennial levels of dissatisfaction. As Oscar Wilde put it: “There are only two tragedies in life: One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”

There’s no reason to quit your job because it fails to give you pleasure, happiness, or fun. And there are many reasons to distrust your employer’s alleged interest in boosting your happiness, mood, and well-being. More importantly, life provides a rich repertoire of instances and opportunities to experience meaning, fulfillment, and satisfaction.

You may just not need as much positivity in your mind or soul as other people do, which is okay. Discontent is a fundamental driver of self-improvement and personal development because it pushes us to reflect on our circumstances, question our decisions, and seek meaningful change. As author and coach Thibaut Meurisse noted: “Your unhappiness is your greatest teacher.”